Long term rental

Stella

100 a month? That's fair in exchange for some maintenance. But many charge 900 (or more) a month and make you feel guilty when you dare to call them to tell something's wrong. Or they moan about mortgage payments and drive away in their Posche. <br>

Papa

It is unfair to typecast all landlords. Many of them are decent people who have made an investment and want to protect it by maintaining it and keeping things up-to-scratch, but for obvious reasons have no interest in turning a place into a swanky palace unless they have tenants willing to pay the top end rent for that.<br><br>They should, however, make sure that essential maintenance and refurbing every so often is done, and tenants need to ensure they do so. Even in London's mental rental market you need to stand up for your rights - after all rents are very high so landlords should have the cash.<br><br>But often this simply comes down to actually telling them. I've seen the other side of this from someone who runs a decent letting agency and gets all landlords to make sure repairs are done straight away. You would not believe how often seemingly sentient tenants leave problems without reporting them.<br><br>Stella, I'm not in anyway suggesting that this is the reason for yours and if there is a bad problem the landlords should sort it, but there is a lot of mold caused by people not airing rooms properly by opening windows and using extractor fans. It's a condensation problem. This is compounded by people then not clearing off the mold when it first occurs.<br><br>In our old place both us and the neighbours had the same crap old double glazed windows. Both suffered from this. Ours had no mold on because we cleaned them and then kept it from coming back.<br><br>When people own their home they tend to deal with this stuff, some tenants have a tendency to leave it.<br><br><br>

vetski

I see a lot of rental properties in North London, and good, responsible landlords do seem to be in the minority. The best are usually where the property being let was their family home and the owners have e.g. moved abroad for a time, or moved somewhere bigger to start a family and been unable to sell the smaller place. There are some shocking investment landlords; the worst are in Camden, where there are a lot of lets to students. I've even refused to return to a couple of places because I consider them structurally dangerous!

Stella

Blimey!

andy

The maths on being a landlord are messed up. It's so attractive, relative to other types of investment, nothing touches it.<div><br><div>Say you bought a place fifteen/twenty years ago in Zone 2 in London and it cost you £150,000. That's not an unreasonable amount for someone earning a 'good'-ish London salary. A 10% deposit was £15k. That's accessible to teachers, professionals - it's not the exclusive reserve of the super-rich.</div><div><br></div><div>Roll on fifteen years. If you had a repayment mortgage that whole time, that could be under £50k by now.</div><div><br></div><div>The crazy thing - that place is now worth in region of £750,000. Your salary might have gone up, but not by the same rate. You're sitting on £600/700k plus of equity. More than you could have ever saved in your job.</div><div><br></div><div>The only sensible thing (assuming you don't want to trade up - because you can't afford to trade up, because the places you want to trade up to are £1m+, not £250,000 like they used to be) is to take out an extra mortgage on that place and use it to fund the deposit for a buy-to-let. Whether or not you're a good landlord, you get to leverage that equity and double down on house price growth.</div><div><br></div><div>The same person - but fifteen years younger - probably still on £40k, can't hope to get anywhere near any of this, as £150,000 buys literally nothing in Zone 2.</div></div>

Mirandola

The usual metric is that spending more than 1/3 of take-home income on housing counts as housing poverty.

vetski

@Mirandola, interesting; I wasn't aware of the metric being a general rule, but French banks won't offer mortgages to buyers if repayments would be more than 30-35% of income. I guess that's partly why home ownership there - at least in cities - is much lower than here.

Idoru

I was in my last place for four years. In that time there were no rent hikes and the landlady did everything I asked her to do re. repairs and replacements. <br><br>The benefit of owning your home? In two years my boyfriend wil own his house outright. No mortgage, no rent, no concerns about rising interest rates or rent hikes. Just money in the bank should he need it.<br>

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Sutent

Andy I agree with you. The housing bubble is completely unsustainable and unfair and again is an example of the unfairness of current society.  If you looks at the stats of the type of people who have applied for  these new home loans from the government the majority are for second homes. Again the government looking after their friends.  <div>I bought my place off Tollington Park in 2007 for 170,000. I was earning 30k as a junior Dr and only managed to buy it because I was LUCKY that  an ex girlfriend leant me 10K as a deposit. I never bought it to make money, I just needed somewhere to stay and it was cheaper buying my own place and paying mortgage rather than renting in N4. At that time banks were still recklessly lending and I was head deep in student loans. </div><div>The rental market is overinflated because demand >supply and it will remain like this. Our taxes paid in terms of housing benefit are going straight into the pockets of landlords at super high prices. Its funny how the government decided to cap housing benefit rather than tackle high rents.Shelter have an excellent campaign and I urge you to sign up as all this can be changed. <a href="http://england.shelter.org.uk/campaigns/homes_for_london" style="font-size: 10pt;">http://england.shelter.org.uk/campaigns/homes_for_london</a></div>;

andy

@misscara - in general, banks don't like foreclosing. In the 80s "crash", my understanding is that they foreclosed on lots of people and flooded the market with property, making the crash worse. They've since learned to foreclose as a last resort, and are much more careful about putting foreclosed property on the market

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andy

probably for much longer than you might think

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Mirandola

The speed with which it happens is striking. We bought round here in Jan 2010. There is no way we could afford to buy our flat now.

