Illegal for landlord to refuse on food preference?
Discussion
The injunction was granted, by the way. Wilson, not surprisingly, lost the case
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-kent-41915889
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-kent-41915889
spikeyhead said:
TooMany2cvs said:
anonymous said:
[redacted]
I'm not even particularly convinced he's "rich".MASSIVE mortgage monkey on his back, with quite probably fairly ho-hum yields, and a tenant base that's not going to be particularly low-maintenance. If and when he manages to flog it as an entire portfolio, he might do OK. If nobody wants to buy 1,000 properties in one go, as they don't appear to (the first reports he was trying were 2009, and they've been fairly consistent since 2014), then he'll be down to having the better parts cherry-picked, leaving him with the dross.
He's even reported to have agreed a sale in 2015 - https://www.theguardian.com/money/2015/dec/09/ferg... - guess that fell through, then.
Edited by TooMany2cvs on Friday 10th November 14:18
However, you and the posters above have decided to knock down his business. Even if it has debt, that doesn’t make it a poor business and 1000 properties will be pulling in an absolute minimum of half a million pounds a month. It’s unlikely his debt will exceed 80% of this in the very worst case scenario. The maths on that suggest over £1m a year in personal income even allowing for £1m worth of repairs / fallow, which again is unlikely. An income like that is definitely at the rich end of the scale.
Oh and not all debt is bad, many, if not most, businesses run significant debt.
superlightr said:
if you think a type of cooking is going to damage your property then you can restrict and try to stop that from happening.
ie continued cooking of curries using gyi oil is the issue. Certain nationalities tend to use this oil in the cooking of their curries.
clearly a landlord can't say a race or colour of a person they don't want to let to as that is illegal.
^^^ Agree, and after having one set of foreign tenants defecate throughout a rental property, and another Turkish family, drain the blood from the animals they killed in the rental property’s bathroom, I will quietly continue to discriminate on who I rent a property to.ie continued cooking of curries using gyi oil is the issue. Certain nationalities tend to use this oil in the cooking of their curries.
clearly a landlord can't say a race or colour of a person they don't want to let to as that is illegal.
Edited by superlightr on Wednesday 8th November 14:56
Edited by superlightr on Wednesday 8th November 14:57
Gavia said:
However, you and the posters above have decided to knock down his business.
Probably because we're realists.Gavia said:
Even if it has debt, that doesn’t make it a poor business and 1000 properties will be pulling in an absolute minimum of half a million pounds a month.
He's in the SE. Let's assume an average of a grand a month per property. Knock a chunk off that STRAIGHT away for the managing agents - let's assume it's only 7.5%. Then there's all the other paperwork, gas safety certs, voids, maintenance, unpaid rent, unreclaimable damage at the end of tenancy.He's in the SE - so let's go with the "portfolio worth £250k" theory - that's an average of £250k per property. £1k/mo rent is only 4.8% raw yield.
Gavia said:
It’s unlikely his debt will exceed 80% of this in the very worst case scenario.
This is somebody who was a maths teacher before he bought his first rental, and was buying "a house a day" at the peak. He does not have significant equity. He hasn't moved his own home in a bit of Maidstone suburbia since he started building his "empire", unless he's simply still using his old home as a correspondence address for CoHo etc.And what interest do you think he's paying on that 80% LTV? 4%? So that's 3.2% of his 4.8% raw yield STRAIGHT out the window. The grand a month from each property is straight down to £330/mo. Except he's paying £75 to the agent, remember. £255/mo. Before all those other expenses. It's not hard to see the average property basically just about breaking even. A few quid off each one every month turns into a nice income, sure, but that's one HELL of a lot of risk. What sort of income could you get from £100m of other people's money if you invested it even in a FTSE tracker?
Basically, his entire business is based on property value rises - and most of his purchases were just before the crash.
Gavia said:
The maths on that suggest over £1m a year in personal income even allowing for £1m worth of repairs / fallow, which again is unlikely. An income like that is definitely at the rich end of the scale.
Perhaps you're forgetting that he can't even offset all the mortgage interest against his income tax any more - only basic rate.Gavia said:
Oh and not all debt is bad, many, if not most, businesses run significant debt.
Sure. Any debt that you can refinance tomorrow, if need be, is sustainable. If you live in permanent fear of your lenders pulling the rug, though....Breadvan72 said:
The injunction was granted, by the way. Wilson, not surprisingly, lost the case
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-kent-41915889
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-kent-41915889
The Grauniad said:
The property tycoon who previously announced the £250 sale of his empire but said the process was taking a long time will be representing himself in court
LOL. I've seen this old 
interviewed on TV before, thoroughly dislikeable. Good on the judge for knocking him off his perch. My first house was in Luton, when looking a friend in the area advised me that the only way to get rid of "some cooking smells" was a total gutting, re-plaster and floor boards up......after having visited lots of houses I had to agree with him....pungent was not the word for what we encountered !
I've got a mate who rent out his house in Luton and i remember having a discussion with him about this years ago, he had the same rule with the letting agency. I told him I was amazed that you where allowed to state that "no curry cooking" was allowed.
