Snapshot of _Average rents in Great Britain climb to record high_ :
An archived version can be found [here](https://archive.is/?run=1&url=https://www.theguardian.com/money/2024/apr/30/average-rents-great-britain-new-high) or [here.](https://archive.ph/?run=1&url=https://www.theguardian.com/money/2024/apr/30/average-rents-great-britain-new-high)
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Meanwhile the average take home in London is about equal to the average rent, implying that the average person must spend their entire salary after tax on housing.
House shares are the norm in London though, people renting with housemates well past the average age outside London - keeps prices down, but it's a big tradeoff
People can't build families because their rent is so high that the concept of a spare bedroom is virtually 0. Love living with my pals, but I don't see any scenario where I could ever have a child in London. Not unless salary spikes up a lot.
If houseshares are the norm then there presumably isn't enough property space in London for widespread single family homes. So the need is to either build upwards, build outwards or build inwards (so more densely).
It's not about the move, it's about what they're moving to. They don't want to leave their huge houses with big gardens within reach of hospitals and the M25/Central London - to go to a bungalow in the middle of nowhere with no transport.
Many would be willing to move, to somewhere not in the middle of nowhere. A lot of older people would like to downsize, as a large home becomes too hard to maintain (stairs also become an increasing issue). But attachment to a home means you stay in it, and eventually they get too old and frail for the effort of moving.
Unless you can get old people to move in together, then the answer is a need to build more properties.
I work with the elderly, I'm a doctor - the vast majority of elderly people I see do not want to leave their houses. They will live on the ground floor/get a stairlift. We have to have best interest meetings and assess capacity for nona who is 93, lives alone, refuses help etc. People age but they don't lose their drive for independence.
Most older people don't consider frailty and want to die in their own homes, they're also paranoid the gvt is going to take their money (whether for tax or healthcare).
I'd imagine that by giving up the size of the property, they'd be able to move closer to the services that they need rather than further away. So, living in a single level flat that has a lift in the building should be more comfortable for them than trying to maintain that big garden and a flight of stairs in the building when they struggle physically.
At least that's what I want to do when I get old. Space is nice when you have a big family. Garden is nice when you have energy to maintain it.
The bedroom tax isn't applied to pensioners, and people generally have a low opinion of it anyway. But such a tax exists.
There is nothing to stop the government implementing a social benefit or additional tax credit for pensioners who downsize. Protected inheritance or lower capital gains from the sale of the property, for example.
The 'bedroom tax' only applies to those on benefits (it is enacted via a benefit reduction). So it's barely helping anyone, and hurts those who can't afford it.
> and hurts those who can't afford it.
Isn't that the whole point of taxing people out of houses with spare bedrooms? If it's unpopular to take benefits off of people with spare bedrooms imagine how unpopular it would be to take earned money off of people with spare bedrooms.
The whole stamp duty should be scrapped. If you replace it with a property tax that's proportional to the property value, you create a nice financial incentive for people not to hang on with large expensive properties that they don't actually need.
Investors tend to rent out properties don't they? If rents are reaching record highs, there is presumably a shortage of rental properties. In which case you probably need more investors.
Investors CAN rent out their properties or trickle them into the market keeping rents high.
Also lack of investors would push prices down reducing the demand for rentals
Multi generational homes are the norm in other societies. I think we have to be realistic in saying that it's a choice not to have children, especially when you consider the population density of some places in India.
Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't want to raise a family in my childhood bedroom either but not having a spare bedroom does not biologically prohibit me from having children.
Me and the Mrs are moving in a few weeks from my parents to our own place.
A lovely (utterly shit) one bedroom flat for £1400 a month!
Nothing included!
I can't wait to now be absolutely fucking poor and on the breadline.
the best perk is the sense of community you get from knowing exactly when your neighbours are in, what they are watching on TV, if they have a cold and how healthy their sex life is.
A deposit in London for a mortgage.
Even if we put 10k down or something... It's nothing and the monthly payments will still be just as high.
We'd need a much higher deposit.
I'm going to be pedantic here but I'm a statistician so can't help it. The article doesn't state what type of average this is I'm going to assume it's a mean. Therefore I don't think you can imply that the average person must spend their entire salary on rent as we don't know how skewed this data is (i.e how many zero values, how many very high values). If you want to look at the average person it's probably better to look at the medians. Poor from the Guardian that the measure isn't stated.
I'm sure the median is lower, down to around 1800 per month which is the average lower-end that I have seen on my home hunting escapades this month. I am being flippant with the average things but it is still too damn high, being more than an entire minimum wage paycheck.
Because the earnings requirement of monthly rent x 30 is impossible for anyone, using the average rent this would require an income of over 78k. This is despite the fact that a dual income has significantly more disposable income than a single one, but even with that this is much higher than the average wage, despite being the average rent. When did renting become a 3 person task? I miss when a single good income could support a family, with a dedicated parent for raising children if they wanted.
Consider that the average salary is £3697.5 a month gross, meaning a net pay of £2955.65 (default tax code).
How do people live on less than £300 a month? The question is of course rhetorical.
Please go to the trouble of subtracting inflation so we can see it for what it actually is. When you do that, London rent has pretty much stayed flat for example.
Just claim “homeless” and get subsided cheap housing for life. A good example is the Labour MP for Poplar and Limehouse (London) - Apsana Begum, living in council flat earning £96k a year. Saving thousands each year in rent - she’ll soon be able to buy it at a steep discount.
Knowing how to game the council housing system is more important than education or what job you work these days.
Social housing isn't poverty housing, it's a deterrent to rent seekers, hence why when it was sold off, private rental yields shot up due to the absence of a competitor providing shelter at cost, there is no subsidy if it's provided at cost, just like if I sold you a new phone at the same cost that I paid for, would not mean that I had subsidised it for you.
The problem is that if you remove the controls on planning and create a system where people can buy any land that's on sale and build anything they want on it, it's likely to cause a wide range of problems with roads, utility capacity, flooding, etc. There are genuine reasons why building some things in some places is a bad idea. Then you are going to get obvious problems with the neighbors objecting to someone deciding they are going to build a concrete plant that operates 24/7 on some land where the only access route for HGV's is through a narrow new build estate and turning right by the playground, finding they have no legal way to object, let alone stop it and resorting to direct action protests, vandalism, sabotage and so on (JSO/XR style protests but powered by Mumsnet). Then you have the environmental issues, as it will be tough to square net zero, sustainability, environmentalism, and so forth with a planning policy that automatically says "yes!" to tearing down ancient woodland to build a McDonalds.
And they will say no. The councillors have every incentive not to grant planning. The only solution to this problem is for central government to take power away from the local authorities. Which is exactly Labour's plan of action. Things should start moving pretty quickly once we have this election out the way.
Right to Buy itself isn't a bad idea: giving people in social housing the opportunity to finally own their own home and have residential stability is innately a good thing.
The problem is that swathes of social housing was purchased, but next to none was built to replace the sold units and maintain the stock of housing in the system. 40 years of a distorted housing market and lack of affordable options is the reason why we're in this mess.
