Safe as houses
According to Savills the sale of second homes and buy-to-let properties has risen by 36% in the last six years. This is, of course, good news but not good enough.
The housing market in the UK is a dog’s dinner, not enough houses, the wrong kind of properties, in the wrong places with the already wealthy able to make a fortune by buying up property and renting it out.
As George Orwell said the worst slum landlords were the widows who had put their life savings into rental property but could never afford to do it up or improve it and instead made a living out of the misery of others. Things are not that bad but any sensible property market would have large, well run, well financed property businesses. Build to let would get the tax breaks and not buy-to-let. Standards would be higher and protections for renters much higher.
At the moment not only can people not get on the housing ladder they increasingly find themselves shafted by greedy landlords. Landlords who then preen themselves and boast that they are providing some kind of social service. They aren’t they just force up house prices and then ramp their rents because the market is so dysfunctional that they can.
Just seeing such people leave this sector is not enough, the whole industry needs reform, regulation and proper encouragements to do the right thing. Something the Tories would never do, which helps explain why their vote amongst the young utterly collapsed.
Affordable, high quality easily available, secure rental properties are not some pipe dream they are common in many countries, just not here, not yet.
Economics, trade and Brexit, not necessarily in that order but the dog always comes first.
By Jonty Bloom Media
Just a thought.
How about making it illegal to rent-out a house that's still subject to mortgage repayments? I think there are both moral an economic imperatives.
Seems to me that depending on tenants to pay for the landlord's mortgage on the roof over their heads (for the landlord's "pension") might have some bearing on extortionate rents (and rent increases to compensate for mortgage interest increases).
Isn't the practice of buying a home on the premise of being able to extort the mortgage repayments from others in need of a roof over their heads, just a form of usury?