To be fair the smell does get into everything and takes forever to go, but then its similar for smokers houses. I guess its difficult to measure a smell and deduct deposit accordingly.
I live 20 meters away for an Indian restaurant kitchen, the food is amazing, but almost every night a get a whiff of it walking from my car to the backdoor coming home. Drives me mad, i want to pop across for a curry but we will be having chicken and potatoes, or some bland kind of salad or some other no inspiring food. If i was veiwing house and it stunk of curry it would put me off, had a another mate at college that brought a MK3 Escort, everytime you turned the heater on it smelled of curry, he had it 2 years, the smell remained exactly the same and the mystery of why was never solved.
To be fair the smell does get into everything and takes forever to go, but then its similar for smokers houses. I guess its difficult to measure a smell and deduct deposit accordingly.
I live 20 meters away for an Indian restaurant kitchen, the food is amazing, but almost every night a get a whiff of it walking from my car to the backdoor coming home. Drives me mad, i want to pop across for a curry but we will be having chicken and potatoes, or some bland kind of salad or some other no inspiring food. If i was veiwing house and it stunk of curry it would put me off, had a another mate at college that brought a MK3 Escort, everytime you turned the heater on it smelled of curry, he had it 2 years, the smell remained exactly the same and the mystery of why was never solved.
I was told in our local curry shop (loved that place) by the owner that the reason is not gee or the cooking of the actual curry itself but the dry roasting of spices combined with very poor extraction in houses. The fine particles settle and stick, then the oils in them release and soak into plaster, wood, underfloor dust etc.
I was warned by one of the estate agents (a Pakistani) that we would never be able to sell the house later if we did buy one (to "White people !"). Shame really as we saw some great houses but they just stank of it (even if you love curry)....maybe the same was true of fish in Hull back in the day when we had a fishing port ?
I was warned by one of the estate agents (a Pakistani) that we would never be able to sell the house later if we did buy one (to "White people !"). Shame really as we saw some great houses but they just stank of it (even if you love curry)....maybe the same was true of fish in Hull back in the day when we had a fishing port ?
Edited by Stickyfinger on Friday 10th November 20:49
98elise said:
CAPP0 said:
This is also a very old story. He lives in my part of the world, he and his (quite fantastically unattractive) wife used to buy up whole developments of new houses off plan. They own, or at least did, a ridiculously high number of properties.
They seem to be a particularly unpleasant couple with no empathy for any of their tenants. Suspect his "lack of empathy" is probably caused by years of f*ckwit tenants (all races, all classes, all ages).
Know someone who runs a posh block of ~50 mostly-rental apartments, and it's like herding cats or pulling teeth. He's always got a mental story about people secretly knocking down internal walls (without permission) to "make their bedroom bigger", falling asleep in a running bath and flooding the apartment below, or secretly ripping up entire carpets worth thousands (without permission) because "the wife did not like the pattern". He has grown to despise tenants over the years.
Yipper said:
Know someone who runs a posh block of ~50 mostly-rental apartments, and it's like herding cats or pulling teeth. He's always got a mental story about people secretly knocking down internal walls (without permission) to "make their bedroom bigger", falling asleep in a running bath and flooding the apartment below, or secretly ripping up entire carpets worth thousands (without permission) because "the wife did not like the pattern". He has grown to despise tenants over the years.
Doesn't despise their money paying for his BTL empire though, I'm sure. Whilst those things are unfortunate, they are part of the business of being a landlord. Price accordingly.
Stickyfinger said:
My first house was in Luton, when looking a friend in the area advised me that the only way to get rid of "some cooking smells" was a total gutting, re-plaster and floor boards up......after having visited lots of houses I had to agree with him....pungent was not the word for what we encountered !
I have a friend down by Stevenage whose neighbour was working abroad for a couple of years, and rented their house out to an Asian family who seemed to cook curries and traditional Asian food every single day that they were in the house (with the kitchen windows and door open, the smell of the cooking was quite pungent).When the owner eventually returned home, she thought the house would just need a light clean up, and she could move back in after a couple of days.
She said that the whole house reeked of curry, and when she stepped into the kitchen every single surface was coated in a black sticky substance that couldn't be removed with standard household cleaning products, and her shoes were sticking to the floor as though she was standing on glue.
In the end, she had to get industrial cleaning experts in to clean the house, and builders in to strip the entire kitchen out (including removing all the plaster on the kitchen walls), in order to make the house liveable again.
She classified the mess left behind as damage to the property and refused to return the families deposit (which I believe they were contesting - No idea what the outcome of that was), because she had to spend a lot more money than the deposit to put the house right.
So whilst the Landlord's choice of language was out of order, I can understand the sentiment of what his issue is - Certain foods being cooked all the time in a house/flat/apartment etc., etc., can be very damaging to a property, and can cost a lot of money to put right.
hyphen said:
So do these curry smells have some amazing powers that can't be tackled?
Or is is a case of the bargain basement ventilatiors/extractors this landlord fits, not actually do anything.
Depends on how diligent the renters are at cleaning. Over time some smells will get deeply engrained into wood/paper, etc Or is is a case of the bargain basement ventilatiors/extractors this landlord fits, not actually do anything.
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