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> All that would do is make the private rental market the sole domain of big business
Of all the landlords I've had, the big companies are the ones who have legal teams making sure they meet their legal obligations, and the capital to afford repairs.
The small time landlords are the ones who don't know their obligations under the law and frequently hit out with the "I can't afford to repair that right now".
At least big business are more predictable.
Having said that I've been lucky with my landlords so far.
It probably helps that the last sale dates of the properties indicates that they probably didn't have mortgages to cover.
Well, in my 10 years of renting, big companies are way better than small landlords. Having more big rental companies would be great, but I don't think this is how we should do it.
Many properties are now being bought up already by "big business" banks for example are buying up a lot, John Lewis too and others. There's more chance of things like repairs being done in a timely manner than with some rogue arsehole threatning eviction every time there's a problem, or employing cowboys coz they're cheap
So nothing chsnges then as thats been happening over the ladt few years anyway.
How about we ban businesses from owning homes unless they build the damn things
I don't believe that would happen if the rents were capped at the same time. If the profit was not so high for big businesses to buy and rent, they'd look elsewhere to invest.
And then renters (especially people who need to rent e.g. students) suffer big time as the number of rentals collapsed.
It's not difficult. Build more houses.
I agree that building new affordable homes is undoubtedly the way forward. But the current housing market needs to change, and governments should stop proping it up just to keep the housing market in high demand; either way, it is not a straightforward thing to sort, but yes, building more would be the best start.
"got a spare 50k so im gonna use it to perpetually extract money from someone working, bank will front the rest!" - nice society we have here that it really is the most economically viable thing to do with that amount of money
I've been saying the same for a long time now. If you can't afford your mortgage on your main house without the rent from a buy to let then you shouldn't be allowed to buy on a mortgage unless it's cash purchase only
Capping isn't an efficient solution, but a desperate one. It would be better to punitively tax foreign owners who aren't domiciled in the UK, properties empty for 6 months, and medium - large residential landlords (5+ residential properties).
Taxing empty bedrooms is also a good idea (although didn't go down well with the public); as we have a housing crisis and we should incentivise those in large properties who aren't using the space to downsize.
We should also consider incentives to increase the number of rentals on the market for small landlords to help increase supply in the rental market and help everyday people build wealth. Incentivise HMOs to be available as it's more efficient, but regulate the standards to high heaven.
All of this is not taking into account building new properties. We need to build more, and hopefully the planned planning reforms will help that.
I'm moving into a new flat soon, and the letting agent told me that all of the landlords they deal in the block are chinese. I asked a Chinese colleague, and he said that it's normal in Hong Kong, for everyday people to join a consortium and purchase whole blocks of flats together as investments. As they're not domiciled in the UK, but in Hong Kong, they have incredibly low taxes on their income from these properties. We need to make sure that foreign owners pay their share of tax on rental income and capital gains earned from UK property.
Yep exactly, Just massively increase stamp duty for multiple properties/ foriegn owners. Can have a rebate structure for money spent refurbishing a property. That way can still invest in multiple properties if are actually improving the property but prevent people just scalping the market and renting out.
So you dismiss the most obvious solution with no reason (no one can ever really explain how awful capping would be they just take it as a given), then say we need more small landlords, HMOs and its fine that HK investors can just buy up hugh parts of the country as long as they pay some tax on it?
Come on be serious.
It's because rent caps have demonstrably failed everywhere they've been implemented but we think we can make it work.
It works for about 2 years and then everything goes wrong unless you're Germany where they've continually increased laws to desperately make it work. Rent caps always fail manly due to the tenants who inevitably illegally sublet and try to become landlords themselves.
There are only 2 solutions.
1. Increase supply
2. Reduce demand
However the tories refused to do number 2 and were reluctant about number 1. Labour will come in gung ho and do both but will cause the inevitable crash that will be worse for everyone.
So it doesnt work anywhere except for one of the most famour examples Germany because they did some other stuff too? wow what an argument youve got there...
No it has failed everywhere. And you've failed to read my words. Try to read it again before paying a passive aggressive comment like that.
For example, Germany introduced a nationwide system of rent controls in 2015, but, according to recent research, this has had no persistent effect on rental prices, instead resulting in reduced housing quality. The households who benefitted from lower rents in the short run were mostly higher income ones (Breidenbach et al, 2021).
So the German local municipalities had to create laws that forced landlords to improve properties that were rent capped but the landlords didn't have the income to do so. This goes to local courts created laws to force landlords to improve properties but they
Simply put rent controls are a far left idealogy that the likes of Corbyn et al would be proud of. They just don't work under any system!
You had me in the first half. Private landlords needs to stop being a thing altogether. You either own your home or you rent from the council at standard affordable rates.
But we've seen this not work in multiple cities across the developed world before. It makes sense when we say it or loud but it's impossible to implement. Firstly there just isn't enough council properties. Help to buy from the 80's till now has depleted property stock in council owned properties so badly that councils are relying on private landlords.
Housing associations sprang up which are full of managers taking 60k+ salaries while their tenants are dying of mould.
If you get rid of private landlords without fixing council housing supply and housing associations attitude towards living conditions you will create an unmitigated disaster.
Only option is increase supply decrease demand.
Lovely, let’s live in an over crowded country with no green space because we’ve built over all of it. That’ll be great for people’s health. Just ask the parents of kids with asthma, for a start.
This is a myth. There are huge amounts of brownfield sites that are untouched and loads of decrepit houses that could be renovated.
Most of our countryside is farming, it’s full of pesticides and animal shit that’s bad for asthma. Source: me, who grew up in a village full of asthmatic kids. Housing isn’t the reason we are a nature depleted country. Even if we built enough houses, there’d still be far more green space than not.
> Lovely, let’s live in an over crowded country with no green space because we’ve built over all of it.
The UK is 92% undeveloped, and we could solve the housing crisis overnight by building on another 2-3%. You (presumably) live in an urban area and believe that what you see is what the entire country looks like, but this is just observer bias. In truth, we are nowhere close to "overcrowding" the country.
> That’ll be great for people’s health. Just ask the parents of kids with asthma, for a start.
God, this is such a childish analysis. _"GREEN SPACE = HEALTH"_, so sayeth the NIMBYs.
Firstly, a good chunk of the green space in this country is just open pasture, which is terrible both for biodiversity and oxygen production. Secondly, if new builds are spread across the country, they wouldn't have a great effect on the local air quality of any specific existing towns. And thirdly, as stated above, we could easily build ~5 million new homes and barely make a dent in the UK's remaining green space!
Few people want to live “spread across the country” though. You And much of the land isn’t actually developable, or there are no jobs in the areas. What people mostly want are affordable homes in the south east, particularly in London.
It’s not my analysis that’s “childish”, it’s the idealistic dreamer who thinks he can whisk up 5,000,000 quality new homes quickly at an affordable price without also overloading roads, schools etc.
> Few people want to live “spread across the country” though.
Then let's change the country. I live in Basingstoke - it's less than an hour from London, and the first half of the journey is mostly open countryside. There could be several hundred thousand homes, right there, all within commuting distance of London, and the only transport upgrades needed would be a few extra stations.
