"Landlords are social parasites. They’re the last people we should be honouring"

[Elpenor]

I've gone back and changed 'hedge funds' to 'banks and other companies'. How silly do you look now?

If you’d said that originally, I wouldn’t have objected!

Urban pedantry at its best

 

[editor]

And this is why the Tories are absolute scum

Plans to ban no-fault evictions could be scrapped

Ministers are also considering relaxing affordable homes targets, sparking outrage from Labour.

www.bbc.co.uk

 

[kabbes]

I've gone back and changed 'hedge funds' to 'banks and other companies'. How silly do you look now?

Your original quote still exists in my original reply, though!

 

[kabbes]

Urban pedantry at its best

In a way, true. There’s a huge difference, however, between what is essentially vulture capital seeking to exploit short term positions and a company that has been set up to permanently transact in a particular retail space. It’s not at all comparable.

 

[two sheds]

Your original quote still exists in my original reply, though!

You changed that, you take it back

 

[Elpenor]

In a way, true. There’s a huge difference, however, between what is essentially vulture capital seeking to exploit short term positions and a company that has been set up to permanently transact in a particular retail space. It’s not at all comparable.

It’s still the transfer from owner-occupier to a corporate interest which is highly problematic as it’s a reversion to a feudal existence

 

[kabbes]

.

 

[kabbes]

It’s still the transfer from owner-occupier to a corporate interest which is highly problematic as it’s a reversion to a feudal existence

Has this not already happened/ is happening anyway as an ongoing process? The problem is that the terrible lack of tenancy rights creates an exploitative opportunity, meaning that landlords can outbid owner occupiers for purchases. That’s true regardless of who the landlord is. If anything, a corporation is less likely to undercut the owner-occupier than a private individual is, because private individuals are notoriously terrible at estimating the full costs of being a landlord and thus will overbid due to that ignorance. And companies aren’t willing to leverage purchases to the same extent (no company is going to be 90% debt), which restricts their return on capital. It would be interesting to actually see the stats on this but my working assumption would be that the corporations are mostly buying up housing from panicked landlords that are exiting the industry rather than from owner-occupiers

I see this much like Brainaddict — a sign of failed housing policy but a failure that is actually better than the status quo. For a start, the change makes it much easier to regulate the industry. Companies will respond to legal requirements in a way that private individuals generally don’t or won’t.

 

[MickiQ]

There's a housing crisis now.

Wouldn't argue with you but all signs are it's going to get worse.

This is based on the presumption (which you see a lot) that landlords actually provide housing though. Which they don't. What does pulling out mean? It's not just not renting the property is it? It's selling up and whether that's to a different landlord, a previous renter or someone moving house, someone will be living there. It's not a decrease in housing.

Well to a very real extent they do, they provide housing to those who can't get a deposit together, not those who can't afford the repayments, everyone I know who has switched from renting to buying as found monthly outgoings to be broadly comparable. If the landlord sells other than to another landlord he reduces the housing supply to those down at the bottom if not the total pool. There might very well be someone living in the house but it probably won't be the tenants who were already there. They are going to have find somewhere else in a shrinking rental market. The system can't cope with large numbers of people especially families in that situation. The only solution is large scale public house building and that is just not going to happen any time in the foreseeable I'm afraid.
I can't imagine anyone around here is going to shed a tear about landlords feeling they're forced to sell up but they will end up with a fistful of cash and won't really lose out.
The family of four living in the house my son bought apparently got their finances together and bought their own and the landlord was happy enough to wait for them to go before selling but what if he wasn't? how many have been told to leave because the landlord wants to sell and they can't afford to be the ones?

 

[BristolEcho]

Wouldn't argue with you but all signs are it's going to get worse.

Well to a very real extent they do, they provide housing to those who can't get a deposit together

Because we are paying off our landlords mortgage.

 

[platinumsage]

And this is why the Tories are absolute scum

Plans to ban no-fault evictions could be scrapped

Ministers are also considering relaxing affordable homes targets, sparking outrage from Labour.

www.bbc.co.uk

An hour later and they apparently aren't scum:

No fault evictions will be banned, says Liz Truss

The prime minister confirms that the government will stick to its promise to protect tenants in England.

www.bbc.com

 

[Pickman's model]

Investment funds with more of an eye to the long term on the other hand.... Blackstone is now a massive landlord around the world. I do think that if (a) house prices drop even a bit and (b) the pound stays low, we're probably in for a rush of international money buying up private housing.

This might seem like a bad outcome, and usually I'd be against big corporates getting into a market, but in this case I have more mixed feelings. Firstly because most of the worst landlords in Britain are small landlords. They often have other jobs and aren't paying attention to managing their properties. These people should not be landlords and should be pushed out the market asap*. Secondly because it's easier to organise against big landlords than small landlords

*Of course I'd rather councils were funded to buy them out, but not gonna happen under Truss.

