More families and older renters downsize as rents soar

On: “Fundamentally, the problem is that landlords are exiting the market when demand for rental properties continues to rise.

“Landlords are making a loss when rents are rising, and we need to address the root causes if we’re to solve this.”

Putting a safe roof over somebody's head is socially useful and it seems odd to be penalising it.

We were told that the changes we've faced preventing us from deducting our finance costs were to prevent another housing bubble; they seem more likely to be political to me. Some landlords are now finding that they are better off investing in premium bonds, but all that does is enable the government to finance its debt and it doesn't house anybody. We can't deduct finance costs unless we incorporate and we are also not allowed to invest our pension assets in residential housing.

But we need a boom in housing that doesn't produce much CO2 emissions. At the very least we ought to be able to deduct our finance costs of making energy efficiency improvements as operational expenditure and given that we need so much of it I can't see what the problem would be in allowing us to invest our SIPPS in EPC category A properties whether as new builds or retrofits.

Why is it that I can invest my SIPP in petroleum companies, tobacco, any number of activities that put out CO2 emissions: And yet I can't invest it to retrofit a Band D property and make it Band A or build a band A property on land I own in my SIPP?

"The rising cost and scarcity of rental homes have forced thousands of families to downsize........."

If this is the 'workaround' families are resorting to, then coming down the tracks fast are:
a) Overcrowded living conditions in the private sector
b) Lack of adequate space for growing families
c) Homes being overfilled with stuff as well as people
d) Condensation/ventilation issues
e) Mental health issues stockpiling for tenant
f) Return to historical squalid living conditions
g) No way out as all routes are unaffordable or unobtainable
What, exactly, can a disempowered landlord do about any of this?

Reply to the comment left by LordOf TheManor at 30/11/2023 - 11:32Good points, but none of these issues seem to matter to Government - they would be yet more of the unintended consequences of their endless and punitive tinkering with the PRS - and whatever happens, it seems as though the LL will always be at fault.

Reply to the comment left by Freda Blogs at 30/11/2023 - 12:52
These things never seem to have mattered to governments across the UK.

I was watching some news coverage within the last couple of weeks that concerned a couple of single mums who were having a hard time in the housing market because they couldn't afford suitable accommodation. I think one of them said that she'd had to move 8 times in the last couple of years and had nowhere she could call home. And then the other lady being interviewed said that she thought that residential property should be taxed to pay for the problem.

And that's part of the problem. The electorate doesn't understand that landlords owning residential property are already taxed more than other businesses and other investments and it's dissuading smaller landlords from investing. So what you are left with is less choice and the larger, incorporated landlords who understand how and why they have to drive rents up to manage their risk. All the UK's governments have favoured short-term policies which basically amount to "we think the electorate wants to see us bashing landlords for the problem we caused so we are going to bash landlords."

But we are in a run up to the next election and in the run up to elections parties are under pressure to come up with big ideas. One of those big ideas could be to allow us to invest our SIPPS in residential property at cat A and create a boom in high quality, energy efficient housing both via new build and retrofitting existing housing stock.

I wonder which party isn't so entrenched in the historical dogma it's been spouting for decades to see that that's the only way to address both the housing crisis and the 20% of emissions coming from housing stock.

Reply to the comment left by LordOf TheManor at 30/11/2023 - 11:32In answer to your final question, the only thing a landlord can do about it is decline to let to a family you know will be strapped for space in your property, even though it might be tempting to take on tenants with more wage earners to mitigate the risk of their struggling to pay the rent. The cost of living crisis at the same time as a proliferation of regulations, restrictions and expense for landlords (with even more in the pipeline) makes it necessary to balance many more considerations and risks these days when reletting a property.