Rental: cheeky potential tenants

[erloe]

I have a rental which was my home before I met dh. It’s a one bedroom flat in a very very sought after development. I listed it for £3,200 a month and got no interest. I reduced to £3,000 and got one viewing. They offered £2,700 a month.

I got another message asking if the kitchen appliances had been updated since the pictures because the washing machine looked 20 years old. I have now had new pictures taken.

Have other people had tenants haggle on price? I rented it for £2,700 in 2019.

If her mortgage is more than £2700 (plus agents fees, plus maintenance costs) then yes she would be subsidising someone else's life style.

If thats the case she should sell the flat or move back in herself. Both of which will likely mean one less rental flat on the market and more competition for the others.

It’s not subsidising if nobody wants it at 3k

If literally one person has views in months and offered £500 less than the OP originally had it on for there’s a very strong likelihood the OP has misjudged the market for their flat.

Either prices have dropped in the area generally or their flat simply isn’t up to standard for top price in the area

Well it seems as if nobody is wanting to rent your flat at £3000 per month, so it would appear that you are the cheeky one for charging that much!

Where can you get a one bed flat for £1,500 a month in London?

People want to live centrally so they can walk to work or be close to everything. If you rent in some commuter village on the outskirts of London, you'll be spending hundreds a month in travel costs. This soon eats into any saving of living further out.

She still wouldn’t be subsidising them.

Nobody suggests that people who bought at peak prices and sell at a loss are subsidising the next owners. This is the same.

If she’s lost money, or rental incomes haven’t jumped as much as she thought, that’s unlucky. Not the same as actively subsidising someone else’s lifestyle though.

And given she’s literally had one viewer in months there’s either not a competitive rental market where she is, or she’s been very unrealistic in what her flat is worth in the current market

No. She wouldn't be subsidising someone else's lifestyle as she wouldn't be paying the renter anything. She would have under estimated the risks of mortgage rates going up/ other costs increasing and would be better off selling.
Tenants do subsidise a landlord's lifestyle, not the other way around.

As I said before though, whether she needs it or not is irrelevant to potential tenants. They’ll base their offer on what they can afford and think it is worth. Either no one can afford it or no one thinks it’s worth it.

As for her mortgage, a £3000 mortgage when you can only get that in rent (or in this case, can’t even get that) is very irresponsible. Most BTL mortgages require that the going rate is 125% of the mortgage. Unless there’s been a major crash in the area, the only reason for this disparity would be if the OP had massively overstretched herself in the first place.

The OP has two options here - keep on holding out for the price she wants/needs, or get the place tenanted and generating some return. Let’s say in the best case scenario she leaves it empty for another month and does get her £3000. By leaving it empty for a month, she’s lost £2700, and it will be nine months before she’s made that up. In a worse scenario, she could have it empty for two more months and then eventually accept £2800, for example. That means she’s lost £5400 and, with the better offer only worth £100 a month extra, it would take four and a half years to make that up.

Something to think about.

Your, frankly odd, assumption is that because she needs three grand to not contribute to buying her own flat, that there is a mysterious person out there who owes her three grand a month. That is frankly nuts.
I do not think I have the right to have some buy me a flat.

If she owns the flat without a mortgage, would that affect the rent according to you?

And builders create housing, not landlords.

Please, think this through. Slowly if required.

Bathroom tile grouting is pretty grotty too.

I think the high end, central London rental market all seems to be fully furnished with appliances. I assume the tenants tend to be younger professionals who don’t have lots of stuff. I didn’t buy white goods/ sofas / beds until I was 33 and bought my house

@veisan

I just had a look on Rightmove out of interest.

Where Keir Starmer lives. Kentish Town.

Not quite central London but pretty close. Looks like average price is around £1700 to £2000 a month, but there's a couple adertised for around £1500 a month.

I had a look at other areas and there's a one bedroom flat for £1450 a month in Hither Green, and several around £1350 in Walhamstow.

Those areas aren't central London but I don't think they're commuter villages on the very outskirts either?

(All of them seem very expensive to me and I'm in the not cheap SE, although not London).

Look at it this way…

£2700 now is £32,400 in 12m

how many more months void are you prepared to waste?
assuming someone is prepared to pay 3k but it takes you 3m to find them and until they can move in that’s 27k in the same period and a loss of 5.4k

And a previous poster mentioned the Barbican as a possible location for OP's £3,200 a month flat.

There's a one bedroom flat in that area for £2,200 a month.

https://www.rightmove.co.uk/properties/148888805

They're not cheeky at all, just asking a question, surely?

If it is the flat linked above then of course you won't get 3K, it's a basement flat with bars on the window and not much charm. You can get something much better for less.

I’m so sorry op but whether it’s the going price or not, it seems like the most insane thing I’ve heard- is your mortgage close to that? In Ireland and have a rental property (lumbered with it since we bought in 2006), and have always tried to keep it reasonable- we make no money off it since the mortgage got up because prices are just unaffordable for people and we didn’t want to add to the housing shit.

What the landlord 'needs' is totally irrelevant if no one is paying it. I'm sure plenty of landlords would be saying that 'Louise smith who 'needs ' a nice 2 bedder, near transport and in centralish London but to fit with her income 'needs' it to be £1200 max- well that would be unreasonable-- well the reverse is true. Thems the breaks if you buy expensive property with a very fixed and specific appeal and then 'need/want ' to let it out.

I'd agree with this. It is not like they offered £1000 and also the appliances will be older and more used than when you rented in 2019

Thread should be renamed "rental:cheeky potential landlord"

If that is your flat, I'd expect luxury for £3.2k even in central. It's one bedroom at the end of the day.

Do you have a number of potential renters at 3k? If so they can try to haggle but will miss out to one of your other potential renters.
Are they the only ones interested? Then you property probably isn't worth 3k. Maybe be thankful of the 2.7

Most rentals have a lot of applicants these days.

We rent in London ( one bed in Chelsea, 2.4k ) one year ago it was ferociously competitive getting flats, people offering over, paying a year in advance, all sorts of estate agent shenanigans. We'd been out of the rental market for decades and it was grim- we were turned down and outbid several times. However it's definitely calmed down and lots of rentals are dropping their prices so I think it's just a reflection of the market and maybe just accept the offer. How big is it ?

The London rental market is on fire at the moment with everyone and his dog complaining that they can't find flats quickly enough. They go on the market ... they are snapped up.

The fact that your flat hasn't been snapped up very definitely means it is over-priced.

If it's correctly priced you will have multiple applicants. If it's too expensive you will either get no applicants at all or one who tries to haggle. So I think you have overpriced it.

I think you tell this applicant that you will consider his offer of £2700pm but will advertise it at £2850pm for a week and see if there's more interest. If you don't get someone better then accept the 2700pm offer.

But London is where the high paid jobs are. My secretary at work earns 50k, low stress, 10-6, some home working. My sister who lives in Bristol recently saw an advert at her work for the same type job, and it was 26k.

Maybe it's just me, but I think I'd have a much better deal in my part of the Midlands earning 'only' half as much but paying approx. 10-20% of that rental price to BUY a three-bed family house.

I presume that people looking to rent properties for £3,000 or thereabouts a month are reasonably wealthy and aspiring to the central London lifestyle, rather than desperate people who are trapped in renting and couldn't possibly afford anything significantly cheaper to buy (or indeed to rent) anywhere within commuting distance.

Therefore, of course they aren't going to put up with old appliances, drab decor or anything like that. Just like people who buy a cheap second-hand Fiesta are usually happy if it gets them from A to B and is reasonably reliable; but somebody buying a brand new Bentley will be very much more particular about all of the luxurious extras.