Why are people so against private landlords?

[StopRainingNow]

I don't get it (and I'm not a landlord), no one shouts at Tesco that it is disgusting that they make money off selling something (food) to people on UC, when people need food TO literallysurvive/ live. But if someone has a business renting houses to people who need them, they are the devil. It makes no sense to me.

To make it worse, Tesco are also making profits by not paying a living wage to employees who then have to claim UC to top up their salaries and so benefit from profit from employees and customers.

Why do private landlords get such a hard time? They are providing a service to people that need it - AIBU?

How does this make you an accidental landlord?

You are able to sell the property and cease to be a landlord if you want, you’ve chosen to keep the property and rent it out.

You make no monthly profit because you are using the rent to pay the mortgage.

Yeah 'I chose not to sell my property because I wouldn't make a profit on it therefore I had no choice other than to become a landlord' is not being an accidental landlord.

I have enough savings that I could buy a BTL but it would be too much hassle in my opinion so it's in stocks & shares.

I am an accidental landlord (bought a flat in 2007, paid a huge amount for it and straight after the market crashed)

This doesn't make you an accidental landlord, you became one because you didn't want to sell at a loss.

I make no monthly profit after tax/bills

But presumably it pays the mortgage? Why should there be a profit? No investment guarantees a profit.

I mean originally I was an accidental landlord because I was in so much negativity equity I couldn't sell. I could sell now but have never wanted to evict someone to do that.

So why do you keep the flat then?

Your posts are ideological but not rooted in economic reality. Have you noticed that the price of fish and chips have increased by 50% in the past 5 years? Do you assume that all the fish and chips proprietors are ripping customers off? Do you complain how fish and chips used to be cheaper for previous generations so it automatically should cost the same to current customers? Whatever you thought or believed, fish and chips would cost the same because the economic reality is that the proprietor has to charge 50% more to cover their costs and survive. Remonstrating and getting angry about how things should be doesn't change that.

The same goes with housing. Have you noticed that the population of the UK is increasing by more each year than the housing supply? Have you had any work done on your property and experienced the huge increase in cost of labour and materials since COVID? Have you tried to renew your mortgage lately or borrow a large amount of money and noticed that repayments have tripled compared to five years ago? The Government isn't immune to any of these pressures and they simply can't afford to build houses to the scale that people think should be possible. They need private landlords who perform an important function for them. Yes, they have to pay them HB but there isn't a sensible, practical solution in the context of the state of public finances and the cost and practicalities of building SH en masse.

I honestly believe things like this should be taught in schools. People should be more aware of how capitalism works and how we as a relatively small country have limited ability to change this. People find great comfort in ideology and believing that things can and should be radically better but if ideas aren't realistic then it is dangerous and stop people engaging with the actual reality of what needs to happen to improve things.

I mean originally I was an accidental landlord because I was in so much negativity equity I couldn't sell.

That's not accidental though. You didn't just have tenants turn up one day & move in unexpectedly...

You dont have to evict someone, you could just give someone shit loads of notice

Selling at a massive loss wasn't an option as I didn't have the money to make up the short fall so I had no other choice but to rent the property out.

@Marshmallow4545 as educational as you think your post is I'm not sure why you don't understand that I can simultaneously grasp the issues with more house building but still be annoyed that so much council housing was sold off & not replaced, thus leaving more renters having to use housing benefit to pay private landlords.

I have never wanted to evict my tenants in order to sell. I am almost at the end of the mortgage so there is light at the end of the tunnel. But my point really is more why would anyone be expected to be a landlord for free with all the effort it entails (if you are doing it properly)?

It's funny seeing these big words bandied about by someone with very obviously a total lack of inform about even basic economics as it comes to housing supply and demand.

But please, educate us more on why- checks notes- more property investors specifically would increase the housing stock available to first home buyers, and indeed, your theory on why the exact opposite has occured in Australia.

Selling at a massive loss wasn't an option as I didn't have the money to make up the short fall so I had no other choice but to rent the property out.

which is understandable but not accidental.

I have never wanted to evict my tenants in order to sell. I am almost at the end of the mortgage so there is light at the end of the tunnel. But my point really is more why would anyone be expected to be a landlord for free with all the effort it entails (if you are doing it properly)?

Who expects landlords to do it for free? presumably your mortgage is been paid off by your tenants. Now you may not have made an extra money but you didn't offer your property for free...

