The Looming Threat

For some lucky people, renting is a glorious world, a constant fountain of glee, contentment, joy and freedom, with tenants waltzing from one ideal home into another lovely residence. All interactions with owners, letting agents and well, darnit - everyone serve to reaffirm the tenant’s faith in human nature. Rented homes are grand, repairs are prompt and prices are reasonable. Happy days! But even fantasy renting is about to get a whole lot worse. It's the news of 'home-owner's soaraway house price delight.' Hooray!

I am as ever dubious that prices are rising as much as claimed (compare 'prices asked for' with 'prices achieved'). In London demand is high and supply is tight, but elsewhere - like less salubrious parts of Glasgow - the cost of a home is stagnant after a fall. Mostly, I believe that febrile, rising house prices are extremely disadvantageous to tenants, especially those saving to buy, but more especially, any tenant whose landlord is one of those so-called 'forced' rentiers, who own homes they cannot afford to sell due to negative equity. Boy can they be difficult.

Often, they do not inform the mortgage company or insurers, which leaves tenants vulnerable if they default, or if there are structural problems with the building. They are often ignorant of the law related to renting out property. They can also be very bitter, and more than other owner resent their tenants, who they view not as the nice people who are keeping them afloat, but as irritants, who whine and bleat for repairs. (Landgirl is the exception to this sad reality.)

They hope to sell up as soon as possible, a fact they often hide form tenants. In the worst examples, they inform tenants not by carefully consulting, thedn arranging for viewings when it is convenient. Nor will they jeopardise their rent by giving notice to tenants, giving them the benefit of certainty. Occupants face having strangers traipsing in and out at their capricious leisure. I've even been told of rentiers attempting to retain deposits because the home they were trying to sell was deemed not to be clean enough to pass muster for viewers, which, politely put, is cheeky.

If acting properly and respectfully, they sell with vacant possession, and so, inevitably, tenants will have to move. The bad rentiers insist on multiple intrusions - viewings at awkward, random times. They will expect the property to gleam.

They might even let themselves in unannounced with some random people to gawp, as once happened to me. An editor I work for was in bed with his girlfriend, but told 'Just hide under the covers until we're gone.' Or there’s my friend 'Dave' who was enthusiastically and athletically expressing his love for his boyfriend.

This will hit if prices rise. Landlords who do not wish to let homes for the long term, and plan to offload their property ASAP must be compelled to inform tenants, who already endure the tyranny of institutionalised insecurity, and live knowing they might have to move every six months.

http://rentergirl.blogspot.co.uk/2008/12/forced-landlord-meet-your-forced-tenant.html

And Around We Go

The property market is like Groundhog Day without the gags. It’s an eternal, infernal cycle where people buy piles of bricks and mortar, either to live in or to charge others for the privilege. The value of these bricks subsequently soars off into the troposphere, or plummets to the very centre of earth’s molten core. Bystanders must then either celebrate or commiserate, as the news reports bang sonorously and portentously on about this situation being either really, really bad or very, very good.

Meanwhile, tenants watch helplessly from the sidelines, wondering how this will affect their lives, hearing talk of something mythical called Capital Gains Tax which may (or may not) compel their landlord, aka the de facto owner of their immortal soul to sell up or hang onto their investment. This means they are either homeless or housed – either really. It’s all so tenuous and fanciful.

Astonishingly, the Housing Minster no longer sits on the cabinet, and something which sent the economy spiralling into disaster like a vast tornado devouring public funds, forcing thousands out onto the street as novice landlords went bankrupt, forcing the state to take steps to stem the first run on a bank in hundreds of years, is regarded as an distraction, not a vital economic, or a basic human need, namely: a safe home and security of tenure.

Sometimes I wonder if I am engaged in my own life: or am I at the mercy of a huge game of piggy-in-the-middle crossed with monopoly, with giants flipping coins and throwing rubber balls over our heads to decide where ordinary people will get to live, and for how long they can stay. I want a home, a permanent home. I do not want to live in a piggy bank, but once again, I am.

What’s bought this on? Well, commercial property is cranking up for a new boom, with mothballed sites being reactivated. Buy-let-mortgages are back on offer and soon, building will begin again.

Again. And again. Which means: speculative short term investment in shabby, toy-town new build dovecot, with the private rental sector entrusted with housing us all, and no improved regulation of letting agents, building standards and no end to the dire renting culture here in the UK, with renters hanging on the end of fraying rope, with landlords and letting agents tugging furiously at the other end.

I suppose the saturation of one or two bed flats might help us still, as landlords are desperate to rent, and anyone who bought in the recent ‘fire sales’ might not expect to crank up the rent to cover an extortionate mortgage with a gifted deposit.

Except – except… that’s all staring to happen again – soon we’ll see re-animated Inside Track staffers staggering around like zombies, promising vast inflated profits before eating neophyte investors and saving the best part (their beating heart) for last.

Have we learned from the recent past? No. We didn’t. And so it goes - around and around we spin, back on the speeding hazardous carousel again…and again.