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- unitedkingdom@feddit.uk
- cross-posted to:
- unitedkingdom@feddit.uk
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The Negotiator is a trade magazine that “serves the residential property industry, specifically targeting estate and letting agents and their suppliers”. The original source for this news is https://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/property/buy-to-let/landlords-quit-rental-market-at-fastest-rate-in-a-decade, which is mirrored by https://www.aol.com/articles/landlords-quit-rental-market-fastest-094056000.html .
Wow that telegraph website is absolute arse
In addition: The Telegraph is a rightwing rag who are automatically against anything Labour does. Apart from their right-wing bias, in the last few (3?) decades they’ve seen a decline in quality to the level of gutter journalism, so they have no credibility and their claims are basically meaningless.
I must be used to American rightwing media because this Telegraph article seems downright neutral by comparison haha. Also, I have a question. It says that one of the things this bill does is abolish “fixed term tenancies”. Does that mean, for example, that someone could just move in for a month and then move out?
It means that the landlord can’t force you to sign a contract for a year or whatever, you can always give notice and leave.
I’m not from the UK myself, I’ve just read some trash tier articles from The Telegraph in the past. Articles written with long words, but still obvious falsehoods. Which is a shame, because they didn’t use to be like that. Wikipedia lists some of their controversies (see history since 2004): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Daily_Telegraph
About the new law:
“Fixed-term tenancies mean renters are obliged to pay rent regardless of whether a property is up-to-standard, and they reduce flexibility to move in response to changing circumstances, for example after relationship breakdown, to take up a new job or when buying a first home.Instead, all tenancies will be periodic, with tenants able to stay in their home until they decide to end the tenancy by giving 2 months’ notice. This will end the injustice of tenants being trapped paying rent for substandard properties and offer more flexibility to both parties to respond to changing circumstances.” https://www.stirlingackroyd.com/property-insights/fixed-term-tenancies/
That’s wild. I wish America had something like this! I once signed a two year lease just to get picked over another applicant, because I really needed a place close to work.
That fucking rules. Expected to job hop to increase your pay but also stay in the same place for 6 - 12 months?
Yeah the Telegraph is subtle about it. They exercise their bias more through selective reporting, rather than slanted language.
I agree, but I would believe them when they’re saying Labour’s doing a good thing, especially when they don’t realize that’s what they say.
Yeah, from that it sounds like the implication of a supply crunch pushed by the original article is highly misleading:
The analysis suggested that rents were flat across the country, increasing by just £4 to an average of £1,475 a month compared to last year.
However, stock across the rental sector still increased year-on-year, driven largely by new build-to-rent properties coming on to the market. Available properties increased by 1.3pc on average, reversing years of decline.
The data showed 7pc growth in rental properties costing between £800 and £1,500 a month, while the number of more expensive rentals on the market declined.
So even though existing properties are leaving the UK rental market, if you factor in new construction it’s a net gain and affordable rentals have increased, facts it omitted entirely.
" quitting in droves" Selling their properties to people who want to live there
Hooray!
Lol I can’t believe this article frames the whole thing as if it’s terrible news that the economy will never recover from.
Actually, I can believe it. It’s just disgusting.
What is in the new law?
EDIT: I read a summary. Most things listed are fairly straightforward and already in place in the US, which brings up two questions for me.
- How do any of these rules make renting not economically viable?
- How fucking horrible was it to be a renter in the UK?
No more banging young impressionable tenants
That’s like half the movies I watch
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They don’t. The landlords who are whingeing are just rentier capitalists who resent any regulation.
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Very dependent on the landlord (usually bad) & the property (ditto) & the willingness (ditto) of the local council to intervene when needed. IME, it was shit.
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How does a landlord quit?
They own the property, don’t they?
I imagine they’re either selling their properties to corporations or hiring someone to manage the rentals for them.
Yeah I would imagine this would lead to slightly reduced property prices and increased rent prices as the market adjusts.
They were already renting, and when someone sells that pushes the property value down.
Right, but if landlords are exiting the market that probably means they are selling to someone who wants to live there, meaning rental properties are going off the market. Which is good for first time homebuyers but bad for renters. Either that or this is just landlords consolidating which which wont make much of a difference either way.
The first time buyer was previously renting though, so the renter could go there. Total number of people and houses hasn’t changed in this simplified example.
Right but a lot of renters cannot or do not want to buy property. Thus, rental units leaving the market creates a supply demand imbalance in the rent market, driving up prices (and driving down property prices, for the inverse reason)
Plenty of renters do want to buy and house prices coming down would allow that for some of them. If no one buys it and the landlord wants to sell, all they can do is lower the price until someone does buy it.
