National Rent Rise Day 5 April 2017

Reply to the comment left by "Luke P" at "12/10/2016 - 10:01":

Taking defensive measures such as rearranging one's affairs in order to offset a tax imposition should not be taken, of neccessity, as apathy or resignation to toward the status quo.

Reply to the comment left by "money manager" at "12/10/2016 - 10:52":

Indeed, but the sentiment behind the comment appears to be exactly that.

This is a stupid idea as it will do nothing but increase the bad image that landlords are money grabbing crooks.
We should have a "free rent day" where we give our tenants one days rent back - the cost to the individual landlord would be negligible in the grand scheme of things but it would create a lot of good publicity

Reply to the comment left by "Luke P" at "12/10/2016 - 10:01":

@Luke P

I for one would be sorry to lose your contribution to the campaign.

I am sure George Osborne's attack on Landlords was in the knowledge that private LL s are disparate and not organised (except for the 100k or so members of the NLA & RLA). This is our biggest weakness. In fact there are still many, if not the majority, LL's out there who are not even aware of s.24 let alone its possible impact upon them.

Getting our message across when we are constantly vilified by the media, housing charities, HPC, etc is not going to be easy, or happen overnight. But by sticking together and sending a consistent positive message we will win the day, as our predictions come true one by one.
We mustn't get too extreme - look what happened to the Junior Doctors proposed strike. Collectively, I am sure we can come up with other ways to publicise the injustice of this legislation and the impacts it will have.

Reply to the comment left by "Barry Fitzpatrick" at "12/10/2016 - 11:52":

Than you Barry.

I can accept being constantly vilified by the media, housing charities, HPC...what I can't comprehend is why 'our own' are hell bent on vilifying each other.

osborne, like boydave, is no conservative

Reply to the comment left by "David Rose" at "12/10/2016 - 11:11":

Good publicity to what end?

Reply to the comment left by "Luke P" at "12/10/2016 - 10:01":

I'm sorry, Luke, but I object to your caricature of my position. I am extremely bothered by all the attacks on landlords, from mortgage interest deductibility to the loss of the 10% wear and tear allowance, the stamp duty rises, compulsory landlord licensing, Article 4 directions, and the current proposal to make HMOs with just two storeys into properties that require a compulsory license.

So what is to be done? We have to face the fact that landlords, however unfairly, get an extremely bad press in this country, and for every landlord or potential landlord who complains vociferously, there will be ten people saying "about time - it serves them right". My Conservative MP is utterly useless and just parrots the Party or Treasury line whenever I waste my time writing carefully-crafted letters about these subjects, and with barely 10% of all landlords estimated to be in any kind of collective organisation like the RLA or NLA, I can't see 1.8 million landlords, or however many it is, ever acting in a coordinated way.

This has been the problem faced by organisations like Shelter who claim to act on behalf of tenants - their clientele never act in a coordinated way, so the chances of organising, say, a National Rent Strike Day are virtually zero. And even if they did with 10% of tenants, the word "strike", like "rent rise" is more likely to do harm than good: it just gets people's backs up. So Shelter adopts a different two-track approach once it has decided its policy agenda: firstly, operate behind the scenes to influence opinion and get the professionals in the public sector and the Labour Party and Lib Dems almost entirely on their side; and secondly, develop a very effective "never-stops" media campaign which seeks to influence public opinion by running down landlords at every opportunity, providing the media with ready-made stories, every day of the week, for them to choose from when they need to fill some space in their schedules.

In my view the voices of landlords will only ever be heard and be effective if we adopt similar tactics to Shelter. I am therefore a member of the RLA because it appears to be a more rambunctious and also more effective campaigning organisation that the NLA. I believe its work is probably a more effective way of building relationships with policymakers and MPs and seeking to change things than marching on the streets or stamping my feet and shouting "it's just not FAIR!" to anyone who will listen. I just wish more landlords could be persuaded to put their hands in their pockets and pay the relatively small subscription fee, because landlords really need effective campaigning organisations that will work, year in and year out, to support our interests.

In the meantime, any rational landlord should also look at their own business at a personal level and seek to modify it in response to things as they are, not just how he or she wishes things would be. This is not apathy - it is realism.

Reply to the comment left by "Tony Atkins" at "12/10/2016 - 14:16":

You didn't put any of that in your original post, whilst I don't necessarily agree it does explain your position somewhat.

You've already defeated yourself by accepting this is just the way things are. It's not realism, it's what you're settling for and calling it realism -there's opportunity to make a change, but only with proper hard-fought action and not a restrained, gentle approach that we don't have the luxury of time for. I don't believe the RLA (or NLA) do enough -certainly not in terms of direct action- for landlords, hence the emergence of the likes of the P118 Action Group.

Remember that the public *need* the PRS, whereas we landlords only *prefer* to have the public rent from us. The majority of us will survive (albeit with a smaller nest-egg/less investment) if we pack up shop, but HMG/LAs/the renting public would severely struggle without us.

Slowly winning hearts and minds is a very long game, especially if tip-toeing whilst doing it.

Either way, with so much disagreement amongst us all I don't now expect we will get anywhere. The slow march to inevitability will see this reversed once it begins to bite, so I suppose I can join those taking a back seat.

I suspect dark forces are at work in terms of commenting on this thread.

Take a look at the member profiles of people making what most landlords would consider to be ludicrous comments and you will see in most cases these are their first comments.

Could it be that an anti-landlord organisation is sufficiently rattled by this thread that they are encouraging people to to post comments to discourage the suggested action? The fact that they are trying to masquerade as landlords is laughable.

Goerge Osborne's tax changes forced me to into becoming corporate and to live overseas in order to restructure my portfolio so that I am no longer affected by them. Those same tax changes and associated discussions ever since have convinced me that I should run my business on a much more corporate basis so that is what I shall be doing henceforth.

Many of my tenants haven't had their rents increased for over 10 years as I haven't tended to increase rents during a tenancy, only when re-letting a property that has been vacated. That will now change. I will give my tenants grace through the Xmas and New Year festivities and then issue section 13 notices on 5th Feb to take effect on 5th April. The average rent increase will be £200 a month which soon adds up to circa £100,000 a year over the number of properties I can do this for.

That will only take my rents to current market value and I know for sure that demand in the area will allow me to re-let the properties if some of my tenants cannot afford the rent rises. I might just continue to be soft of some of my favourite tenants if they can't afford the rent rises because it will be hard to become a ruthless corporate overnight, despite what Government policies have encouraged me to become. However, I will be increasing rents annually from now on for all tenants where market forces allow.

This is not rent fixing as one person has suggested, it is merely responding to supply and demand issues exasperated by Government policy. I am no longer a over leveraged private landlord, I am corporate and I will act accordingly.

Any landlords who want to follow in my footsteps should take a look at the guidance offered in our Tax section.
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