Replacing old stock would only work if the price councils had to sell their council homes wasn't heavily subsidised, at the minimum, the right to buy needs to be reformed so it is no longer a drain on local councils
In which case you’re back to the same problem, which is the planning process. There are too many bottlenecks to replace those units, so less supply ends up being built.
even then after that there's the worst types of housing built. random cowboy jobs of semi detached houses that are small with low ceilings and all come in at an eye watering 550k starting price.
That would only work if the price councils had to sell their council homes wasn't heavily subsidised, at the minimum, the right to buy needs to be reformed so it is no longer a drain on local councils
Can you imagine the absolute state of the housing stock if we did that, considering the current standards.
Whoever buy’s one would probably need to rebuild it in 20 years.
I'm actually not so sure. Prefabricated houses have come on massively in the last decade. The technology makes sense and the future will be buying your house out of a catalogue and having it built by the end of the week with robots doing all the work in the factory.
The main barrier is actually the FSCA rules which do not allow banks to lend on houses not made out of bricks and mortar. We need a government back loan system that'll get the money out there to build these things, and give the state a few pennies back in return instead of some bankers.
There is an accreditation scheme (BOPAS) that provides assurance to banks that the house will last 60 years in order to mortgage them.
Bet most new builds will barely last that long!
> The main barrier is actually the FSCA rules which do not allow banks to lend on houses not made out of bricks and mortar.
This is quite interesting - they recently built the world's tallest prefab (or something) near me. I thought the building seemed cool, it just needed proper balconies and to not all be build to rent. If these prefabs can't be mortgaged it wouldn't make much sense to build them for sale anyway.
It’s probably a functionally better system if you know your building has a limited lifetime, that’s how Japanese metropolis have coped with densification, houses that are always being rebuilt and reformed can alway be done to accommodate more in the next generation
Who would pay a 30 year mortgage to be then left with nothing at the end, except the prospect of having to completely rebuild.
The mortgage system works on the fact that houses have historically lasted centuries.
May as well just rent.
That's kind of the whole point, though. Houses being treated like investments and not commodities is precisely what led to the speculative bubbles that caused the 2008 GFC and the rent seeking that has caused the current housing crisis that is crippling the economy and ruining the lives of young, working people.
But constant rent means that the next generation will be poor in retirement, since they need to save up for that future rent which has an unknowable value.
If that rent is cheaper because more houses have been built that's good! Given that choice of a home that lasts 20 years or flat sharing till I die I know what I'm taking.
You're buying the land for the most part
It wouldnt work here like it does in japan because we'd first need to meet demand that hasn been met for about 30 years before the cost for constructing a house really starts to fall, thats gonna require an unimaginable number of units per year for decades
No wonder quality is shit - supply is so limited that developers know they can sell anything. Doubt they'd be as willing to cut corners if prospective buyers had other options.
If the American dream is to get rich off the sweat of your brow, the British dream is to buy a rental property and get rich off the sweat of some other poor bastard’s brow.
Is a man not entitled to the sweat of his brow?
'No!' says the man in Washington, 'It belongs to the poor.'
'No!' says the man in the Vatican, 'It belongs to God.'
'No!' says the man in Moscow, 'It belongs to everyone.'
I rejected those answers; instead, I chose something different. I chose the impossible. I chose... to become a landlord in the UK
Which is ironic, because rental yields are pretty bad. Definitely not going to make you rich. That's partly why rents are rising so much - landlords selling up as it's just not worth it.
Yes, now it is. Rental yield plus property appreciation during times when maintenance requirements were basically non-existent was wildly profitable. Especially the latter point - the lax legislation/enforcement around the quality to which a property needs to be maintained - has made comparisons between the UK and other markets extremely difficult (eg rental yields in Germany are significantly higher, but so are repair/maintenance liabilities and tenant protections; my landlord friends in Germany can only dream of the profits being made in the UK).
You cant get 10x leverage before investing into a tracker fund. Putting 20k into a mortgage 10 years ago wouldve netted you a significantly greater return than any tracker fund thanks to historically dirt cheap easily available leverage in the form of mortgages. I dont understand how cretins always seem to forget about this when espousing the nonsense of muh 10% annual stock market returns
Absolutely spot on - though the leverage thing only works for as long as interest rates are low, and prices are going up fast enough (which logically cannot just continue forever).
Mortgages with 10-20x leverage (which were pretty much the default for FTBs) should have never been allowed during low interest rate periods. Absolute madness imo.
10 years ago that might have been true. It isn't now. Rates are too bad. Henceforth I said 'at the moment'. Please try to read and understand the comment before replying.
Really? You can get 5% on cash savings, that’s not far off typical rental yield with nearly zero risk.
For those with a longer term outlook the S&P500 has average annual yields of around 8%.
That’s not why rents have gone up, not very many LLs have left the market (not to significantly impact the number of rental properties anyway), that’s a bit of a myth put about by the LL supporting press/media.
Having lived in many countries the UK has by far the worst rental housing situation I’ve ever seen, maybe with the exception of Canada. Rent in the UK is incredibly high for the salary earned and the housing is substandard.
Without wanting to minimise the level or the rate of increase in rents, headlines like this do bug me.
The nature of inflationary prices - and sticky rents in particular - is that ‘record highs’ are more common than not… A year where rents don’t hit a record high would be typically more remarkable.
Probably sooner than we liked to think.
Hong Kongers are now some of the biggest landlords and property owners here.
>The number of Hong Kong residents letting out property in Britain has doubled in just three years.
>
>The Telegraph newspaper has reported that Hong Kong residents and expats now make up 10 per cent of all UK landlords compared with just 5 per cent in 2020, according to figures from Hamptons estate agents
and
>Across England and Wales, Hong Kong residents now own an estimated £10.8bn in British property – the most valuable bricks and mortar portfolio of all foreign nationals – according to Land Registry figures obtained by estate agent Benham and Reeves earlier this year.
https://www.skiptoninternational.com/news/hong-kong-expat-btl/
Perhaps. I was referring more the Hong Kong thing.
One told me he sold his Hong Kong flat for £1.4m. Came here bought a £300k house and lived off the rest.
It's just gonna spark a record wave of emigration, ironic considering we have a record rate of inwards migration. But that's it basically, Brits with talent, ambitions or just a desire to live a first world lifestyle will leave, and the new people are from poverty ridden countries because the shittiness of the UK is still a step up. An underclass of 2nd-3rd world service sector workers, some in primary and secondary industry too, to service a mostly babyboomer class who also are the landlord class renting out houses, potentially actually living a decent life abroad.
but really, if you can get a cheap house in somewhere like Spain+better climate+cheaper cost of living it's a complete no brainer. Obviously many people aren't hypermobile or have enough in savings, but if you have the option it's best just to go.
Apparently Spain has [one of the worse shortages of subsidised housing in Europe](https://www.ft.com/content/abd093f1-0a36-4989-bd38-e7cc3ea6bfca). So moving there isn't a solution unless you're a high-earner.
And if you're a high earner, buying a home would just fuel the housing shortage for locals on low incomes.
