rents will soon be rising and the poor will suffer

[bil66]

There is a new tax coming out called section 24 which the Government does not want you to know about.

The tax will put up the cost of renting properties dramatically and this in turn means that landlords will not be able to rent to people on low income.

Finding a property for people on low income is already very difficult but its about to get much worse.

Action needs to be taken to stop this tax and complaints should be made to your local council and MP.

All very well to say landlords will sell up and there will be more houses for people who want to buy BUT what about people who don’t want to buy? Students, young professionals who move around between jobs? I live in a university town and there is massive demand for rented accommodation, landlords are selling up and rents are rising. Simple supply and demand.

bil66 My heart bleeds for you.

The thing we need is a huge crash or massive increase in wages, but we can't have it as our whole economy will fall apart. it doesn't add up anymore.
If chickens had gone up as much as houses they would cost £50 now and even more in the south east.

There will always be houses to rent. But a reduction in BTL can only do good imo.

Currently, we have large numbers of people renting who do not want to be. Anything that drives down prices will do them good, and a glut of BTL properties being sold will do just that.

If i remember rightly the renting numbers of families are something like 4 million, now as you say, not all of them would want to buy. But id bet the majority want to be settled.

There will always be the landlord who sees it as a long term investment and somewhere to keep their capital, the mostly cash buyer and accumulator. But our levels are all skewed at the moment.

Whilst it is possible to charge very low rents under the old tax system this is no longer the case.You cannot expect me to stay in a market for which there is no profit as I have bills to pay.

You all seem very angry with the suggestion that landlords may be charging well below the market rate.well I can tell you that I did.Obviously I cannot do this for everyone.With single mum's or the elderly who would find it difficult to move I left them alone as long as my interest charges were covered These tax changes mean I can no longer do that.

All very well to say landlords will sell up and there will be more houses for people who want to buy BUT what about people who don’t want to buy?

More renters able to buy = fewer renters = fewer rental properties needed for the remaining people who do want to rent.

I rented for years and years before we managed to buy. Buy-to-let amateur landlording is a scourge upon this land. Full of people who amble vaguely into landlording knowing bugger all about how to do it well, or even legally a lot of the time, and think that renting out a 3-bed semi in Wolverhampton makes them Titus Salt.

bil66
No I'm not angry with the suggestion, I'm angry with your attitude that your business (insert, single mums home) model of housing the poor is doing the world a fucking favour. Now your selling up making said single mum homeless as your bottom line is affected.
Can you not see your contradiction there?

bil66 to a certain degree i think potentially you have a point as the government have done little to address the other issues surrounding the BTL market. But your attitude stinks.

This argument cuts both ways. For a period of two years I was an ‘accidental landlord’ when I went overseas with the armed forces and rented my house out for the duration.

Never again - the rent stopped after two months. Luckily the tenant left when I started issuing the necessary paperwork to recover the property. If he hadn’t we would have been stuffed.

If that example gives an idea as to the kind of tenants professional landlords have to put up with, then actually I would say their operating costs are pretty high.

But it is a business. You are renting something from someone else. They should expect to make profit from that and the tenant should get a property at a given standard.

Not everyone in the country can live in a council house either - it simply couldn’t be done

Don't "poor people" get help with housing? I have friends who get most of theirs paid because they are poor. Although one of them does have to pay for an extra bedroom because she wants one for her mum to stay when she is too ill to care for her dd.

bil66 it's totally pointless to try to educate people and stop them from calling us greedy and somehow responsible for the housing crisis.
Society needs LL's but we can't sustain this level of taxation.
We provide a service and if people could or wanted to buy they just would.
We've been ll's for 16 years and so few people have moved out of our properties because they can't afford to buy.
We sold a house to one of tenants at a discount.
Don't educate anyone.

Does society need the kind of shit amateur landlord that has flourished in the last two decades? Really?

Most landlords do the bare minimum of maintenance, withhold deposits for little reason, and hike rents at every opportunity. Why else is renting so expensive now? It's not because all the lovely landlords are charging below market rate, that's for sure.

I'm a homeowner, but my previous experience of renting was not one of lovely benevolent landlords.

