With the rental market the way it is, i can understand how some landlords offer properties without doing any work on them. I personally could never do that. The way i look at it, id rather spend a bit put some nice floors in and a nice kitchen and bathroom that way you can get a bit more rent and you get better tenants that will look after your stuff. If everything is cheap you get cheap tenants who don't look after your stuff. Plus when you go to resell it, a better looking property gets more money. There is no doubt that doing properties up can result in equity gained, of course in some instances its not worth spending any money on properties.
What annoys me is these landlords that take the ****. They take one large house and instead of diving it up in to two and making two very nice one bed flats and charging £1000 per month. Still earning £600+- more than they would get if they rented it out as one house. They go and get greedy and divide it up in to four flats and create crappy little studios with cheap fittings and cheap finishes, just so they can get an extra £200-300 per month out of it. Mean while their tenants are miserable and live in a crappy studio and because they are paying for crap they treat the place like crap.
There is a sweet spot to dividing up properties. I find though if the landlord has a low standard of living, this is represented in his properties. I personally couldn't be a landlord of a property with mould on the walls and everything falling apart. But for some landlords that is how they live in their primary house, because they are one step above animals a lot of them.
