Why so much hate for Landlords on MN?

[coulditbeme2323]

Who do LL's get so much hate on MN?

It seems so much more hate than there is any real life.

I’m a landlord and have received abuse on here. I make a profit, that’s the point, but all of my properties are well maintained. My family have lived in some of them. I’m certainly not embarrassed and if people don’t like it, tough really.

A couple of my properties are quite expensive and rented by people who clearly could buy if they wanted, but for various reasons don’t want to at the moment. Everyone presumes that if people rent it’s because they have no choice and it’s often not the case. One couple I rent to likes to move a lot so buying doesn’t appeal to them.

Because too many are arseholes, and I say this as a LL myself.

Failing to carry out essential maintenance/repairs, hassling tenants with unannounced and too-frequent inspections, whacking the rent up for no real reason other than the fact that they can, and enough people will still be queueing up, deciding to sell, and expecting tenants to put up with would-be purchasers traipsing round their home, instead of waiting until they’ve left, failing to return deposits promptly….
Any more?

Every single landlord I know has a full time job and between one and three properties they rent out.

So yes, they do offer more to society. And providing housing to people who cannot afford to buy is a social good.

That should really largely be done by social landlords, but blame the government for destroying the social rented sector.

I don't like them at all.
This is partly for all of the popular reasons, IE: They are social parasites, they exploit people in need of housing etc etc.
But in addition to this, I hate them because of what I see. Like letting agents, I've never met one who is a decent person, even the ones that put on a nice front.
Just join a landlord group on Facebook and see how they all talk to each other, the nasty things they say about their tenants, the contempt they have for their tenants that are paying their mortgage for them, the inflated sense of superiority they have even though most of them have no real job or profession and are letting to the people who actually keep society going like the nurses, teachers etc.
They are all very angry that they are being made to take more and more responsibility, and seem to expect sympathy for this because they really do just want to sit back and use their tenants as cash cows without putting on any effort.
It's like a huge percentage don't even see them as people.
I've also run a home improvements company before and landlords really are the absolute worst customers to deal with. They are stingy as hell, will scrimp out on everything and will happily cut any corner possible to save money, even if that means compromising safety. They're also invariably very rude and demanding.

They are generally just awful and seem to attract a certain type of personality I don't warm to.

In Scotland and Wales there is, and I believe in England now too.

Private rentals have laws to follow but they are not regulated (by a regulator)

Mortgages are typically less than rent now though, so letting housing to people at inflated cost is actively preventing swathes of the population from being able to invest in their own home.
I am glad the government are making it less profitable and discouraging more landleeching, they really need to up the building of social housing now to make it even less profitable. And I say all this as a homeowner, I don't rent..

And I do not buy this "accidental landlord" crap either. It's always a choice.

I was an “accidental” landlord in my 20s. It was a financial crisis, but no need to go into any more detail. I can’t believe it looking back- I didn’t ask my mortgage company for permission, had no insurance- and I was one of many doing it.

im glad that it’s probably not as easy now. That restricts people’s ability to become accidental landlords when they really shouldn’t be.

I dont understand the concept that many posters have that no one should own more than one home.
There are numerous instances where people might need to rent.....what are they meant to do if there aren't any rentals.
Off the top of my head but there are probably others - students, junior Dr's, people on short term contracts, people whose house might be currently uninhabitable (floods/building work/renovations etc) new to an area/country etc etc.
And ive never heard what the alternative is if no one is allowed to rent out a property.
Im not a LL btw! And im paying rent on a scummy student house that DD lives in!

I do not believe that there was no other option available to you than to rent your property.

In my case it's very simple. My LL can evict me at a couple of months notice and sell the house I live in, as it's his. This means I can never fully relax about housing. Ever.

The graph (which may take a little while to upload) from this article gives the long picture on house prices. Basically, they have indeed risen steeply relative to wages but the situation was even worse prior to 1900.
https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/mortgageshome/article-7943741/House-prices-174-years-70-year-period-got-cheaper.html

Food is pretty cheap by historical standards. But of course one of the reasons is the incredible economies of scale (cheaper costs when producing in bulk) that modern supermarkets get, along with the very low wastage due to the efficient cool chain, plus (as the link below says), modern farming methods. And they have to be good because their profit margins are thin and competition is intense so they can't afford to lose market share.

This article is interesting on food costs and how they've changed since the 1970s.

https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/bills/article-12277823/Money-squeezed-tight-young-hardest-hit.html

As an economist what I think I'd take from this, is that improving housing availability would need modernisation of what we're building and how we're building it, standardisation of what gets built, and economies of scale in renting which would suggest consolidation (but not the kind of consolidation we actually have). The 'wastage' part would be reducing housing sitting empty and maybe making it harder for non-UK citizens/residents to buy housing. I believe that's not totally unlike how Singapore solved their acute housing problem that they had in the 1950s (I'm no expert on Singapore though). Plus much better planning to match housing availability to where the jobs actually are.