That's still evicting them. The mortgage is coming to an end in a few years so I can will eventually start making a monthly profit.

It depends why you are losing money. If this is simply because the cost of capital has risen then no, it isn't ripping tenants off to charge them this cost and it doesn't necessarily mean you're over leveraged. If you owned a house then your mortgage would also increase or if you had a bank loan. Lots of businesses rely on credit to run and will pass on the cost of this credit to the consumer.

One could actually argue that the State is the biggest over leveraged Landlord. Should they stop building SH?

My daughter is at university. Her second year house is costing six of them £877 a month for a room each. The person who owns this is therefore making over £70000 a year and has been for several years. I will not accept that running a fully paid off house in a (albeit very posh) northern city costs that.
Where I live (a southern posh city!) a tiny room in a terraced house will go for an average of £700 a month.
We have a huge Homelessness problem here and families being forced out of their home city because of this greed.
There is not one 3 bed normal house to rent here for less than 1300 a month - wages unless you are working in top jobs are basic and low .
People hoover up properties, snapping everything on the market up to add to their 'portfolio' (fuck off!) so even if the average family could scrape a mortgage together, they'd be outbid anyway
Greed
That's why I hate private landlords

The people on the thread that don't agree with making profit of housing. That was the point of my original comment.

People aren't going expecting you to be a landlord for free, they are saying using other people's need for a home as a way for you to make an income is on a personal level ethically gross and on an economic and political level disastrous as a policy.

Go buy some shares and stop expecting society to feel sorry for you for owning an entire second property almost outright.

So… you aren’t an accidental landlord, and you aren’t not making any money.

You are using the rental money to pay the mortgage, which will then give you a valuable asset.

That you have a large mortgage on this property which the tenant is funding downs mean ‘you aren’t making any money’.

This is one of the key problems with private renting - you’ve got all these landlords who can’t really afford to do it, because any money generated through rent is used to repay debt - and then they feel hard done by because they can’t immediately see the financial rewards, forgetting the incredibly valuable asset they will shortly own.

If this is simply because the cost of capital has risen then no, it isn't ripping tenants off to charge them this cost and it doesn't necessarily mean you're over leveraged.

But it doesn't just depend on the cost of the capital it also depends on the local market. And when the cost of capital goes down rents don't tend to get reduced do they?

You can be annoyed but I don't really understand what you think a practical solution is? Not a pie in the sky "let's build enough SH for everyone" solution but a solution that could actually be implemented? If you don't have one, then it's simply moaning.

Many landlords do over leverage themselves unfortunately

For what it’s worth I do think Tesco are disgusting. They’re complicit in a system that worsens health outcomes for those on limited budgets by marketing their unhealthiest food at the lowest price margin and marketing a hell of a lot of it towards kids.

They pay their supply chain very poorly.

And any company that makes such huge profits margins while relying on the government to top the salaries of their workers is worse than anyone who is called benefit scrounger.

They line the pockets of Nestle and Cola - two other trash companies.

They’ve been accused of using fire and rehire strategies.

They’re not stringent about ensuring their garment and agriculture supply chains are free from human rights abuses.

Now am I allowed to criticise landlords?

To be fair with landlords it’s the system that needs criticising more than anything. It’s a bit like Nestle selling weight loss products in that they’re providing a solution for a problem they’re helping cause in that scarcity of homes for sale drives up housing prices and then they’re providing homes for people who are unable to buy. There needs to be systematic change to help address this.

Also I rented for years and was fortunate to always have excellent landlords. I’ve no idea if this is a coincidence or if this mirrors other people’s experience but they all fell into it by accident in that they inherited the house or separated and it wouldn’t sell so had to rent it out. However I see professionally a lot of very bad landlords. Particularly in Northumbrian ex-mining towns people that buy up a lot of houses because they’re cheap and then rent them out at extortionate prices and because people are desperate they have to pay it. I’ve been in some of these homes and they’re unsafe and the landlords are confident enough to say if you don’t like it, leave. I’ve tried to support people through the usual avenues of addressing this and hit a brick wall. These towns were fairly rural with a high proportion of people living in poverty so I’m sure that this is a problem rears its head in other parts of the U.K. too - again systems need to change to prevent this from happening.

It's just a phrase that's used to describe a landlord who didn't intend to become a landlord but circumstances dictated that would be the best (or least bad) option.