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.

I'm doing the same. Short sighted Labour policies.

It was a Tory policy.

Same near me. Lots of landlords selling up. Properties in terrible condition and asking over the odds!

Their properties are sitting on the websites while owner occupied places that have been taken care of are going for the same price.

It was Tory policy and they put the bill in motion when they were in power

Absolutely. And the rot began when Thatcher sold off council housing and didn't replace it. Then scrapped the Fair Rent agreements and reduced tenants' rights. And then on her watch and Blair's, house prices skyrocketed and they did nothing to prevent this. So homes - the most fundamental human need of all is shelter - became investment items. Thousands of inner London homes standing empty, probably many more throughout UK, as they are just part of foreign investors' portfolios. And keyworkers can't afford to live where they work.

Labour may not have solved the problem. They may have exacerbated it at times. But they didn't create it.

Brown/Blair had 13 years and did nothing. Starmer is showing no interest in improving matters. I think we can clearly see neither of the main parties are remotely interested in improving the situation. Too many snouts in the trough making money from high housing costs.

no one wants to be the one to push people into negative equity and bring down the card tower that is house prices.

the answer is mass building of social housing, but that involves long term investment and purchasing of land etc upsetting NIMBYs.
once you’ve taken care and given stability to those people, your building communities again. And adjusting the private rental market. You’re keeping money circular into councils and governments instead of lining private firms pockets.
that in turn will adjust the buyers market.

Doesn't need to be green belt building. There are huge amounts of grey belt and brownfield land, ex industrial sites, semi derelict areas of town centres, huge numbers of "flats above shops" that lie empty, huge numbers of unoccupied houses where the owner has gone into a home (often for many years), empty houses due to slow/delayed probate, etc.

So much could be done to release empty properties, to convert empty/derelict buildings, to build on brown/grey field sites. A lot of the time it's planning rules and councils that are holding things up rather than NIMBY's. Such as a recent planning refusal in Blackpool where the owner of a disused B&B wanted PP to convert it into a family home, but the council refused PP - they obviously prefer a semi derelict eyesore than a family home!!

Loads of cases just like that. One of my clients has a closed down shop - he's in his 80s - typical ground floor shop, with flat above on a shopping street - no one wants to buy it because council won't give PP to convert it to residential and he can't get building regs for the flat above as there is no separate access and the stairs are too narrow/steep for modern standards - unfortunately it had PP for change of use FROM residential to commercial when he started using the upstairs for business storage etc. - if he hadn't changed it, it would still be residential and wouldn't need the hoops to jump through re the separate entrance and staircase improvements required. Of course, no grants or support available for the conversion, and no purchaser is interested, so it just continues to deteriorate.

Thats rather irrelevant.

Labour could scrap it or at least water it down, instead they are going full steam ahead and the only people who will pay for this, will be tenants ALL costs passed on.

The changes to EPC to a C and tighter standards, will mean more costs, even when an exemption granted.

It also means HA's wont be buying new builds as they will and are diverting funds to bring up to spec existing properties, meaning less new social housing will be built unless new funding provided (by the tax payer) which in todays climate will not happen.