The Negotiator is a trade magazine that “serves the residential property industry, specifically targeting estate and letting agents and their suppliers”. The original source for this news is https://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/property/buy-to-let/landlords-quit-rental-market-at-fastest-rate-in-a-decade, which is mirrored by https://www.aol.com/articles/landlords-quit-rental-market-fastest-094056000.html .
In addition: The Telegraph is a rightwing rag who are automatically against anything Labour does. Apart from their right-wing bias, in the last few (3?) decades they’ve seen a decline in quality to the level of gutter journalism, so they have no credibility and their claims are basically meaningless.
I agree, but I would believe them when they’re saying Labour’s doing a good thing, especially when they don’t realize that’s what they say.
I must be used to American rightwing media because this Telegraph article seems downright neutral by comparison haha. Also, I have a question. It says that one of the things this bill does is abolish “fixed term tenancies”. Does that mean, for example, that someone could just move in for a month and then move out?
It means that the landlord can’t force you to sign a contract for a year or whatever, you can always give notice and leave.
I’m not from the UK myself, I’ve just read some trash tier articles from The Telegraph in the past. Articles written with long words, but still obvious falsehoods. Which is a shame, because they didn’t use to be like that. Wikipedia lists some of their controversies (see history since 2004): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Daily_Telegraph
About the new law:
“Fixed-term tenancies mean renters are obliged to pay rent regardless of whether a property is up-to-standard, and they reduce flexibility to move in response to changing circumstances, for example after relationship breakdown, to take up a new job or when buying a first home.Instead, all tenancies will be periodic, with tenants able to stay in their home until they decide to end the tenancy by giving 2 months’ notice. This will end the injustice of tenants being trapped paying rent for substandard properties and offer more flexibility to both parties to respond to changing circumstances.” https://www.stirlingackroyd.com/property-insights/fixed-term-tenancies/
That fucking rules. Expected to job hop to increase your pay but also stay in the same place for 6 - 12 months?
That’s wild. I wish America had something like this! I once signed a two year lease just to get picked over another applicant, because I really needed a place close to work.
Yeah, from that it sounds like the implication of a supply crunch pushed by the original article is highly misleading:
The analysis suggested that rents were flat across the country, increasing by just £4 to an average of £1,475 a month compared to last year.
However, stock across the rental sector still increased year-on-year, driven largely by new build-to-rent properties coming on to the market. Available properties increased by 1.3pc on average, reversing years of decline.
The data showed 7pc growth in rental properties costing between £800 and £1,500 a month, while the number of more expensive rentals on the market declined.
So even though existing properties are leaving the UK rental market, if you factor in new construction it’s a net gain and affordable rentals have increased, facts it omitted entirely.
Wow that telegraph website is absolute arse
The barnacles on the hull of society might have to get a job
Parasites detaching after the tiniest amount of medication is used.
Don’t you have to have a job to quit? How would a landlord quit?
Arson.
You can also quit smoking, or heroin
sell
Good!
I had my college degree sabotaged by these shitstains. I would have needed an apprenticeship, but couldn’t get one in Budapest without a Budapest home address, but every piece of shit needed a Porsche SUV to take their brats to private schools.
Even if it doesn’t happening in my home country, I’m happy to see these wastes of oxygen and other resources (especially raw iron and fuel on their luxury SUVs) suffer a bit.
The population of ethical landlords needs to be massively expanded.
And by ethical, I mean former.
You know, if most landlords quit, their property doesn’t end up in your hands. It ends up bought by a smaller number of more organized corporate landlords. Do you want an oligopoly? Because that’s how you get an oligopoly.
Yeah everyone seems to think the properties will end up in the hands of owner/occupiers. What likely will happen is they will get snapped up by corporates. The bigger they get the worse it will be. There are some shitty individual landlords out there for sure but I can guarantee that EVERY corporate one will be evil incarnate… law of unintended consequences will slam hard here
This is not a reason to not protect renters. Ultimately we will need renters’ unions and rent strikes to gain affordable housing, regardless of ownership.
“quitting” as if leeching is a job.
My neighbor has been trying to get their house rented after it didn’t sell for 1.3million. Now they’re paying the monthly mortgage for several months now. It doesn’t seem like anyone is interested at practically $4000/month. Who would pay that mucho wonder. I bet the previous generation felt exactly the same as inflation was swallowing them into homelessness… I.e. me, I could be underpaid and not know it. CuzI had to pay that rent I would not be able to afford where we live. We would need two incomes over $120,000 each. Crazy.
My brother and sister-in-law were considering renting a house in that price range. The reason is that they were sending their two kids (1st and 3rd grade) to a private school with a $30K (each!) tuition, so paying around $4K per month for a house in a good school district would have actually saved them money. Eventually they came to their senses and just bought a house in a good school district instead.
That’s brain dead thinking they can sell any house at 1.3 millie. I hope that house sinks them.
Lol that is standard for a standalone (and even some townhouses) where I live 🥲
I don’t hope bad things on them but that house was definitely a 950k hot potato. Now there’s no way they could sell or rent it at any reasonable price that was good for them or the renters. They will just have to take a loss.
They… quit? So they’re letting people buy the places people should live in without a middleman leech profiting off of them?
Landlords can’t quit, it isn’t a job.
They could quit being alive. That would be pretty cool.
Don’t you need a job in order to quit?
that should be the goal. make it pointless to rent and let people buy homes for themselves
Renting can be a good option, especially when you consider the way equity vs interest are structured in the first few years of a mortgage. It’s 99% interest at first, and then it slowly inverts year-over-year, which sure feels like renting my house from the bank for the first ten years… but I can’t call up the bank and make them fix my electrical, plumbing, or appliances.
