Massive wake up call about renting

[madcatladyforever]

I've always owned my own home from age 21 as houses were around £15,000 in those days and affordable for everyone, I'm 57.
I never really realised how awful renting is.
I've just got divorced and lost my job so I've got a new job 300 miles away in the NHS and moved into a rented place (hovel) while my house sale and new house purchase goes through.
My mortgage will be around £200 a month, had paid it off but divorce settlement meant I had to downsize and get a small mortgage out, all affordable.
Renting on the other hand.
One bedroom flat in a shitty area, £900 a month all inclusive of bills, furnished, no washing machine so I have to go to the laundrette.
Bloody hell, the rent is 2/3rds of my salary, the flat is horrible but allows my cat, furniture looks like it came out of a skip. I'm very house proud and this place is damp, shabby, paint peeling off, floors worn out. It's horrible.
The laundrette costs £10.00 to wash and dry a load and I have to fo two loads so that's £20.00 a week as my uniforms are pure white and I can't wash them with coloured stuff.
I have to start handwashing stuff to save money and it never smells like newly washed clothes when you handwash.
Sometimes I hang wet washing in the shower to save on money for the dryer making the flat even more damp.
I have to maintain a good car because I travel miles for work and the lease and the petrol takes up nearly all the rest of my money so I'm in Aldi on a Friday evening buying all the almost out of date food and not eating properly. The landlord is constantly on my back and I can't put up any pictures or anything to make this place look more like home.
As soon as I'm in my new home everything will be affordable again and my life will be 100 times better.
This has really opened my eyes to what the majority of people have to cope with in this country and it makes me feel so ashamed.
WHY don't we have a system like Germany where you have a lifetime rental at a decent price and can do pretty much what you like to the place.
My son pays an extortionate rent in Woking and has been forced to move three times in the last three years as the landlord wants to sell or put the rent up.
If I had to do this long term I don't know how I'd cope, my mental health would really suffer.
How does everyone manage?

There are many nice rentals - they don’t look like the dump. Probably easier to rent those if you haven’t got a cat.

To answer your question OP yes renting can be shit & I agree we should have a better model.

I'm pretty sure JoJo is a landlord, hence why the cat is the issue and not the market.

@duckyolucky Yes, I rent out some very lovely properties. I was a renter before I got onto the property ladder myself and always lived in lovely places too.

I’m a LL and would never have a property that I wouldn’t live in myself. I make sure my properties are immaculate, but that’s why I’ll never be rich.

If it's short term, then you might have been cheaper booking a long stay at a travel lodge, premier inn or b&b. I know it's nowhere near like having your own place, and youd need to sneak in a microwave and live off microwaveable food but it would be nicer.
When I sold my place and had to wait 4 weeks to move into my new place, I did that. It was quite nice not having to do any cleaning for 4 weeks!

I learnt to love magnolia and kitchens that clearly came out of other houses

@DobbyTheHouseElk shame there aren't more like you. I'm a homeowner but rented whilst at university & just after, some of the places were awful. Far too many greedy landlords in my eyes.

Are you in or near London, OP? That sounds like London prices!

Sorry! I missed the cat. Yeah, you couldn't stay in a hotel with a car.

Welcome back to the slums

Seriously though we aren't going to get a big influx of SH for five years at least.

While your situation does sound rubbish, renting isn't always awful. I rent (will buy in next few years) and it's so easy. Any time there's an issue the landlord has a tradesperson out straight away, we don't have to worry about any large unexpected bills when something does go wrong, they trust us enough to paint and do what we want as long as it's put back when we leave, the rent is about what we'd pay on a mortgage and they seem happy for us to stay as long as we like. I think it makes a big difference whether you have a decent landlord or not, but there are good ones out there.

Renting is shit. I rent and people do look down on renters yet with the price of rentals no wonder we can't afford to save for a house deposit. Then again even if someone gifted me a deposit on paper I wouldn't meet affordability tests

I never realised that people looked down on renters. Its not something I would even ask someone. But then I joined mumsnet and I csnt believe the number of times I've seen someone post to complain about a neughbour parking legally in the street or letting their kids run around in their own garden and they've always used the line "we are owners whilst they're just renters"... as if that somehow changes their right to park legally in the street or use the garden they pay for. It's a really horrible way to think.

@duckyolucky It’s not good business sense really. But I couldn’t live with myself if I offered shoddy houses. Unfortunately it makes no difference to the behaviour. I get trashed on a regular basis. LA tell me I’m mad for recarpeting and painting so frequently. Even my plumber commented on how generous a LL I am. Makes no money though.

Agree OP! I rented with my DC, in a similar situation after separation. Actually, I landed on my feet and managed to get a pet-friendly place that was in good condition, but OMG the rent was so high - I grabbed it while I could because I know I wouldn't easily find another OK flat where I could have a cat, but it gobbled up my money for the 9 months we were there.