Right. So small landlords often don't pay attention so you want all of them thrust out of the market. What's often? 33% of small landlords 33% of the time? And it's easier to organise against big landlords? What's your experience of organising against landlords, big or small? Negligible I suspect. You counterpose corporate landlords against social landlords in a way I suspect you wouldn't if you'd lived on a council estate where your landlord, the council, has tried to smash their way into your flat and then denied responsibility. Council aren't some sort of superlandlord with best practice ensured. Just look at eg grenfell tower and the history there

 

[editor]

An hour later and they apparently aren't scum:

No fault evictions will be banned, says Liz Truss

The prime minister confirms that the government will stick to its promise to protect tenants in England.

www.bbc.com

They're still scum and they're still responsible for the housing crisis and greedy landlords squeezing the poor.

 

[hitmouse]

Hate to just post twitter links, but this is pretty funny:

 

[SpookyFrank]

And this is why the Tories are absolute scum

Plans to ban no-fault evictions could be scrapped

Ministers are also considering relaxing affordable homes targets, sparking outrage from Labour.

www.bbc.co.uk

Entirely predictable. This was dangled through two whole governments and now shitcanned by a third.

Truss was already on record saying the only problem with housing was that it was too hard for landlords to evict people.

 

[SpookyFrank]

Investment funds with more of an eye to the long term on the other hand.... Blackstone is now a massive landlord around the world. I do think that if (a) house prices drop even a bit and (b) the pound stays low, we're probably in for a rush of international money buying up private housing.

This might seem like a bad outcome, and usually I'd be against big corporates getting into a market, but in this case I have more mixed feelings. Firstly because most of the worst landlords in Britain are small landlords. They often have other jobs and aren't paying attention to managing their properties. These people should not be landlords and should be pushed out the market asap*. Secondly because it's easier to organise against big landlords than small landlords

*Of course I'd rather councils were funded to buy them out, but not gonna happen under Truss.

A big corporate landlord near me just evicted an entire estate, 60 houses, for 'renovations' ie chopping up family homes into student rabbit warrens. They did this immediately on buying the estate from some other company.

 

[MickiQ]

I would imagine students are relatively profitable, Youngest Q shares her digs with 6 other girls in 2 semi's that have been knocked into one. £8K per student, the landlord is pulling in £56K a year. Looking at average rentals for the area where they are it seems to be around £20-£24K pa so left as 2 semi's it would pull in £8K to £16K pa less than what it does now.

 

[Fruitloop]

Some pretty insightful stuff here I thought:

 

[Brainaddict]

A big corporate landlord near me just evicted an entire estate, 60 houses, for 'renovations' ie chopping up family homes into student rabbit warrens. They did this immediately on buying the estate from some other company.

Small landlords are evicting people every day in huge numbers for any number of reasons but usually to exploit other people more in some way. It's not about who is most moral, it's about who is easier to organise against. For instance Berlin organisers won a vote to expropriate 240,000 properties from big landlords (yet to be implemented, but still). You couldn't get people to vote for expropriating small landlords, and you can't really organise against them much at all when you don't have numbers (of tenants) to create leverage against them.

 

[redsquirrel]

Short article on corporate landlordism
Whisper it, but companies might make better landlords than people - The Big Issue

This is a new departure for the British housing market, but it’s more common elsewhere. The USA’s corporate-owned housing sector has ballooned since the credit crunch, for uncomfortable reasons you can probably guess at. Less soul-crushingly, big companies have owned a big share of the large German rental market for decades. At any rate: ten years ago, the odds a rented flat you were interested in would be owned by a corporation were tiny; ten years from now, it could happen rather a lot.

All that said, there’s a compelling case that companies may actually make better landlords than individuals with a couple of buy-to-let properties. Corporations, after all, are unlikely to claim poverty when a boiler breaks or the locks need changing. They’ll have the resources to deal with tighter regulation, rather than simply ignoring it, possibly bitching about it to tenants all the while. They’re more likely to invest from the long term; less likely to announce they’re selling a property on a whim. They’re unlikely to indulge in revenge evictions when a tenant complains or asks for a repair, either.

Of course housing should be a social resource but I'm not going to cry over small capitalists being displaced by large capitalists.

 

[Pickman's model]

Of course housing should be a social resource but I'm not going to cry over small capitalists being displaced by large capitalists.

That's a great example of a sentence that should never have been written with the socialisation of housing being dammed with faint praise and a wholly unrelated bit about sympathy for the petit bourgeois. The point ought not to be about sympathy for one class of landlords nor a debate about whether large landlords are better but whether there should be landlords at all, and on this point a look at what eirigi propose in Ireland around universal public housing is useful. Explainer: Why Universal Public Housing Is NOT The Same As Social Housing — Éirígí For A New Republic.

 

[SpookyFrank]

Some pretty insightful stuff here I thought:

TL;DW: Finance bro puts down the coke mirror for five minutes and realises the blindingly obvious fact that he and all his mates are pieces of fucking shit.