The big problem is I don't think we could trust the UK government to do this competently. So in the short/medium term we'd probably be best off enforcing existing housing law (including appropriate action on problem tenants - landlords are currently having to wait up to 8 months to evict tenants who have e.g. not paid rent for years, caused extensive damage to properties etc) rather than just demonising landlords while having no solution other than "the state takes over everything".

They're regulated by the local authority for whatever area they're in. That's where the issues lie. The local authorities aren't doing the checks, or only on the most obvious issues like HMOs.

You’re expecting me to defend it- I’m not. It shouldn’t have been as easy (or possible at all)

That’s not a regulator, that’s complying with laws and regulations imposed by your license. I comply with the rules of my driving license, I’m not regulated by the dvla.

Why would anyone rent out a house if they weren’t making a profit?

All of those scenarios you mention are short term.

Alternative housing models can be sought for these scenarios and would be more widespread if there were no private leeches landlords.

Property guardianship, community land trusts, van living etc are all viable options to these short term scenarios.

Noone needs to own a second home and no one needs them to. Noone and noone.

I am a decent hardworking person, I have owned houses and rented houses. The last landlord I had seemed reasonable when I met him house looked ok. I never dried anything in the house and to my horror had a thick layer of mould on all the walls in the rooms we slept in - he admitted eventually he had just wallpapered over it. He refused to sort it. Leaving me running heating, constantly, opening windows and running dehumidifier and I found documents showing he knew there was a mould issue 5 years before. Bastard had lied to my face when I moved in and initially blamed me for the mould. He still hasn’t sorted it for next ten tenants - they only last a year and move. He laughed to my old neighbour that he just paints it. He could really cause someone harm from me he got £20,000 and didn’t spend a penny on his house (no mortgage) and when I was complaining about mould he replied that he was on holiday in Barbados for 8 weeks and would have a look when back! That’s why - we have experience and 99% of them treat it as income for no effort.

It's the state of the housing usually. You rent it, then you find the back wall is leaking and mouldy, so you can't put food in the kitchen cupboards. The bathroom, that looked fine on viewing also goes mouldy in 6 weeks, because of course the landlord just slapped paint over it prior to viewing. The gas inspection is due, and your boiler is condemned and not replaced, so you are freezing for weeks. Chimney never got swept, so one day you come home and everything is covered with soot after it all fell in. My husband once rented somewhere and found when pulled the bed out, two bricks were missing from the wall which rather explained the howling gale! Add to this the fact you paid a whacking deposit and months rent upfront for the privilege off all this, and you could go off landlords....

Because most people think they make lots of money but as an accountant that does lots of rental accounts most make a loss. But that doesn’t fall in most renter’s narratives

My dd student landlord is awful. He tried to charge her for a fault which was nothing to with her and until the workmen told him it was a break through other means, he was threatening all sorts. She's 19 and was terrified. Evil fucker makes 5000 a month out of them on a house he's owed outright for years and has done the bare minimum, if anything, when they've had issues. The other dc had similar issues when at university.
I'm so relieved she's leaving there this month

Because landlords are evil

Typical landlord story sadly.

They'll do anything to get you in and paying their mortgage for them and have no qualms about lying.

My last one before my current told me the garden (it was a converted house of five flats) was mine as was the driveway. It was even iny contract - private garden and driveway.

After moving I discovered he had said the same thing to all other flats, that the garden was theirs. When I brought this up with the landlord he told me no no it's definitely yours, I'll tell them to stop using it, and he never did. The other tenants showed me evidence he was saying the same to them.

He also used to turn up and use my driveway, told neighbours they could use it and would let his son turn up and use it. Response was always "well, I own the building/my dad owns the building". We were definitely sold a rental with a drive. It was a town centre property and we had a large van, we'd never have rented it if we hadn't been told the drive was ours.

He would dump old furniture in the hallways of the flats.

He refused to replace my fridge, which was rented to me as part of the property

Any argument would result in him throwing a huge tantrum, shouting, throwing his hands up in the air and driving off then getting his secretary to phone me later.

We lasted a year and when we moved out, he sent a picture of a random, huge, and very expensive looking mirror we'd never seen in our lives, saying we'd broken it and wouldn't be getting our deposit back. We then discovered he hadn't protected our deposit and he backed down when we threatened to sue him, and gave us back our deposit plus compensation which was satisfying.

He was a muti millionare, with tonnes of properties who also owned farms and a wedding venue. And he tried to scam a young family out of a rental deposit.

Far took many stories like this. They are all pretty much the same type of people.

Hear hear!! It’s invariably a conscious decision, almost always for financial reasons.

Nobody ever woke up one morning to find random people suddenly in their property, and said, ‘How the hell did that happen?’