Right. We are in agreement that this should cause some reduction in property prices.
But not all renters are able to buy property. Here’s an extreme example - lets say 99.9% of landlords are forced to sell their rental homes. There are now just 100 units left in all of London.
There are 10000 students who need a temporary place to stay, and another 10000 people that have bad credit and cant get a mortgage. What will happen to rental prices?
When someone decides to sell a good because market conditions have changed, the price of the good goes down.
Rental prices are proportional to overall housing prices. In general, more homeowners is correlated with lower rents. Renters are also removed from the market.
When someone decides to sell a good because market conditions have changed, the price of the good goes down
Yes i agree with that part
Rental prices are proportional to overall housing prices. In general, more homeowners is correlated with lower rents. Renters are also removed from the market.
That is correlation without causation. When there isn’t enough housing, rent and property prices will both be high. However, if properties get taken off the rental market and are put up for sale instead, with no changes to population or overall housing supply, that is going to drive up rental prices. There will be fewer people renting, by necessity, but the people who want or need to rent will not change by as much, creating an imbalance between supply and demand that will drive up rental prices.
Not to mention another thing we haven’t touched on which is why landlords are leaving in the first place. Those who remain in the now-less-profitable environment may try to raise rent to compensate.
There will be fewer people renting, by necessity, but the people who want or need to rent will not change by as much, creating an imbalance between supply and demand that will drive up rental prices.
Why would demand not change by as much as supply, if both a buyer and a seller have been removed from the rental market? It’s like landlords being forced to sell to tenants at a reduced price.
Because having your rental unit taken away from you does not remove you from the rental market. You might consider leaving the rental market and buying property if housing prices collapse, but outside of that most people are going to have to look around for a new rental unit in a now tighter market.
You overlooked the most important outcome: landlords selling property to individuals who will live there.
This is a good thing because it reduces property prices, moves the market away from rentier capitalism towards people owning their own homes, and reduces economic inequality and insecurity.
They’re going to get sold to corporations who rent out even higher with no value add
Source?
the source is the general trend in housing industry over the last 20-30 years, hedge funds and private equity trying to monopolize housing.
usually turning them into vacation rentals (airbnb) or luxury rentals (tech bro homes).
it’s happening in every rich country (g8, etc), and probably poor countries soon, if not already.
Do you have a source showing that it is happening in the UK at a greater rate than former rental properties are being sold to people who will live in them?
Quitting means selling, yes.
I wish quitting meant a six figure windfall in my profession…
If you’re quitting because of this, it probably means you have a buy-to-let mortgage, quite possibly on a long term/interest only. You might therefore not get that much back, and what you do get back is essentially a liquidation of your savings asset.
But I guess what you’re getting at seen another way is that it’s nice when your savings can pay enough for you to retire.
If you had a fixed interest only mortgage from several years ago that is now expiring you are also about to get fucked by the increased interest rates. Not as bad as they were a few years ago but could still be a lot worse than a decade ago.
No need to feel any sympathy for them, they are still making a shitload of money for little to no actual work from the whole thing.
Do people think the corporate landlords will be better?
Eh?
Why do you think that this will result in there being more corporate landlords? I don’t think people think that is true, so I don’t think they have an opinion on whether they’ll be better or worse.
I’d be careful before crying victory. This most likely means those houses will be bought by PE, not individual buyers. The end result will be higher prices still.
They should be forced to give their tenants an offer to form a union and purchase the property before they’re allowed to sell it to someone else.
A civil union? I mean, I suppose you wouldn’t want a really rude union… ;-)
Yup. This sounds like the perfect opportunity for some kind of housing cooperative. You’d just need to find someone to provide the initial capital to buy the houses
How would having lower demand increase prices?
Artificial scarcity got hands
In a lot of European countries, small private landlords are relatively rare and apartments are owned and let out by corporations that own (and in many cases build) entire developments, like Deutsche Wohnung in Berlin. Given that continental Europe typically has a more stringent regulatory environment than the Anglo-American world, this does not end up with the sort of predatory monopolies one sees in the US where private equity have cornered regional markets, and the landlord companies have support desks and maintenance contractors that can be more responsive and professional than your typical small landlord.
what a majority actually wants: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Wohnen_&_Co._enteignen
I wish the US had something like Art. 15 of the German Constitution. As for the UK, we are lucky in this regard with the flexibility our lack of rigid constitution offers
not a constitution until the people voted on it
so the US Constitution is not a constitution? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Economic_Interpretation_of_the_Constitution_of_the_United_States#Historiography
i didn’t say that but the german grundgesetzt specifies it’s valid until the german population votes on a constitution
Thats just the replacement mechanism isn’t it? Or is it de jure a provisional constitution which was just kept?