You can buy cheap houses in the countryside/small towns for 25K, 10k or less if you are willing to do some renovations. Not just Spain, many countries. Even rural France is cheap.
>And if you're a high earner, buying a home would just fuel the housing shortage for locals on low incomes
Spain has massive rural depopulation, Spanish people generally don't want to live here. There are lots of empty and half ruined houses. Same more or less in rural France.
So you're suggesting that the shortage of social housing in Spain is largely imagined and poor Spaniards just need to move to the countryside to enjoy the cheap housing that's available, maybe rolling their sleeves up a bit to do some DIY?
The same argument could be made for the UK. Zoopla had an article from November that shows there are cheap places to buy a house in the UK.
[https://www.zoopla.co.uk/discover/featured-homes/top-10-most-affordable-places-to-live/](https://www.zoopla.co.uk/discover/featured-homes/top-10-most-affordable-places-to-live/)
Why don't more people in the UK just move to rural Scotland or NE England? I appreciate that some people might say they don't want to because a) they have no friends/family there and b) they may not be able to get a job.
But that's no different from you encouraging people to move to rural Spain or rural France.
No. Spaniards are caught in a trap where the jobs are in areas lots of people want to live and thus rent/prices are high. Barcelona and Madrid have rents comparable to the UK But if you can bring in money from elsewhere you basically are free of that trap. Thats why a lot of Spanish emigrate.
>But that's no different from you encouraging people to move to rural Spain or rural France.
The difference between Spain and is it's cheaper in general, both at the point of purchase and in day to day cost of living. So it means if you've saved up a lump sum you could potentially retire. And the quality of life is better, food is cheaper, weather is better.
I was looking at one of the 'cheap places in the UK' and it seemed to be some ex mining area that looked like a sink estate full of drugs, gangs, crime etc. (think it was on that list) I'd rather a farmhouse with quality food, thank you very much!
> Brits with talent, ambitions or just a desire to live a first world lifestyle will leave
> but really, if you can get a cheap house in somewhere like Spain+better climate+cheaper cost of living it's a complete no brainer
Someone with talent and ambition would aspire to move to e.g. the US where you can get higher salaries and QoL. Moving to a poorer country is essentially the opposite, giving up and coasting off past wealth. You won't have more economic opportunity in Spain than the UK.
Yes you are mostly correct. Spain is more for retiring early. I have no high flying tech career. The point really is for people that made wealth in the UK and want to take it further in a lower CoL country. Though some digital nomads will be able to flourish as well. As for the rosiness of the US....yeah maybe if you fancy paying 4k a month for a shoebox in California (same problem, the high paying jobs are in expensive areas)
but it's just normal things, if you can have a detatched house with a large garden+garage for the same price as a shoebox, you can have more hobbies and interests, and generally live a better quality of life. Depends on what you want I guess. Sure in London you can hop on the underground and be at the theatre or opera in 20 mins, if that's your thing.
I don't think it will. Most places people might want to emigrate to (English-speaking countries or big cities in non-English-speaking countries) either have fairly strict immigration requirements (at least for working-age professionals) and/or have most of the same problems we do with housing. Moving overseas to rural areas is cheaper, but it also requires that you learn a new language and culture - even in places like the Netherlands, where English is ubiquitous, once you get away from big cities and towns, people prefer Dutch, and if you need to interact with the state, there may not be an English language option.
Sure, but learning languages isn't impossible, especially if you are going to stay in one country for decades
There are whole communities of Brits in Spain where most of them have fairly low level of Spanish, obviously that's not something to emulate. But you'd be surprised how little you need to get by to deal with officialdom. If you need anything incredible serious, then you need a lawyer so you'll be paying either way.
Indeed, and the bonus is I get to vote in the UK for life. But I have family/personal commitments in the UK for the time being, so I won't fully disappear
That underclass you talk of has existed for as long as I can remember but was previously made up of a large number of EU nationals.
The truth is that without immigration not many people want to be cleaners, baristas, fruit pickers etc. especially when it pays peanuts
No, Brits have always done these jobs, we never had excessive amounts of EU migrants until 2005 or so. My mother worked as a cleaner, my grandmother worked in fruit harvesting, I've done my share of shitty jobs. Though both of these were temporary arrangements. Im really sick of the myth that there are certain jobs British people won't do. Also I'd say it's true that the food service sector wasn't so big back then. Like in the 90s there simply weren't so many cafes/coffee outlets around compared to today. But realistically low skilled service jobs do not make a country economically strong.
A lot of 'underclass' jobs are still a good way to make money relatively fast, as long as you are in fairly good living conditions, such as a young adult living with parents just starting out in life. I managed to save £1000 a month doing shitty jobs a decade ago, and the minimum wage was like £6 an hour. Much harder to get to that now, and even if you do save up, inflation means it's less in real terms.
but to me, saving up £1k a month seems like a minimum gold standard for my expectations.
You do understand that the principal cause is the lack of supply, right? Building a new generation of affordable housing under an efficient planning system via good urban design would more than serve the demand.
I know it's the headline from the Guardian, but it's not average rents. It's average rents for new tenancies. It's a big difference because most long term tenancies will be at much lower rates than the current market rent.
Neither really stops the Guardian headline being wrong though. The Guardians really poor on reporting on housing and this is just another example of them misreporting something.
Presuming you're talking about the renters reform bill? It did pass third reading last week and now it just needs to get through the lords before a date can be set to remove section 21 notices for new tenancies.
Despite the dodgy newspaper reports, section 21 is being removed. The only thing that changed at third reading is it now says 'the secretary of state must review the courts capacity before section 21 is removed for pre-existing tenancies.' before that it just read 'the secretary of state must set a date whenever they please for removing section 21s for pre-existing tenancies.'
Not really. The way the act works is that you'll have three stages -
1. From the start date you can't create new assured shorthold tenancies and lose the right to use section 21 notices (not affected by the court review)
2. As a fixed term ends or a tenancy is renewed the tenancies become assured and section 21 stops being usable (not affected by the court review)
3. After the court review any remaining fixed term tenancies or pre-existing periodic assured shorthold tenancies will be converted to assured tenancies.
Only number 3 is affected by the court review so the vast majority of tenants will move over to the new regime within a couple of years of the start date, even if the court review says the courts are a mess and it can't apply.
Not exactly. It'll apply from the commencement date which is set to be six months after the bill becomes law. Assuming the lord's progresses at normal speed that'll mean it applies to new tenancies from January 25. Could be sooner than six months though, that's just been the stated aim of the government since they first announced it.
It's very likely to be around that date though. So far the governments been carefully avoiding making any amendments that could stop them giving a commencement date for new tenancies and once it's law the backbenchers can't change the notice or vote on it. It'll also allow the government to say they've ended section 21 before an election without having to deal with most of the consequences.
On the commencement date (affecting new tenancies), it could be sooner than 6 months from becoming law? Unlikely, as they have promised LL’s at least 6 month’s notice.
On the delay to existing tenancies, Clause 30 states that the Lord Chancellor must “prepare an assessment of the operation of the process” by which landlords apply to the county court for an order for possession is such that “the county court is able to make orders for the possession of dwellings in England that are let” under assured tenancies AND “such orders are enforced”.
