Section 21 Notices….

[CuriouslyDifferent]

Saw on the bbc today that a landlord has had to fight the tenant for two years to get their property back.

Obviously an extreme case - but surely all this is going to do is discourage potential landlords from renting out a property.

When renting I always knew that one day I’d be asked to leave and yep it happened and agreed when and sorted out a new pad.

i do understand that buying is not always an option for many reasons and some people will always rent, as i always have.

But surely a landlord has a right to decide they no longer wish to rent out a property and possibly put it on the market empty.

And I know there are abuses which I’ve never suffered - a complaint causing a s31 isn’t fair - and if it goes on the market afterwards in same state for a price increase is an abuse. In my opinion.

But surely the sort of hate we are seeing against landlords who actually fill a very necessary need - shouldn’t have to go through anything more than a few months whilst a tenant moves on. It’s ultimately going to discourage a section of landlords.

I know myself, when I discuss investment options, I’d steer very clear of property as an investment. It’s potentially just to much grief.

It's not a bad thing of this squeezes some low end, amateur landlords out of the market. They often can be poor landlords, well intentioned but under capitalised and ignortant of the law.

Also this may free up properties for first time buyers

There are simply not enough rental properties on the market. Many landlords have sold up. I wouldn’t let a property at a loss unless circumstances dictated.
I’ve had to evict tenants living in my home, which I’d let our due to redundancy and having to work elsewhere. They refused council housing as it wasn’t as nice as my home. Sadly the bailiffs had to be called.
Im currently renting again due to circumstance, though I own a property. Finding a rental is a nightmare- not so bad if in my position it’s a stop gap( albeit a very long one) but when you cannot buy it’s a different question.
both landlords and tenants need protection

I charge the full market rate to new tenants. I'm a LL and increase the rent a small amount each year so I look at inflation eg 2 percent most years. Tenants have told me that they prefer this to a bigger jump up every 3 or 4 years. This has allowed me to cushion the blow of high inflation last year and this year and only increase by 4 percent even though inflation is running at about 10 percent. My mortgage rates have increased for about 12 months in a row as I'm on a tracker. Once I have a professional relationship with a tenant and they have paid rent on time consistently if they have a personal difficulty eg being made redundant or having to go in hospital for an operation and a couple of months recovery before can go back to work and don't get good sick benefits from work etc I will work with the tenant to help them through the difficult period. One tenant lost their job so paid half rent for 2 month's until they got another job and is slowly catching up the arrears £50 per month. In Dec I had a tenant who asked if they could pay less rent that month as they overspent on Xmas gifts. I agreed £300 less in December then £50 more each month from January until July.

We need a sea change in housing in this country. If landlords aren't willing to take the risk of having tenants who won't leave or not having the option of issuing section 21 notice then so be it. Yes private landlords fulfil a purpose but that's only because the rest of the housing market is dysfunctional. Private rents paid for by state benefits aren't a solution to housing for low income households. Local authorities could invest in council housing or purchasing stock at auction etc but without political will and support from central government this won't happen.
private landlords should only be able to provide long term, secure housing for tenants. It could still be a good financial investment under those circumstances for some people. Others wouldn't manage and those should not be landlording. If they sell, more properties come on the market and prices drop. In the end that would be a better outcome.

You just need to look on RM and can see there are loads of houses for sale. LL owning property is not stopping others from buying. Barriers to buying are not having a deposit, not having a good credit record and not having the earnings multiples to afford a house. I find it frustrating when LL's get blamed for people not being able to buy a house because they are not causing the barriers to buying. Too many people are working for minimum wage and the government don't put the MW up enough. Then workers have to rely on state handouts to top up their wages. The government could stop this and raise MW so companies have to pay instead of the state thus freeing up more government money for building new council houses. I don't believe they should have ever been sold off. If people want to buy a house then that should be on the open market.

The problem with some private landlords is they don't see letting out property as a business, but as a solution to funding a spare property.

Would it be such a disaster if all these "accidental" and temporary landlords exited?

The money from rtb WAS supposed to be for new council houses. But they pissed it up the wall.
Short-sighted. They should have used the rent money, invested it etc instead to do it. Instead of selling them off for peanuts.