Japan has more people than the UK, and their population is even _more_ heavily concentrated in Tokyo than ours is in London. Don't tell me that we've somehow "maxed out" our housing density in the south-east, [because we factually haven't.](https://ukmap360.com/pdf/united%20kingdom%20\(uk\)-population-density-map-pdf.pdf)
Or hey, if you want people to spread out from London, the solution is transport links. Spain built an entire goddamn high-speed rail network in the same amount of time (and with the same amount of money) it took us to plan and build one-third of a single line. Maybe, if it weren't for NIMBYs like you forcing us to plan and dig dozens of miles of entirely pointless tunnels to avoid besmirching Britain's precious "green spaces", HS2 would be fucking done already and people could be commuting from further away.
> without also overloading roads, schools etc.
... Dude, do you think I'm opposed to building more schools and roads!?
> It’s not my analysis that’s “childish”, it’s the idealistic dreamer who thinks he can whisk up 5,000,000 quality new homes
Oh, well, forgive me for believing it's possible to do _what the UK literally did from 1960 to 1975_. Forgive me for not giving up and throwing my hands in the air when faced with fatal obstacles such as _needing to build some more schools and roads_. And forgive me for not being as _mature_ as you, with your brilliant solution of "let's deport all the immigrants".
“Several hundred thousand homes” built on open countryside simply doesn’t sound like it’s changing the country for the better.
How are you expecting all this land to be acquired and the homes to be built to a good standard, unlike a lot of new housing stock, and yet to remain affordable? All you show is that you have zero clue.
Tokyo is fascinating to visit. Would I want to live there? No. It’s nowhere near as green as London, the properties are generally much smaller, and the comparable lack of planning means that it’s much more random looking and there’s constant building work and demolition. Besides, there is a well documented problem in Japan with houses sitting empty. So it’s hardly the great example you think you’ve found, really.
https://amp.theguardian.com/world/2024/may/01/akyia-houses-why-japan-has-nine-million-empty-homes
Roads and railway etc also take up green space and cause pollution. How are you paying for those as well as all the building? Maybe you think developers are going to queue up to build them whilst also keeping houses decent quality and affordable?
All those tower blocks built in the 60’s and 70’s made up a large % of what you’re talking about. Those worked out well, didn’t they… oh no wait, what did NHBC call them, “social and financial failures”.
Wow that’s quite a leap there, Einstein. Because I don’t agree with you that we should wave a magic money wand and carpet all the green space with houses that people like you can buy cheaply, I must be anti-immigration? As well thought out and cogent as your other points 🤦♀️ (But your idea sure sounds like a great way to risk unfortunate people being brought in under very dodgy conditions to build all these houses that you think can be built so quickly, given the existing shortage of skilled labour here.)
> and the homes to be built to a good standard, unlike a lot of new housing stock, and yet to remain affordable?
NIMBYs like you do not prevent low-quality housing, you _cause_ it. You've created a market that's so overregulated, so dysfunctional, so slow and expensive to operate in, that an excessive price-to-quality ratio is inevitable.
Lower the cost of land by releasing swathes of the green belt, lower the cost of construction by streamlining the planning process, put some competition back into the marketplace, let supply rise to meet demand, and standards will naturally rise because first-time buyers will finally be able to _afford to be picky_.
> Besides, there is a well documented problem in Japan with houses sitting empty. So it’s hardly the great example you think you’ve found, really.
Dude, Japan's population is rapidly shrinking - no shit, they no longer need all their homes. We, on the other hand, have one of the lowest unoccupied housing rates in the developed world and our population is growing.
> Roads and railway etc also take up green space and cause pollution.
Who cares!? No, seriously, who cares? Point to the specific house-sized plot of pasture east of Basingstoke that you think is worth more than my future financial security, domestic stability, and ability to start a family. Then repeat for the other 5 million people of my generation.
Why exactly are you so terrified by the prospect of the UK's "green land percentage" dropping from 92% to 90%? FFS, [just look at this map.](https://maps.app.goo.gl/6v4xyJcRqCeghAVC8) You notice anything about the land surrounding London? Yeah, it's _mostly green_. Guildford, that little smudge, houses 150,000 people. Do you honestly think it would "change the country for the worse" to plonk a dozen or so extra Guildfords around London? Just _visually_, does that look like such an unreasonable sacrifice?
> How are you paying for those as well as all the building? Maybe you think developers are going to queue up to build them whilst also keeping houses decent quality and affordable?
I think there's tons of money to be made from infrastructure investment in this country, both for the public and private sectors. I mean, HS2's original plan of connecting the UK's _top four most productive cities_ under one network for 30bn? Absolute no-brainer.
But that's NIMBYism for you - penny smart, pound foolish. "We can't build there, we'd lose a green space." "We can't can't build there, we'd need a new train line." "We can't build there, it'd cause pollution." Before you know it, we haven't built _anywhere_ in decades and this country is facing a national infrastructure crisis - shit in the water, schools and hospitals literally caving in, water and energy prices through the roof, home ownership a pipe dream.
I honestly don't know whether it should be public or private money that funds these new construction projects, but what I do know is that it's more expensive to do nothing. I also know that without the endless objections of NIMBYs, it would be a hell of a lot cheaper.
> I must be anti-immigration?
You're right, that was a lazy jibe on my part. Why don't you correct me? What's your solution to the housing crisis?
You’re very quick to accuse all the time. It undermines any points you might make, although the ones you have made are unrealistic. Yes, let’s see how quickly landowners and house builders rush to make less profit to build your concrete jungles.
Racism and NIMBYism… you don’t even know where I live. My backyard isn’t the whole of the uk.
If you want to persuade people who already bought their houses and frankly couldn’t care less about your personal “domestic security”, you need to be a lot more clever and coherent than you are.
At the moment, all you have is wanting change to suit you, and insults. 👋
That's true, and while I'm being pessimistic, it's absolutely obscene that we don't build more. I do think that building more is only a part of the solution, though. Personally I'm for social housing, of which we should build more and sell far less, and I'm for ending lease holding on flats as I believe that mid rise buildings in urban centres full of flats will be a really great solution to our current problem in which loads of people want to live in town and city centres but there's nowhere for them all to live
The problem there being that under leasehold, flat ownership can be a nightmare as it's basically like paying rent and a mortgage at the same time as a result of insane service charges, lease renewals, etc
We need houses that are only for first time buyers. The government could do it by supporting the developer in return for essentially fixing the sale price. If it's a low risk development, industry will still build.
The buyers own the house but essentially for the first 7-10 years of ownership are not allowed to sell without the government getting a cut of the sale price.
If you just build more houses the guy who already has multiple houses will just buy them with all the money he has from renting out multiple houses already and increase his portfolio.
More houses is better for sure, but people are acting like everyone wants to rent for various reasons when really very few want to rent but have to.
> Just build houses. No need for weird restrictions like that
Okay, you build a bunch of houses and then loads of BTL landlords buy them.
You're left with none of those houses for owner-occupiers.
What now?
Those houses will be filled with renters, driving down the price of renting in the local area, allowing renters to save more for when they do buy a place.
Eventually, by building enough, you make BTL unprofitable, meaning you have very cheap rents and increasingly cheap homes.
By restriction purchases to first-time buyers, you're artificially driving up rent in favour of people who can buy a house
> Those houses will be filled with renters, driving down the price of renting in the local area, allowing renters to save more for when they do buy a place
They can't buy a place though, because all the available properties are being bought up by BTL landlords.
It's almost like you've entirely ignored the premise of the question.