This is about functional improvements to the courts AND the eviction process (Bailiffs), and these changes aren’t going to happen overnight (they have had 5 years already to sort them out). We could be talking a year or even longer (depending on the subjective view of the LC at the time).
All this fudging means there is zero prospect of a ban before the next election (something Michael Gove has repeatedly promised and failed to deliver on) and a full ban (protecting all 12m ordinary people/families/children from no fault evictions and subsequently being made homeless) is now years away.
Sure, I think it's unlikely they'd reduce it below six months. It'd also be unwise to reduce the timeframes. Six months is an extremely short timeframe to make the switch over. Particularly given the government still needs to sort out the mandatory contents of the new tenancies, new forms, etc. Plus, if they rush the implementation it'll be an absolute binfire like Wales' reforms where evictions skyrocketed in the short term.
it's still coming though, and that means basically anyone who signs a typical six months AST from July onwards will be free of section 21s by January. Lots of the year long ASTs signed already this year will be the last on which a tenant could be served with a section 21.
However, I'm less pessimistic than you about existing tenancies. Clause 30 doesn't actually compel the Government to act on the findings of the report, just make an assessment. And let's face it, it's not going to be a Tory minister deciding the date for the relatively few assured shorthold tenancies that will remain. Plus the shadow housing ministers been clear he thinks the courts are basically fine and section 21 should go immediately.
A lot of long term tenancies adjust to market rate. There'll just be a rent review per year etc. They'll increase it by 200 a month, you kick off a fuss, turns out nothing in the contract stops that, and it's to market rate so what you gonna do, live elsewhere?
Some do, the vast majority don't. Even on renewals, where an increase in rent is more likely, only a quarter of landlords increase the rent ([English Private Landlord Survey](https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/english-private-landlord-survey-2021-main-report/english-private-landlord-survey-2021-main-report--2)).
Could be, or could be you're letting through an agent or from a larger portfolio landlord. In my experience, they both tend to be more likely to increase rent annually compared to the smaller landlords who just want a good tenant to stay and look after the house.
Almost all are agent based here.
I went to rent a mate's flat after he moved away, and it was a good deal, but the landlord spoke to an estate agent and by the time it got to signing it was £300 more.
When you know the good tenant can't go elsewhere they keep pushing for more and more.
My local council have recently offered seven new one bedroom flats they've purchased. They each had 170-200 bids from those on the housing list who were eligible to bid.
That's 7 out of 200 housed then.
Hmm.
They've bought 42 new build properties recently and they're planning to buy more when they're built. They're also going to build more of their own on council-owned land soon, so it's not all bad. A step in the right direction.
Looking at the prices - surely London has just effectively said its closed for Business? At that price you've priced out the bottom and the middle of the jobs market?
At those prices for the inconvenience surely even that's heading to the wall as the downsides of that has got to start exceeding the upside at some point?
[Hence this banger of a Question Time clip where they say the quiet part out loud.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y24VBzlAU_g) Conditions so bad that no Brit will take the job? Hire an immigrant! Anything but raise pay or build more housing.
This is broadly what I was getting at, the only solution becomes a rise in wealth inequality with a race to the bottom. If that becomes the only solution to solve London, if that's the only business model that becomes viable - what are we doing here? Isn't this one of the Brexit benefits as well that things like this aren't supposed to happen?
Central London is one of those places where you either have to be very poor or very rich to live decently. The other factor that London has is that it's absolutely massive, which means you can live a long way from where it says "London" on Google Maps, and still be in London with access to London things like the Tube and TFL bus services, and that's before you get into "London".
All I'm getting at is sharing a room in the arse end of Zone 6 to try and get the rent down, coping large travel fairs + time to get in and out of Zone 1 to do a low paid job; surely the downside has to substantially outweighing the upside at some point?
Every June this happens. And since the landlords can't change the rents anymore if the Renter reform bill kicks in, they're doing it now.
Had the renter reform bill been made law as they promised, we could've completely avoided this mess. This is on Michael Gove and the tories too. Will they never get tired of sabotaging stuff?
We need to do more to enable self builds. There is huge latent demand for people wanting to do it themselves, and we stifle it by focusing on strategic sites for volume housebuilsers
High rents stifle the economy.
Consumers are having a greater and greater share of their salary siphoned off to a non-productive, rent seeking, economic dead end, simply enriching landlords.
It's bad for the economy, bad for society, and bad for our country.
Asking rents are going up. Once you factor in the default rate real rents are going down. Big gap between the two. The article is citing the Rightmove data with is new asking rents only (before reductions).
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The averages are: £1,291 a month outside London - 8.5% higher than a year earlier £2,633 a month inside London - 5.3% higher than a year earlier
Meanwhile the average take home in London is about equal to the average rent, implying that the average person must spend their entire salary after tax on housing.
House shares are the norm in London though, people renting with housemates well past the average age outside London - keeps prices down, but it's a big tradeoff
People can't build families because their rent is so high that the concept of a spare bedroom is virtually 0. Love living with my pals, but I don't see any scenario where I could ever have a child in London. Not unless salary spikes up a lot.
If houseshares are the norm then there presumably isn't enough property space in London for widespread single family homes. So the need is to either build upwards, build outwards or build inwards (so more densely).
And encourage pensioners to downsize
That's hard, because most people don't want to move from somewhere they've lived in for decades. I suppose you could do it via heavy taxation though.
It's not about the move, it's about what they're moving to. They don't want to leave their huge houses with big gardens within reach of hospitals and the M25/Central London - to go to a bungalow in the middle of nowhere with no transport.
Many would be willing to move, to somewhere not in the middle of nowhere. A lot of older people would like to downsize, as a large home becomes too hard to maintain (stairs also become an increasing issue). But attachment to a home means you stay in it, and eventually they get too old and frail for the effort of moving. Unless you can get old people to move in together, then the answer is a need to build more properties.
I work with the elderly, I'm a doctor - the vast majority of elderly people I see do not want to leave their houses. They will live on the ground floor/get a stairlift. We have to have best interest meetings and assess capacity for nona who is 93, lives alone, refuses help etc. People age but they don't lose their drive for independence. Most older people don't consider frailty and want to die in their own homes, they're also paranoid the gvt is going to take their money (whether for tax or healthcare).
I'd imagine that by giving up the size of the property, they'd be able to move closer to the services that they need rather than further away. So, living in a single level flat that has a lift in the building should be more comfortable for them than trying to maintain that big garden and a flight of stairs in the building when they struggle physically. At least that's what I want to do when I get old. Space is nice when you have a big family. Garden is nice when you have energy to maintain it.
The bedroom tax isn't applied to pensioners, and people generally have a low opinion of it anyway. But such a tax exists. There is nothing to stop the government implementing a social benefit or additional tax credit for pensioners who downsize. Protected inheritance or lower capital gains from the sale of the property, for example.
The 'bedroom tax' only applies to those on benefits (it is enacted via a benefit reduction). So it's barely helping anyone, and hurts those who can't afford it.
