To think we should ban private renting?

[honeyrosesandwich]

AIBU to think this is a great idea?

Imagine if private renting was banned. All rented houses were done under social housing / housing association. There are already over 4.5 million houses rented under social housing, so it's on a huge scale already.

It would mean rent would be affordable for everyone and effectively help the cost of living prices. I live in a housing association house and my 2 bed is £520 a month. My brother, who private rents, pays £1100 for a 2 bed in the same area.

Repairs for my house are done by the HA's own company. I just put in a request online for it.

People that want to stay in their privately rented home will be free to do so but they put a ban on any new tenancies. The owners will have the opportuntiy to sell the house to social housing or keep it for themselves, but not rent it out further. If sold, the tenant will be allowed to stay.

I've been thinking about this randomly today and haven't come up with any negatives so far. Is it bad to monopolise housing? Well, there are already certain housing associations which own hundreds of thousands of houses.

I don't think insurers would want tenants doing their own maintenance. The landlord has to insure. Friend in a council house wanted to put in new carpets, paint and wallpaper the house. Pave part of the garden. They agreed but reminded her that if she left. The carpets would have to come up and all the walls be repainted magnolia again. The house looks beautiful now. She said it was sad that a future tenant couldn't enjoy it when she moves on.

But those rules can be changed too! It’s one thing leaving a shit tip - fine, whatever. But painting everything magnolia etc can be stopped and they live with the decor the same as you do when you buy a house and can’t afford to do it up

I take it you've never owned anything and that's why you think it's ok to steal somebodies home and offer them only half a low rent payment every month as compensation for stealing it! As a working tax payer who has worked to own my home, I am not willing to fund people having large homes in nice places for tiny rents! How do you expect a homeowner to pay a mortgage off if you steal their house so they can't sell it, how can they move and get a mortgage on a new property of you steal their equity that's tied up ok the old one and their ability to pay anything left on the old mortgage off!

The problem is some of these seaside places have impracticalities. There's an argument always rumbles on about holiday rentals in Robin Hoods Bay and Staithes on the north east coast but these places are small and a long commute from any decent sized urban places to find work and it's rural roads that would be busy with holiday traffic in the summer and pitch black and icy in the winter, there might quite a distance to go for schools, colleges, GPs, dentists and hospitals.

Also if you got rid of all the holiday rentals it would probably impact the local pubs, shops and cafes etc but somebody on holiday would be out spending locally everyday but you wouldn't if you lived there.

I also keep hearing how first time buyers can't afford to get on the property ladder these days.

I think this is only really the case in the south east.

When I got divorced 5 years ago (when house prices were at a peak) I had to buy my own house. I couldn't get a big mortgage on my own as I'm self-employed, but I needed a 3 bed house for the DC. I paid £150k for a three bed semi in the midlands. It needed a lot of modernisation, which I've saved up and done over time (rewiring, new kitchen, new bathroom etc etc). The house i bought legally couldn't have been rented out because it wouldn't have passed eg electrical safety checks, so I lived in something that looked like a building site for nearly 2 years whilst I invested time and money doing it up.

There are houses out there which are still affordable, it's just people don't want to buy those houses. They either want to buy more expensive houses in more desirable areas, or they want someone else to invest the money to get the house up to a certain standard and then complain about the cost to rent it.

Britain doesn't have a housing crisis. The south east does. That's an entirely different thing and could be solved if work opportunities were more evenly distributed across the country.

We're becoming a country that wants everything subsidised! It's important to remember what the point of social housing is! It's so people who can't work or are on low incomes could afford to have a place to live. If the councils / HA's buy every rental property across the country it would cost frightening amounts of money because they would have to pay full market value for it because nobody should be expected to let them have it cheap and some will have mortgages to pay off. Who funds that when the rents are small for the low income tenants?

