Angela Rayner launches £1 billion scheme to tackle evictions

Reply to the comment left by Beaver at 10/01/2025 - 13:09
Fully agree that the RRB will disadvantage tenants. I’d still say get the asking rental pitched correctly and if there isn’t the possibility of accepting offers over, it will be a matter of first come first served to more detailed referencing etc after an initial suitability and affordability screen. As far as I’m aware it is still going to be ok to accept a simple holding deposit.

I suppose if you have been used to a competitive bidding model then the change will seem huge. My later years were mainly focussed on student HMOs, and it just didn’t feature - my agent and I set the asking rents each year and that was it - they were let at that price. (and some years fairly recently had huge increases).

I take your point about buyers already on the agents ‘books’ - I was one back when I was buying! Although the agent must be seen to be getting the best deal for the seller who is paying them.

I sold a few with tenants in situ, they went on the open market just the same as vacant possession. Obviously only very good tenants make this possible and I got good prices, even a premium with HMOs where an Article 4 Directive had stopped new ones being created. Some sales to landlords who were on the agents books and were notified of the availability - but the properties were also up on Rightmove and the agents own websites simultaneously, so my experience differs from yours in that respect.

Reply to the comment left by Keith Wellburn at 10/01/2025 - 13:52
I agree with all this except that if the RRB proposals go through unchanged it isn't necessarily going to be first-come first served....it may be cash to agent in brown envelope.

Unlike you most landlords are small portfolio landlords. Although there are lots of myths out there about registering with the IPO for data protection purposes you don't need to register with the IPO if you are only collecting data for basic accounting purposes. So if you don't store or process data about the tenant at all beyond what is basically required for accounts then you don't have to register. But the agent does have to register store, process data etc.

So for the majority of landlords using an agent it's better to know nothing about the tenant other than what is required on the rental agreement. The agent that charges you 10% plus VAT and gets you £4,000 PCM is going to be better than the agent that charges you 6% plus VAT and gets you £2,500 PCM.

What the RRB is going to do is to create a situation where the, for example, economic migrant or corporate tenant with loads of cash is going to out-compete the single parent, or the family that's been on the council-house waiting list for 3 years. If all the written info is correct but the agent comes to some kind of verbal agreement with the tenant and maybe accepts cash then you aren't going to know about it or have any evidence. And the truth is that the situation that the government is creating is an environment where the less you know the better. I think that this doesn't serve the public interest.

The way it used to work for small landlords is that you worked out what a reasonable rent was, possibly held it down a bit if you wanted to encourage a long-term tenant and then you actually hoped that the tenant would stay. The presence of very large numbers of small-portfolio landlords in the market provided investment, competition and choice.

The proposed RRB is a disaster.

Spending 1 billion of tax payers money on trying to stop landlords evicting non paying tenants is a waste of money, they are only go on to their next property and do the same again, especially when they know that the government will just try to bail them out again.

After watching the video of Raynor several times, does this woman really believe the words that come out of her mouth?

At times she seems to try not to smile when she talks about wanting to work with and help landlords and perhaps there are good landlords out there.

Does she really think that any landlord under her government will take an ex convict that probably has no income, or someone on benefits when they could get a couple that both work and could each afford the rent if their partner left?

When will the government in the UK and other countries realize that they are are the main source of homelessness and increase in house prices and then increasing government spending by housing people that have no regard for paying for accommodation as they know that the government will pick up the bill and rehouse them. They are causing good landlords to sell up, to help their friends in the BTR section.

Bad landlords will just live under the radar and they can't be bothered ( or don't want to) to go after them.

Good landlords will pay all of the taxes and rents will increase to a point where they are no longer affordable so as they are not in dept and then they will sell up and re invest the money elsewhere.

The more landlords they force out of the market, the higher the amount the government will have to pay to house people and the higher private rents will climb. They seem to ignore the social houses.

When local council houses register thousands of breaches they are let off without even a slap on the wrist. If it was a private landlord there would be a 30k fine.

Selective licencing, stamp duty, inheritance tax. There is just no incentive these days to sell or even buy a house in the UK.

Reply to the comment left by Beaver at 10/01/2025 - 14:07
*The way it used to work for small landlords is that you worked out what a reasonable rent was, possibly held it down a bit if you wanted to encourage a long-term tenant and then you actually hoped that the tenant would stay. *

Couldn’t agree more with this, I started with 2 cheap terraced houses in a small northern town in 1990, ‘DSS’ a large part of the market and you had to compete for tenants - long term good payers were worth their weight on gold. Got another a couple of years later and doubled to 6 in 2000 with another two in 2002. After being stagnant for years at £20k +/- , values rose considerably and I mortgaged the portfolio including buying a last two there and diversifying by going into student HMOs in a prosperous university city where I got up to five by 2009.

Started selling down in 2015 when Osborne put the boot in with S24 as I had seven figure borrowings in my own name and didn’t like the scapegoating of LLs for the governments failings on housing. I see myself very much as a LL forced out of the market, remembering the Tory RRB was on the cards before the 2019 election.

I know the stats as well as anyone that the largest number of landlords have just one or two properties - but I would suggest this forum has plenty of contributors with more properties than I had - and the biggest portfolio often starts with one. The legislation will not have as much impact on the newly emerging Build to Rent players of course - but the notion that someone such as myself with the portfolio I had is aligned more with that corporate level of operation is a little far fetched if I may say so!

The market is broken with lack of supply (or too many would be renters chasing the available stock). The RRB will drive out more LLs over the primary issues such as removing S21. In many areas single parents and low earners are priced out now.
I can’t say no cash will ever be put in a brown envelope in the future but I can’t see this being anywhere near the top of the very long list of the adverse effects of the RRB. Perhaps I’ve just been lucky or chosen well with generally good letting agents.

Reply to the comment left by Keith Wellburn at 12/01/2025 - 08:51
What you were doing made perfect sense then if you could get access to the capital. I think that if you were going to do the same again now then under the present regime the only sensible way to do that would be via a limited company, although in England, not in Scotland.