Why? This will increase supply of housing available to buy and reduce the supply available to rent. So house prices will go down slightly, and rents will go up slightly.
Because there isn’t a free market in housing anymore, they’ve all been caught colluding to keep pricing up even when there’s a huge glut of available units/houses in an area. They have been caught using apps to do it, and when faced with threats to stop that practice were found to use traditional means to collude. The free market is a myth in 2026, stop believing in fairy tales. Ayn Rand was a charlatan and capital isn’t going to ever be allowed to work for the poors.
I think you’re thinking of a case in the USA that colluded on rental prices? I don’t know of any evidence that there is collusion on house prices in the UK. People separately talk about investment companies buying up housing in the US as if that will have much impact on prices, but the proportion of housing under discussion is miniscule and unlikely to have any effect on prices - at least, outside of limited areas.
I’m guessing at what you’re referring to here so feel free to get specific. But cases in the USA are not that relevant to the UK, where the government is far more willing to enforce free market conditions than the “free market” idiotlogues in America who think that you can have a free market without regulation.
Oh, so it only hurts the poorest and benefits those who can already afford to buy? How uplifting.
The Renters Rights Act overall benefits renters by making sure they can do such shocking things as keep a pet and make requests of the landlord without being evicted in revenge. This imposes a restriction on landlords, which amounts to a “cost” (in the sense of cost/benefit, not necessarily monetary) which means it was inevitable some would sell up. That part - landlords selling - does hurt the poorest, at least in the short term.
However, the effect will be small in the long run: because houses for sale will increase a bit in supply, those prices will come down, enabling more people to exit the rental market. That will bring down prices at the top of the rental market, and eventually a portion of the decrease in house prices will feed through to a mitigation (not a reversal) of the increase in rents at the bottom of the rental sector as well. So a small effect to begin with (because it’s not like 50% of landlords will sell up without being replaced) and mitigated because while there’s no perfect exchange between the rental and owner-occupied sectors, there is some exchange.
It’s therefore a small price to pay for basic standards of decency for renters.
The true mitigation will come from building more social and affordable housing. The government has committed to do this but has so far abjectly failed, like many governments before them.
Why would PE buy them if not to rent & be subject to the same renter’s bill of rights? Holding a vacant house isn’t a good 😊 investment, they have upkeep costs, are subject to property taxes, and depreciate faster when unoccupied.
Holding a vacant house isn’t a good investment
This is in many cases demonstrably false. PE is holding on to vacant properties all over the US, and sometimes don’t mind holding them for years unoccupied, waiting for a redevelopment opportunity
As well as holding onto housing stock to maintain a local monopoly.
It isn’t as big a deal when you know any potential renter will be renting from you regardless of it is this unit or that unit. They are still forced to be your customer and you don’t have to compete with lower prices from another landlord.
Fair enough, it does happen. Relevant background: https://nationalmortgageprofessional.com/news/investors-hold-most-empty-houses
The states with the highest vacancy rates in investor-owned properties were:
Indiana (7.2%); Illinois (6.1%); Oklahoma (5.9%); Alabama (5.9%); and Ohio (5.8%).States with the lowest vacancy rates were:
New Hampshire (0.9%); Vermont (1%); Idaho (1.2%); Utah (1.5%); and North Dakota (1.5%).I’d argue my sentiment remains, investors for the most part rent out property, they don’t typically hold it vacant. When they do it’s more likely vacancies are transitory (trying to find a renter) than long term and intentionally kept vacant.
For the most part, until it’s more profitable for them not to. It’s never done to the benefit of people who need a place to live.
Yall this doesnt mean theyre letting people live in these houses for free, it just means theyre off the rental market. Considering poorer people generally rent and richer people generally buy property, this is probably a regressive change.
Tax incidence does not work that way!
We’re cheering a bunch of rental properties being removed from the market?
Sure, some homes will enter the market for private buyers, so those doing quite well might have a slightly cheaper house but a lot are going to be sold to less scrupulous/more corporate landlords who feel they can extract more value, or in packages to developers.
I get it, we hate landlords hut this feels like cutting off one’s nose to spite the face.
do you think these landlords are just gonna sit on empty homes? doing nothing with them?