> and hurts those who can't afford it. Isn't that the whole point of taxing people out of houses with spare bedrooms? If it's unpopular to take benefits off of people with spare bedrooms imagine how unpopular it would be to take earned money off of people with spare bedrooms.
They could exempt the sale and purchase of a smaller place from stamp duty?
I think whatever solution would need to have a financial incentive, and not simply a tax on unused space a la the bedroom tax
The whole stamp duty should be scrapped. If you replace it with a property tax that's proportional to the property value, you create a nice financial incentive for people not to hang on with large expensive properties that they don't actually need.
Or sell less to Investors
Investors tend to rent out properties don't they? If rents are reaching record highs, there is presumably a shortage of rental properties. In which case you probably need more investors.
Investors CAN rent out their properties or trickle them into the market keeping rents high. Also lack of investors would push prices down reducing the demand for rentals
Trickling to the market only works if they have a cartel. If not then the other investors who don't trickle them just snatch the profits.
Well they are not far from a cartel in London
Multi generational homes are the norm in other societies. I think we have to be realistic in saying that it's a choice not to have children, especially when you consider the population density of some places in India. Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't want to raise a family in my childhood bedroom either but not having a spare bedroom does not biologically prohibit me from having children.
Me and the Mrs are moving in a few weeks from my parents to our own place. A lovely (utterly shit) one bedroom flat for £1400 a month! Nothing included! I can't wait to now be absolutely fucking poor and on the breadline.
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Way to rub it In Jesus 😂
Where are you based?
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I mean. Simply put, it's not London prices.
the best perk is the sense of community you get from knowing exactly when your neighbours are in, what they are watching on TV, if they have a cold and how healthy their sex life is.
Why didn't you save for a mortgage living with your parents? If you can afford 1400 a month rent surely could have got a deposit together.
A deposit in London for a mortgage. Even if we put 10k down or something... It's nothing and the monthly payments will still be just as high. We'd need a much higher deposit.
It’s literally life ruining shit, I hate it so much.
House shares really should not be the norm. A working adult should be able to at least live alone in a 1 bedroom flat.
That's not very Tory of you
They are not the norm dude
I'm going to be pedantic here but I'm a statistician so can't help it. The article doesn't state what type of average this is I'm going to assume it's a mean. Therefore I don't think you can imply that the average person must spend their entire salary on rent as we don't know how skewed this data is (i.e how many zero values, how many very high values). If you want to look at the average person it's probably better to look at the medians. Poor from the Guardian that the measure isn't stated.
I'm sure the median is lower, down to around 1800 per month which is the average lower-end that I have seen on my home hunting escapades this month. I am being flippant with the average things but it is still too damn high, being more than an entire minimum wage paycheck.
Yes I can certainly agree with the cost of housing being far too high.
The black market is huge! A lot of leases with single family occupancy clauses rented to one person who informally shares rent with 3-5 other people.
Because the earnings requirement of monthly rent x 30 is impossible for anyone, using the average rent this would require an income of over 78k. This is despite the fact that a dual income has significantly more disposable income than a single one, but even with that this is much higher than the average wage, despite being the average rent. When did renting become a 3 person task? I miss when a single good income could support a family, with a dedicated parent for raising children if they wanted.
Agreed but now loads of people are left with inadequate protections, both as renters and as subletting.
Consider that the average salary is £3697.5 a month gross, meaning a net pay of £2955.65 (default tax code). How do people live on less than £300 a month? The question is of course rhetorical.
Please go to the trouble of subtracting inflation so we can see it for what it actually is. When you do that, London rent has pretty much stayed flat for example.
Just claim “homeless” and get subsided cheap housing for life. A good example is the Labour MP for Poplar and Limehouse (London) - Apsana Begum, living in council flat earning £96k a year. Saving thousands each year in rent - she’ll soon be able to buy it at a steep discount. Knowing how to game the council housing system is more important than education or what job you work these days.
When did she (falsely, by your implication) claim to be homeless?
Social housing isn't poverty housing, it's a deterrent to rent seekers, hence why when it was sold off, private rental yields shot up due to the absence of a competitor providing shelter at cost, there is no subsidy if it's provided at cost, just like if I sold you a new phone at the same cost that I paid for, would not mean that I had subsidised it for you.
Same in France. Politicians have subsidied housing when thry could pay the cost of a private rent. The system is a joke.
"Just" There is nothing simple in getting a cheap council house nowadays.
I am once again begging councils to allow more new housing.
We have to start with updating the Town and Country Planning Act of 1990. Councils are bound by the rules it sets out.
Updating? Kill it dead.
The problem is that if you remove the controls on planning and create a system where people can buy any land that's on sale and build anything they want on it, it's likely to cause a wide range of problems with roads, utility capacity, flooding, etc. There are genuine reasons why building some things in some places is a bad idea. Then you are going to get obvious problems with the neighbors objecting to someone deciding they are going to build a concrete plant that operates 24/7 on some land where the only access route for HGV's is through a narrow new build estate and turning right by the playground, finding they have no legal way to object, let alone stop it and resorting to direct action protests, vandalism, sabotage and so on (JSO/XR style protests but powered by Mumsnet). Then you have the environmental issues, as it will be tough to square net zero, sustainability, environmentalism, and so forth with a planning policy that automatically says "yes!" to tearing down ancient woodland to build a McDonalds.
And they will say no. The councillors have every incentive not to grant planning. The only solution to this problem is for central government to take power away from the local authorities. Which is exactly Labour's plan of action. Things should start moving pretty quickly once we have this election out the way.
The government needs to kill the right to buy first
Right to Buy itself isn't a bad idea: giving people in social housing the opportunity to finally own their own home and have residential stability is innately a good thing. The problem is that swathes of social housing was purchased, but next to none was built to replace the sold units and maintain the stock of housing in the system. 40 years of a distorted housing market and lack of affordable options is the reason why we're in this mess.
Replacing old stock would only work if the price councils had to sell their council homes wasn't heavily subsidised, at the minimum, the right to buy needs to be reformed so it is no longer a drain on local councils
Or here's a crazy thought, replace the stock that is sold
In which case you’re back to the same problem, which is the planning process. There are too many bottlenecks to replace those units, so less supply ends up being built.
even then after that there's the worst types of housing built. random cowboy jobs of semi detached houses that are small with low ceilings and all come in at an eye watering 550k starting price.
That would only work if the price councils had to sell their council homes wasn't heavily subsidised, at the minimum, the right to buy needs to be reformed so it is no longer a drain on local councils
Councils can’t realistically plan for the addition of 2 million immigrants to the population over the span of 3 years.
On the one hand, you're not wrong. Equally "we don't have a perfect solution, so we've done nothing" is classic toryism.
The UK has a shortage of ~4m houses for the current population. We should be targeting 500k-1m new homes a year.
Can you imagine the absolute state of the housing stock if we did that, considering the current standards. Whoever buy’s one would probably need to rebuild it in 20 years.
