Should minions be the instrument of rich people?

Dolph said:
The average age of marriage or long term partnership has also risen over the same period, and housing as a single person has very rarely been affordable.
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Well, generally people get married, and have kids, after they have a settled home.

Marriage average age, interestingly, has been rising steadily since about 1980, but dipped with the house price crash in 2008. I'd not place too much truck on that, but it could support the hypothesis that house prices push marriage age.
 
chrcoluk said:
Are you sure?

My dad brought my childhood home on his own wage, by the time we got to the 90s he joked how much of a pittance the mortgage was vs wage increases etc. As typically debt value goes down overtime unlike rents.
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Depends when he did it, banks didn't really consider second (or more accurately, women's) incomes in mortgage affordability until the late 70s/early 80s, so multiple incomes didn't really factor into accessibility until after that.
 
cheesyboy said:
But in this proposed case, it's dropping because you're cutting away a swathe of buyers (landlords, to be clear). So the demand curve has shifted.
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And how do mortgage providers react to dropping prices? By tightening lending criteria and increasing deposit requirements, so the housing is no more accessible than it was before.
 
Dolph said:
And how do mortgage providers react to dropping prices? By tightening lending criteria and increasing deposit requirements, so the housing is no more accessible than it was before.
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In a world where the societal bad of private landlording had never been allowed, that would never have been a problem.

In a world where we've built up a societal bad, whose existence has its claws in mechanisms that will punish us for fixing - does that mean it's now not a societal bad?

Now, I don't think the issue is insurmountable, but I'm sure you can acknowledge that landlording can still be bad, even if a shock to fix it is also bad. Of course, even the 2008 shock was overcome in about 3 years, in house price terms and mortgage availability (meaning it settled into its long term pattern: it didn't return to the madness of 105% mortgages and the like)

In any case, a tapered policy of discouraging landlordism would not cause a market shock. A 100%CGT rate, based on gains starting today, for example, would not cause massive immediate flight from the market.
 
cheesyboy said:
In any case, a tapered policy of discouraging landlordism would not cause a market shock. A 100%CGT rate, based on gains starting today, for example, would not cause massive immediate flight from the market.
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How would you discourage it without causing loss of confidence in the market and a resulting temporary crash (which then results in a massive tightening of lending - pushing first time buyers out of the market)?

Also the natural reaction to discouragement is for the small private landlords to exit the market. The bigger landlords would snap up their property at reduced price, resulting in a smaller number of landlords still owning that property. Competition would have been reduced and rentals would probably increase.
 
cheesyboy said:
In a world where the societal bad of private landlording had never been allowed, that would never have been a problem.

In a world where we've built up a societal bad, whose existence has its claws in mechanisms that will punish us for fixing - does that mean it's now not a societal bad?

Now, I don't think the issue is insurmountable, but I'm sure you can acknowledge that landlording can still be bad, even if a shock to fix it is also bad. Of course, even the 2008 shock was overcome in about 3 years, in house price terms and mortgage availability (meaning it settled into its long term pattern: it didn't return to the madness of 105% mortgages and the like)

In any case, a tapered policy of discouraging landlordism would not cause a market shock. A 100%CGT rate, based on gains starting today, for example, would not cause massive immediate flight from the market.
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You're obsessed, wrong but obsessed.

The idea that landlords are the problem in the housing market is similar to the idea that immigrants are the problem in the job market. Essentially, qualified persons aren't outcompeting unqualified persons and preventing the latter engaging, so the argument is flawed. The removal of qualified people doesn't suddenly make the unqualified people a viable alternative.

The willingness of lenders to lend to individuals on a given property isn't going to change significantly.
 
cheesyboy said:
They do not [provide a valuable service]. They simply remove a home from the market and therefore force a person/family to pay their mortgage for them.

You might think this nonsense on an individual level, but when there are 2.65million landlords in the UK, that's exactly what happens.

The requirement for rentals is, to a great extent, caused by the price of buying being too high. Which is directly caused by landlords.
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I will offer you a direct counter-example. When I moved to Warrington I wasn't certain how long I'd be here, and didn't want the hassle and expense of owning a property, plus I would never have been able to buy one due to a lack of capital. Therefore I rented one.

In your ideal world with no landlords I would have been unable to move anywhere except back into my parent's house, and would basically have been unable to start my career due to lack of relevant industry in the area where they lived.

Buying a house is a pain. It takes months, costs lots of money (solicitors, survey etc), has various risks attached, and incurs stamp duty after your first time making it even more expensive. Once you're in the house you either need spare capital (on top of your mortgage deposit) or access to more credit to cover any unexpected expenses (eg have to replace a broken window or boiler or repair the roof etc) and have various responsibilities you don't as a renter. You then spend even more money when you want to move out (which in my case could originally have been after only a year) on estate agents, solicitors etc, with more paperwork and hassle, and the date you manage to move in to your next house can be delayed over and over again.

