To think people who own multiple homes have helped drive house prices out of reach?

[OneRoofIsEnough]

I’m not saying they’re the only reason but I do think anyone who owns more than one residential property has played some part in pushing prices up over the last few decades.
When housing is treated as an investment vehicle rather than shelter, demand increases, supply tightens and first-time buyers lose out. Over time, that has made home ownership unaffordable for huge numbers of people.

AIBU to think this isn’t just “the market”, it’s a collective outcome created by individual choices?

@taxguru. I like my spare rooms, means the kids and their dps can stay, one bedroom is used as an office mostly, 2 are spare rooms. We own our house outright

Don your tin hat.

I like my spare rooms as well. DGC often has a sleep over so their parents can have a night off and has their room set up for them. They are all coming for Christmas so I'll have a full house DD often stays over with DGC if she has an early dentist appointment as it's just up the road from us and she doesn't want to dash across town in the morning rush

DH uses one room as an office

So sorry no I'm not going to down size - just yet but will do in the future but the set up suits us

Edited for typo and to say a lot of people work from home now so all these spare rooms are set up as offices

That’s an admirably simple solution — just legislate people’s spare rooms out of existence.

The difficulty is deciding who gets to define ‘need.’

Children grow up, parents age, people work from home, families change, illness happens, guests exist. Life has an annoying habit of not fitting neatly into a bedroom-to-human ratio approved by strangers.

As for banning multiple homes, that sounds satisfyingly tough until you remember it would also catch carers, separated families, rural workers, people relocating for jobs, and anyone renting out a former home because selling would bankrupt them.

Housing policy is genuinely broken, yes.

But turning square footage into a moral crime mostly feels like a way to vent frustration at the wrong target.

The problem isn’t that someone, somewhere, has a spare bedroom.

It’s that the system can’t build enough homes — and pretending otherwise just keeps us arguing about curtains instead of foundations.

When a housing crisis makes us want to criminalise spare bedrooms instead of fixing supply, planning, and investment, that’s not policy — it’s just envy dressed up as virtue.

The biggest issue in our area is people relocating to the area. It is often Londoners with large budgets who price out the locals. It’s been a total pain in the arse since Covid and I can’t see it improving. We have been actively looking to move since 2022!

The problem is supply and demand and the supply side is always looked at, never the demand. We keep building houses without improving infrastructure, we just splice off existing infrastructure, putting more pressure on the system. The people who own multiple properties are so tiny in number that it's not worth scrutinising.

We're an overpopulated country, with thousands still coming in and expecting to buy a house. Demand pushes prices up.

Less people means less demand, but that's not something anyone wants to address, because we're open to the world.

The tone you use when you talk about older people here isn't very nice.

Yes people are living longer in smaller households.
But the population was around 60 million in 2005 and is approaching 70 million now.
thats a huge increase and latest projections show a possible 80 million within 20-30 years.

Not everyone can get a mortgage. It isn't just about cost. It's about having cash for a deposit and being credit worthy.

Rental homes are needed. Yes, most of the rental homes available should be social housing. But they're not. So private rental is needed to fill the gap.

I don't like the system (selling off of council houses etc) but it's the one we're stuck with. Private rentals are needed.

And not everyone wants to own anyway. There are a lot of people who move to be with their partners or closer to work. Then when they're ready to settle and/or have saved up enough, they can put a deposit down for a house.

Rentals are sorely needed, as much as freeholds are. A lot of people see the homeowner, get jealous and then want all property owners to hand over their properties to increase the available housing stock and then push private landlords out to make way for the government to be the landlord.

IMO it’d be a start if we stopped foreigners who don’t actually live in the U.K., from buying properties. In London and I dare say elsewhere, there are many thousands of flats bought by Chinese or others from the Far East, , who don’t even rent them out, let alone live in them. The properties are simply a safe, convenient place to park their money.

We should take a leaf out of Denmark’s book. No foreigners allowed to buy unless they’ve actually lived there, full time, for 5 years. Apparently this was because of the proximity to Germany and Denmark’s extensive coastline - it was reasoned that without restrictions, Germans would buy up a great deal of Danish property and thus push prices up.

But they couldn’t say ‘no Germans’ (against EU law) so they said ‘no foreigners’ instead.

Dh was told this by a Dane he met at one of his professional society conferences.

Lol !

How many threads do you intend to start on this topic?

The good news is that as holiday homes/BTL/second home owners try to sell up due to legislation, lack of tenants, price of mortgage debt etc, they will cause prices to come down, that is a net good for everyone in society.

The biggest thing is foreign buyers buying up swathes of properties. Needs to be stopped.

Stopped a long time ago, property is now a tax target, not a store of wealth.

Why did you resurrect a zombie? There is a message when you do it. Was that not a clue?

Don’t be ridiculous

More relevant than ever as AB gears up to tax property until the pips squeak.

Why is it ridiculous @GotALionInMyPocket?Houses will be priced as high as the market can bear, many first time buyers can only afford the current prices because they are being subsidised by their parents. If there were fewer people able to buy at these prices, the market would drop. Seems logical to me?

People were mainly getting help with deposits I think, higher monthly interest on mortgage debt won"t be able to be subsidised by most parents.

Homes under the Hammer… people from London, buying cheap properties in areas of deprivation, that they can rent out, to pay for their large London mortgage.

The rent is more than local people would pay for a mortgage.

Driving up prices in the deprived areas

i feel like putting my foot through the screen when I hear “property portfolio”

This needs to stop.

Of course they have! That’s never been in doubt!

God yes this!

It was a Labour government - Blair and Brown - who thought it’d be a good idea to allow mortgage tax relief for buy to let, while abolishing it for owner occupiers. So that kicked off the buy to let boom with a vengeance.

Presumably they reasoned that a huge increase in private rentals would remove the need for them to provide more social housing - to replace that which had been lost to right-to-buy.

However the surge in house prices can’t have been just down to this - many other countries inc. Australia have experienced much the same.