There shouldn't be encouragement of people to to keep their income low and deliberately try and get a lifestyle that gets them a nice house for low rent! The whole point is they get a house and then aspire to get in their own two feet and buy or rent something better and hand back the subsidised housing for someone else to get a leg up with. They shouldn't be offered luxury homes for really small rents because you are giving them something they'll never get by themselves! Why should benefits get you a larger and more luxurious house than many of those that work and completely pay for their own housing!

You also cannot jeopardise the house values of people's owned homes by putting social housing / council housing tenants anywhere and everywhere because not all of them look after their housed, do you put people in a nice house on a high value street and they just let the front garden overflow, fill it with junk? Anti social behaviour? Have single mothers moving in with 6 unruly kids? We all know these kinds of people exist and peoples owned houses are like life savings, it's money for retirement and that shouldn't be destroyed.

When we were moving house a couple of years back we were eyeing up a detached house on a new build estate but when we went for a drive there, there was an alarming number of houses up for sale - later found out it was because the council had bought some houses there and the tenants they moved into them were causing problems.

My thoughts exactly! Young people today don't want to start at the bottom of the housing ladder and work their way up it like we did, I get annoyed wheni I see people whinging online that they need to save such a big deposit and when they talk about the value of house they want acd where they want it, they basically want their starter home to be the same calibre and value of the house I live in now after 22 years of paying mortgages!

I remember an article about a couple only just in their twenties and they wanted a £300k three storey Victorian terrace in Manchester somewhere as their first home, a lot of young people thinking like that will take on massive mortgages that consume most of their income and end up in financial trouble

I agree. I tried selling a 1 bedroom flat in a city with good employment opportunities in the south a few years ago. It was cheap - under £100k decorated nicely and maintenance fees low too. Would have made an ideal starter flat for a young couple or a single person.
The only people who came to view it were landlords. Ditto when I tried to offload a 2 bed flat in the same area - LLs only came to view it.

I wanted to sell it to someone who was going to live in it and not rent it out - hypocrite much, I know but I wanted to do the right thing.

"Luxury" housing? 😆

I shall tell my friend that then. The damp is wrecking her belongings and health, yet the council wont do anything about it.

Maybe the council won't do anything about it, but as a private small-time landlord I certainly would.

I've invested personal money into my houses and I don't want them falling into disrepair and therefore losing value. The capital put in needs protecting because that's where the investment is, not in rent received (which can easily be wiped out from month to month by an unexpected repair bill). I am proactive on maintenance and sorting problems before they even become problems (and it is amazing how many tenants have no clue about maintaining properties).

Bigger corporate landlords or councils/housing associations are much less likely to give a shit.

So the local HA gets compulsory purchase orders for every private rented property at market price? Do you think Has are just sorting on millions of pounds profit? What able the massive increase in staff they'd need and the infrastructure to sort that?

A) where is the state going to get the money to buy all that property?

B) the maintenance of all that property is a huge undertaking. Do we really trust the state to do this to a high standard, at such scale?

I was in a private rental with damp, holes in the ceiling and barely functioning central heating as one radiator had a hole in it. Landlord did nothing.

I think the OP title should be renamed "To think we should ban bad landlords from renting properties out"

So if you get posted to UAE or Singapore or whatever for a couple of years you have to either sell your family home or let it stand empty?

And what about all the rentals used by workers being posted to London for a few years? Should the government/housing association really be in the business of renting out luxury flats to financial services workers?

Especially if you've ever seen the state of some private rents. I have several friends stuck in damp houses that need news windows etc. Window and central heating programmes take YEARS to complete as it is, you'd basically have to pause on all but emergencies for existing HA tenants trying to legally get properties up to standard.

And imagine the workload.

The legal and admin team liaising with landlords and processing the purchase.
You're also imposing new tennacny agreements on tenants and all those need to be signed.
What if the tenants have preexisting debt with the HA?

All the surveys etc that occur when you buy a new house.