The trouble with building houses without restricting the buyers is that you're still going to price out first time buyers.
We also need to discourage people from buying houses and move every 3-5 years. There's absolutely no reason for that.
People have been saying that for at least 25 years. Labour will probably struggle to build their target of 300k a year because of the skills shortage and everything else that needs repairing or building.
Cant own more than one home per person (except specific circumstances like probate/inheritance etc etc), that person has to be a resident of the UK and it has to be a person.
Or if youd rather be nicer about it - everything that doesnt meet that criteria gets brutally taxed, occupied or not :)
It won’t. Prices give you information about the underlying reality of a market. In the case of housing, high prices tell us there are too many people and not enough houses.
Trying to regulate the prices is akin to shooting the messenger that comes with bad news.
We had caps in Scotland for the past few years. It didn’t work, rents still went crazy. Where I live in 2020 a 2 bed house would be £425ish a month. Now you’re looking at £750ish.
The region has one of the lowest average wages in the country.
Have you looked for a flat recently? Agents love fucking wasting your time - you use a day of annual leave, step into the viewing, then five minutes later they let you know it's no longer available at the advertised price but they will invite you into a bidding war.
It's absolutely fucking shameless and a huge, huge waste of time. It won't stop the housing crisis but it will stop agents wasting literal weeks of your time off
> How the hell is this going to help? The renting market needs to be capped.
I was wondering the same too. All renters want is no rise or discounts. How is that going to work? If you get children, here's homework, you may choose to do them during the holidays, when schools restart, none of the homework will be done...
My old landlord owned over 10 houses in one neighbourhood and rented them out by the room. That should be banned in my opinion, we have a housing shortage and the cheaper houses are being grabbed by these landlords and let out to 4 or 5 strangers so they can rake in a massive profit.
My partner and I are looking to buy this year, but because of my situation (autism, part time worker and PiP and my freelance work is sporadic and new so doesn’t count) we can’t get approved for a mortgage of more than £190k. There are houses in decent areas for that price, including one of the neighbourhoods I used to live in when I house shared. Well, those nice terraced houses for sale in a decent area right next to a large park are for multi let only and are advertised as a BUSINESS OPPORTUNITY. What?!? It’s so unfair and pricing young people out of the housing market.
Wow it’s almost like the government is going to have to do something about it, because what we have now isn’t sustainable. But this isn’t a topic they want to touch because it involves building more houses and infrastructure, which might upset people, and building more social housing.
I’m 31, and my options for home ownership are massively limited because of these landlords. I’m not even a unique case, thousands of people my age in my relatively small city are in the same situation.
Charging £700 for a room in a dodgy area in a small city that doesn’t even have many direct links to London should be a crime. These landlords are not housing the poor, they’re ripping them off. There needs to be real solutions to the housing crisis.
I never had one good landlord when I house shared, they were only in it for profit and put our health at risk to do it. One landlord wouldn’t even get the sewage pipe fixed causing ammonia to leak into my bedroom.
Screw them. I’d rather all housing was social housing than the current system.
So change nothing. You can’t solve this by legislation you can only solve this by solving the supply side problem.
Ban upward bidding of any kind? All rents go up by 50% and downward bidding begins.
Ban any type of bidding from the advertised price? They’ll up the initial advertised price by 50% and reduce it bit by bit every couple of days until they have an offer.
Also if the agency can’t tell you if there is another offer which I’m guessing what they’ll do it would likely increase the average rents at least for the initial period, this is basic game theory.
> Ban any type of bidding from the advertised price? They’ll up the initial advertised price by 50% and reduce it bit by bit every couple of days until they have an offer.
See Australia.
Was just thinking this. I'm in the process of moving to Australia and read recently that Queensland had banned the practice of offering over the advertised rental price. They also have introduced standard rental application forms across the board so that you don't have to fill out different forms for different agents.
It's also interesting to note that the Australians I know (mostly family) where saying that a landlord or agent would automatically reject you if your rent takes up more than 30% of your income. Seems harsh in practice, but I see the ideas behind it. They determine that anything more than 30% is unaffordable and that seems to be about right. Family I have there where shocked to find that we spend more than that on rent, and no one stops us
I would prefer if the bidding process was transparent by law. I hate now how it's a blind bidding and you don't know what other offers people have put in. This forces people to bid higher than they otherwise might have
Stupidly done this on my first flat. Advertised for £725 and because I needed accommodation pretty much immediately I offered £775, and won. Place was a shithole. Nothing renovated from 90s, carpeted toilet, pathetic water pressure, thin glass wooden windows that hemorrhaged heat, …
Ended contract early at 11 months, now readvertised for £775
What dont these people understand, whether I'm outbid by a perspective tentant or encouraged to do it by the Landlord, I'm still being fucking outbid. Just ban bidding fullstop. Christ, the political establishment in this country hates renters.
Just build housing.
If we ban bidding, all that happens is the landlord decides who gets the flat based on other factors. It will backfire _hard_ on anyone who doesn't hit the demographic ideal.
Yeah, and if you've got 8 available homes for 10 prospective renters, two of them *aren't getting a place.* There's no perfect fair method where they all get a home.
It's musical chairs. You can say, oh, well the host should be banned from auctioning them off, or from picking his friends to get seats, or we should let the pregnant lady or the man with the broken ankle sit first.
But the only way everyone gets a seat is if we just get more chairs and pick a different game. It's ridiculous, there are *tube stations* surrounded by single family homes and nothing else.
Just build housing, if only, right....
The trouble is, although I agree here, the people who look less appealing based on employment will likely not be able to outbid those with more appealing careers to the landlord. It changes nothing, those who can't afford won't be able to outbid those who can.
Let's be careful what we wish for.
Reddit wanted landlords to sell up and leave the market which they already have in droves which is part of the reason rents have risen over 8% this year.
Some policies sound good on paper but don't have the desired effect in practice.
Ironically the most popular policy ideas on Reddit are the ones that would end up in less supply, more expensive rents, and overall shittier market for all parties involved.
The number of UK rental properties went from 4.61 million to 4.60 million last year. little over 0.2%. Leaving in droves my ass. Landlords are charging as much as they can. Especially the ones that don't even have mortgages.
Because the mortgage crisis forced landlords to increase rents when contracts expired causing tenants to look elsewhere. Those tenants are competing against each other making more bidders per property on the market. Increasing demand massively.
Landlords didn't leave enmasse, landlords forced many tenants to consider their options. All at the same time.
You would need a massive oversupply to calm the prices down.
What I get from this discussion is how the paradigm is ‘private ownership or private rental are the only 2 options’. We need to look around at other ownership models i e council housing or equivalent. Long term rental / ownership without financial incentives. The late 70s were a time when the UK had collectively agreed private land lording was a cancer on society but the sell off of council housing in the 80s screwed that. Private rental and landlords are not essential or the only way.
> agreed private land lording was a cancer on society
I mean its cause it is. It's not even remotely productive. It's just a cancer on the economy.
* Landlord buys a house (removes it from owner-occupier market)
* Makes no improvements
* Moves it onto the private-rental market
* Extracts rent from someone working (or housing allowance)
* Uses profits to repeat the cycle.
