So are Landlords finished?

Right now for BTL- high interest rates, high property prices, hostile government, surplus of entitled tenants with massive government/council protection.

If you disagree then please confirm how many you will be buying soon.

I'm sorry, but a £500k house is not the sort of house I'd want to rent out.

Then I'm not in the south.

Paid £130k for our rental property in 2015, The divorcing couple who sold it to us, bought it as a rental property in 2007 at the peak for £147k.

There are currently 4 similar ex council houses within 300 yards on the market for £180 to £230k.

None of my calculations when we bought it involved worrying about its value. There's a point in time and a value, that I'd probably just sell it and retire on the equity.

As it's a piece of piss, makes one wonder why you aren't out there being the next Rigsby....

My theoretical/ideological view on landlords and rent-seeking should come as no surprise to anyone - in an ideal world they wouldn't exist as it would not be possible to hold housing as a private asset - it's something that should either be personal property or public property. Not private. While he was wrong about many things, Churchill had the right idea about landlords.

But we're not in an ideal world and we have to sublimate theory to reality.

That said, I'm not going to comment on the specifics of the policy. Instead I'll offer up three case studies of some my experiences with landlords:

1) The second flat I rented after I moved to my current location was from a large corporate property company which had hundreds of lets all over the region. The flat was modern, furnished and of a boring but decent-quality standard. On the rare occasion things went wrong with the electrics or plumbing, a quick log-in to the web portal would see a repair done within a few days. The grass, hedges and flowers around the development were well maintained and when there was a spate of bike thefts from the on-site shed they were very quick and willing to enclose the shed with a locked door. There was a period of a few months when various personal and family situations collided and I arranged to pay reduced rent, which they were incredibly blasé about - very flexible and accommodating. Far more so than the small-scale private landlords I dealt with in my student days.

On that basis, give me large corporate landlords with full-time staff and proper resources over one private person squeezing all they can out of a BTL while running a day-job on the side.

2) A close family friend of my partner does landlord-ing pretty much as a hobby. He has a sizeable military pension, did very well out of business and has a current business which essentially 'runs itself', which all together gives him a very comfy passive income. He gets genuine pleasure, pride and satisfaction from spotting 'properties with potential', restoring/refurbishing them, doing as much of the physical building/decorating/landscaping himself as he can, laying-out and decorating the interiors etc. etc. When he's done that, he rents the properties out, predominantly to people who are otherwise on the social housing list. He used to liase closely with various charities to find tenants, but now he pretty much has a waiting list generated via the grapevine and word-of-mouth. These are people who either find themselves suddenly homeless or have been on the social housing waiting list for years. And instead of finally getting some 1970s closet-sized flat on the wrong side of the tracks in Peterborough they get a house in the countryside or an outlying market town. And at most they pay 'at cost' rent, often less than that by arrangement and sometime they pay nothing at all. And since the fun for him is fixing people's leaky taps, dodgy hinges and flickering lights you can bet that they can barely keep him away when there's an issue. Of course he usually makes profit when he sells the properties once the tenants have moved on, but it's mostly a philanthropic hobby for him.

He's the only landlord I've ever encountered who actually deserves to affect the "hard-done by public servant" mien that so many do. But he doesn't. And yes, it's not fair to expect every landlord to act this way, since he has the means and the desire to treat it as an occasionally-remunerative hobby which most don't.

3) On my first publishing job I occupied a desk pod next to a pod of ad-sales people. Now, sales attracts people with a certain worldview and a certain personality, both of which are usually fairly different to my own. That said, I have never encountered such a group (half a dozen) of collective big-heads. They were all in their late-30s/early 40s. About half had been in the last cohorts to go to university without tuition fees, and all were of an age and means to be in the right place at the right time to ride the 1990s/2000s property boom, which was especially strong in an East Midlands city with a dodgy rep but which was less than an hour from London on the train. Almost without exception they had BTL portfolios and without exception a regular source of conversation was how difficult their tenants were being and how ridiculous it was that they were expected to pay for such-and-such a repair or to renew this-and-that or how "there's barely any money in this game anymore". Also without exception they thought they were hard-working, astute business geniuses for being able buy a scarce but necessary asset at the bottom of the price curve and then get other people to pay their ongoing capital costs and seemed to be utterly convinced that they had achieved a large passive income through sheer guile and effort that the rest of us should either try and emulate or be grateful for.

