limitations on home ownership

[thehappyotter]

Apparently they are going to make it harder for land loards to evict . If you say you need the money you have to prove your in a true financial poor situation. This will obviously stop as many people using it as an income .
This is all well and good but will they build more social housing .
If this does go through i wouldnt want to be a landloard

Why don't the councils buy properties rather than build them? I'm not sure that it's cheaper to build and where you can build is often not where people need to live.

Bloody hell!

There will always be a need for private rentals. Young people leaving home, students, those working in short term jobs. We're currently in a private rental while we relocate and find our feet in our new area. No we're not going to withhold the rent and/or trash the property.

I agree there should be more social housing but even with it private renting should remain an option as only a small % would qualify.

Investing in most things is pretty risky, property, businesses, shop keeping anything where you put your hard earned and your life into something rather than settling for an easier life just working for someone else. Most landlords are not mega wealthy just ordinary people making a living and providing a service.

But you have just made the perfect case for why there is such a shortage of rental properties, the risk is too great from people who think like you. I assume you would wreck a council house and refuse to pay rent there as well, greedy councils expecting you to actually pay.

@custardpyjamas councils are clearly not greedy because they are providing a viral public service and not profiting from it. I don't advocate anyone damaging social housing, because I don't hate councils.

If landlords were desperate to get rid of their properties because, for example, private tenants all went on a rent strike, then they would be willing to sell them at a price people who wanted to buy homes could afford, or councils (or central government) could buy them up.

The value of property is the net present value of the potential income stream from it. If letting was no longer profitable, that npv would fall dramatically, and property would become affordable. There's a book about it called Against Landlords by Nick Bano which is amazing.

Its actually very hard to evict legally now, takes up to a year and costs a fortune.
There are far fewer rental properties available than there are people who want to rent, not everyine can or wants to buy so rental properties ARE needed and in some cases there are 10 applications for each house.
Landlords can be great, awful or something in between but its increasingly less profitable and harder to do it as a living. Its good that the rental market is regulated but it can cause problems - for example capping deposits meant it was impossible to pay extra as a pet deposit so LL's were less likely to allow pets.
We do need far more Social not for profit rental housing available

I think the landlords should be able to evict if rent isn’t paid, property is damaged or there is antisocial behaviour.
I also think that the assumption should be if you get to the end of your contract you should leave if the tenant but no break clauses for landlords that contract should be however long you want it to be 6 months, a year, 2 years, 10 years however long.

How does it work in European countries, like France and Germany? I think tenants have a lot more rights than they do here, and yet most people rent privately, so presumably the landlords still think it's worthwhile.

Well I’d happily rent it out for next to nothing to a low income family. However I’d want to stipulate that once the family no longer needed a property of that size (let’s say the kids have grown and moved out) they would need to make way for a family who required 4 bedrooms. Obviously that is not something I could legally enforce and since the remaining family would have to find somewhere else to live it would be viewed as unfair etc.

And yes, the attitude towards Landlords does make me think twice. Already on this thread someone has written that it’s perfectly acceptable for tenants to trash a house because that’s what Landlords deserve in this evil capitalist society.

@Eastie77Returns I think you're massively overthinking this. You've got a spare house, not a fiefdom.

I think that as there is a much bigger culture of renting it isn't seen as something undesirable you need to do if you can't get a mortgage, its just normal.
Therefore people who rent do so for longer and aren't necessarily those who would like to buy and also may have less money.
Thats just my theory based on my professional knowledge of the UK rental market and also having friends and family in Germany and France

I think in some Eu countries tenants have to do things like buy and have kitchens fitted and take the risk and cost of replacing gas boilers. It is not the property nirvana the UK landlord hating people think it is over there.

The Uk state can do what it likes. Currently it is choosing to make letting out property unattractive both to individual and institutional landlords so there is a massive shortage of properties to let and the state is letting 1.2m people a year move to the UK (900,000 net) so again the state has chosen to have a lot of people come and there not be enough housing, hence the current mess.

