Small landlords selling off isn't a great news after all

[Goingindrain]

My landlord is a small landlord, just owns his house and the one where we live. He is a nice man and charges us below the market rate rent.
He is fed up of all the anti landlord rules and has decided to sell. It seems he had an offer from FTB and then a big corporation put in an offer 10k over and he's selling it off to them via the agents.
I am worried about the rent going up and it's not a great news for tenants.

Any landlords should pm me. I'm working with a British battery provider as part of Clean Power 30.

We plan to provide oversized batteries free of charge (the investor gets their money by providing the connected batteries to balance the grid) to householders and can do the same for small companies. A typical household should earn c£1k by using the battery to buy cheap and sell electricity high, so only using electricity when it is at it's cheapest. (Electricity is at its cheapest when thee is excess renewable energy.). Won't help with EPC rating, but may help fund something that does.

This government isn't socialist. They're not even really left wing.

I’d imagine tenants have only ever wanted a sensible rent, proper maintenance of the property, not to be made to move on a whim and not to have their deposit stolen for general wear and tear by living there. Those protections should be in place.

Im pretty sure they aren’t the ones demanding heat pumps etc though.

This UK gov is really not socialist.

When did all the rules come in for landlords?

It is such a shame.

i have been a landlord as I moved in with my partner and we rented out my house. I always prided myself on being a great landlord. Kept house nice. Fixed things straight away. Low rent as I was passing on my good fortune. Tenants always said how good I was.

selling up now.

Tenants were able to have all that until governments started meddling in the name of regulating bad landlords. All it has done is driven out good landlords. The bad ones are still operating because they don’t give a shit

I totally agree. Labour is really putting the boot in to ordinary folk. And worst to come in the budget or so we keep being told.

I very much believe the private rented sector is a key part of our housing provision and should remain. The problem generally with private rentimg is the insecurity and lack of standards for landlords. You could luck out and get someone like my neighbour who is in it for the long term and takes his duties very seriously or you could get an utter incompetant "accidental" landlord who is one missed mortgage payment away from repossession. Who knows?

Letting out a residential property is first and foremost a service business, tenants are your customers, not just a convienient way for you to pay for your pension.

Therefore it is right there are standards and cusomter protections, which yes means there is admin for landlords to do. Don't like it, find some other way to make money. Of course these need to be reasonable and notntip thr balacoe too far the other way, but by god the moaning when it is suggested that mortgage paying units (sorry tenants!) might possibly have a right to a safe, secure home.

Just another one to add to the voice of small landlords selling up. We let out a big property that we used to live in. We were good landlords, beautiful house well maintained. Sadly we sold up early this year. Labour gvt making it totally untenable for us to keep it. Had to put the lovely tenants, a family who’d been there for years, on notice.

Labour disgust me.

This cant be a serious post surely? Do you realise how much profit pharmaceutical companies make? there is an absolute ton of money being made in treating diseases. The estimated pharma profits in US for example are about 1.21 trillion dollars so dont be so ignorant

My friend is an OT working in a hospital, she is now employed by Virgin as they have privatised off several departments - are Virgin doing this out of the goodness of their hearts or is it for profit? 🤣

No it is not good news, the landlord rules have played into the hands of the mega rich that buy up property via corporations. It has nothing to do with part politics, but unfortunately politicians are either very rich , getting richer or want to get rich -so restraining the mega wealthy is not attractive to them.

Now we are finally getting somewhere.

Profiteering is distorting our economy.

Before we pull the rug from the feet of small landlords, we need to address the elephant in the room. What can people do to fund their retirement?

Agreed. The rental sector has been an absolute hellhole for decades now. I have had several landlords who would describe themselves as "good landlords" who have either left issues unfixed, blamed us for structural issues with the house, left us without heating and hot water for weeks, stole deposit money and visited almost weekly and disturbed our peace. I have had a couple of decent ones but they are few and far between. Same story from many people I know.
Rent has doubled in my area in the last few years since COVID. For us, we always stay long-term, pay on-time and look after the property but every 4-5 years a landlord sells from under us costing us thousands to move our family each time.
The solution is council housing but that's not likely to be an option in my lifetime. I would prefer to rent from somewhere like Lloyds in the meantime as they are likely to be more professional and more willing/able to cough up funds for issues with a rental property. I am torn however, as I don't want more corporate ownership of housing but purely from a tenant's POV this would be preferable.

