Before they left, they plastered globs of lard on the walls, and destroyed the kitchen floor and wall by rigging the water pipes to constantly overflow down the outside wall.
I was not allowed to enter the property to inspect it, nor was I allowed to "harass them" by speaking to them face-to-face, because they didn't want me to. I was powerless.
Yes, they lost their deposit, but I was out of pocket tens of thousands, which I basically couldn't afford. I maxed out my credit cards and bank account overdrafts. Even selling the house, it took me nearly 5 years to get back to zero.
I'm not saying that UK law is worse for landlords, but the laws aren't particularly on the side of landlords either.
As a landlord in the UK you have tons of power, while it's great you didn't abuse them, why you didn't exercise these legal rights when these people abused your property?
UK laws are very much in the favour of the landlord.
But without going into detail, I definitely buried my head in the sand too much, and they did pay a small amount at one stage to make me think it might be okay. It was sixteen years ago now, and I've thankfully forgotten a lot of it.
I do remember that I had to restart the whole process when it was thrown out because a date was wrong on a letter. I wasted a whole heap of time trying to get the judge to reverse that decision rather than moving on and starting again.
Anyway, like I said, I was very naive back then, and made lots of mistakes.
Sorry you've had such crap tenants. 16 Years is a long time, and the laws could have changed on this in this time. So there is a good chance you are both right!
I might rent out a house to a friend of a friend, but certainly not to a complete stranger.
The goal is to have a property pad off by tenants in 20-30 years so you have a nice nest egg to add to your 401K.
Best investment are certain multi-unit properties - thats where the math works the best.
[0] https://www.rightmove.co.uk/property-for-sale/property-69983... [1] https://www.rightmove.co.uk/property-for-sale/property-80308...
Can you elaborate? Help us to understand your point of view.
The council/govenment simply cannot house everyone, and the population is growing faster than the rate new houses are built.
Private landlords actually solve a lot of people's problems by renting their properties out to said people. And the contract that is signed between the tenant needs to be a win-win situation for it to work.
Specifically speaking for people who are renting. The 'win' for them is that they have a place to stay, they do have a choice where they stay. If they want to stay in a 3 bed house, they'll need to pay whatever rate that rent is going for.
One problem is that some tenants try renting in a property they simply cannot afford. So when it's time to pay rent, they take advantage with the system and refuse to pay. It's actually really difficult to evict people from your rented properties even though they signed and agreed to a contract.
The 'win' for landlords is that they get rent. If you're a good tenant who looks after the property and pay rent on time, imagine that there is a problem with the property and the landlord doesn't get it fixed or refuses to get it fixed then really the tenants should aim to look for somewhere else to live. The landlord will lose out on a good loyal tenant.
I don't think its fair to claim that all landlords are parasites. Tenants can be horrible, landlords can be horrible, but unless the agreement is a win-win situation for everyone. Somebody is going to have a bad time.
I take it you don't acknowledge the need for short or long-term rentals, either by migrant workers or low-income households who have no access or interest in taking home loans.
That only means that the state should not have the right to evict a homeowner from their private property, not that you have the right to live in someone else's home at someone else's expense.
4 years later when I had to move for work and family reasons, we were still in negative equity, so we had to rent it out. Fortunately we had good tenants, and the income just about covered the costs including the interest on the mortgage (which we could offset against tax, can't do that now), which was a good job as we ourselves were paying far more in rent elsewhere. Fortunatly we'd gone for an interest-only tracker mortgage, as we needed everything we were paying into savings to pay the rent on where we were actually living.
Eventually sold in 2016 for the price we paid 9 years earlier
It seems like if you had the appropriate connections to government, this process would've been easier?
I learned a lot about contracts. I learned a lot about tenant laws. I learned a lot about insurance. I learned that if you have a cleaner employed in the houses you rent, then you have a legal right to enter the property to "inspect their work". I learned a lot about different types of people.
I did not learn any way, shape or form, that "having connections to government" would have made my efforts any easier.
One place I used to rent from tried to swindle my deposit for "repairs" of things that were clearly just standard wear and tear over the years.
I argued till I was blue in the face and they eventually agreed with me on most of the things and agreed to "refund" me. They messed up somehow and transferred me 2x my initial deposit, normally I would absolutely let them know about their mistake but as they messed me around for months I didn't say a word and kept it. Suprise suprise they went out of business a few months later
Example: 21 days for some areas
Also, what happens when a property is vacant? Do taxes revert to the owner, or do they not get paid?
(Basically, a landlord bears the economic burden of a land value tax.)
"However, some economists think that the worker bears almost the entire burden of the tax because the employer passes the tax on in the form of lower wages. The tax incidence is thus said to fall on the employee."
This is much closer to reality than the contrary
The last apartment I rented (15 years back) had an interesting mechanism for this: The rent was about $2000 but they applied something they called a "subsidy" of $400 off per month. Basically if you pissed them off they could immediately raise your rent by $400 per month to drive you out.
It would eliminate the need for a middleman who is often borrowing money to fund the purchase himself, adding further inefficiencies to an already inefficient business model.
The prospect of builders becoming long-term landlords may also incentivize them to build a house that will last the course of the tenancy?
Developers (who hire builders) go to market for finance - they don't have the funds lying around.
Those financiers want a quickish (< 3/5 yrs) return, not a long term investment(20+ years).
£50k house -- £750 (1.5%)
£150k house -- £1500 (1%)
£650k house -- £3000 (0.5%)
£3000k house -- £3000 (0.1%)1) It doesn't solve the problem of affordable housing.
2) If the owner leaves the property vacant instead of renting, it makes the problem worse.
3) The less well off usually rent instead of buying, so prohibiting it disadvantages them.