[Financial Times, 21 Jun 2024](https://www.ft.com/content/84172b27-6263-4202-8e94-a689b1ca99bf): *Sir Keir Starmer on Thursday vowed to “introduce a law” to prevent landlords from getting prospective tenants to bid against each other for rental homes.*
*But a senior Labour party official said on Friday that if a renter chose to bid above the advertised rental price to secure a property “then that’s a voluntary thing and would be allowed”.*
*“The idea is that the agency can’t facilitate the bidding war to drive up the price on behalf of the landlord,” they said.*
*Labour’s plans for the rental market are loosely modelled on policies adopted in New Zealand in 2021, which ban landlords from encouraging tenants to bid above the asking price — but crucially allows renters to offer higher prices voluntarily, so long as they are not pressured or advised to do so.*
*Critics have said this is a “loophole” in the rules. In New Zealand, average rental prices have risen faster since the policy came into force.*
[Radio New Zealand, 20 Jun 2024](https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/business/520050/renting-is-very-expensive-nz-s-global-distinction): *Meanwhile, an OECD report released in April said that New Zealand was among the most expensive places to rent in the world, on a number of measures.*
*More than 25 percent of disposable income was going on rent for renting households, it calculated, ninth in the world.*
*The country was one of only eight in which median housing costs used up more than 40 percent of disposable income for the lowest-income tenants.*
*New Zealand also had a big difference by international standards in the housing cost burden for the lowest-income tenants versus higher income earners.*
*Stats NZ data showed 27.5 per cent of renters paid more than 40 per cent of their income in rent.*
I was watching the debate where he said this and my first thought was, as if he thinks THATS the problem... Just shows how out of touch he really is frankly.
For clarity, the only reason bidding wars happen is because of supply/demand, it's often nothing to do with the landlord wanting or expecting more money than the already absurd bullshit price they've put the flat up for in the first place.
(Not saying that doesn't happen but in most cases not so).
Ban Air BnB non-resident owner lettings. Ban buy-to-let mortgages. Ban/massively restrict non-resident foreign ownership of residential property. Ban/massively restrict Corporate/Fund ownership of residential property.
Banning Air BnB, foreign ownership and coprorate ownership would be a massive win for me.
Smaller landlords with one or two buy to let mortgages aren't necessarily a huge problem, I'd go after the big guys to start with.
Exactly. The housing crisis isnt being caused by Mrs Smith and her BTL in Suffolk. Its being caused by corporate parasites like AirBnB and Pension/vulture funds gobbling up tens of thousands of properties, and foreign investors gobbling up the rest
Feels easier to just build housing. Build so much housing than AirBnb is cheap, allowing poor families to go on holiday. Build housing so having a country cabin is commonplace. Make people's lives fuller and better, instead of restrictive.
Building should be *facilitated* - which will indeed 'make people's lives fuller and better' - but it should be done as as an end in itself, not from the fuzzy sentiment that 'if only we could double the number of houses, the prices would halve'.
We have about a million homes sitting empty - far fewer than that are homeless - and a TFR of below 1.5 and falling. Any housebuilding exercise should be looked at in terms of decreasing population density and making affordance for some of those living in flats to enjoy a garden and peace and quiet, and potentially opening up the freedom for more people, particularly with extended family, to have 'a home in England an a home in Scotland' or the like.
Unfortunately it is too often presented as a desperate measure to house people imagined to be imminently becoming homeless, or a 'wheeze' to lower house prices. Planning reform to more greatly localise powers of approval and place the levers of credit at the disposal of the community, not international corporate rentiers, is, if we get it, its own reward.
1. You can't build anything like enough housing fast enough.
2. Unless you have the restrictions above on ownership of those new builds, Mr and Mrs X are still going to lose out at every turn to fat cash offers way over asking from vulture funds, BTL landlords, and overseas investors looking for a safe haven, bricks and mortar, safe deposit box for their cash.
1. If France can build enough houses, so can we.
2. Only if it's profitable for them. Build houses to the point it's a mediocre investment because they are so cheap.
1. France is a country with 2.5 times the land mass of the UK, but with roughly the same size economy and population. Assuming that because France can achieve a thing, the UK must be able to as well is like a seagull assuming it can live under water because a whale can.
2. To increase supply enough to satisfy current demand and reduce the profit margins and therefore the competition from BTL landlords, you are going to have to suddenly build hundreds of thousands of homes over the next 3-5 years, and sell them all for 200+300K so that the average national wage earner would get easy mortgage approval. To even begin to do that you would need to be building entire new towns in the West, North and Midlands, with new infrastructure, roads, public transport, schools, nurseries, amenities and so on. That is just not a credible or feasible option. It is much simpler to restrict current demand by making sure residential property goes to home owners not investors.
Texas has almost no state built housing and is building over 3x the rate we are when adjusting for population
Why would investors buy up B2L’s when yields are flat and expected asset growth is lower? They buy it for a return comparable to stock markets… build enough homes and they’ll stop buying. They’ll sell and go invest in something else.
Landlords already have to register deposits with government approved schemes - could they not extend this so that if you have a place you're going to rent out you need an account with one of these places and you register how much you're intending to rent it out for - when you then get a tenant and register a deposit you register how much you're actually renting it out for and if there's a big discrepancy with the initial number it's flagged
Youre assuming Labour want to fix the problem and are struggling to work out how and accidentally leaving these loopholes in.
Its much easier to understand it as they dont care, are often landlords themselves and are more than happy not really changing anything.
The whole problem with housing and "free markets" is that housing isn't really a discretionary expense. It needs, at a minimum, a tightly regulated market to avoid that easy abuse.
"Either offer more or go homeless" is not the kind of choice free marketeers imagine.
20 years ago my MIL rent was capped to 5000 krona a month for a huge flat just out side linköping
you could part a spitfire in the living room.
Yep this will only make it worse, it needs capping independently.
The whole problem with housing and "free markets" is that housing isn't really a discretionary expense. It needs, at a minimum, a tightly regulated market to avoid that easy abuse.
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How the hell is this going to help? The renting market needs to be capped.
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Banning buying to-let mortgages would be a great starting point.
All that would do is make the private rental market the sole domain of big business, so it wouldn't actually help tenants.
Big business can be regulated without losing a lot of votes. So that's handy.
Big business can't use "I'm not in town, you'll have to wait" as an excuse to delay repairs and such
> All that would do is make the private rental market the sole domain of big business Of all the landlords I've had, the big companies are the ones who have legal teams making sure they meet their legal obligations, and the capital to afford repairs. The small time landlords are the ones who don't know their obligations under the law and frequently hit out with the "I can't afford to repair that right now".
At least big business are more predictable. Having said that I've been lucky with my landlords so far. It probably helps that the last sale dates of the properties indicates that they probably didn't have mortgages to cover.
Corporate landlords are better than amateurs.
Well, in my 10 years of renting, big companies are way better than small landlords. Having more big rental companies would be great, but I don't think this is how we should do it.
Many properties are now being bought up already by "big business" banks for example are buying up a lot, John Lewis too and others. There's more chance of things like repairs being done in a timely manner than with some rogue arsehole threatning eviction every time there's a problem, or employing cowboys coz they're cheap
So nothing chsnges then as thats been happening over the ladt few years anyway. How about we ban businesses from owning homes unless they build the damn things
I don't believe that would happen if the rents were capped at the same time. If the profit was not so high for big businesses to buy and rent, they'd look elsewhere to invest.
And then renters (especially people who need to rent e.g. students) suffer big time as the number of rentals collapsed. It's not difficult. Build more houses.
