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 .
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 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.
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/
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.
Wow that telegraph website is absolute arse
They… quit? So they’re letting people buy the places people should live in without a middleman leech profiting off of them?
Landlords can’t quit, it isn’t a job.
They could quit being alive. That would be pretty cool.
Don’t you need a job in order to quit?
that should be the goal. make it pointless to rent and let people buy homes for themselves
Renting can be a good option, especially when you consider the way equity vs interest are structured in the first few years of a mortgage. It’s 99% interest at first, and then it slowly inverts year-over-year, which sure feels like renting my house from the bank for the first ten years… but I can’t call up the bank and make them fix my electrical, plumbing, or appliances.
It would be nice to see a ban on renters snapping up existing properties, and a limit on how long single family newly constructed homes can be kept as rental properties.
This means rent will increase and house prices will drop in short term? Long term who knows. But yeah fixed tenancies kind of suck and because of high demand especially in places like London, bad landlords can get away with being shitty by exploiting fixed tenancies. Shouldn’t really be a problem for those who anyways aren’t shitty so hopefully this is a clean up of shitty landlords who don’t want to maintain their rental properties properly.
Thank god. Landlords are scum and our housing market is cooked. The USA is in desperate need of a housing market crash. Prices are way too high and many millennials still can’t afford homes despite being in their 40’s. Younger generations don’t stand a chance. Homes are not an investment. Your home isn’t worth more just because you’ve lived in it for years wearing it down, breaking things, and stinking up the place. Like anything that gets used they lose value over time and the market needs to reflect that. Hopefully this makes landlords leave the housing market in droves. A flood of housing hitting the market at a time no one is able to afford them will hopefully trigger the crash.
They say 2008 was a housing market crash but it didn’t. Houses cost way too much before and cost way too much after. They use every trick to kick the can as long as they are able to. I want to see a 60% loss in housing value across the board. Everywhere across the USA. And I want to see that loss become permanent. Intrinsic value that is lost forever because it was never actually there to begin with. Just made up numbers with voodoo math.
2008 was enough of a crash that it wiped out my family’s property value we sold our house at a loss
God if I could get a nice suburban starter home in my area for under $250k I’d be so happy… Everything that’s not dilapidated or in a terrible neighborhood is going for $400-500k right now 🙃
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.
The house does that, they just paint over the plug sockets.
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.
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
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 non-profit. But somehow no landlord is okay with such an idea even though it’s still a net positive for them.
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.
Nice! CONGRATULATIONS UK!
It’s about time. Generally speaking the UK have some pretty robust consumer protection laws, mostly thanks to the EU, but the laws around renting were draconian, they might as well of not existed.
To be clear I’m not really all that certain on why they would be quitting, you can still absolutely make money as a landlord under these rules you’re just not allowed to run a Victorian era workhouse level operation. Maybe that’s what all these landlords were doing.
They’ve withdrawn their labour? 🫢
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.
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?
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.
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
A civil union? I mean, I suppose you wouldn’t want a really rude union… ;-)
How would having lower demand increase prices?
Artificial scarcity got hands
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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Violin too big
<sub>🎻</sub> or perhaps <sub><sub><sub><sub>🎻</sub></sub></sub></sub>
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:)