In conclusion...landlording is a land of contrasts.

Thank you for the reply. I don’t disagree with much of it other than the forked tongue comment.

I have no hostility, but my lack of respect to authorities can come across that way. I’m used to it. I don’t disrespect you biggy. (Autocorrect wanted that to be buggy and I laughed).

They are reaping what they’ve sewed. Do you think it could go on forever where a multitude of well off people could skim money off everyone who hasn’t? Or do you think the government would spot the racket and regulate the less well off out of it? Yes there’s a hostile environment. From many directions.

I have no idea whose side I’m on in this conversation, what I do know is I’ll criticise bullst. Landlording is not hard work. A hard job may happen in fits and bursts but it’s not every day when you’re a landlord.

The epitaph of New Labour, 1997-2010.

(Possibly to be revived in 2024-2029?)

I agree with your general point about how asset-holding and wealth sharing/creation is increasingly becoming the preserve of the very rich and the very corporate - it is how the socio-economic landscape has been going for the past 35 years or so.

With regard to property, it's the unfortunate result of having a legislature stuffed with people who are either large private landlords, owners/shareholders in corporate property holders or in the pay of those interests. They inevitably produce legislation to improve their interests.

My 'preference' for corporate landlords is based only on my experience that they actually earned and deserved the rent I was paying them by providing and upholding their side of the literal contract and treating me, if not exactly as a human being, at least as a customer with agency and expectations that deserved to be met.

In stark contrast to my dealings with private landlords as a student and the first rental I had here (before the corporate-owned one) where everything had to be argued and restated and threatened and cajoled into happening and it was very much a 'minimum input for maximum extraction' deal.

If we must have a commoditised property market then let it be pursued by entities with the time and means to do it properly as a business, not almost as a form of mineral extraction by people unwilling to uphold their side of the bargain.

Of course, my preference would be to slowly decommodify the property market and solve the issues of landlord-ism, an overheated property market, a housing shortage, unproductive wealth accumulation in bricks and mortar and Parliament captured by landlord interests that way.

Same here. It's purely transactional, no emotion attached to it. However we do make sure the property is well looked after and pleasant. Any repair is done immediately. The benefit is that it maximises the chances of the tenant staying. Same for rent increases, we work hard with them to make sure it remains affordable and in line with their own salary uplifts, particularly over the past 2/3 years. Works well for them and for us. Not sure what the problem is.

Hope I'm not the wibbler being referred to as I'm not anti landlord.

I'm anti landlords claiming it's a tough job taking other's money.

I know some will refuse to get that and make another slur.

"All I want from a tenant"

You make it easy to criticise but I won't take the easy kick.

The crux of the current issue is not that there is no way of ensuring payment is made. it's that there's no way of ensuring landlords and tenants both honour a legally enforceable contract and landlords have their advantage being removed and have loud voices that get listened to more than their tenants by political parties. But if I'm the wibbler you're on about, I'm someone questioning the system that's defending your wealth. Which means I fully understand why you'd get annoyed at being accused of being a freeloader.

I also enjoy a joke. I've been a landlord, I'm not a hater. But some of you have a very high opinion of yourselves. You're not public servants, you're profiting from people with less wealth than you. Just accept your privilege instead of pretending you're hard done by and maybe some wibblers will stop commenting.

There's been a few absolute crackers from landlords on this thread:

1) An increase of BTL landlords entering the market doesn't increase house prices - supply and demand say what?
2) 'Big corporates' will take over the rental market, pushing out amateur BTL landlords and making everything worse for tenants - no evidence presented that this is happening nor of it being detrimental, with the suggestion that they've entered the market to provide a higher quality of let (and not just making a profit) being completely laughable

Those who rely on credit cards? I'll admit I have mixed opinions. But I'm not relying on them.

What do you invest in, it's only fair you also answer?

I've a decent amount of savings and I'm CTO of an old startup (probably should no longer be called a startup but it's a small successful company) and a new startup where I'm taking a risk unlike some landlords. I've a sensible amount put in my pension and I've a wife on the NHS who I joke is my pension if it all goes tits up.

That's the most information you're getting.