What shocked me even more was the competition to get a flat – when a flat was advertised, there were appointments where loads of people turned up to be shown round, the agent looked you up and down and you had to fill in a form about your income, work, habits, renting experience etc - it was like applying for a job. Then they chose the "best applicant". Which was never me. I finally got the place I did by asking the agents to let me know if a pet-friendly place came up and they saved themselves some bother by letting me have it without the application process. It was just luck.

Fucking awful and I'm so sorry for people who have to deal with this. Often they have to pay all kinds of fees up front as well. Then they have hardly any security and it costs a bomb.

I'm also shocked by the number of people I know who have extra homes that they rent out - like that's become a normal thing for the middle classes, while poorer people have no hope of buying.

Unless you are filthy rich it does tend to be the option for beggars who can't be choosers. It's an obscene proportion of one's income just to cover the rent for somewhere very basic and you have no security.

I've said this before but what is going to happen when generation rent retire? How the hell are people who can no longer work supposed to find £900 a month rent money when plenty of working people couldn't manage it.

Renting is awful!! We’ve been renting for years as we couldn’t get on the market. It means moving around a lot, not really feeling like house is your home because you can’t do anything to it & quite often fuck all works & takes ages to repair despite sky high prices.

Unfortunately it’s my generation that seem to be suffering the most. On the brute side we’ve just bought our first property after both working two jobs & selling everything we own. The kids have had nothing for the last 3 years.

Brute *bright 😂

What England needs is a compulsory registration of lardlords, like Scotland. It will not make it a paradise overnight, but it will put a brake on some of the unscrupulous landlords and help those who are good.

As regards the owners v tenants - unfortunatley a small number of tenants do not seem to care about maintaining things they can easily or readily look after - cut the grass, keep the area tidy - a minority I know but unfortunately these are the ones some owners pick up on. Of course a place needing maintance, paiting and some work doing is the landlords duty and they cannot always be relied upon.

I've moved 12 times in the last 7 years. I've paid the vast majority of my wages on renting shitty flats for my entire adulthood. It is horrendous never having any certainty of where you will be living in 6 months time. We have to put up with our current shitty landlords because we want to stay where we are for a while and have some stability. When I look at mortgage calculators and see how little we would be paying if we could just get a mortgage it's heartbreaking. I don't understand why, given we pay well over £1k in rent per month currently, we would not be able to get a mortgage paying less than half that. We have access to a sizeable deposit but the salary necessary to borrow what we need for a very modest 2 bed flat would require us to be earning more than double our current combined income according to calculators. We currently live pretty much hand to mouth because of renting, the £800 a month we would save if we had a mortgage would make us feel very wealthy indeed.

Yes, I worry about the older folk who have to rent long term.. What the hell do they do?
Chances are that you're renting, you haven't been building up any reliable pension pot.

@Frothybothie in some areas of England, there is compulsory landlord licensing - the borough my rented house is in brought it in a couple of years ago. As a LL who previously spent 13 years renting I support it 100%. The process is quite rigorous - long winded application forms that want to know the ins and outs of everything to do with the property, copies of the tenancy agreement and safety certs have to be submitted and to cap it all off, an in-person inspection from the council at which tenant and LL have to be present. The council worker checks the paperwork in front of the tenant and ensures they know their rights, and looks around the property for signs of mould, unsafe electrics etc.

The problem? The shit landlords just don't bother registering. The houses on that street all have gardens which back onto other gardens. There are literally three properties with shed-type concrete structures in the back and we know that at least two of them have multiple people living inside them. We reported them to the council and two years later... no change.

Although I'm happy to pay my £1000 licensing fee and comply with the law, it really grates that the bad ones just carry on getting away with it over and over again. Some of the licensing money should go towards better enforcement.

Yep.. absolute joke.. obviously some are better than others but after 6 years of renting in London my last experience was horrendous. I wasn’t made aware that electric heaters in the property weren’t working and the place was riddled with damp.. £900 a month not including bills, landlord harrassed me constantly to get electric company to fix heaters when it was all her fault in the first place, now arguing over deposit as she wants to take £600 from it for stuff she fabricated. Wow! Massive eye opener and never again please god

@madcatladyforever I'm sorry to say I agree with the other LLs on here, the cat is probably the issue in finding a nice place. I turned down a potential tenant on the grounds that she had a "mostly house trained" large dog, and I had just spent the money for brand new carpets throughout - I say that with maximum sympathy as a cat lover / owner myself! Her solution was to propose that I rip out the new carpets and replace with laminate flooring - err, no chance!

The pets issue would be less of a problem if we had decent length tenancy agreements.

If a tenant with a pet was going to be living in a house for years the cost to the LL would be negligible - flooring has to be replaced at some point.

But when tenants may only be in 6 months or so, I can understand why LLs are reluctant.