When buying a flat 8 years ago we were competing with wannabe landlords. Also "we"ll just let it out if we don't get the price we want" was a common negotiating tactic from vendors. So the ease with which private letting can be entered in to does distort certain parts of the housing market.

I've just got on flat left which I will sell when the occupier leaves and hopefully won't need to evict them. Too much hassle for a small portfolio tbh. Can't even rent for six months tenancy in Scotland - tenant can give 28 days notice to leave at any time. Great for them though!

Am selling 2 of mine at the moment as tenants have moved out. It's a very different situation now to when we bought them

We were never accidental landlords, it was a decision we took to invest redundancy payments after pension security was lost.

However most properties were bought at the request of potential tenants - people we knew who could not find anything to rent that was decent and they could afford

I have only done 1 eviction in 16 years. They owed 5 months rent, trashed the house and we never saw a penny back

Mostly our tenants are long term and lovely.

But as each one leaves, we are selling. The regulations & tax changes mean we can't afford to rent below market value anymore. The stress and time consumption is not something I want to take into retirement either

We desperately need more social housing; the lack of good rentals is awful and I can only see it getting worse. I have had people beg me to take a house off the market and rent it to them - it's a horrible situation

BIL and his family have just had to move out of their rental due to the landlord selling. They have been unable to find another property to rent. They were lucky they could move in with another family member but it means there are 2 families, 7 people in a 4 bed house. So that's 4 adults, 1 young adult doing an apprenticeship so can't afford to move out, 1 teen doing exams and a young teen with severe SEN. 2 months in and they are no further forward. I can see why people without even that option hang on in there. More social housing is the only answer.

I don't see any issue with this.

It is aimed at the type of rogue landlords who serve notices for random reasons such as a tenant asking them to do repairs/maintain the property correctly, which they can't be arsed to do, so they evict the person instead...

It does not affect a landlord that wants to sell the property or do some major refurbishment that would require the person to move out.

You mean like our friend over at thread https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/property/4804287-new-tenant-asks-for-maintenance-work-that-is-financially-not-viable

who wants to evict rather than fix the damp issue?

More social housing is the only answer

I don’t think it’s the only answer. It needs both private and social. Encouraging those who are willing and can afford it to be landlords, whilst paying enough housing benefit and making sure landlords accept benefits would mean enough supply to keep the market stable . The crisis is now, and as a country we don’t have rhe money or time to build or buy enough social housing to ease it. We need both.

right now it’s become too difficult for private landlords, so they are selling in their droves. Since 2016 the amount of private rentals available has declined by 20 percent, it was stable through Covid and I suspect as we move through 2023 and the market rights, it will show a significant further reduction . The demand for those rentals has grown by 50 percent.

as demand grows you need both social and private rentals to grow with it, but the opposite is happening. And private rentals are the worst hit. As landlords just can’t do it any more. The additional rights, the taxation, it came at a huge, huge cost to private renters, as being a landlord is a choice, so they can choose not to be, and that’s what they are doing now. No one can be forced to be a landlord. They can sell up and stop. But Being a private renter is seldom a choice, it’s a necessity for many and when the private landlords exit, then people become homeless, as they are doing now.

The government are still allowing rtb. They should have stopped that in line with changing section 21.

Private lettings don't give any security to tenants. We are building a nightmare scenario where eventually we will have a lot of frail older people with no secure tenancy. Thank god my mum owns her place because moving someone with even early stage alzheimers would be beyond a nightmare even if I lived locally to her. There will always be a place for private letting e.g. for people who only need a temporary solution or who choose that route but children, the disabled, the elderly need security and that means social housing.

no, I can’t read legislation that isn’t written yet.

So who told you you can’t sell your rental property then?

It’s widely reported, the change will be to non-fault evictions, but a caveat will be selling the property. Sounds perfectly reasonable.

Final bill for us £3k to evict. We're now de bed bugging, de fleaing the whole property 3 bed semi with three working adults who've had one rent rise of £50 in six years.the incontinent human and dog meant the carpets were pulled up and a skip ordered. We've now been decorating top to bottom with the help of a decorator. Had a message from ex tenant asking for their deposit back .

