General Election 8th June – Who on earth do landlords vote for?

Reply to the comment left by "Monty Bodkin" at "28/05/2017 - 14:36":

Denmark nearly always comes top on happiness, that's why. And it's warmer than Norway. And the food's better.

Reply to the comment left by "Dr Rosalind Beck" at "27/05/2017 - 17:34":

Herein lies the nature of the political beast.
We sit at our computers using common sense, working out the consequences of decisions we and others take and make what we think are informed choices.
They on the other hand shift in the mildest of breezes to capture the perceived mood of the hour, day week and month to make personal gain which is mostly about perceived popularity.
They don't give a stuff about the electorate

on on Roz 🙂

Reply to the comment left by "Darlington Landlord" at "28/05/2017 - 20:04":

Therese, I'm sorry for the error in my calculations butt rest assured I will get that extra 15% in my next budget, Philip

Reply to the comment left by "J Moodie" at "28/05/2017 - 22:03":

Well at the moment Jamie I'm planning on soiling (okay 'spoiling ') my ballot paper. Members of my family who either are supported by my business or just want to support me anyway will do the same. Had I told them to vote UKIP they would have done so. I believe UKIP has made the wrong call on this and potentially lost a huge number of votes. I must say that this kind of behaviour has been rare in my life - when people explicitly promise you something very important, renege on that promise and then do not even have the good grace to apologise or explain themselves. I assume it's really common in politics though. What a bunch of charlatans - and I mean politicians in general; not just UKIP - to think that this kind of behaviour is acceptable.

Reply to the comment left by "Darlington Landlord" at "28/05/2017 - 20:04":

But the comments show that the politicians still don't get it or understand the calculations at all.

Reply to the comment left by "Luk Udav" at "28/05/2017 - 21:49":

Hi Luk Udav, we do of course differ on our views of how much the state should be involved although I prefer to think of myself as more Daily Telegraph than Daily Mail ! Out of interest how do you sit then with the PRS ? There is every chance the faux Tories will slip further into the centre ground/left with more attacks on PRS, possibly even rent controls - how do you feel on this ? It really is not much of a stretch to see Red Theresa intervene (interfere) in the perceived broken housing market when the s24 rent increases start to bite as a populist response rather than really grasping the nettle.

Reply to the comment left by "Darlington Landlord" at "28/05/2017 - 20:04":

I just shared that link on my Facebook with the following post. Ranting awaited 🙂

When governments have an agenda to go after a certain group, this usually starts with attacks in the media. The group is demonised, presented as different to others, posed in a way that removes all public support for them. The worst people on the group are highlighted as individuals, then gradually it is filtered in that those people are representative of all the rest. When the man on the street starts vilify them, it’s usually safe to go after them. They have become outgroup, dehumanised, open to attack without anyone defending them. In fact, defending them would now become such a bad proposition that no other party will stand in support of them either.
Landlords, under the new tax changes, can now pay tax equivalent to over 100% of their income. That’s right, OVER 100%. How would you live if you paid more tax than you earned? And how, in a supposedly civilised country, can this happen to any group? Well, simple really. See paragraph 1.
So landlords are selling up. Landlords who cannot sell up, due to negative equity, are getting repossessed and going bankrupt. Great news for first time buyers? Maybe, but if you ignore the spin, you’ll see that landlords and first time buyers only compete for around 3% of properties anyway. Great news for tenants? Hardly. Where will they live? Council housing? There is nowhere near enough of it, it was sold off and not replaced. Bring in the corporate landlords, who want to build tiny boxes for people to live in and control the rental market. I wonder what will happen to the “bad” tenants, who wreck the property and don’t pay across their rent money? It takes a landlord up to 8 months to evict someone behaving like this; and the Council will not help the landlord as that person would become homeless – and the Council will not house them because they “don’t take tenants like that”. Don’t believe me? I have it in writing. Do we think the law will not change when the corporate landlords come in?
The current law protects tenants against bad landlords, and not landlords against bad tenants. Landlords have had to deal with this as just being part of the game. Unpaid rent, trashed houses, complaining neighbours, threats. Of course, not all tenants are like this; but if the media had vilified tenants by the worse common denominator, as they had done landlords, you would think they were.
Listen to the media, and you will hear that all landlords are rich, greedy and unethical. Cleaning out bags of rotten food, human and animal waste and other detritus, fixing smashed doors, replacing wrecked carpets, filling holes in walls, finding out all your white goods have been stolen, not being able to get into the house for three months because the tenant took the keys and won’t tell you they moved out – these are never mentioned. And there will be no mention of going bust when their tax bills exceed their income and they lose everything they have worked for either. Because contrary to media spin, most landlords are not rich loafers. They are mostly people who put their savings into property deposits thinking they were giving themselves a pension and safeguarding themselves against state reliance. And it is not an easy thing to be.
The public has been sold a pup. Landlords are not the enemy. If this company goes bust, where will their tenants go? Not everyone is in a position to buy. And whatever you think of landlords, how can you justify anyone paying 85 -100%+ of their income in tax?
You will find most landlords would not object to paying 3% extra on purchases to make things fairer for first buyers. They would even mostly swallow not being able to offset their mortgages against taxable income in the future. But applying Section 24 retroactively (i.e. to existing properties) is bankrupting hardworking people with small investments, and making tenants homeless. People need to be aware of this, not the rubbish that the media is peddling.
I am happy to debate the ethics and the position of this with anyone. However, if you just want an anti-landlord rant (like the nice lady who commented last time I posted a landlord-related post that landlords are parasites and she hopes they all go bankrupt) please get off my page.