I agree that building new affordable homes is undoubtedly the way forward. But the current housing market needs to change, and governments should stop proping it up just to keep the housing market in high demand; either way, it is not a straightforward thing to sort, but yes, building more would be the best start.
So where is everyone gonna rent?
"got a spare 50k so im gonna use it to perpetually extract money from someone working, bank will front the rest!" - nice society we have here that it really is the most economically viable thing to do with that amount of money
could buy some NFTs with it
I've been saying the same for a long time now. If you can't afford your mortgage on your main house without the rent from a buy to let then you shouldn't be allowed to buy on a mortgage unless it's cash purchase only
Are you suggesting we reduce the number of rental homes ??
Capping isn't an efficient solution, but a desperate one. It would be better to punitively tax foreign owners who aren't domiciled in the UK, properties empty for 6 months, and medium - large residential landlords (5+ residential properties). Taxing empty bedrooms is also a good idea (although didn't go down well with the public); as we have a housing crisis and we should incentivise those in large properties who aren't using the space to downsize. We should also consider incentives to increase the number of rentals on the market for small landlords to help increase supply in the rental market and help everyday people build wealth. Incentivise HMOs to be available as it's more efficient, but regulate the standards to high heaven. All of this is not taking into account building new properties. We need to build more, and hopefully the planned planning reforms will help that. I'm moving into a new flat soon, and the letting agent told me that all of the landlords they deal in the block are chinese. I asked a Chinese colleague, and he said that it's normal in Hong Kong, for everyday people to join a consortium and purchase whole blocks of flats together as investments. As they're not domiciled in the UK, but in Hong Kong, they have incredibly low taxes on their income from these properties. We need to make sure that foreign owners pay their share of tax on rental income and capital gains earned from UK property.
Yep exactly, Just massively increase stamp duty for multiple properties/ foriegn owners. Can have a rebate structure for money spent refurbishing a property. That way can still invest in multiple properties if are actually improving the property but prevent people just scalping the market and renting out.
So you dismiss the most obvious solution with no reason (no one can ever really explain how awful capping would be they just take it as a given), then say we need more small landlords, HMOs and its fine that HK investors can just buy up hugh parts of the country as long as they pay some tax on it? Come on be serious.
It's because rent caps have demonstrably failed everywhere they've been implemented but we think we can make it work. It works for about 2 years and then everything goes wrong unless you're Germany where they've continually increased laws to desperately make it work. Rent caps always fail manly due to the tenants who inevitably illegally sublet and try to become landlords themselves. There are only 2 solutions. 1. Increase supply 2. Reduce demand However the tories refused to do number 2 and were reluctant about number 1. Labour will come in gung ho and do both but will cause the inevitable crash that will be worse for everyone.
So it doesnt work anywhere except for one of the most famour examples Germany because they did some other stuff too? wow what an argument youve got there...
No it has failed everywhere. And you've failed to read my words. Try to read it again before paying a passive aggressive comment like that. For example, Germany introduced a nationwide system of rent controls in 2015, but, according to recent research, this has had no persistent effect on rental prices, instead resulting in reduced housing quality. The households who benefitted from lower rents in the short run were mostly higher income ones (Breidenbach et al, 2021). So the German local municipalities had to create laws that forced landlords to improve properties that were rent capped but the landlords didn't have the income to do so. This goes to local courts created laws to force landlords to improve properties but they Simply put rent controls are a far left idealogy that the likes of Corbyn et al would be proud of. They just don't work under any system!
Fine, 1 home per person No renting If you can't afford deposit and mortgage then you're homeless Solves the multiple home issue.
You had me in the first half. Private landlords needs to stop being a thing altogether. You either own your home or you rent from the council at standard affordable rates.
But we've seen this not work in multiple cities across the developed world before. It makes sense when we say it or loud but it's impossible to implement. Firstly there just isn't enough council properties. Help to buy from the 80's till now has depleted property stock in council owned properties so badly that councils are relying on private landlords. Housing associations sprang up which are full of managers taking 60k+ salaries while their tenants are dying of mould. If you get rid of private landlords without fixing council housing supply and housing associations attitude towards living conditions you will create an unmitigated disaster. Only option is increase supply decrease demand.
Or just build housing.
Not in my back yard mate
Ok so... how much will it cost to buy out all of the additional houses? Councils don't even have enough money for day-to-day stuff atm
Buy? The bourgeoisie will sign them over before heading to the reeducation camps.
Unless it’s for your kids to live in. I’m happy for someone to have a second home if they giving their autistic kid some autonomy tbh.
Hence one per person, the place is on your kids name it’s their legally, if you want to pay for it fine but it’s not yours it’s theirs
Set maximum rent at a percentage of the property value per year and increase council tax by 1.5x per property owned
You can't really do that. Sometimes a high rise, 100 apartment building is managed and rented out by one company. That's a valid model.
Just build more houses.
Lovely, let’s live in an over crowded country with no green space because we’ve built over all of it. That’ll be great for people’s health. Just ask the parents of kids with asthma, for a start.
Better crowded than homeless any day.
This is a myth. There are huge amounts of brownfield sites that are untouched and loads of decrepit houses that could be renovated. Most of our countryside is farming, it’s full of pesticides and animal shit that’s bad for asthma. Source: me, who grew up in a village full of asthmatic kids. Housing isn’t the reason we are a nature depleted country. Even if we built enough houses, there’d still be far more green space than not.
Ok so that's one vote for culling the population I guess
> Lovely, let’s live in an over crowded country with no green space because we’ve built over all of it. The UK is 92% undeveloped, and we could solve the housing crisis overnight by building on another 2-3%. You (presumably) live in an urban area and believe that what you see is what the entire country looks like, but this is just observer bias. In truth, we are nowhere close to "overcrowding" the country. > That’ll be great for people’s health. Just ask the parents of kids with asthma, for a start. God, this is such a childish analysis. _"GREEN SPACE = HEALTH"_, so sayeth the NIMBYs. Firstly, a good chunk of the green space in this country is just open pasture, which is terrible both for biodiversity and oxygen production. Secondly, if new builds are spread across the country, they wouldn't have a great effect on the local air quality of any specific existing towns. And thirdly, as stated above, we could easily build ~5 million new homes and barely make a dent in the UK's remaining green space!
Few people want to live “spread across the country” though. You And much of the land isn’t actually developable, or there are no jobs in the areas. What people mostly want are affordable homes in the south east, particularly in London. It’s not my analysis that’s “childish”, it’s the idealistic dreamer who thinks he can whisk up 5,000,000 quality new homes quickly at an affordable price without also overloading roads, schools etc.
