A personal view of Shelter’s latest anti-landlord campaign

Reply to the comment left by "alan curtis" at "01/05/2017 - 16:39":

With more than 80 properties under my management control (I do not own them all) I am more or less constantly in the situation you describe. Expensive court application being rejected on some minor technicality and then having to start again while the tenant openly laughs at my plight. Please join landlord referencing (www.landlordreferencing.co.uk/) and enter your tenant's details on their database - it will not help you but it may prevent another landlord housing your tenant.

Reply to the comment left by "David Price" at "02/05/2017 - 06:18":

Thank you David.

In Edinburgh the Private rental market was working very well. Rents were rising at well below inflation and tenant satisfaction surveys conducted by The Scottish Government revealed high levels of tenant satisfaction.

Then the Scottish Government decided councils could use the Private rental sector to meet their homelessness obligations and that encouraged Shelter to get involved with their private renting not fit for purpose campaign.

Suddenly landlords and letting agents were demonised in the media as rogues, crazy made up statistics were used to declare that landlords were stealing deposits, letting agent fees were classed as illegal premiums, short assured tenancies were no longer fit for purpose, tenants were supposed to be scared to ask for repairs for fear of eviction and all manner of unbelievable made up complete nonsense by Shelter.

Just as if you drop a stone in the water and the water level rises. Every piece of so called tenant friendly introduced has increased rent levels so that now rent levels in Edinburgh are unaffordable.

According to Shelter this is down to greedy landlords and they are now calling for Rent Control. Rent control in Sweden has led to ten year waiting lists and illegal subletting it is an awful policy and anyone with half a brain would avoid it like the plague.

The closer you look at Shelter the more you see that they are a bunch of Champagne Socialists pocketing huge salaries whilst doing nothing but damage to the housing market.

The best thing that could happen is that Shelter be stripped of their Charitable Status and the money awarded to them out of the public purse (which dwarfs donations) is used to build houses for people to live in.

Reply to the comment left by "Arnie Newington" at "06/05/2017 - 12:15":

Well said, Arnie

Some months ago my girlfriend, whose hobby is window shopping, found a particularly beguiling little black dress in a charity shop. She was about to purchase when I realised it was a Shelter shop and I had to use my 'Landlord veto'. Pity, that dress would have looked good on my bedroom floor.

Reply to the comment left by "David Price" at "06/05/2017 - 12:50":

"I had to use my ‘Landlord veto’"
You unreconstructed chauvinist you 😉

The rhetoric definitely based on Shelter anti-landlord language: https://www.theguardian.com/housing-network/2017/may/05/conservative-election-victory-could-spell-end-of-council-housing?CMP=share_btn_tw
Have look at some comments, there is even a proposition to hang private landlords...

Reply to the comment left by "Whiteskifreak Surrey" at "09/05/2017 - 15:25":

Found it
" Anasurimbor_Kellhus
If we just hanged a few BTL landlords and letting agents, the trend in this direction might not continue! I'm not saying we SHOULD, of course..."
Sentenced to death for providing accommodation, you could not make it up.

Reply to the comment left by "David Price" at "09/05/2017 - 18:16":

As it was in the Guardian, one can perhaps assume Labour may want a similar position.
Maybe not hanging (no death penalty here so far), but criminalizing the activity and confiscating all assets. A certain Prof Dorling would be on the cloud nine!

Shelter have launched yet another campaign (yawn). As I still can't post on their site, I shall make a few points here.

Firstly they state:

'This group [they are talking about people who earn around £17,000 pa] has largely slipped under the radar of politicians of all parties: traditionally government assistance has focused on those in greatest need, while more recently parties have competed to help better off young professionals priced out of the housing market. In that time things have got silently worse for this group of low income private renters.

http://blog.shelter.org.uk/2017/05/shelters-general-election-call-homes-at-living-rents-for-the-growing-army-of-hard-pressed-private-renters/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=LivingRentHomes-2017&utm_content=Post1572_link-post_12thMay

Well, it wasn't just political parties who 'forgot' about this group. It was Shelter itself, as can be seen in the following exchange in October 2015:

Campbell Robb in response to concerns raised by another landlord stated about s24:

'In the first place, this change will help to level the playing field between landlords who pay the higher rate of tax and first time buyers when they’re trying to buy a property. The tax relief currently makes borrowing cheaper for landlords than for owner occupiers, giving landlords a competitive advantage over prospective first time buyers. This is part of the reason that the share of new mortgages going to buy-to-let is at an all-time high. Given the preference of the overwhelming majority to own a home rather than to rent, we think that this advantage is unfair.'

https://www.property118.com/campbell-robb-ceo-shelter-open-letter/81625/

I replied as follows (on behalf of the landlord 'David'):

'It would be better if you could... get back to supporting the tenants who I believed your organisation championed. Or has Shelter now switched allegiances to only support potential first time buyers (there may sometimes be an overlap between these; more often, there isn’t). Has Shelter made such a massive shift in policy direction? I haven’t read anything about that in the news.'

So they did the very thing they are now criticising. It appears the pendulum has now swung back and they are once more deciding to support poorer tenants rather than the better off potential first time buyers, who they were focusing all their energies on, following the Tories and Labour, like a load of sheep

In the new campaign, they also state:

'As a result, they are trapped in expensive and unstable private renting, paying an increasing proportion of their salary in rent and often having to uproot and move home every 12 months.'

What nonsense is this? The average tenancy length in the PRS is 4 years. Tenants are not 'moving home every 12 months' - apart from, for example, students, who want to move every 12 months.

They see things have got 'silently worse' for private renters and go on to repeat the new cliche that the private market is 'broken.' Uh - research just out shows that about 90% of tenants are satisfied with their private rental. How is that 'getting worse?' How is it 'broken?'

They present their ideas as though they are well-researched, when half the time we can see right through them.

I also don't see the point in them making demands about the need for half a million homes to be built. We also have Labour saying it should be a million. WE ALL KNOW THAT. What they need to do is come up with a detailed plan of how this could be done. We can all bang on about the need for more homes.

If anyone can get any of this feedback onto their FB page that would be good, AS I AM BANNED!