Brilliant post

Reply to the comment left by "Lindsey " at "29/05/2017 - 10:38":

Fantastic summary but you're preaching to the converted and the deaf Lindsey.

Much earlier in the process, in my outrage, I began a change.org petition in an attempt to engage the tenants and flag up with them the reality of what is about to happen to them because of Section 24. Waste of time and I gave up very quickly when I was spending the majority of my time deleting vile rants about how I was a money grabbing piece of '**** who was exploiting the vulnerable in society. Even my own friends on Facebook either ignored me or spewed out the standard ignorant 'Boo Hoo, sorry you're not going to be skimming a neat profit off the poorer in society. Poor you (not)'. I couldn't have asked for more support and encouragement from you guys on Property118 and 'Axe the Tenant Tax' but, with all due respect, they weren't my target demographic.

The poor opinion of landlords isn't new, it goes back to Dickens and further probably so it hasn't exactly been hard work for the anti-landlord rhetoric to take hold. People have to have somebody to blame and the government have taken full advantage of this easy target.

In reality, tenants are individuals whose priority is to keep a roof over their head. They won't be creating a collective and lobbying the government for tax changes so that their landlord won't evict them, they aren't that organised and the amount of tax blurb they'd have to read in order to even understand it means it just isn't going to happen. Instead, they will curse the greedy selfishness of their landlord for evicting them, they may have a vague notion that it's something to do with a tax change but they'll assume it's the loss of profit for their greedy heartless landlord that is behind it all rather than the risk of bankruptcy. Their focus will be on doing what needs to be done to find alternative accommodation, they won't have the head space for the 'bigger picture'. A graduating student just finishing his degree spoke on Victoria Derbyshire this morning and laid the blame for their inability to afford a house squarely at the feet of the private sector landlord and he got a round of applause. No mention of the required 25% deposit from the financial institutions or the lack of housing stock because of the government selling council houses, or their already ridiculous debt because of their university fees, etc. etc. The battle to change that perception is lost I'm afraid. When it comes to being blamed and hated, in this instance, we are the chosen ones and the government are happy to let that fly.

I have watched with amazement at the amount of energy that has gone into protesting Section 24 from Landlord Associations, Tenant Associations, individual landlords, etc. I chuck my flimsy little hat into the ring when I can with the occasional angry letter to my MP, etc. but have received the same standard responses as everyone else and watched as everything is blocked and blocked and blocked again. The people with the power have closed their ears, they stopped listening a long time ago. I hate to be defeatist but I think we're now flogging a dead horse.

I have chosen to accept the inevitable and will now wait to see how this will all play out. Whilst I will still have a moderate income from my rental properties I have decided it is time to adapt and at 53 am going back to work. Fortunately, I do love my job and I can work from home so I'm taking some comfort in that. I do know that isn't the same for everyone.

I think what will happen over the next two years is that the government will sit tight until the noise in the media generated by the homelessness horror stories becomes louder than the government generated noise about 'levelling the playing field' between first time buyers and PRS landlords. Images of families living in squalor, single parents and people with mental health issues/disabled tenants being kept in one room hostels for 2/3 years will begin to appear regularly on local news programmes. Families being separated with Mum and Dad living rough and the kids going to grandparents. Homeless people will start to protest to their local MP. Council housing budgets being spent on Travelodge Hotel bills will be leaked to the media and the focus will begin to shift. Homeless charities will rally the government, support groups will join forces and the government will have to act before a disaster happens or maybe even after a couple of disasters happen (depending upon how close they are to an election).

The more astute journalists will bring up the impact of S24 but it will be brushed over (too complex for soundbite news programmes). Journalists will begin to challenge the government's election promises on housing and realise that, on top of the 25,000 Chinese pod houses which will already be costing councils a fortune in repairs (Boo, greedy Chinese business), hardly any brownfield sites have been released for the building of the proposed 250,000/300,000/500,000 houses that they'd promised. (Boo to greedy landowners).

The government will then say that the situation arose because the greedy landlords deserted the sector due to falling profits and made the situation worse not better, (Boo to greedy landlords). They will also say that the big building corporations have not kept to their promises - even though many of them have already said they don't have the finances or resources for such a large roll out. (Boo to greedy builders).

What is guaranteed is that nothing will be their fault. But, very quietly and without announcement they will either partially or completely withdraw Section 24 and start kissing the arses of the PRS landlords just like they have in Ireland.

For me it's a matter of when rather than if but it will happen. The difference for me now is that I strongly believe there is nothing more than we can do but sit and watch the inevitable disaster as it unfolds and hope that the government, based on what they know of Ireland, responds to it sooner rather than later. In the meantime, I am currently looking at a variety of ways to handle my portfolio until it does.

I am gradually letting go of the idea that I can rely on it for a long term income any more and accepting that my plans, whilst good for a while, haven't panned out. As frustrating and as hard as it is to accept this, especially after the hard work I've put into it all over the last five years, I feel a lot better now that I have. Although I will still make a profit when I sell up so I'm hardly in a position to complain.

As Charles Darwin said 'It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent but the one most responsive to change". So I'm changing.

Reply to the comment left by "Pamela Potter" at "29/05/2017 - 13:44":

All fair points, Pamela. I know it's not going to do any good but just needed to get it off my chest. For me it was a bad decision - I am selling at the worst possible time and I will lose pretty much all of my pension. But there are many worse off - and as I have never given up work (or wanted to) I do at least have a fighting chance of being able to keep my mortgages paid until they sell. I know many are not so lucky.