Tenants have never had that in this country. The state of the rental sector is shocking and has been for decades.

My friend started renting from a large landlord the same year I rented a flat out.
They put the rent up every year to the max recommended, whereas my tenants have the same rent. Same area.
Her rent is now just shy of 2k, my tenants pay £1.15k I know downstairs has been rented out longer and pay 1k.
The large landlords are driving rent so hard round here I’d feel disgusted to ask the same amount.

Exactly, profiteering

Don’t get me wrong — I don’t want corporate involvement in the housing sector, ideally. But as a family, I do think renting this way might actually be better for us. The cost of moving every few years adds up: a new deposit, whatever your current landlord decides to take from the old one, moving expenses, replacing furniture that doesn’t fit the next (usually smaller and more expensive) place, and so on.
This is exactly why social housing needs to play a much bigger role, with more rent-to-buy and shared ownership options for people who can’t save a deposit because of extortionate rents.
And let’s be honest — small landlords aren’t immune to price gouging either. For every “good” one, there are many more who hike rents as high as possible and ignore maintenance issues.

Yes, I will be selling mine. I have been hated on Mumsnet for having a buy to let as my pension. I'm selfish, greedy, shouldn't make a profit from a human right bla bla bla.

Sainsburys Tesco et al make a profit from food, a human right, and their shareholders make a tidy sum. But that's OK it seems.

My tenants have always been people who don't want to buy or who can't afford to buy. Or my longest tenant was in a very high paid job that he knew would relocate at some point.

This is roundly at Thatchers door. The council estate near me is nearly all owned now and two of them are even holiday cottages. While people on minimum wage struggle to find a private rental. The council houses were built for people on lower incomes but Thatcher fucked that and spent the money. There is not enough money in the pot to replace the social housing that was lost. Criminal.

I hear you. I’m just thinking, on balance, monopolies in areas are worse. There’s no good ones/ getting lucky and the rent overall is driven up more than if there is some balance. Plus I’ve seen round here massive sell ups or changes that suddenly affect huge numbers of people who can’t find alternatives. For example one business charging a 1000+ every year for lease renewals

I agree. I think a lot of small landlords take pride in not putting the rent up and don't mind not making much money as one day they will sell their nest egg or pass it on to their children. I can't see corporate landlords happy to make no money - "making no money" would also include returns that only match simply investing the money in secure bonds. All the reward with none of the work or risk.

Here is an idea of the money you can make selling up a 200k property and putting the money in the bank.
No voids, no maintenance, no risk.

This is a bond from Yorkshire Building Society - money tied up until Dec 2030.

I was a landlord for one flat and I made a huge loss, finally got rid of it a couple of years ago. Never again.
Small landlords will give up and big corps will take over and charge extortionate rent.
Either this was the government's plan all along or they've accidentally created the environment they said they wanted to avoid.

I'm a small landlord with just one small flat which is properly managed by an agent. We have very rarely put up the rent, our return on the value is less than we'd get from having the money in a building society. We've had the same elderly tenant for about five years now, he's very happy and we don't want to evict him though we will probably sell when he leaves. The rules on EPC's mean that we may have to evict him though as it is a listed building so there are not many ways we can improve the insulation etc. Double glazing is out, as are exterior heat pumps. The cost would probably be over £10,000 which we simply cannot afford so we will no longer to legally allowed to rent it out.

I rented in Cornwall (Newquay) for a few years around 2004.

We found a big (4 bed house) for 3 of us to share no problem (£800 a month for the whole property) and then when I wanted to share only with my boyfriend and save for our own place we found a cheap (basement) flat easily (£400 a month whole property).

I wasn't able to rent on the exact estate I was hoping for where terraced houses were £500 as they were snapped up quickly but there was housing of all types available. Loads of flats, plenty of big posh houses with a bit of a tight market in small cheaper houses.

Families in Cornwall were not living in temporary accommodation at that time. Nobody with a job was living on a campsite unless they chose to in order to save the maximum money, Nobody was having to turn down a job at the hospital because they couldn't find somewhere to live.

The housing market has not been like this for decades in most places - perhaps in London.

You don’t get an inflation allowance with any other investment - apart from index linked gilts where it’s factored into the price. You buy, you sell, you make profit, you pay tax on profit. That’s it.