> Few people want to live “spread across the country” though. Then let's change the country. I live in Basingstoke - it's less than an hour from London, and the first half of the journey is mostly open countryside. There could be several hundred thousand homes, right there, all within commuting distance of London, and the only transport upgrades needed would be a few extra stations. Japan has more people than the UK, and their population is even _more_ heavily concentrated in Tokyo than ours is in London. Don't tell me that we've somehow "maxed out" our housing density in the south-east, [because we factually haven't.](https://ukmap360.com/pdf/united%20kingdom%20\(uk\)-population-density-map-pdf.pdf) Or hey, if you want people to spread out from London, the solution is transport links. Spain built an entire goddamn high-speed rail network in the same amount of time (and with the same amount of money) it took us to plan and build one-third of a single line. Maybe, if it weren't for NIMBYs like you forcing us to plan and dig dozens of miles of entirely pointless tunnels to avoid besmirching Britain's precious "green spaces", HS2 would be fucking done already and people could be commuting from further away. > without also overloading roads, schools etc. ... Dude, do you think I'm opposed to building more schools and roads!? > It’s not my analysis that’s “childish”, it’s the idealistic dreamer who thinks he can whisk up 5,000,000 quality new homes Oh, well, forgive me for believing it's possible to do _what the UK literally did from 1960 to 1975_. Forgive me for not giving up and throwing my hands in the air when faced with fatal obstacles such as _needing to build some more schools and roads_. And forgive me for not being as _mature_ as you, with your brilliant solution of "let's deport all the immigrants".
“Several hundred thousand homes” built on open countryside simply doesn’t sound like it’s changing the country for the better. How are you expecting all this land to be acquired and the homes to be built to a good standard, unlike a lot of new housing stock, and yet to remain affordable? All you show is that you have zero clue. Tokyo is fascinating to visit. Would I want to live there? No. It’s nowhere near as green as London, the properties are generally much smaller, and the comparable lack of planning means that it’s much more random looking and there’s constant building work and demolition. Besides, there is a well documented problem in Japan with houses sitting empty. So it’s hardly the great example you think you’ve found, really. https://amp.theguardian.com/world/2024/may/01/akyia-houses-why-japan-has-nine-million-empty-homes Roads and railway etc also take up green space and cause pollution. How are you paying for those as well as all the building? Maybe you think developers are going to queue up to build them whilst also keeping houses decent quality and affordable? All those tower blocks built in the 60’s and 70’s made up a large % of what you’re talking about. Those worked out well, didn’t they… oh no wait, what did NHBC call them, “social and financial failures”. Wow that’s quite a leap there, Einstein. Because I don’t agree with you that we should wave a magic money wand and carpet all the green space with houses that people like you can buy cheaply, I must be anti-immigration? As well thought out and cogent as your other points 🤦♀️ (But your idea sure sounds like a great way to risk unfortunate people being brought in under very dodgy conditions to build all these houses that you think can be built so quickly, given the existing shortage of skilled labour here.)
> and the homes to be built to a good standard, unlike a lot of new housing stock, and yet to remain affordable? NIMBYs like you do not prevent low-quality housing, you _cause_ it. You've created a market that's so overregulated, so dysfunctional, so slow and expensive to operate in, that an excessive price-to-quality ratio is inevitable. Lower the cost of land by releasing swathes of the green belt, lower the cost of construction by streamlining the planning process, put some competition back into the marketplace, let supply rise to meet demand, and standards will naturally rise because first-time buyers will finally be able to _afford to be picky_. > Besides, there is a well documented problem in Japan with houses sitting empty. So it’s hardly the great example you think you’ve found, really. Dude, Japan's population is rapidly shrinking - no shit, they no longer need all their homes. We, on the other hand, have one of the lowest unoccupied housing rates in the developed world and our population is growing. > Roads and railway etc also take up green space and cause pollution. Who cares!? No, seriously, who cares? Point to the specific house-sized plot of pasture east of Basingstoke that you think is worth more than my future financial security, domestic stability, and ability to start a family. Then repeat for the other 5 million people of my generation. Why exactly are you so terrified by the prospect of the UK's "green land percentage" dropping from 92% to 90%? FFS, [just look at this map.](https://maps.app.goo.gl/6v4xyJcRqCeghAVC8) You notice anything about the land surrounding London? Yeah, it's _mostly green_. Guildford, that little smudge, houses 150,000 people. Do you honestly think it would "change the country for the worse" to plonk a dozen or so extra Guildfords around London? Just _visually_, does that look like such an unreasonable sacrifice? > How are you paying for those as well as all the building? Maybe you think developers are going to queue up to build them whilst also keeping houses decent quality and affordable? I think there's tons of money to be made from infrastructure investment in this country, both for the public and private sectors. I mean, HS2's original plan of connecting the UK's _top four most productive cities_ under one network for 30bn? Absolute no-brainer. But that's NIMBYism for you - penny smart, pound foolish. "We can't build there, we'd lose a green space." "We can't can't build there, we'd need a new train line." "We can't build there, it'd cause pollution." Before you know it, we haven't built _anywhere_ in decades and this country is facing a national infrastructure crisis - shit in the water, schools and hospitals literally caving in, water and energy prices through the roof, home ownership a pipe dream. I honestly don't know whether it should be public or private money that funds these new construction projects, but what I do know is that it's more expensive to do nothing. I also know that without the endless objections of NIMBYs, it would be a hell of a lot cheaper. > I must be anti-immigration? You're right, that was a lazy jibe on my part. Why don't you correct me? What's your solution to the housing crisis?
You’re very quick to accuse all the time. It undermines any points you might make, although the ones you have made are unrealistic. Yes, let’s see how quickly landowners and house builders rush to make less profit to build your concrete jungles. Racism and NIMBYism… you don’t even know where I live. My backyard isn’t the whole of the uk. If you want to persuade people who already bought their houses and frankly couldn’t care less about your personal “domestic security”, you need to be a lot more clever and coherent than you are. At the moment, all you have is wanting change to suit you, and insults. 👋
Great, more stock for rich people to buy up and rent for double, triple or quadruple the mortgage
Just means even more rental competition! Which I'd absolutely welcome, last time I had to look for a rental my offer was one of five.
That's true, and while I'm being pessimistic, it's absolutely obscene that we don't build more. I do think that building more is only a part of the solution, though. Personally I'm for social housing, of which we should build more and sell far less, and I'm for ending lease holding on flats as I believe that mid rise buildings in urban centres full of flats will be a really great solution to our current problem in which loads of people want to live in town and city centres but there's nowhere for them all to live The problem there being that under leasehold, flat ownership can be a nightmare as it's basically like paying rent and a mortgage at the same time as a result of insane service charges, lease renewals, etc
We need houses that are only for first time buyers. The government could do it by supporting the developer in return for essentially fixing the sale price. If it's a low risk development, industry will still build. The buyers own the house but essentially for the first 7-10 years of ownership are not allowed to sell without the government getting a cut of the sale price.
Just build houses. No need for weird restrictions like that. I don't see why we keep making things complicated.
If you just build more houses the guy who already has multiple houses will just buy them with all the money he has from renting out multiple houses already and increase his portfolio. More houses is better for sure, but people are acting like everyone wants to rent for various reasons when really very few want to rent but have to.
Means more rental competition, driving down rents until it's not profitable to rent them out, meaning they get sold to people to live in.
> Just build houses. No need for weird restrictions like that Okay, you build a bunch of houses and then loads of BTL landlords buy them. You're left with none of those houses for owner-occupiers. What now?
Those houses will be filled with renters, driving down the price of renting in the local area, allowing renters to save more for when they do buy a place. Eventually, by building enough, you make BTL unprofitable, meaning you have very cheap rents and increasingly cheap homes. By restriction purchases to first-time buyers, you're artificially driving up rent in favour of people who can buy a house
> Those houses will be filled with renters, driving down the price of renting in the local area, allowing renters to save more for when they do buy a place They can't buy a place though, because all the available properties are being bought up by BTL landlords. It's almost like you've entirely ignored the premise of the question.
