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.

Have rented in EU countries and it wasn't great. Rent caps and secure tenancies are great once you have a place but if the supply isn't there then it is impossible to get anywhere to rent unless black market with no protection. Not sure what the best system is

what makes me laugh on here is the frequency in which, when someone is considering moving to a new area, or trying to move house and the chain has broken/is getting too big etc, people (almost always those who either have never rented or haven't done so in at least a decade) pipe up "just rent for 6 months!"

as though it's easy and there are absolutely loads of properties
a) at all
b) where someone who doesn't have any recent rental references and who clearly isn't going to be staying long won't be at the bottom of all the potential applicants

Not to mention the faff of moving multiple times and the sheer cost of deposit plus rent plus moving van etc plus setting up all your energy supply, internet, tv licence, changing all your bills and contact info etc.

My friend and her DP have a 6 figure income between them, decades of good references and never missing payments etc and still got rejected when they tried to move to a new rental because someone else had a perfect credit score whereas theirs was a few points off!

The house next to me (semis so identical) is renting for nearly 4 x my mortgage and still went almost immediately after being advertised.

When I was looking to move and thinking about breaking the chain, it worked out cheaper (and far easier) to stay in a premier inn in my city for several weeks/months (albeit one of the hub types compared to a 'proper' one) than try and rent somewhere.

Exactly, you won't be able to text/email/call these giants, it'll be like dealing with a lost yodel parcel and a chat bot!

Yep, I am a small landlord but get totally shafted at every turn (I am in Scotland so even worse). I will probably sell up when my tenant leaves as it's not worth the hassle for the amount of money it brings in.

In my mid 50s and rented with my retired DP for 7 years. Landlady wants to retire, I don't blame her so she's selling up. Our only option now is shared ownership as we have pets. Don't get me started. I'll be working til 70 to pay that part off and be left with a smallish rent.

Which people?

What are the rules and regulations small landlords are finding too onerous?

Look up the new Renters Rights Bill.

Same is happening with other professional practices like opticians and accountants - the latest "gimmick" is for them to retain the same name/branding to make them look independent, but they're owned and managed by hedge fund financing, often foreign owned.

The opticians we've used is exactly that. Two guys owned it for decades, one the optician and one the dispenser. They retired and someone else bought it. Same name, same branding, the look of the place hasn't changed at all. Scratch under the surface though. Now it's a revolving door of locum opticians and they no longer make the glasses in house - they get them delivered from some kind of factory, which means it takes a lot longer. Service is utter crap. I traced the new owners via Companies House and they have, literally, dozens of "independent" opticians, all ostensibly private owned (separate companies).

I'm an accountant and another firm I know locally have likewise retired and sold out - the new "owners" are a national firm with a couple of hundred small "independent" practices, all trading under their original names - I know the old owner well as we used to work together and he told me how it works - again, all the old staff were got rid of and it's now just a "front" with a couple of receptionists with all the actual work being sent electronically to India for processing etc.

I have wondered the same. Can think of so many situations where I’ve wanted to rent not buy. Sometimes you want to live somewhere temporarily. I have been a landlord renting out my house while simultaneously being a tenant because I wanted to live somewhere else. I rented off someone who’d bought his dream retirement home but found the commute too hard so rented it out until he could retire. Imagine if we couldn’t move somewhere without buying a house first because there were no landlords.

I'm aware of the renter rights bill I'm not sure how that impacts the small landlords being mentioned here? Most of the cases mentioned are talking about landlords who have happily rented their houses to long term tenants who are also happy with the arrangement?

I loathe landlords on principle but I also think they are a very necessary evil. I could never be one.

There needs to be a balance in enabling landlords to make money, easily remove shitty tenants, but at the same time ensure that those wishing to buy have enough stock to select from and those having to rent are also protected from shitty landlords.

I was also one of those tenants until recently. Me and my husband very happily rented a flat in Central London our landlord put the rent up once in the ten years we were there and the only reason we left is because we bought a flat.

We’ve just sold ours. We were charging £475, the market rate was £800 but all the changes made me anxious even though we have always been compliant and good landlords. We sold to someone who had it as his home though so I was happy with that.

Except that the llast government was supposed to be banning section 21 notices but they ran out of time because the PM called the election earlier.

We know it’s this but landlords will pretend otherwise and want people to cry them a river…

I will never cry a single tear for somebody with 6 BTLs

As always in this country all the attention and legislation is directed at the compliant people. The decent landlords letting out properties that might be a bit dated or compromised are forced to sell while little attention is given to the shitshow of beds in sheds and illegal HMOs.
I’ve been a landlord when I went abroad for a few years. There is no way my ordinary family semi would have been compliant or worth adapting or I could have taken the risk the tenants would not move out. As it was the family who rented it got a cheap rent on a nice house for a few years and everyone was happy.

The energy efficiency proposals will have a horrendous effect. We've been looking for flats for our son to buy and there's an absolute shed load of flats coming on the market with adverse energy efficiency ratings as the landlords try to offload them before the new rules come into force which effectively ban the letting of them without huge expense (often actually impossible) to gain the right energy efficient rating. As others have said, it could well push private rents underground with "informal" letting agreements giving tenants even less protection.

Lots of councils are doing buying schemes at the moment.

the crux of the issue is what a pp said, they needed to build more social housing first.

poor first time buyer in the @Goingindrain getting outbid by a big group. That’s pretty shitty.

Seems obvious that small "businesses" can't be arsed tor able to sustain it.

also seems obvious that two things are going to happen: millions more houses are going to be builit because we don't have "enough housing" which will coincide with a lot of people dying off from old age, so there will be a glut of housing.

But noone will be selling because theyve paid more for it and dont want to fall into negative equity and a lot of people will sit tight hoping for price increases or sell to corporations who will pay more.

We rent privately. It’s so shit.
we looked at buying somewhere smaller to rent out, then we’d just need the shortfall for our rent. idea being the kids would inherit something and so we had a step on that ladder.
But, we just couldn’t do it. We just couldn’t be part of the problem and if we ever did need to sell, we’d have to give them notice and we know how gut wrenching that is.

Where is the Monopolies and Mergers Commission, when you need them?

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/guide-to-the-renters-rights-bill/guide-to-the-renters-rights-bill#overview-of-bill-measures

If anybody is interested in what the renter’s rights bill will say.

I couldn’t do it. As somebody who has rented I know what would make a “good” landlord.

But then to be a truly good landlord means I would have to have a higher rent to get a return on my investment and I would feel too guilty making it harder for somebody else to fulfil their home ownership desires.

So I think landlords are needed but I could never be one.