#23

They’d be able to afford to buy on accounts of how supply would meet demand better.

#24

There’s no chance of me doing it. But yeah, I also struggle with the ALL LANDLORDS are evil shit. Hey ho. I have friends who own more than one house, I don’t think they are evil :slight_smile:

#25

That’s a rather romantic view of the situation.

#26

Most of my shitty landlords have actually been shitty letting agents not doing their jobs.

My one really awful landlord was a guy whose spare room I rented for six months and who introduced a load of weird/ restrictive contract conditions on the day I moved in without mentioning them when I looked at the room initially. I don’t think he liked that I wasn’t that impressed by any of his references to his ex-wife or ex-girlfriend or that he owned a five bed house (which he couldn’t afford without the lodgers.) He also decided quite early on that all teachers are arrogant and that my desire to live in his house without being his new BFF was sheer and unforgivable rudeness. In the end he managed to take £43 from my deposit which was after a series of haggling and threatening messages involving me contacting CAB.

#27

I also think because I am so far removed from the London market, my opinion on this probably only applies outside of London.

Where I live, you can buy a nice flat in a decent area for about 70k (one bed) 80k for a two bed. So the letting market is really only for the people who are jobless/ students/ on extremely low wages, because it’s not that hard to buy around here. And we have large housing associations. So really the private lettings market is tiny in rural/ western Scotland.

#28

was this in Cornwall by any chance?

#29

@stupidsexyflanders

Could I have permission to change the OP to “Landlords / Letting Agents are pricks [rolling]”?

#30

I was a landlord for some years. It was rubbish.

#31

In Leeds

#32

ah cool.

#33

This was exactly the situation with Mrs F’s landlords. They owned a place, they moved abroad, they kept the old place and rented it out. Obviously they couldn’t be particularly hands-on with the management, but they did get problems fixed and eventually hired our upstairs neighbours as sort of pseudo management agents. It all worked fine.

Part of me wants to say that renting out one property for the purposes of a small income/pension is fine, but that doing it to speculate on the property market, or BTLing fifty houses is not fine, but I’ll be honest I can’t quite work out where or what my red line is there.

#35

oh abso-fucking-LUTELY

#36

Seconded. In principle I could do this now, although I’d have to get a mortgage on the BTL property. But I won’t.

#37

Unless they’re building properties, private landlords are not adding to the supply in any way, and are instead adding to the demand, pushing houses out of the reach of many of the people who are now forced to rent.

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#38

But there’s a balance to be struck isn’t there? Some people need and/or want to rent. Is it feasible/desirable to have that satisfied entirely with council/state letting?

#39

To answer my own question, I think private letting ought to be perfectly allowable, as long as proper regulation is in place regarding rents and landlord obligations. And of course that regulation doesn’t currently exist.

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#40

The number of people who need and/or want to rent rather than buying a property is a fraction of those who are actually renting (I think it’s something like 10-15% of all current renters).

And the reasons why people might need or want to rent (non-permanent jobs, moving around, can’t afford a deposit etc), are exactly the kind of tenants best served by landlords with large estates of property let out at subsidised rates.

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#41

But they still exist, which was my point.

Also: want to rent for reasons of flexibility/personal preference.

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#42

Siri, what are “principles”?

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#43

I don’t think renting out a room/property automatically makes you a bad person but there does seem to be a correlation there.

My last landlord wasn’t the worst but was fairly thick. Example - the toilet cistern had that little pipe coming out of it in case of overflows. That had been positioned over the sink. It started dripping, then dripped more and more until a constant stream of water was running back along the underside of the pipe, down the cistern, onto the wall then down into the kitchen below.

Landlord wanted to cut a hole in the kitchen ceiling to check that the water running down the kitchen wall was definitely coming from the toilet cistern directly above, because he had a theory it was actually coming from the bath. ???

I managed to dissuade him from ruining the kitchen but he wouldn’t call a plumber so his solution was to attach a longer piece of pipe to make all the water run into the sink