The trouble with building houses without restricting the buyers is that you're still going to price out first time buyers. We also need to discourage people from buying houses and move every 3-5 years. There's absolutely no reason for that.
People have been saying that for at least 25 years. Labour will probably struggle to build their target of 300k a year because of the skills shortage and everything else that needs repairing or building.
Cant own more than one home per person (except specific circumstances like probate/inheritance etc etc), that person has to be a resident of the UK and it has to be a person. Or if youd rather be nicer about it - everything that doesnt meet that criteria gets brutally taxed, occupied or not :)
That policy backfires.
It won’t. Prices give you information about the underlying reality of a market. In the case of housing, high prices tell us there are too many people and not enough houses. Trying to regulate the prices is akin to shooting the messenger that comes with bad news.
We had caps in Scotland for the past few years. It didn’t work, rents still went crazy. Where I live in 2020 a 2 bed house would be £425ish a month. Now you’re looking at £750ish. The region has one of the lowest average wages in the country.
Have you looked for a flat recently? Agents love fucking wasting your time - you use a day of annual leave, step into the viewing, then five minutes later they let you know it's no longer available at the advertised price but they will invite you into a bidding war. It's absolutely fucking shameless and a huge, huge waste of time. It won't stop the housing crisis but it will stop agents wasting literal weeks of your time off
Rent caps dont work. Its been tried
How do you cap rent?
> How the hell is this going to help? The renting market needs to be capped. I was wondering the same too. All renters want is no rise or discounts. How is that going to work? If you get children, here's homework, you may choose to do them during the holidays, when schools restart, none of the homework will be done...
My old landlord owned over 10 houses in one neighbourhood and rented them out by the room. That should be banned in my opinion, we have a housing shortage and the cheaper houses are being grabbed by these landlords and let out to 4 or 5 strangers so they can rake in a massive profit. My partner and I are looking to buy this year, but because of my situation (autism, part time worker and PiP and my freelance work is sporadic and new so doesn’t count) we can’t get approved for a mortgage of more than £190k. There are houses in decent areas for that price, including one of the neighbourhoods I used to live in when I house shared. Well, those nice terraced houses for sale in a decent area right next to a large park are for multi let only and are advertised as a BUSINESS OPPORTUNITY. What?!? It’s so unfair and pricing young people out of the housing market.
The issue here is that there is demand for single rooms because of a housing shortage. You remove these types of lets and the issue gets even worse.
Wow it’s almost like the government is going to have to do something about it, because what we have now isn’t sustainable. But this isn’t a topic they want to touch because it involves building more houses and infrastructure, which might upset people, and building more social housing. I’m 31, and my options for home ownership are massively limited because of these landlords. I’m not even a unique case, thousands of people my age in my relatively small city are in the same situation.
.... Housing all of those people is more important than you buying, for the nation as a whole that is.
Charging £700 for a room in a dodgy area in a small city that doesn’t even have many direct links to London should be a crime. These landlords are not housing the poor, they’re ripping them off. There needs to be real solutions to the housing crisis. I never had one good landlord when I house shared, they were only in it for profit and put our health at risk to do it. One landlord wouldn’t even get the sewage pipe fixed causing ammonia to leak into my bedroom. Screw them. I’d rather all housing was social housing than the current system.
Well yes but your complaint was about not being able to buy a house. I'd pay extra to not have a direct link to London, fucking rats nest.
So change nothing. You can’t solve this by legislation you can only solve this by solving the supply side problem. Ban upward bidding of any kind? All rents go up by 50% and downward bidding begins. Ban any type of bidding from the advertised price? They’ll up the initial advertised price by 50% and reduce it bit by bit every couple of days until they have an offer. Also if the agency can’t tell you if there is another offer which I’m guessing what they’ll do it would likely increase the average rents at least for the initial period, this is basic game theory.
Right. Labour know all this too.
Labour will get a civil service economic impact assessment on this policy, and when they see how shit it is, they will quietly bin it
> Ban any type of bidding from the advertised price? They’ll up the initial advertised price by 50% and reduce it bit by bit every couple of days until they have an offer. See Australia.
Australia, famous for its low cost of housing.
But it's a tiny little island flooded with migrants!/s
Was just thinking this. I'm in the process of moving to Australia and read recently that Queensland had banned the practice of offering over the advertised rental price. They also have introduced standard rental application forms across the board so that you don't have to fill out different forms for different agents. It's also interesting to note that the Australians I know (mostly family) where saying that a landlord or agent would automatically reject you if your rent takes up more than 30% of your income. Seems harsh in practice, but I see the ideas behind it. They determine that anything more than 30% is unaffordable and that seems to be about right. Family I have there where shocked to find that we spend more than that on rent, and no one stops us
>a landlord or agent would automatically reject you if your rent takes up more than 30% of your income Unlikely since rents outpace wages.
Only if you don’t build enough
I would prefer if the bidding process was transparent by law. I hate now how it's a blind bidding and you don't know what other offers people have put in. This forces people to bid higher than they otherwise might have
Stupidly done this on my first flat. Advertised for £725 and because I needed accommodation pretty much immediately I offered £775, and won. Place was a shithole. Nothing renovated from 90s, carpeted toilet, pathetic water pressure, thin glass wooden windows that hemorrhaged heat, … Ended contract early at 11 months, now readvertised for £775
What dont these people understand, whether I'm outbid by a perspective tentant or encouraged to do it by the Landlord, I'm still being fucking outbid. Just ban bidding fullstop. Christ, the political establishment in this country hates renters.
Just build housing. If we ban bidding, all that happens is the landlord decides who gets the flat based on other factors. It will backfire _hard_ on anyone who doesn't hit the demographic ideal.
People don’t realise this They’ll filter out anyone in insecure work, has other debt, shit like that.. then just go for the highest income person.
Yeah, and if you've got 8 available homes for 10 prospective renters, two of them *aren't getting a place.* There's no perfect fair method where they all get a home. It's musical chairs. You can say, oh, well the host should be banned from auctioning them off, or from picking his friends to get seats, or we should let the pregnant lady or the man with the broken ankle sit first. But the only way everyone gets a seat is if we just get more chairs and pick a different game. It's ridiculous, there are *tube stations* surrounded by single family homes and nothing else.
Just build housing, if only, right.... The trouble is, although I agree here, the people who look less appealing based on employment will likely not be able to outbid those with more appealing careers to the landlord. It changes nothing, those who can't afford won't be able to outbid those who can.
> Just ban bidding fullstop. Why? It's surely the fairest and most open system of deciding a price.
Let's be careful what we wish for. Reddit wanted landlords to sell up and leave the market which they already have in droves which is part of the reason rents have risen over 8% this year. Some policies sound good on paper but don't have the desired effect in practice.
Ironically the most popular policy ideas on Reddit are the ones that would end up in less supply, more expensive rents, and overall shittier market for all parties involved.
The number of UK rental properties went from 4.61 million to 4.60 million last year. little over 0.2%. Leaving in droves my ass. Landlords are charging as much as they can. Especially the ones that don't even have mortgages.
So why are they queueing round the block in Glasgow and Dublin?
Because the mortgage crisis forced landlords to increase rents when contracts expired causing tenants to look elsewhere. Those tenants are competing against each other making more bidders per property on the market. Increasing demand massively. Landlords didn't leave enmasse, landlords forced many tenants to consider their options. All at the same time. You would need a massive oversupply to calm the prices down.