Renting avoids all of that delay, hassle and cost. It's just completely false and dishonest to claim landlords don't provide a useful service. I settled down a bit and was able to buy a house here several years down the line, but would never have been able, or even wanted to buy a house when I first wanted to move here for work.

Yes it would be nice if prices were lower, and I don't think it's just how much some landlords have been able to profit simply from holding property due to government policies pushing prices up, but that's a completely different issue to just pretending that buying a house is a realistic or desirable option for everyone.
 
GreatAuk said:
I will offer you a direct counter-example. When I moved to Warrington I wasn't certain how long I'd be here, and didn't want the hassle and expense of owning a property, plus I would never have been able to buy one due to a lack of capital. Therefore I rented one.

In your ideal world with no landlords I would have been unable to move anywhere except back into my parent's house, and would basically have been unable to start my career due to lack of relevant industry in the area where they lived.
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I've acknowledged the need for some rental properties.

cheesyboy said:
And have councils manage licencing for a limited number, and managed-quality portfolio, of rentals to allow those who need shorter term accommodation (contractors, students etc) to have that flexibility.
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I'm sure we can have a non-predatory way of doing it, if the will is there.
 
GreatAuk said:
I will offer you a direct counter-example. When I moved to Warrington I wasn't certain how long I'd be here, and didn't want the hassle and expense of owning a property, plus I would never have been able to buy one due to a lack of capital. Therefore I rented one.

In your ideal world with no landlords I would have been unable to move anywhere except back into my parent's house, and would basically have been unable to start my career due to lack of relevant industry in the area where they lived.

Buying a house is a pain. It takes months, costs lots of money (solicitors, survey etc), has various risks attached, and incurs stamp duty after your first time making it even more expensive. Once you're in the house you either need spare capital (on top of your mortgage deposit) or access to more credit to cover any unexpected expenses (eg have to replace a broken window or boiler or repair the roof etc) and have various responsibilities you don't as a renter. You then spend even more money when you want to move out (which in my case could originally have been after only a year) on estate agents, solicitors etc, with more paperwork and hassle, and the date you manage to move in to your next house can be delayed over and over again.

Renting avoids all of that delay, hassle and cost. It's just completely false and dishonest to claim landlords don't provide a useful service. I settled down a bit and was able to buy a house here several years down the line, but would never have been able, or even wanted to buy a house when I first wanted to move here for work.

Yes it would be nice if prices were lower, but that's a completely different issue to just pretending that buying a house is a realistic or desirable option for everyone.
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Exactly, our last house purchase, two houses were being sold, with one large house purchased to accommodate a multi-generational household.

Rather than make a horrendously complicated chain, we rented a property to allow one house sale to go through, then the other a few months later, then started the purchase process on the single new property.

It wouldn't have worked without the rental step in the middle. That gave us substantial flexibility and opportunity to properly consider our options.
 
I've rented twice in my life too. The first time was for a year to live with my girlfriend. We were both living t home at the time and didn't want to buy a house together only to find that we didn't get along. The second time was between houses when I wanted to see if we liked the area before buying there. Both times the rental market provided a service I needed and was prepared to pay for.
 
cheesyboy said:
I've acknowledged the need for some rental properties.


I'm sure we can have a non-predatory way of doing it, if the will is there.
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All that limiting rental property will do is push up rent without some kind of wholesale reform of the entire housing market to make owning a house cost and hassle free and much more flexible, which is completely beyond the scope of this thread. The people you're shutting out of renting houses will go... Where? Not all of them will be in a position to buy houses, and not all of them will want to.
 
cheesyboy said:
The current way of doing it is pushing up rent at three times the rate of inflation.
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I don't think that reducing the number of rental properties will make that any better though... The current legal ways of owning and renting property aren't the only things affecting rent. The number of houses in parts of the UK where people want to live, and the number of people that would like their own household are pretty big factors, along with the influence of the wider UK economy.
 
GreatAuk said:
The number of houses in parts of the UK where people want to live, and the number of people that would like their own household are pretty big factors, along with the influence of the wider UK economy.
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Yes. Which is another reason landlording is a social bad: their influence on policy (essentially, rising prices is a vote winner)...
cheesyboy said:
And landlords are such a huge population (2.65million of them), including a vast number of MPs, that they actually shape government policy to protect their investments instead of action being taken to restructure the system to allow young people, young families, to own a home.
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Does anybody want to acknowledge the trends, here?

The trend of rents as a share of income going through the roof. >70% if income now spent on rent in some areas.

The % of home ownership dropping steadily year on year.

The amount of tax revenue going to private landlords increasing year on year?

Lots of people saying there's nothing wrong with the status quo, but the trends are that the status quo is changing fairly rapidly.
 
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