Looper

<p>I now use Davies& Davies, excellent service.</p><p>I had used David Philips, poor service, lost rent when they went into liquidation and had to fight to get the tenants deposit back. I am not the only one, see reviews in <a href="http://www.allagents.co.uk">www.allagents.co.uk</a>.</p><p> </p>

NorthNineteen

For me buying made sense.  I came into a bit of capital through inheritance, nothing major and sitting in the bank would have done nowt so made sense to use it as a deposit.<br><br>With a mortgage (repayment and long term fix) we are paying considerably less for a 2 bed flat than we would for renting a 1 bed flat.  Clearly maintence cost is a risk but we are paying off the mortgage so it's in affect taken over from my monthly regualr saving.<br>

Sutent

Unless something is done soon London will turn into an area for the rich and the elite. That would be a disaster. One of the big attractions of living in London is the wonderful diversity of the city and all the positivity that brings. 

Stella

I, too, think it a bit weird to cap benefits instead of tackling high rents. I think higher min. wage and lower rents would be a good thing for everyone, particularly for the economy. If people have to pay all their wages into a flat, they can't go and buy the shiny things the telly advertises. Or they buy on credit, and that's again when the banks will benefit again.<br><br>If I had the money, I'd buy an old warehouse or factory, restore it and run my rescue centre from there whilst living above it in a small loft. I don't need a castle, but I want something where I can breathe. The flats they're offering are disgusting. Mostly a shabby cupboard over a shabby cooker, straight next to a stained double bed and walk to steps to find the door for the bathroom with mold crawling up the walls. And that's what they call a 'spacious' one bed flat for 850 excl. bills. No kidding.<br>

Sutent

I agree Stella. Decent affordable housing is a basic requirement for any decent and fair society. Post world war 2 when the country was in ruins and we had a higher level of national debt we managed to build 1.2 million housing which improved living standards for the poor and helped reduced disease. The issue is the biggest scroungers and leaches of society, the city of London have too much power at the moment and are laughing all the way to the bank with the current market. The only positive thing is that there are 60 million more of us then them so we can change it if there is will in society to do this.our ancestors have done it before so we can do it again. 

Stella

Mutiny! Let's do it. :-) <br>

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Stella

Sad but true.<br>

miss annie

Ok, so there a quite a few members of this forum who are buy to let landlords - of a number of properties in a couple of cases. Would be interesting to hear their thoughts on rent control etc.

Papa

I'm not a buy-to-let landlord, but rent controls won't work - in fact they would probably make things worse in terms of neglected properties. They did in the past.<br><br>The problem is the imbalanced economy with people flooding into London from the rest of Britain and Europe because it is where the money and jobs are. <br><br>That and every decision made since 1997 to artificially prop up the housing market, which has led to a horrendous over dependence on it.<br><br>It's a bubble - it will pop.<br><br>Ultimately, what will cure this problem is when the market says enough, it is too expensive and the bubble bursts. But that would probably require a sizeable chunk of people like us deciding to leave London, so we wouldn't win.<br>

kittygal

With the average age of 1st time buyer now nearly 40 home ownership is not going to be a reality for many, how will people afford market rents when they get older...

miss annie

I'm older than 40. I intend to rent until I retire and then the council can look after me. If that is the metric, I've been in housing poverty for about 9 years! My rent is cheap compared to most and it's way more than half my take home.

kittygal

With the pension age nudging 70 you might have a wait for their help to kick in.

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Papa

In September the average age of a first time buyer was 30, they borrowed £117,700 at 80 per cent loan-to-value to buy a £147,125 home. So that's a deposit of £29,425.<br><br>They had joint or individual income of £35,623 and borrowed a record 3.39 times of that - matching the 2007 peak. <br><br>That's Council of Mortgage Lenders figures - they don't do a regional breakdown, so no London specific ones.<br><br>Also you can't use Help to Buy for second homes but Funding for Lending cash is going into buy-to-let loans, which also get favourable tax treatment as it is considered a business. (You can offset interest payments against your tax bill for the rental income and offset stamp duty against any profits when you sell).<br><br>