It would be nice to see a ban on renters snapping up existing properties, and a limit on how long single family newly constructed homes can be kept as rental properties.
prices would go down to affordable if renting was unprofitable. and even if you have to buy in, eventually you own the equity and even now with housing prices and interest rates high, it’s still cheaper to pay a mortgage than rent and A LOT of renters are scum that won’t even maintain your building.
Awww… couldn’t happen to a nicer group of blokes, too.
I’d be careful before crying victory. This most likely means those houses will be bought by PE, not individual buyers. The end result will be higher prices still.
In a lot of European countries, small private landlords are relatively rare and apartments are owned and let out by corporations that own (and in many cases build) entire developments, like Deutsche Wohnung in Berlin. Given that continental Europe typically has a more stringent regulatory environment than the Anglo-American world, this does not end up with the sort of predatory monopolies one sees in the US where private equity have cornered regional markets, and the landlord companies have support desks and maintenance contractors that can be more responsive and professional than your typical small landlord.
what a majority actually wants: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Wohnen_&_Co._enteignen
I wish the US had something like Art. 15 of the German Constitution. As for the UK, we are lucky in this regard with the flexibility our lack of rigid constitution offers
not a constitution until the people voted on it
so the US Constitution is not a constitution? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Economic_Interpretation_of_the_Constitution_of_the_United_States#Historiography
i didn’t say that but the german grundgesetzt specifies it’s valid until the german population votes on a constitution
Thats just the replacement mechanism isn’t it? Or is it de jure a provisional constitution which was just kept?
They should be forced to give their tenants an offer to form a union and purchase the property before they’re allowed to sell it to someone else.
Yup. This sounds like the perfect opportunity for some kind of housing cooperative. You’d just need to find someone to provide the initial capital to buy the houses
A civil union? I mean, I suppose you wouldn’t want a really rude union… ;-)
How would having lower demand increase prices?
Artificial scarcity got hands
Why would PE buy them if not to rent & be subject to the same renter’s bill of rights? Holding a vacant house isn’t a good 😊 investment, they have upkeep costs, are subject to property taxes, and depreciate faster when unoccupied.
Holding a vacant house isn’t a good investment
This is in many cases demonstrably false. PE is holding on to vacant properties all over the US, and sometimes don’t mind holding them for years unoccupied, waiting for a redevelopment opportunity
Fair enough, it does happen. Relevant background: https://nationalmortgageprofessional.com/news/investors-hold-most-empty-houses
The states with the highest vacancy rates in investor-owned properties were:
Indiana (7.2%); Illinois (6.1%); Oklahoma (5.9%); Alabama (5.9%); and Ohio (5.8%).States with the lowest vacancy rates were:
New Hampshire (0.9%); Vermont (1%); Idaho (1.2%); Utah (1.5%); and North Dakota (1.5%).I’d argue my sentiment remains, investors for the most part rent out property, they don’t typically hold it vacant. When they do it’s more likely vacancies are transitory (trying to find a renter) than long term and intentionally kept vacant.
For the most part, until it’s more profitable for them not to. It’s never done to the benefit of people who need a place to live.
As well as holding onto housing stock to maintain a local monopoly.
It isn’t as big a deal when you know any potential renter will be renting from you regardless of it is this unit or that unit. They are still forced to be your customer and you don’t have to compete with lower prices from another landlord.
Why? This will increase supply of housing available to buy and reduce the supply available to rent. So house prices will go down slightly, and rents will go up slightly.
Because there isn’t a free market in housing anymore, they’ve all been caught colluding to keep pricing up even when there’s a huge glut of available units/houses in an area. They have been caught using apps to do it, and when faced with threats to stop that practice were found to use traditional means to collude. The free market is a myth in 2026, stop believing in fairy tales. Ayn Rand was a charlatan and capital isn’t going to ever be allowed to work for the poors.
I think you’re thinking of a case in the USA that colluded on rental prices? I don’t know of any evidence that there is collusion on house prices in the UK. People separately talk about investment companies buying up housing in the US as if that will have much impact on prices, but the proportion of housing under discussion is miniscule and unlikely to have any effect on prices - at least, outside of limited areas.
I’m guessing at what you’re referring to here so feel free to get specific. But cases in the USA are not that relevant to the UK, where the government is far more willing to enforce free market conditions than the “free market” idiotlogues in America who think that you can have a free market without regulation.
Oh, so it only hurts the poorest and benefits those who can already afford to buy? How uplifting.
The Renters Rights Act overall benefits renters by making sure they can do such shocking things as keep a pet and make requests of the landlord without being evicted in revenge. This imposes a restriction on landlords, which amounts to a “cost” (in the sense of cost/benefit, not necessarily monetary) which means it was inevitable some would sell up. That part - landlords selling - does hurt the poorest, at least in the short term.
However, the effect will be small in the long run: because houses for sale will increase a bit in supply, those prices will come down, enabling more people to exit the rental market. That will bring down prices at the top of the rental market, and eventually a portion of the decrease in house prices will feed through to a mitigation (not a reversal) of the increase in rents at the bottom of the rental sector as well. So a small effect to begin with (because it’s not like 50% of landlords will sell up without being replaced) and mitigated because while there’s no perfect exchange between the rental and owner-occupied sectors, there is some exchange.
It’s therefore a small price to pay for basic standards of decency for renters.
The true mitigation will come from building more social and affordable housing. The government has committed to do this but has so far abjectly failed, like many governments before them.