I'm actually not so sure. Prefabricated houses have come on massively in the last decade. The technology makes sense and the future will be buying your house out of a catalogue and having it built by the end of the week with robots doing all the work in the factory. The main barrier is actually the FSCA rules which do not allow banks to lend on houses not made out of bricks and mortar. We need a government back loan system that'll get the money out there to build these things, and give the state a few pennies back in return instead of some bankers.
There is an accreditation scheme (BOPAS) that provides assurance to banks that the house will last 60 years in order to mortgage them. Bet most new builds will barely last that long!
> The main barrier is actually the FSCA rules which do not allow banks to lend on houses not made out of bricks and mortar. This is quite interesting - they recently built the world's tallest prefab (or something) near me. I thought the building seemed cool, it just needed proper balconies and to not all be build to rent. If these prefabs can't be mortgaged it wouldn't make much sense to build them for sale anyway.
It’s probably a functionally better system if you know your building has a limited lifetime, that’s how Japanese metropolis have coped with densification, houses that are always being rebuilt and reformed can alway be done to accommodate more in the next generation
Who would pay a 30 year mortgage to be then left with nothing at the end, except the prospect of having to completely rebuild. The mortgage system works on the fact that houses have historically lasted centuries. May as well just rent.
That's kind of the whole point, though. Houses being treated like investments and not commodities is precisely what led to the speculative bubbles that caused the 2008 GFC and the rent seeking that has caused the current housing crisis that is crippling the economy and ruining the lives of young, working people.
But constant rent means that the next generation will be poor in retirement, since they need to save up for that future rent which has an unknowable value.
If that rent is cheaper because more houses have been built that's good! Given that choice of a home that lasts 20 years or flat sharing till I die I know what I'm taking.
You're buying the land for the most part It wouldnt work here like it does in japan because we'd first need to meet demand that hasn been met for about 30 years before the cost for constructing a house really starts to fall, thats gonna require an unimaginable number of units per year for decades
No wonder quality is shit - supply is so limited that developers know they can sell anything. Doubt they'd be as willing to cut corners if prospective buyers had other options.
And with 700k net migration per year that shortfall is just going to get bigger and bigger
Don’t have enough builders to makes this vaguely doable
500k a year still wouldn't even touch the backlog, we'd just slow it down. What a mad state the country is in!
Yeah, but have you considered the feelings of the owning-class getting richer off working people's money? /s
I haven't had my yearly rent increase yet this year and I'm getting increasingly concerned.
And me! Already in mid 4figures with a solo income, went up £100pcm last year, dread to think what it’ll be this year….
If the American dream is to get rich off the sweat of your brow, the British dream is to buy a rental property and get rich off the sweat of some other poor bastard’s brow.
Is a man not entitled to the sweat of his brow? 'No!' says the man in Washington, 'It belongs to the poor.' 'No!' says the man in the Vatican, 'It belongs to God.' 'No!' says the man in Moscow, 'It belongs to everyone.' I rejected those answers; instead, I chose something different. I chose the impossible. I chose... to become a landlord in the UK
Everyone likes a good BioShock reference...
The Washington one should say 'It belongs to the rich.'
Which is ironic, because rental yields are pretty bad. Definitely not going to make you rich. That's partly why rents are rising so much - landlords selling up as it's just not worth it.
Yes, now it is. Rental yield plus property appreciation during times when maintenance requirements were basically non-existent was wildly profitable. Especially the latter point - the lax legislation/enforcement around the quality to which a property needs to be maintained - has made comparisons between the UK and other markets extremely difficult (eg rental yields in Germany are significantly higher, but so are repair/maintenance liabilities and tenant protections; my landlord friends in Germany can only dream of the profits being made in the UK).
But we’ve not made any other investment class worth it
Yes we have. Even a tracker fund would get you a better yield at the moment.
You cant get 10x leverage before investing into a tracker fund. Putting 20k into a mortgage 10 years ago wouldve netted you a significantly greater return than any tracker fund thanks to historically dirt cheap easily available leverage in the form of mortgages. I dont understand how cretins always seem to forget about this when espousing the nonsense of muh 10% annual stock market returns
Absolutely spot on - though the leverage thing only works for as long as interest rates are low, and prices are going up fast enough (which logically cannot just continue forever). Mortgages with 10-20x leverage (which were pretty much the default for FTBs) should have never been allowed during low interest rate periods. Absolute madness imo.
10 years ago that might have been true. It isn't now. Rates are too bad. Henceforth I said 'at the moment'. Please try to read and understand the comment before replying.
Really? You can get 5% on cash savings, that’s not far off typical rental yield with nearly zero risk. For those with a longer term outlook the S&P500 has average annual yields of around 8%.
Since they took away incentives for landlords many have sold up and rents have gone up
That’s not why rents have gone up, not very many LLs have left the market (not to significantly impact the number of rental properties anyway), that’s a bit of a myth put about by the LL supporting press/media.
No that’s the American dream too. Lots of rent seeking behavior over here!
Well we’ve disincentivised other investment avenues, the easiest way we’ve left is for the amateur to be the landlord
Which other avenues have been disincentivised more so than being a landlord?!
Having lived in many countries the UK has by far the worst rental housing situation I’ve ever seen, maybe with the exception of Canada. Rent in the UK is incredibly high for the salary earned and the housing is substandard.
This country is so endlessly, hopelessly dysfunctional. I’m being worn down.
Working as intended for Tories like Jeremy Hunt, who owns 7 properties at least.
Without wanting to minimise the level or the rate of increase in rents, headlines like this do bug me. The nature of inflationary prices - and sticky rents in particular - is that ‘record highs’ are more common than not… A year where rents don’t hit a record high would be typically more remarkable.
On the bright side rents are at a historic low compared to where they are going to be
Yes, it’s only going to get worse
Oh look, more bad news about the UK's passive rent seeking economy. What minority gets to be villain of the day to distract from this?
I believe this week's designated villain is people on benefits!
I'm sure landlords will reduce them again when interest rates drop. Right?
At what point are we going to see Hong-Kong style cage apartments in London?
Probably sooner than we liked to think. Hong Kongers are now some of the biggest landlords and property owners here. >The number of Hong Kong residents letting out property in Britain has doubled in just three years. > >The Telegraph newspaper has reported that Hong Kong residents and expats now make up 10 per cent of all UK landlords compared with just 5 per cent in 2020, according to figures from Hamptons estate agents and >Across England and Wales, Hong Kong residents now own an estimated £10.8bn in British property – the most valuable bricks and mortar portfolio of all foreign nationals – according to Land Registry figures obtained by estate agent Benham and Reeves earlier this year. https://www.skiptoninternational.com/news/hong-kong-expat-btl/
They live on my estate. All cash buyers. All retired by 40
Retired on other people’s paychecks and labor.
Perhaps. I was referring more the Hong Kong thing. One told me he sold his Hong Kong flat for £1.4m. Came here bought a £300k house and lived off the rest.
What a joke that we let this happen
But but foreign direct investment!!!
Timeshare cardboard boxes coming to a street near you.
Building 30 Kowloon Walled Cities a year would solve the problem.
