Owning your own home

good news surely?

Not really because it's the poor sods who rent who will end up paying for it one way or the other.

What a mess.

Probably not.

Less landlords mean potentially more properties for homeowners, of which there is a shortage so that could be positive.
However, fewer private landlords (or replacement for those landlords leaving the market selling to homeowners) in the absence of social houses and rent mean that the demand for rental properties become even worse than it is now.
rapid increases in rental prices due to increased demand.
Any attempt to cap this will mean more landlords sell, reducing rental housing stock which further increases demand.

I know that a couple of family homes came up for rental near where I am where they had over 30 viewings booked.

Plenty of shit landlords out there who should be pushed out the market, but this might result in the crap landlords & HMO landlords who don’t spend money to look after the properties and their tenants being the only ones left with enough of a return to stay in the BTL market.

If you already own a BTL, the stamp duty change doesn't affect you if you just want to carry on renting it out?

Isn't there a finite number of people though. Renters become homeowners in this scenario.

I'm not sure that's right. I get the aspiration behind the policy and those that have come before it but some people will always rent, they are either not in a position financially or psychologically in being able to take responsibility for a mortgage or their own property.

It is they who are gonna end up getting fked over by this in the long run.

Makes no odds to me I am not a landlord.

Only if 100% mortgages come back. Renters need a deposit, which becomes harder when rents become higher. Also stamp duty relief for first time buyers is reducing earlier too.

There are some lenders doing 100% rental history backed mortgages, and lending up to 6x income in some cases, but outside of criteria for many renters at present.

It doesn’t affect existing landlords directly, but overall, landlords are offloading properties due to larger mortgage costs and declining property values and not being replaced.

More concerning is the impact on tenants who get fewer options, and higher prices.

It also won’t do the perception of landlords any good, as there will be landlords who buy shitholes, and rent them out for premium prices, while spending as little on them as possible.

But someone has to be buying the properties for the supply to decrease.

Only if 100% mortgages come back. Renters need a deposit, which becomes harder when rents become higher.

We should hopefully see reduced purchase prices over time from a lower level of demand from landlords. Many renters are actually in a position to buy, and the number of first-time buyers has increased in the last year or two, so a switch of tenure does seem feasible if the conditions are right.

The limiting side of this is that when people do buy their first home, they tend to buy places with more rooms (e.g. rather than sharing with others), so marginally reducing the number of bedrooms available to rent. In any reasonable world that should be easily solved by building more dwellings, and shouldn't be any reason to allow landlords to continue pushing up values.

But that doesn't really matter to you if you're not one of those buying the properties. A friend of mine has been renting his flat for about ten years. He is too old to get a mortgage now but his landlord has died, the property will go to the LLs daughter and he fears she'll sell up and he'll be out. The idea of pricing landlords out of the market / making the market unattractive, with no social housing alternatives seems a bit mad. Other countries seem to manage with a large rental sector

landlords who buy shitholes, and rent them out for premium prices, while spending as little on them as possible.

That's basically all landlords.

Other countries seem to manage with a large rental sector

Other countries have much better tenant protections or rent controls, which is the thing sorely missing here. Personally I'd love to see rights of first refusal when a tenant's home is sold, where they could either purchase the place themselves or elect a housing co-op to run it instead.

Any landlord who doesn't offer their tennant first refusal is making a bad move. As long as they get the market value and presumably don't have to involve an estate agent all would be good. I don't know enough about housing co-ops to know if they're feasible on individual flats rather than blocks

Seems to me that you can hypothesis to any possible scenario heavily biased by your own experiences and position.

I think it’s also significant to see this as a tax for fundraising purposes not just as a way to balance housing market issues.

If you are buying a second property to live in part time this won’t change much.

I also wonder the Airbnb/ holiday let boom effect on towns particularly in more desirable areas where local wages are out of sync with the property market Southwest England and parts of Wales seem heavily affected by this.

I’d be interested to know the distribution stats for 1 property, 2, 3 etc

I think with a formal rights system, rather than a landlord's favour, you'd probably dissuade people from purchasing a place with sitting tenants, so there's potential that it would reduce the price the landlord would be able to achieve.

I don't know enough about housing co-ops to know if they're feasible on individual flats

I can't see why not, it's not like landlords do much anyway, it would just be managed at cost in the interests of the tenants instead

I’ll lend her it, but I want £12k back.

this as a tax for fundraising purposes not just as a way to balance housing market issues.

Yeah that's my worry

I’d be interested to know the distribution stats for 1 property, 2, 3 etc

Can't remember exactly where these were from, but they should give you a rough indication:

2 Attachments

Dunno it’s crude but low implementation cost.

Weirdly a lot of potential reforms would be low or even negative cost, they’d just require the political gumption to face up to landlords and financial organisations.

This is one of the easy ones (from the budget):

The government will reduce right-to-buy discounts, and local governments will retain the earnings from council housing sales to allow them to reinvest.

I’m not that up on them can you elaborate?

Also…Bit confused by the top graph mainly because of the first column…

Just a few that come to mind:
Further limiting grounds for possession, higher minimum service-length terms for landlords (but not tenants), controls on rent increases, rights of first refusal, moving council taxes and business rates onto landowners (proportional to land values), ending buy-to-let for existing dwellings, additional SDLT and land taxes on second/third/etc homes, cracking down on short-term lets, allowing councils to reinvest sales of social homes into new social builds.

And on the financial side, various reforms to the mortgage market to allow long-term fixed rates and various other arcane fixes to undo the effects of market liberalisation, and adding a remit to the BoE to also manage housing inflation.

I’d be in favour of multiple bank rates set by the BoE, with buy-to-let falling in a higher band, and governments able to tax back the difference from banks to reduce their incentive to prioritise lending to those who already have collateral.

Bit confused by the top graph mainly because of the first column…

Just saying that landlords tend to have ‘only’ one or two homes, but that those landlords represent the vast majority of homes on the rental market, so it’s not just large institutional investors that are the problem!

Lots of landlord hate.
I had 3 landlords living in London and all were absolutely fine to deal with, zero issues from us and glowing references from them when moving.
I’m also currently a landlord though not by choice and not for much longer. Someone had a place to live for a year at below market rate at a time when they needed it.
All these ideas to make being a landlord more prohibitive just mean higher rents and less choice for those who want to rent.
The need for rental property isn’t going to disappear overnight and the slack isn’t going to be taken up by councils who are broke.

I had 3 landlords living in London and all were absolutely fine to deal with, zero issues from us and glowing references from them when moving.

I had 6, and all were pleasant enough people, but 3 of them evicted us with one month notice because they were 'selling up'. In all honesty, I think that's what they thought at the time, but only one month later, the places were up on rightmove for rent at a higher price. Meanwhile we had to shell out an extra few hundred quid each time, plus moving costs and all the stress that goes with it.

Someone had a place to live for a year at below market rate at a time when they needed it.

That's great, but at some point you have to ask whether this is a good way to structure society, not just relying on stories of one-off situations where lucky individuals got a deal. It probably wouldn't be difficult to do a carve out for these specific scenarios anyway.

All these ideas to make being a landlord more prohibitive just mean higher rents and less choice for those who want to rent.

Very few people actually want to rent, and this is borne out by many many surveys.

The need for rental property isn’t going to disappear overnight and the slack isn’t going to be taken up by councils who are broke.

Of course it isn't, and a best-case scenario is that this situation will take decades to fix. The slack can be taken up by many more people than just councils too, and even then, their funding models are changing to allow investment in social housing.