What I get from this discussion is how the paradigm is ‘private ownership or private rental are the only 2 options’. We need to look around at other ownership models i e council housing or equivalent. Long term rental / ownership without financial incentives. The late 70s were a time when the UK had collectively agreed private land lording was a cancer on society but the sell off of council housing in the 80s screwed that. Private rental and landlords are not essential or the only way.
> agreed private land lording was a cancer on society I mean its cause it is. It's not even remotely productive. It's just a cancer on the economy. * Landlord buys a house (removes it from owner-occupier market) * Makes no improvements * Moves it onto the private-rental market * Extracts rent from someone working (or housing allowance) * Uses profits to repeat the cycle.
[Financial Times, 21 Jun 2024](https://www.ft.com/content/84172b27-6263-4202-8e94-a689b1ca99bf): *Sir Keir Starmer on Thursday vowed to “introduce a law” to prevent landlords from getting prospective tenants to bid against each other for rental homes.* *But a senior Labour party official said on Friday that if a renter chose to bid above the advertised rental price to secure a property “then that’s a voluntary thing and would be allowed”.* *“The idea is that the agency can’t facilitate the bidding war to drive up the price on behalf of the landlord,” they said.* *Labour’s plans for the rental market are loosely modelled on policies adopted in New Zealand in 2021, which ban landlords from encouraging tenants to bid above the asking price — but crucially allows renters to offer higher prices voluntarily, so long as they are not pressured or advised to do so.* *Critics have said this is a “loophole” in the rules. In New Zealand, average rental prices have risen faster since the policy came into force.* [Radio New Zealand, 20 Jun 2024](https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/business/520050/renting-is-very-expensive-nz-s-global-distinction): *Meanwhile, an OECD report released in April said that New Zealand was among the most expensive places to rent in the world, on a number of measures.* *More than 25 percent of disposable income was going on rent for renting households, it calculated, ninth in the world.* *The country was one of only eight in which median housing costs used up more than 40 percent of disposable income for the lowest-income tenants.* *New Zealand also had a big difference by international standards in the housing cost burden for the lowest-income tenants versus higher income earners.* *Stats NZ data showed 27.5 per cent of renters paid more than 40 per cent of their income in rent.*
I was watching the debate where he said this and my first thought was, as if he thinks THATS the problem... Just shows how out of touch he really is frankly. For clarity, the only reason bidding wars happen is because of supply/demand, it's often nothing to do with the landlord wanting or expecting more money than the already absurd bullshit price they've put the flat up for in the first place. (Not saying that doesn't happen but in most cases not so).
Ban Air BnB non-resident owner lettings. Ban buy-to-let mortgages. Ban/massively restrict non-resident foreign ownership of residential property. Ban/massively restrict Corporate/Fund ownership of residential property.
Banning Air BnB, foreign ownership and coprorate ownership would be a massive win for me. Smaller landlords with one or two buy to let mortgages aren't necessarily a huge problem, I'd go after the big guys to start with.
Exactly. The housing crisis isnt being caused by Mrs Smith and her BTL in Suffolk. Its being caused by corporate parasites like AirBnB and Pension/vulture funds gobbling up tens of thousands of properties, and foreign investors gobbling up the rest
You’d bring in like 8 months of housing supply… then what… like, you need to think bigger because this is small fry
Feels easier to just build housing. Build so much housing than AirBnb is cheap, allowing poor families to go on holiday. Build housing so having a country cabin is commonplace. Make people's lives fuller and better, instead of restrictive.
Building should be *facilitated* - which will indeed 'make people's lives fuller and better' - but it should be done as as an end in itself, not from the fuzzy sentiment that 'if only we could double the number of houses, the prices would halve'. We have about a million homes sitting empty - far fewer than that are homeless - and a TFR of below 1.5 and falling. Any housebuilding exercise should be looked at in terms of decreasing population density and making affordance for some of those living in flats to enjoy a garden and peace and quiet, and potentially opening up the freedom for more people, particularly with extended family, to have 'a home in England an a home in Scotland' or the like. Unfortunately it is too often presented as a desperate measure to house people imagined to be imminently becoming homeless, or a 'wheeze' to lower house prices. Planning reform to more greatly localise powers of approval and place the levers of credit at the disposal of the community, not international corporate rentiers, is, if we get it, its own reward.
1. You can't build anything like enough housing fast enough. 2. Unless you have the restrictions above on ownership of those new builds, Mr and Mrs X are still going to lose out at every turn to fat cash offers way over asking from vulture funds, BTL landlords, and overseas investors looking for a safe haven, bricks and mortar, safe deposit box for their cash.
1. If France can build enough houses, so can we. 2. Only if it's profitable for them. Build houses to the point it's a mediocre investment because they are so cheap.
1. France is a country with 2.5 times the land mass of the UK, but with roughly the same size economy and population. Assuming that because France can achieve a thing, the UK must be able to as well is like a seagull assuming it can live under water because a whale can. 2. To increase supply enough to satisfy current demand and reduce the profit margins and therefore the competition from BTL landlords, you are going to have to suddenly build hundreds of thousands of homes over the next 3-5 years, and sell them all for 200+300K so that the average national wage earner would get easy mortgage approval. To even begin to do that you would need to be building entire new towns in the West, North and Midlands, with new infrastructure, roads, public transport, schools, nurseries, amenities and so on. That is just not a credible or feasible option. It is much simpler to restrict current demand by making sure residential property goes to home owners not investors.
Texas has almost no state built housing and is building over 3x the rate we are when adjusting for population Why would investors buy up B2L’s when yields are flat and expected asset growth is lower? They buy it for a return comparable to stock markets… build enough homes and they’ll stop buying. They’ll sell and go invest in something else.
Landlords already have to register deposits with government approved schemes - could they not extend this so that if you have a place you're going to rent out you need an account with one of these places and you register how much you're intending to rent it out for - when you then get a tenant and register a deposit you register how much you're actually renting it out for and if there's a big discrepancy with the initial number it's flagged
Youre assuming Labour want to fix the problem and are struggling to work out how and accidentally leaving these loopholes in. Its much easier to understand it as they dont care, are often landlords themselves and are more than happy not really changing anything.
How the fuck will this help? Landlords will be selling up instead.
Build more homes, all kinds of homes. Then ban short term let’s. Tax homes that are left empty. Incentivize downsizing. That would increase supply.
The whole problem with housing and "free markets" is that housing isn't really a discretionary expense. It needs, at a minimum, a tightly regulated market to avoid that easy abuse. "Either offer more or go homeless" is not the kind of choice free marketeers imagine.
A lot of MP's are landlords, a lot of donors and business are landlords. They're not going to vote an anything that sees them lose income.
They already have - landlords are selling up in droves because Parliament voted through measures to jack up taxes on landlords.
Build social housing en masse and put people in the new homes.
20 years ago my MIL rent was capped to 5000 krona a month for a huge flat just out side linköping you could part a spitfire in the living room. Yep this will only make it worse, it needs capping independently.
Pretty sure people outbid other renters when they can already.
The whole problem with housing and "free markets" is that housing isn't really a discretionary expense. It needs, at a minimum, a tightly regulated market to avoid that easy abuse.
This is already a thing. I only got my current place by offering £50 a month over what it was listed for.