Internal property inspections to raise necessary jobs, scheduling those in and the trades teams to undertake even the basic level of stuff.
Home visits to new tenants.
The increase in neighbour nuisance complaints which you get in social housing.
Someone to process all the new rents etc.
Extra admin to handle future calls re repairs, enquiries etc.

OP seems to think they just swap some paperwork for a house, drop the rent and life carries on but cheaper!

That doesn't mean every landlord would just ignore though.

If the property was in such a state, why did you agree to rent it in the first place? Surely you inspected the place before taking it on and saw issues with damp and holes in the ceiling, even if the central heating problem might have been more difficult to spot before you signed the tenancy agreement?

It had been repainted so all these issues were hidden until the winter/rain.

The landlord I had before that was very good though.

1. What happens when a rental property isn’t purchased by any of the private HAs? What if none of the HAs bite?
2. What happens when a Newcastle family owns a home, but moves to Cardiff on a 12-month work contract? They cannot afford to pay the mortgage on their Newcastle family home and rent in Cardiff in tandem. Are their only options to either let their Newcastle home sit empty and take a financial hit, or sell it? Even if they’re definitely coming back in 12 months?

Exactly. The scale of all this is eye watering. The OP doesn't seem to have considered any of this.

The OP is probably imagining some kind of confiscation for the greater good

I totally agree with your points about maintenance and going above and beyond, and increasing to cover that, but it's when landlords give a big increase and say that it's because mortgage rates have gone up. If it's actually because of other costs and responsibilities, they should say that, but some (including my DP's landlord) say that it's due to their mortgage rate. So either they're not being honest with why they're increasing it (even though it would be reasonable to say you're increasing because of the extra compliance, repairs etc) or they have borrowed the money and are passing on those borrowing costs to tenants.

I and DH spent ten years priavtely renting moving round country for work.

One property we rented - which did need work and was damp - was owned by elderly couple DIL was renting out it was paying for their care home.

I renetd a property where woman has moved in with fiancée before marriage but wanted to keep flat in case things didn't work out.

Another was someone who worked abroad for a few years - while I renet and anotehr hwo was studying as mature student - my rent paid mortage so they could keep properties and gave me somewhere to live.

Personally I prefered the ones with bigger property portfolios who were doing it professionally as they were more professional about everything including repairs.

My DC rented with private landlords for uni - and with uni halls before that - they can't buy and likely will need to work elsewhere to build their carrers up - so with no private rentals they'd be stuck.

I do think we need more HA and council housing on massive scale but private renting never been banned and doing so would cause massive problems.

I also keep hearing how first time buyers can't afford to get on the property ladder these days.

Took us ten years to get stable jobs and save depoist - by then we were early 30s and had first kids - we didn't want a starter home we needed a family home.

MIL kept on we should have got a 2 up and 2 down - it would already have been too small and we'd have been stuck there - probably so long we couldn't have had the finial child we wanted.

We carefully matched jobs and houseprices so we could aford to buy but it did write off large swaths of the country and I think it will be worse for DC.

You've totally missed what has been said in this thread? The topic of the thread was wanting councils to buy every single private rental property in the UK and turn it into social housing! Not every private rented property is a shit hole! Every single private rental in the UK would absolutely include anything from country houses to penthouses to cottages by the sea! Have a look on Airbnb etc!

At present around 40% of the total budget of tax payer money funding housing benefit/element of UC is paid to tenants in the private sector (ie direct to landlords as profit rather than reinvested in maintenance). This would be higher without caps. This is despite the fact that twice as many social housing tenants qualify for housing support because high rents in the private sector means that individual claims are higher. This is unaffordable. Tax payers cannot afford to pay billions to private landlords to allow them to profit from high rents. Housing benefit that would not be paid to individuals to fund their mortgage is paid to private landlords with a BTL mortgage and a tenant that qualifies for housing support due to high rent. Tax payers and lower paid workers are being exploited to make profit for private landlords. Perhaps rent control is not such a bad thing.