While it's presently the trend to blame foreigners and/or investors for economic problems, I don't think this will end anywhere good.
If you have 8 households who want to live in 5 houses, there is no way to make them affordable to all 8. Full stop. Not with paying all 8 more. Not with rent controls. Not by making everyone own, or everyone rent. It's totally impossible.
The trend now seems to be that affordable housing will be allocated to a lucky few who win a government lottery. Whether this is a politically superior outcome to building more (and allowing the character of the neighborhood to change) is subjective.
If Amsterdam went even further and subsidized/required lenders to approve 0% down home ownership then they could likely fully solve the problem.
For rents, if 8 people want 5 units, the rent will be high enough that 3 people are priced out.
For owning, if 8 people want 5 units, the mortgage payment will be high enough that 3 people are priced out.
I fail to see any difference.
I do think that discouraging unoccupied properties is a good idea though.
Let's say 3 people are willing to pay $1500, $1600, and $1700/mo in rent. For owning, they are willing to shift an extra $1000/mo from saving in the stock market to home equity, paying $2500, $2600, $2700. There is only one house available.
For owning, the seller can charge a price where the mortgage works out to $2700/mo. The person willing to pay $2700 gets the house, and the others are priced out.
Now lets say a landlord comes in. He offers $2800/mo to buy it to rent.
The max he can rent it for is $1700/mo, so he does that. The same person gets the house, and the same people are priced out.
In every case, the price that is charged is determined by who can pay the most. Unless people are willing to pay less to own the house, I can't think of why the monthly mortgage payment would ever be lower than renting.
What a policy prohibiting renting actually seems to do, is force people to shift their (monthly) savings into real estate speculation as a condition of living there. There are some downsides to this. If the local economy is bad and you lose your job, it's likely your home value may not be good either. And people without substantial monthly savings to shift will be at a disadvantage.
The biggest argument I've seen in favor of encouraging home ownership, is that people cut back on spending in order to make their mortgage payment, and as a result save more overall (by building home equity savings instead of spending). But that's a pretty different outcome than making housing affordable.
2) On paper not a problem. There's a law against vacancy in Amsterdam, you can and should get fined. But I have my doubts about enforcements, although they have a monitoring system in place.
3) Not sure how I feel about this one, there's another argument to be made as well that rent-restrictions have a price-dampening effect and may make purchasing possible for a group who'd otherwise be forced to rent in perpetuity. Plus very low-incomes do have substantial opportunities, more than half the housing stock is social housing in Amsterdam. But agreed, this policy can be unfavourable as well, it's just not necessarily always the case.
Housing stock has to increase, rent-restrictions don't help with that. And secondly Amsterdam has to cooperate more with neighbouring municipalities and regional transport infrastructure to spread the demand around. This latter part is really difficult, but if you don't solve this problem and create ever-centralising appeal in concentrating everything in Amsterdam, you can never outbuild the demand. At some point, people must be enticed to not live in Amsterdam. That requires investments into jobs, schooling, amenities etc outside of Amsterdam, as well as good infrastructure to connect it all.
Negative gearing is a special kind of Australian crazy. Must be the drop bear bites.
Your xenophobia is showing, blaming "foreigners". Absentee landowners with vacant properties are a problem. Landlords are a valuable service provider in an economy.
There's no local demand for the housing at the prices that they want to get, so they have to go outside the city. This of course inflates demand and buyers with incomes beyond local Vancouver incomes crowd out locals.
> Amsterdam’s proposed laws wouldn’t stop new rental housing from being built—according to the city’s proposal, that housing would simply have to be proposed and approved as rental property in the first place.
>Imho real estate should be absolutely outside the possibility of speculation and 'investment'
Private services are still not public services, and paying private companies to follkw public service contracts has nothing in common in providing a publix service through a public institution.
What problem would that solve? Certainly not any of the problems covered by the article.
That said, you need very little cash at hand to buy a house in the Netherlands (in fact, a few years back you needed < €0), there’s no upfront payment. Credit is cheap (~2%) and abundant.
The legislation described in TFA is quite literally designed to cut off the introduction of newly built houses in the rental market, including investments in real estate focused on that market segment.
Quite the opposite in fact. TFA is quite clear on how their aim is to stop new housing units to be used for rentals, and they even force an arbitrary process to approve exceptions to the ban by enabling local polititians to approve specific projects they may see as acceptable.
Nevertheless, the goal is quite clear: raise barriers to the introduction of rental properties.
Rental homes are still available for rent. Nothing changes there. The city invests a lot in affordable rental houses. That's not going to change. They just want to stop investors and speculators from snatching up the available houses.
Where I live, to cut down a tree, you can get it approved by council. The problem is, they do not approve any applications.
Not that rent is more affordable though. Most not rent-controlled places require you to have a yearly income of around 50 times the monthly rent, which ensures it's nigh impossible to get any sort of decent place on a single income.
Of course, all of this is near the larger cities. In the countryside, you could probably get the same sort of place for two-thirds the money. However, you'd probably be travelling at least 1.5 hours one-way to your work.
It just puts property investment out of reach of the average middle class person and restricts social mobility.
e.g. a high-school drop-out plumber can afford to buy a house and rent it out based on just wages/credit, but he likely can't afford to do that with an apartment building.
Moreover, have you considered who is going to benefit from the Amsterdam law? Existing landlords! It’s rentseeking (literally) on the part of landlords who don’t want competition!
https://wolfstreet.com/2019/03/21/billions-in-toronto-real-e...
The government is given a mandate by the People to do whatever it takes to make sure Amsterdam doesn't turn into a millionaire playground. If that means violating capitalism and property rights they will do so without hesitation.