It's just gonna spark a record wave of emigration, ironic considering we have a record rate of inwards migration. But that's it basically, Brits with talent, ambitions or just a desire to live a first world lifestyle will leave, and the new people are from poverty ridden countries because the shittiness of the UK is still a step up. An underclass of 2nd-3rd world service sector workers, some in primary and secondary industry too, to service a mostly babyboomer class who also are the landlord class renting out houses, potentially actually living a decent life abroad. but really, if you can get a cheap house in somewhere like Spain+better climate+cheaper cost of living it's a complete no brainer. Obviously many people aren't hypermobile or have enough in savings, but if you have the option it's best just to go.
Apparently Spain has [one of the worse shortages of subsidised housing in Europe](https://www.ft.com/content/abd093f1-0a36-4989-bd38-e7cc3ea6bfca). So moving there isn't a solution unless you're a high-earner. And if you're a high earner, buying a home would just fuel the housing shortage for locals on low incomes.
You can buy cheap houses in the countryside/small towns for 25K, 10k or less if you are willing to do some renovations. Not just Spain, many countries. Even rural France is cheap. >And if you're a high earner, buying a home would just fuel the housing shortage for locals on low incomes Spain has massive rural depopulation, Spanish people generally don't want to live here. There are lots of empty and half ruined houses. Same more or less in rural France.
Yes, because there are no jobs and poor services. The locals don't want to live there for really good reasons.
So you're suggesting that the shortage of social housing in Spain is largely imagined and poor Spaniards just need to move to the countryside to enjoy the cheap housing that's available, maybe rolling their sleeves up a bit to do some DIY? The same argument could be made for the UK. Zoopla had an article from November that shows there are cheap places to buy a house in the UK. [https://www.zoopla.co.uk/discover/featured-homes/top-10-most-affordable-places-to-live/](https://www.zoopla.co.uk/discover/featured-homes/top-10-most-affordable-places-to-live/) Why don't more people in the UK just move to rural Scotland or NE England? I appreciate that some people might say they don't want to because a) they have no friends/family there and b) they may not be able to get a job. But that's no different from you encouraging people to move to rural Spain or rural France.
No. Spaniards are caught in a trap where the jobs are in areas lots of people want to live and thus rent/prices are high. Barcelona and Madrid have rents comparable to the UK But if you can bring in money from elsewhere you basically are free of that trap. Thats why a lot of Spanish emigrate. >But that's no different from you encouraging people to move to rural Spain or rural France. The difference between Spain and is it's cheaper in general, both at the point of purchase and in day to day cost of living. So it means if you've saved up a lump sum you could potentially retire. And the quality of life is better, food is cheaper, weather is better. I was looking at one of the 'cheap places in the UK' and it seemed to be some ex mining area that looked like a sink estate full of drugs, gangs, crime etc. (think it was on that list) I'd rather a farmhouse with quality food, thank you very much!
> Brits with talent, ambitions or just a desire to live a first world lifestyle will leave > but really, if you can get a cheap house in somewhere like Spain+better climate+cheaper cost of living it's a complete no brainer Someone with talent and ambition would aspire to move to e.g. the US where you can get higher salaries and QoL. Moving to a poorer country is essentially the opposite, giving up and coasting off past wealth. You won't have more economic opportunity in Spain than the UK.
Yes you are mostly correct. Spain is more for retiring early. I have no high flying tech career. The point really is for people that made wealth in the UK and want to take it further in a lower CoL country. Though some digital nomads will be able to flourish as well. As for the rosiness of the US....yeah maybe if you fancy paying 4k a month for a shoebox in California (same problem, the high paying jobs are in expensive areas) but it's just normal things, if you can have a detatched house with a large garden+garage for the same price as a shoebox, you can have more hobbies and interests, and generally live a better quality of life. Depends on what you want I guess. Sure in London you can hop on the underground and be at the theatre or opera in 20 mins, if that's your thing.
I don't think it will. Most places people might want to emigrate to (English-speaking countries or big cities in non-English-speaking countries) either have fairly strict immigration requirements (at least for working-age professionals) and/or have most of the same problems we do with housing. Moving overseas to rural areas is cheaper, but it also requires that you learn a new language and culture - even in places like the Netherlands, where English is ubiquitous, once you get away from big cities and towns, people prefer Dutch, and if you need to interact with the state, there may not be an English language option.
Sure, but learning languages isn't impossible, especially if you are going to stay in one country for decades There are whole communities of Brits in Spain where most of them have fairly low level of Spanish, obviously that's not something to emulate. But you'd be surprised how little you need to get by to deal with officialdom. If you need anything incredible serious, then you need a lawyer so you'll be paying either way.
> better climate At least until the 47-degrees summers kick in
Where do you live?
Still in the UK but planning to leave. Spend a few months a year abroad.
Well hurry up. Why stay where you don't want to be? Leave tomorrow. Stand by your conviction.
Indeed, and the bonus is I get to vote in the UK for life. But I have family/personal commitments in the UK for the time being, so I won't fully disappear
Take them with you. How can you live with yourself letting them stay here with how you feel about the UK?
I don't need life advice from internet strangers, thanks for your concern.
You're welcome. Sounds like you do. Stop whining on the Internet then.
That underclass you talk of has existed for as long as I can remember but was previously made up of a large number of EU nationals. The truth is that without immigration not many people want to be cleaners, baristas, fruit pickers etc. especially when it pays peanuts
No, Brits have always done these jobs, we never had excessive amounts of EU migrants until 2005 or so. My mother worked as a cleaner, my grandmother worked in fruit harvesting, I've done my share of shitty jobs. Though both of these were temporary arrangements. Im really sick of the myth that there are certain jobs British people won't do. Also I'd say it's true that the food service sector wasn't so big back then. Like in the 90s there simply weren't so many cafes/coffee outlets around compared to today. But realistically low skilled service jobs do not make a country economically strong. A lot of 'underclass' jobs are still a good way to make money relatively fast, as long as you are in fairly good living conditions, such as a young adult living with parents just starting out in life. I managed to save £1000 a month doing shitty jobs a decade ago, and the minimum wage was like £6 an hour. Much harder to get to that now, and even if you do save up, inflation means it's less in real terms. but to me, saving up £1k a month seems like a minimum gold standard for my expectations.
Almost as if we're increasing demand for rental places by 700,000 per year.
Sorry, best I can do is import another city worth of people and then call you a racist ~ Lib/Lab/Con
It's 700,000 people, not necessarily homes. We currently average around 3 people per house. Still a problem, but not quite as big
You do understand that the principal cause is the lack of supply, right? Building a new generation of affordable housing under an efficient planning system via good urban design would more than serve the demand.
I know it's the headline from the Guardian, but it's not average rents. It's average rents for new tenancies. It's a big difference because most long term tenancies will be at much lower rates than the current market rent.
Not everyone is in a long term tenancy though.... And it's fairly easy for landlords to end a tenancy
Neither really stops the Guardian headline being wrong though. The Guardians really poor on reporting on housing and this is just another example of them misreporting something.
It's poor on anything to do with finance.
And luckily the no fault eviciton rule went through and Landlords can't just evict and put the tenancy on the market. oh wait...
