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.

If they’re rolling out licences for long term rentals, they can do it for short term ones, surely.

Seems ridiculous to prioritise tourists over residents.

There was an interesting article about shared ownership and service charges on the BBC website just now and I find it staggering the charges people are being asked to pay. I can’t believe it’s legal.

I live in Edinburgh and there are lots of Victorian tenement buildings. One front door, 12 flats etc, 4 stories, high ceilings, lovely etc. the owners will generally all group together for the occasional survey and agree structural work, you have to keep your bit of the stairwell clean etc and if anyone if feeling particularly keen they can crack on with the garden. Once in a blue moon the roof needs doing and that’s about £10k a flat, but that’s all and these are old sometimes listed buildings.

How on earth can a service charge on a modern building be thousands a year???

Categorically not. The install, not including new radioators and pipework, is about £12-£16K so the grant only partially covers that, maybe around 40%. Then on top of that you need the new plumbing so it will actually run as intended, plus the redecoration once you've gone into the walls to swap all the pipework out.

The main problem for landlords selling is that the people who might buy from them can"t get loans, not at sensible monthly debt payments anyway.

https://www.mortgagestrategy.co.uk/news/lender-price-hikes-continue-apace/

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-edinburgh-east-fife-15994982

Oh, my!

That's shocking!

Nightmare.

I would never have one anyway due to needing big rads

I hate radiators at the best of times.

They will be rubbing their hands on the house price crash forum.

They will! After 20 odd years they're finally right.

My house is now 'worth' the same as it sold for in 2017.

We did actually put in a heat pump, but that's because we only had storage heaters so the plumbing needed to go in anyway. But for those on mains gas, I don't see the point while electricity is 4x gas prices - you'll have an expensive, disruptive installation process and then if you're lucky and the house is suitable and it's a really good installation, it'll cost about the same - if not, your bills will be higher, often substantially so.

I think holiday lets in residential streets/blocks need far better restriction control. It's not nice living next door to a revolving door of different people every week, if not twice a week - people who generally don't care about noise and disruption, where they park, etc., as they know they'll be gone in a few days! People living in residential streets or blocks of flats don't sign up for that level of annoyance and disruption.

Holiday lets need to be more aimed for "specialist" places, like farm/barn conversions, railway carriages/canal boats, converted railway stations, converted mills, etc - i.e. the kind of place that wouldn't usually be residential.

We holiday in the UK a lot and always try to avoid renting anywhere that looks to be on a residential street/residential area. We cause no noise/disruption, but we still feel it's unfair to the neighbours and anyway, we prefer to stay somewhere unusual. Currently on a short break in a converted chapel in the middle of a field that had been derelict and crumbing for over a hundred years!!

He wasn’t obligated to sell to a FTB. He sold to who paid him more. Perfectly normal’ 👍

We stayed in a AirBnB that was someone's (brick built) garage. Sounds awful, but it was really nice inside. Properly done out. Very comfortable and we would have happily stayed a few days, but we had a schedule to keep to.

Ground rent & maintenance has been the great investment for many over the last few years, especially for companies. It's purely because of the lack of freehold availability in England. As always those owning the buildings lease got greedy. It's easy money for them.

I'd love to have sold my late mum's rental property to a first time buyer. But the stress of dealing with her debts and the whole legal nightmare (plus the stress of having to get the tenants out and dealing with the horrendous state of it) had affected my mental health so much that I wanted the quickest and least complex sale I could get. And the highest offer was a cash one from an investor. I couldn't countenance turning it down.

Nevermind. I know someone who sold her lovely family home to a first time buyer (who'd viewed it with her mum). First viewing, full asking offered and accepted.

Turned out it went straight on the rental market and she never planned to live in it.

Since landlords started (trying to) sell off rents have started falling and supply is up by about 15%, not great news but certainly good news. If you watch a few minutes of Bloomberg news you will see that the suits in the big glass buildings are now seriously rattled about the prospect of a global recession, Big Corp is not going to bail UK small landlords out of their debt mistakes! If they went anywhere near doing this it would be at absolute bottom dollar prices, but it just isn!t worth their time, they have capital, capital can be deployed to much more lucrative, less regulated more liquid investments.

The Zoopla report in early March says rents have risen, in England by 3.6% to (outside of London) £1430 per month.

Even though supply is up (11%) supply is still 23% down on pre pandemic levels & demand down by 14%, with just approx 5 inquires per rented property.

Causes for this is less migration, so it would be good to see where exactly supply is up, because it isn't in the far SW, demand is mental.

The coming recession will balance that out, the first thing young people do (if they can) when the financial SHTF is run to parents for free rent, they have nothing invested in a rented party box in the city, young people now also have no concept of a proper recession, it will be interesting times.

A massive problem for mortgaged landlords is that rents are driven by wages while the cost of their debt is driven by bond markets (global volatility) they could end up with no lever to raise the rent while seeing their debt costs rise ( and potential buyers for their BTL won"t be there because their potential monthly debt cost has also risen) the technical term would be "Stagflation" I think?

The BTL brigade need to bite the bullet and await the good times coming around again, remembering that they are sat on an asset which they have outsourced the majority of the debt.

Yes, but many can"t pay the extra debt that markets are now charging them though, they won"t be in business for the next "good times" IMO the good/bad times of the 2001 - 2008 cheap debt run and crazy bailout from the money printers that followed and suspended reality until relatively recently was a one-off, it won"t be repeated.

It sounds like poor planning. They can always sell up.

Harder to do when mortgage rates are climbing (some small relief today but the rates will be back at the races when Trump makes his next move in the ME)

A bit doom laden there.

We don't know what Trump will do or how the ME will play out.

One thing is certain though, the longer this goes on, the worse it'll be and for Trump too, mid terms 6 months away, US petrol prices up 35% already, this wont be forgotten by even the most thick of MAGA supporters.

All of which means he will be seeking an off ramp asap.

He is seeking an off ramp now (or is he getting ready to escalate?) unlike tariffs he can"t switch this off now, Iran has a lot of cards to play.