As I noted:
Sure, some homes will enter the market for private buyers, so those doing quite well might have a slightly cheaper house but a lot are going to be sold to less scrupulous/more corporate landlords who feel they can extract more value, or in packages to developers
I actually think that buying a property to let it out should be illegal. There’s just no benefit to society to let people do that. And we don’t do that in other areas of business so why housing?
You’re not allowed to go and buy a bunch of Coca-Cola and then sell that Coca-Cola at a 40% markup while doing nothing to add value. It’s explicitly banned, if you do it with valuable enough products it’s called profiteering.
However I don’t necessarily see your point, why people giving up on being landlords is necessarily going to result in those properties being sold to other landlords, if they could still make money being landlords then surely they would keep at it.
However I don’t necessarily see your point, why people giving up on being landlords is necessarily going to result in those properties being sold to other landlords, if they could still make money being landlords then surely they would keep at it.
Think of most commercial properties: usually, when a business closes, another of the same type will occupy that spot. Generally the newcomer feels they can cut the margins enough to make a profit. (Often why you’ll see something family owned being replaced by a corpo chain version.)
As I noted, some houses will enter the private market but I’d expect the much more likely buyer to be a developer or corpo landlord.
Good direction but not enough, no private entity must be allowed to hoard housing. All rental properties must be under local council control to allow proper maintenance, fair pricing and finally getting rid of landlord scum
And while we’re at it, profit must be only high enough to:
- Fairly cover maintenance for the tenants’ residences
- Administration (but not: to fill pockets)
- Expansion into building more price-controlled housing
The barnacles on the hull of society might have to get a job
good maybe price of houses can come down.
Good!
I had my college degree sabotaged by these shitstains. I would have needed an apprenticeship, but couldn’t get one in Budapest without a Budapest home address, but every piece of shit needed a Porsche SUV to take their brats to private schools.
Even if it doesn’t happening in my home country, I’m happy to see these wastes of oxygen and other resources (especially raw iron and fuel on their luxury SUVs) suffer a bit.
Parasites detaching after the tiniest amount of medication is used.
Don’t you have to have a job to quit? How would a landlord quit?
You can also quit smoking, or heroin
sell
Oh NO! Won’t ANYONE please think of the Landlords that Take your Money and do Nothing in RETURN?
I mean… they give you a place to live in return…
Renting / landlords by themselves aren’t necessarily a bad thing, it’s poor renters rights and particularly shitty landlords that are the problem.
I say this as someone who got on the properly ladder just as much to get away from shit landlords as anything.
Your argument is the equivalent of “slave owners gave slaves housing, clothes and food. The problem isn’t slavery, it’s the lack of regulation and bad slave owners.”
A good slave owner was still a slave owner. A good landlord still takes money out of your pocket for something that should be your fundamental right.
But hey, I’m willing to compromise. I’m okay with landlords owning the house they’re renting, if they’re not allowed to rent for profit. But somehow no landlord is okay with such an idea even though it’s still a net positive for them.
EDIT: correcting spelling errors due to autocorrect.
Landlords are by definition a bad thing. Everyone needs a place to live. People who hoard the necessities of life and loan them back to you are cunts, and need to be regulated into oblivion.
Everyone hates scalpers. That’s why it baffles me when there are always legions of white knights rushing in to defend house scalpers. I automatically assume they are all house scalpers who are desperately trying to see themselves as good people.
Scalpers only rip you off once. Landlords rip you off every week of the year.
Good point. Many people know a landlord personally would be my guess. “But my uncle John is a landlord and he’s nice”.
I agree with this, but I’ve always wondered what the solution is for people that do need short term housing. Like going to college or moving to a city on a temporary job. Neither is a situation where you want to buy a house.
The obvious answer is the revolution happens and property ownership is ended, but I don’t see that happening. So what’s the solution? And don’t say dorms for college students, those regularly charge 2-3x market rates for worse accommodations
I think there are lots of fair solutions whereby people don’t get to profit endlessly off people’s fundamental needs for shelter.
Do I think any of them are attainable without any kind of reform that landlords and their apologists would hyperbolise as a “revolution”?
No, I do not.Pick your poison, but unfettered rentier capitalism is a cancer and it has to be stopped.
@arrow74@lemmy.zip was this not the response you were looking for?
Edit: just more down voting! It’s almost as if you weren’t interested in dialogue to begin with!
They don’t build homes, they just hoard them and charge a premium for access. They’re just middlemen. Landlords don’t provide a damn thing.
The house does that, they just paint over the plug sockets.
They took a place to live so they could make a profit off of it.