Thats true
In Germany Tenants have to buy and fit a kitchen in most cases and take it with them (or sell it) when they leave

@Eastie77Returns Honestly, I’d sell it and use some of the money to do something positive. In our area, I can think of a couple of locally-run organizations run on a shoestring that provides fantastic services to homeless and low-income ppl. Unlike larger organizations, they don’t waste money on admin.

i wouldn’t become an accidental landlord, it’ll be a nightmare.

I'm not sure why you'd think that would be a bad thing? I'd much prefer to install a kitchen than live with a cheap, badly designed landlord-chosen one. German tenants are also allowed to paint the walls and install storage, which makes the experience of renting much less horrific than it is in the UK, where the greedy fucker exorting thousands of pounds a month out of you also gets to dictate that you live with grey carpet and nowhere to hang your clothes!

I don’t think of it as a fiefdom🙄 It’s a house I grew up, just bricks and mortar, and not one I have particularly happy memories of (you can see my other thread about my very unpleasant deceased parent) but if I’m not selling it I’d like it to be put to good use to as many people as possible.

Fiefdom..honestly anyone who owns a property they don’t live in is automatically part of an exploitative class in some people’s eyes. You can’t do right for doing wrong.

@Idkwtdwms

I would gladly sell all mine to the council - but they're not buying!

As soon as tenants leave I put them on the market but it's always been private buyers

However, they can't all be sold - what about people who do want/need to rent privately?
Students
In a temporary job in different location
Testing living together before buying a house
Sold a house but not yet found one to buy

There still needs to be private rentals available, it just needs to be better managed for both tenants and landlords

If there was an abundance of social housing people in all those situations could stay in social homes temporarily.

But all of those specific situations have alternatives that don't involve landlords - students can live in university owned not for profit student accommodation.

Temp workers can be lodgers/ stay in hotels.

I guess you test living together by living wherever you were living before getting together.

Don't sell your house if you haven't found one to buy is the easiest one of those to answer.

But all these slightly tedious what ifs are a distraction from the fact that change is possible, and our economic system doesn't have to be as unfair and stupid as it currently is - none of those issues are insurmountable.

I agree with all of this except the testing living together.

If you are like me and most people I know we all went from living with parents to living with partners- you can’t test living together in your parents home.

Nope, that's not what happens.

@AmberOrca I don't know anyone who did that and I can't really imagine how you would develop a proper adult relationship in the first place if you were living with your parents.

But I guess it's another example of the massive way our dysfunctional housing market is profoundly impacting people's lives for the worse.

Why else would landlords do it, other than for income?!

Really?
I don’t think I know anyone who lived away from home before marriage or very very close to marriage.
It’s funny how people’s experiences form what they think of as normal isn’t it.

I've rented lots of places - rights are generally worse, and tenants are expected to do much more day to day maintenance/put up with more.

My tenant (in my house, that I will move back to in theory once my kids have grown up and flown the nest and I don't need a big house any more, so I can sell where we live right now for job/school) has called me round to change a light bulb for goodness sake, and I've employed a gardener for her because she didn't bother to mow the (tiny) lawn or keep the front (largely paved for parking) even slightly neat.

Given how hard it is to find a place now - and I don't mean just find, I mean pass the credit checks and be accepted, imagine how hard it would become if landlords couldn't evict non-paying tenants (which is already a long-winded process, as tenants are advised not to leave before they're forced out). I would imagine that fixed term leases and rent up front would become much more popular, and draconian inspections (far beyond what we have now) would become the norm - if renting even was viable.

I think people shouldn't be landlords if they are very close to the margin for income (eg no buffer for mortgage rates going up, etc). You need to be able to take a loss here and there without having to sell up to cover them. I rent a house out but we own it outright and it's for the children when they leave uni so no need to sell it for some years yet. I wouldn't have risked it if incoming rent was needed for a mortgage.