We're done !!

It's part of the inevitable shift. Houses are iliquid. It's hard to sell them quickly.

It's effectively a tax on the middle class. Government transferring wealth (in terms of tenancy value) from the 2nd property owning middle class to the poorer renting class.

If you moved to a 100% private rental sector then this would be inevitable. It's being done at the moment though as a result of the cost of living crisis.

Landlords bear the pain and cost of a long drawn out eviction rather than the governments needing to house people.

This is the way it is in many European countries, tenants have more rights than they have here, renting is more popular, but house price inflation is lower. Property ownership/landlordism is seen more as a small but safe return rather than a vehicle for rampant speculation.

The final part of the puzzle which we don't have at the moment is the increased building of social housing, but if Labour get it that will come and that will be the final nail in the coffin for private landlords.

All the smart money got out of this a long time ago.

So it’s all conjecture right now. Remember the last budget where it was widely reported about increasing the lta, then they abolished it.

the headline is also to abolish section 21. Caveats, don’t exist under an abolished but of legislation.

can’t see them leaving a loophole that allows landlords to say they are selling, put a silly price on it, get no interest, and then say ah well, or say chain collapsed, back to rental for a few hundred a month more, or just get rid of complainers. Unscrupulous landlords will continue to exist.

the balance is continually swinging in the direction of the tenant being able to stay in a property as long as they want. Why would anyone buy those specifically in the sector of letting properties, take a risk of it being locked up long term. The direction of travel is not promising to Mom and pop landlords, and I believe that’s intentional.

Personally not affected, I use other investments, but with the direction of travel, this has been coming for a while and won’t be the last change either.

im sure we can agree to disagree.

Apparently there will be an ombudsman as well!
With 10 million tenants, the political parties need to cater to them as they are such a large voter base.
Professional landlords and letting companies that own a number properties have nothing to fear from their industry becoming more regulated.

I was an accidental landlord for a while.

Had to relocate for work temporarily, and decided to rent the house out and rent in the new location.

I paid a letting agency a fee to manage it (15% as I recall). They found the tenants, set the rent, informed me of maintenance issues, sent in their repair man promptly?(and deducted the fee from my rental income), collected rent, sorted the deep clean at the end of tenancy, and advised me when they were planning to increase the rent.

I didn’t have to do anything really. It didn’t really earn me any money, but I got to keep my house, and I think the letting agency were good landlords.

Perhaps a good regulation would be to require all landlords with just one property to pay to have it managed by an approved letting agency. The ones who don’t really see it as a business. It protects both parties, means maintenance issues etc will be sorted straight away, means everything is likely to be done according to regulations, eliminates well-meaning but incompetent landlords who don’t really know what they’re doing.

The state has decided to drive landlords fro the market as taxed on profits they don't make (interest deduction changes), 28% capital gains tax, expensive gas and electrical checks, compulsory deposit schemes for which landlords pay, no EPC D or lower lettings from a year or so (one reason landlords are currently selling in droves) and yesterday Gove was saying pets which usually trash a property) will be forced on landlords. Why would anyone continue to let? As someone who hates dogs the pet thing is almost a last straw that breaks the camel's back. It is not a hostile enviornment even for those who are good landlords - you are the dirt on people's shoes so not suprising in socialist Nanny State big spending high tax Tory Britain landlords are leaving the market and tenants have no where to rent.

Given Stamer has said today he intends to crash house prices (so no capital gains) - like Labour in 1974 and again in 2008 now is a good time for landlords to sell or move back into their places.

We also have net immigraiton of about 700k (highest in our history), 1m gross, so a perfect storm for tenants having nowhere to live or rent just about all caused by the state.

Buy if you can.

@Xenia Landlords had YEARS to incorporate and put their rentals into a ltd company where ALL expenses including interest are fully deductible.
You are complaining about safety checks? About renting houses that have some energy efficiency? About the deposit not being yours for the taking?
If a pet wrecks a property then you withhold the deposit.
You are just proving the point these (years too late) regulations are needed.

Now where is my tiny violin?