The problem is that the rental market is heavily privatised.

We need more social housing which is open to anyone. If we had enough houses then we wouldn’t need to means tests.

Most people want to buy anyway.

We’d have a better mix of residents instead of “sink estates” or social houses with a separate back door.

However none of thag would happen because people generally cannot abide the idea of anyone getting “cheap” housing without “deserving” it.

There’s no such thing as the deserving poor, which is what our current social housing is predicated on. Housing is a basic need like healthcare. So why not make it more accessible?

The reason why not is because ultimately the government wants to protect landlords. Because most of them are landlords themselves.

The government has the power to fix the housing market, it just doesn’t have the will.

gilly you mean housing benefit going to private landlords, yeah that happens. Its also capped (unlike rents). But thats not the majority of family renters and thats not who the government are trying to get into buying these homes that were being rented.

hey You were unlucky with the tenant, most i know are like me, I've refenced when the fences have fallen down, retiled, replastered, fixed roofs at my expense as its my home. But surely thats where lettings insurance comes in, and the 'professional' landlord rather than accidental or 'have a go' would build that into their business plan.
What these tax changes are trying to stop is the buy to let landlords with interest only tax dodge mortgages, buying everything up in an area, and renting to the people who should be buying them. I don't think everyone should be in a council house, we can pay our rent, we could pay a mortgage.... we just can't get one.

Cakeofftheplan I do not see a contradiction at all.I cannot survive without an element of profit so this is what I did.The properties that were rented to professionals on good salaries I charged them full market rent because they could afford it.The people who I deemed highly vulnerable such as single mum's or the elderly got a reduced rate .

Now that the tax system has changed there is no profit left hence my exit plan.

You cannot expect me to commit financial suicide and go bankrupt so I don't think I do have a bad attitude.

Having said that I can see why people who are not on the property ladder are not happy

Cake

That's my point though, the poor are all looked after, the middle not to be confused with the poor, may be struggling.
I don't understand how the poor will suffer.
I know hb is capped, but surely the benefit would rise with any price increase. Some of my friends would get more hb on a larger property too, and still be under the cap.

No i don't expect you to commit financial suicide, but its all part of the bigger picture of the issue.
The way house prices have gone i would imagine (although i know this isn't the picture across the country) that if you've had your portfolio a little while your single mum will be kicked out trying to find somewhere else within catchment for her kids (hopefully she will be housed by the council, where she arguably should have been if she is struggling and on housing benefits in the first place) and you will make a nice profit on the property, which you can then reinvest elsewhere in something else.

To a certain degree that tax incentive to get potential landlords to pick up where the sell off of council homes left should never have been there. Would you have entered this market if it wasn't there? No you wouldn't have done, so those properties would have been left for families to buy them. Your single mum would have been housed by the council, as more social housing would have had to have been built. It was a short term solution thats caused long term issues for both the housing market and social housing

This tax makes sense. The excessive number of rented properties has contributed to tightening supply and raising prices. About time landlords were made to pay a fair rate of tax - they've been given free money at the expense of other tax payers for too long.

If they don't like it they can always sell up and invest their money elsewhere and increase supply in the market which will lead to a drop in house prices.

Sorry gilly i get what you mean. Presumably although Bil offering the subsidised rate for her vulnerable tenants she's done ok from the tax payers purse as well as benefiting from this tax relief and from the property going up in value.

DH suggested we get a BTL property a couple of years ago.

I said vetoed it as it's morally fucking bankrupt and is one of the reasons the UK housing market is so fucked.

Sorry you're going to have to abandon your benevolent charity work OP.

Sucks eh?

No it doesn't suck in fact with the correct planning I might do ok.

I will switch to holiday let's get twice the income at least then offset all my interest costs and live happily ever after.

Every cloud has a silver lining.

For those saying we should just magically build loads more social housing - what else should suffer to achieve that? Reduce the nhs budget? Welfare budget? State pension?

Government money (ie our taxes) are not infinite

OP, I don't know why you say 'the government don't want you to know about it'.
This change to the tax system for LLs has been widely publicised for ages.