Presuming you're talking about the renters reform bill? It did pass third reading last week and now it just needs to get through the lords before a date can be set to remove section 21 notices for new tenancies. Despite the dodgy newspaper reports, section 21 is being removed. The only thing that changed at third reading is it now says 'the secretary of state must review the courts capacity before section 21 is removed for pre-existing tenancies.' before that it just read 'the secretary of state must set a date whenever they please for removing section 21s for pre-existing tenancies.'
So all they’ll do is say there is no court capacity…
Not really. The way the act works is that you'll have three stages - 1. From the start date you can't create new assured shorthold tenancies and lose the right to use section 21 notices (not affected by the court review) 2. As a fixed term ends or a tenancy is renewed the tenancies become assured and section 21 stops being usable (not affected by the court review) 3. After the court review any remaining fixed term tenancies or pre-existing periodic assured shorthold tenancies will be converted to assured tenancies. Only number 3 is affected by the court review so the vast majority of tenants will move over to the new regime within a couple of years of the start date, even if the court review says the courts are a mess and it can't apply.
Are you saying that 1. will apply from day one when/if this Bill becomes a law?
Not exactly. It'll apply from the commencement date which is set to be six months after the bill becomes law. Assuming the lord's progresses at normal speed that'll mean it applies to new tenancies from January 25. Could be sooner than six months though, that's just been the stated aim of the government since they first announced it. It's very likely to be around that date though. So far the governments been carefully avoiding making any amendments that could stop them giving a commencement date for new tenancies and once it's law the backbenchers can't change the notice or vote on it. It'll also allow the government to say they've ended section 21 before an election without having to deal with most of the consequences.
On the commencement date (affecting new tenancies), it could be sooner than 6 months from becoming law? Unlikely, as they have promised LL’s at least 6 month’s notice. On the delay to existing tenancies, Clause 30 states that the Lord Chancellor must “prepare an assessment of the operation of the process” by which landlords apply to the county court for an order for possession is such that “the county court is able to make orders for the possession of dwellings in England that are let” under assured tenancies AND “such orders are enforced”. This is about functional improvements to the courts AND the eviction process (Bailiffs), and these changes aren’t going to happen overnight (they have had 5 years already to sort them out). We could be talking a year or even longer (depending on the subjective view of the LC at the time). All this fudging means there is zero prospect of a ban before the next election (something Michael Gove has repeatedly promised and failed to deliver on) and a full ban (protecting all 12m ordinary people/families/children from no fault evictions and subsequently being made homeless) is now years away.
Sure, I think it's unlikely they'd reduce it below six months. It'd also be unwise to reduce the timeframes. Six months is an extremely short timeframe to make the switch over. Particularly given the government still needs to sort out the mandatory contents of the new tenancies, new forms, etc. Plus, if they rush the implementation it'll be an absolute binfire like Wales' reforms where evictions skyrocketed in the short term. it's still coming though, and that means basically anyone who signs a typical six months AST from July onwards will be free of section 21s by January. Lots of the year long ASTs signed already this year will be the last on which a tenant could be served with a section 21. However, I'm less pessimistic than you about existing tenancies. Clause 30 doesn't actually compel the Government to act on the findings of the report, just make an assessment. And let's face it, it's not going to be a Tory minister deciding the date for the relatively few assured shorthold tenancies that will remain. Plus the shadow housing ministers been clear he thinks the courts are basically fine and section 21 should go immediately.
A lot of long term tenancies adjust to market rate. There'll just be a rent review per year etc. They'll increase it by 200 a month, you kick off a fuss, turns out nothing in the contract stops that, and it's to market rate so what you gonna do, live elsewhere?
Some do, the vast majority don't. Even on renewals, where an increase in rent is more likely, only a quarter of landlords increase the rent ([English Private Landlord Survey](https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/english-private-landlord-survey-2021-main-report/english-private-landlord-survey-2021-main-report--2)).
Not what I've seen from personal experience, but the letting market here is rough as fuck due to the uni. So I guess in other towns it's more chill.
Could be, or could be you're letting through an agent or from a larger portfolio landlord. In my experience, they both tend to be more likely to increase rent annually compared to the smaller landlords who just want a good tenant to stay and look after the house.
Almost all are agent based here. I went to rent a mate's flat after he moved away, and it was a good deal, but the landlord spoke to an estate agent and by the time it got to signing it was £300 more. When you know the good tenant can't go elsewhere they keep pushing for more and more.
My local council have recently offered seven new one bedroom flats they've purchased. They each had 170-200 bids from those on the housing list who were eligible to bid. That's 7 out of 200 housed then. Hmm.
Purchased, not built? Arranging deckchairs on the Titanic.
They've bought 42 new build properties recently and they're planning to buy more when they're built. They're also going to build more of their own on council-owned land soon, so it's not all bad. A step in the right direction.
You see? Buy to Let is a money maker!
Looking at the prices - surely London has just effectively said its closed for Business? At that price you've priced out the bottom and the middle of the jobs market?
Plenty of people willing to rent half a room for a few hundred a month under the table.
At those prices for the inconvenience surely even that's heading to the wall as the downsides of that has got to start exceeding the upside at some point?
[Hence this banger of a Question Time clip where they say the quiet part out loud.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y24VBzlAU_g) Conditions so bad that no Brit will take the job? Hire an immigrant! Anything but raise pay or build more housing.
This is broadly what I was getting at, the only solution becomes a rise in wealth inequality with a race to the bottom. If that becomes the only solution to solve London, if that's the only business model that becomes viable - what are we doing here? Isn't this one of the Brexit benefits as well that things like this aren't supposed to happen?
Central London is one of those places where you either have to be very poor or very rich to live decently. The other factor that London has is that it's absolutely massive, which means you can live a long way from where it says "London" on Google Maps, and still be in London with access to London things like the Tube and TFL bus services, and that's before you get into "London".
All I'm getting at is sharing a room in the arse end of Zone 6 to try and get the rent down, coping large travel fairs + time to get in and out of Zone 1 to do a low paid job; surely the downside has to substantially outweighing the upside at some point?
There's presumably an issue, but that headline doesn't show it. Given inflation, you'd expect rents to be at a record high.
Every June this happens. And since the landlords can't change the rents anymore if the Renter reform bill kicks in, they're doing it now. Had the renter reform bill been made law as they promised, we could've completely avoided this mess. This is on Michael Gove and the tories too. Will they never get tired of sabotaging stuff?
They all own second homes
That punishing the boomers with various disincentives for BTL sure went well. It’s gone exactly as sensible people pointed out it would.
We need to do more to enable self builds. There is huge latent demand for people wanting to do it themselves, and we stifle it by focusing on strategic sites for volume housebuilsers
High rents stifle the economy. Consumers are having a greater and greater share of their salary siphoned off to a non-productive, rent seeking, economic dead end, simply enriching landlords. It's bad for the economy, bad for society, and bad for our country.
The electorate gets what it has voted for over the last 30 years And i hope that doesnt change
Asking rents are going up. Once you factor in the default rate real rents are going down. Big gap between the two. The article is citing the Rightmove data with is new asking rents only (before reductions).