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’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
Awww… couldn’t happen to a nicer group of blokes, too.
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.
This means rent will increase and house prices will drop in short term? Long term who knows. But yeah fixed tenancies kind of suck and because of high demand especially in places like London, bad landlords can get away with being shitty by exploiting fixed tenancies. Shouldn’t really be a problem for those who anyways aren’t shitty so hopefully this is a clean up of shitty landlords who don’t want to maintain their rental properties properly.
Oh NO! Won’t ANYONE please think of the Landlords that Take your Money and do Nothing in RETURN?
I mean… they give you a place to live in return…
Renting / landlords by themselves aren’t necessarily a bad thing, it’s poor renters rights and particularly shitty landlords that are the problem.
I say this as someone who got on the properly ladder just as much to get away from shit landlords as anything.
The house does that, they just paint over the plug sockets.
Landlords are by definition a bad thing. Everyone needs a place to live. People who hoard the necessities of life and loan them back to you are cunts, and need to be regulated into oblivion.
Everyone hates scalpers. That’s why it baffles me when there are always legions of white knights rushing in to defend house scalpers. I automatically assume they are all house scalpers who are desperately trying to see themselves as good people.
Good point. Many people know a landlord personally would be my guess. “But my uncle John is a landlord and he’s nice”.
I agree with this, but I’ve always wondered what the solution is for people that do need short term housing. Like going to college or moving to a city on a temporary job. Neither is a situation where you want to buy a house.
The obvious answer is the revolution happens and property ownership is ended, but I don’t see that happening. So what’s the solution? And don’t say dorms for college students, those regularly charge 2-3x market rates for worse accommodations
Your argument is the equivalent of “slave owners gave slaves housing, clothes and food. The problem isn’t slavery, it’s the lack of regulation and bad slave owners.”
A good slave owner was still a slave owner. A good landlord still takes money out of your pocket for something that should be your fundamental right.
But hey, I’m willing to compromise. I’m okay with landlords owning the house they’re"renting, if they’re not allowed to rent non-profit. But somehow no landlord is okay with such an idea even though it’s still a net positive for them.
They don’t build homes, they just hoard them and charge a premium for access. They’re just middlemen. Landlords don’t provide a damn thing.
They’ve withdrawn their labour? 🫢
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.
Thank god. Landlords are scum and our housing market is cooked. The USA is in desperate need of a housing market crash. Prices are way too high and many millennials still can’t afford homes despite being in their 40’s. Younger generations don’t stand a chance. Homes are not an investment. Your home isn’t worth more just because you’ve lived in it for years wearing it down, breaking things, and stinking up the place. Like anything that gets used they lose value over time and the market needs to reflect that. Hopefully this makes landlords leave the housing market in droves. A flood of housing hitting the market at a time no one is able to afford them will hopefully trigger the crash.
They say 2008 was a housing market crash but it didn’t. Houses cost way too much before and cost way too much after. They use every trick to kick the can as long as they are able to. I want to see a 60% loss in housing value across the board. Everywhere across the USA. And I want to see that loss become permanent. Intrinsic value that is lost forever because it was never actually there to begin with. Just made up numbers with voodoo math.
2008 was enough of a crash that it wiped out my family’s property value we sold our house at a loss
God if I could get a nice suburban starter home in my area for under $250k I’d be so happy… Everything that’s not dilapidated or in a terrible neighborhood is going for $400-500k right now 🙃
Nice! CONGRATULATIONS UK!
It’s about time. Generally speaking the UK have some pretty robust consumer protection laws, mostly thanks to the EU, but the laws around renting were draconian, they might as well of not existed.
To be clear I’m not really all that certain on why they would be quitting, you can still absolutely make money as a landlord under these rules you’re just not allowed to run a Victorian era workhouse level operation. Maybe that’s what all these landlords were doing.
How does a landlord quit?
They own the property, don’t they?
I imagine they’re either selling their properties to corporations or hiring someone to manage the rentals for them.
You overlooked the most important outcome: landlords selling property to individuals who will live there.
This is a good thing because it reduces property prices, moves the market away from rentier capitalism towards people owning their own homes, and reduces economic inequality and insecurity.
They’re going to get sold to corporations who rent out even higher with no value add
Source?
the source is the general trend in housing industry over the last 20-30 years, hedge funds and private equity trying to monopolize housing.
usually turning them into vacation rentals (airbnb) or luxury rentals (tech bro homes).
it’s happening in every rich country (g8, etc), and probably poor countries soon, if not already.
Quitting means selling, yes.
I wish quitting meant a six figure windfall in my profession…
If you’re quitting because of this, it probably means you have a buy-to-let mortgage, quite possibly on a long term/interest only. You might therefore not get that much back, and what you do get back is essentially a liquidation of your savings asset.
But I guess what you’re getting at seen another way is that it’s nice when your savings can pay enough for you to retire.
If you had a fixed interest only mortgage from several years ago that is now expiring you are also about to get fucked by the increased interest rates. Not as bad as they were a few years ago but could still be a lot worse than a decade ago.
No need to feel any sympathy for them, they are still making a shitload of money for little to no actual work from the whole thing.
Do people think the corporate landlords will be better?
Eh?
Why do you think that this will result in there being more corporate landlords? I don’t think people think that is true, so I don’t think they have an opinion on whether they’ll be better or worse.
Yeah I would imagine this would lead to slightly reduced property prices and increased rent prices as the market adjusts.
They were already renting, and when someone sells that pushes the property value down.
Right, but if landlords are exiting the market that probably means they are selling to someone who wants to live there, meaning rental properties are going off the market. Which is good for first time homebuyers but bad for renters. Either that or this is just landlords consolidating which which wont make much of a difference either way.
The first time buyer was previously renting though, so the renter could go there. Total number of people and houses hasn’t changed in this simplified example.
Right but a lot of renters cannot or do not want to buy property. Thus, rental units leaving the market creates a supply demand imbalance in the rent market, driving up prices (and driving down property prices, for the inverse reason)
Plenty of renters do want to buy and house prices coming down would allow that for some of them. If no one buys it and the landlord wants to sell, all they can do is lower the price until someone does buy it.
Right. We are in agreement that this should cause some reduction in property prices.
But not all renters are able to buy property. Here’s an extreme example - lets say 99.9% of landlords are forced to sell their rental homes. There are now just 100 units left in all of London.
There are 10000 students who need a temporary place to stay, and another 10000 people that have bad credit and cant get a mortgage. What will happen to rental prices?
When someone decides to sell a good because market conditions have changed, the price of the good goes down.
Rental prices are proportional to overall housing prices. In general, more homeowners is correlated with lower rents. Renters are also removed from the market.
When someone decides to sell a good because market conditions have changed, the price of the good goes down
Yes i agree with that part
Rental prices are proportional to overall housing prices. In general, more homeowners is correlated with lower rents. Renters are also removed from the market.
That is correlation without causation. When there isn’t enough housing, rent and property prices will both be high. However, if properties get taken off the rental market and are put up for sale instead, with no changes to population or overall housing supply, that is going to drive up rental prices. There will be fewer people renting, by necessity, but the people who want or need to rent will not change by as much, creating an imbalance between supply and demand that will drive up rental prices.
Not to mention another thing we haven’t touched on which is why landlords are leaving in the first place. Those who remain in the now-less-profitable environment may try to raise rent to compensate.
There will be fewer people renting, by necessity, but the people who want or need to rent will not change by as much, creating an imbalance between supply and demand that will drive up rental prices.
Why would demand not change by as much as supply, if both a buyer and a seller have been removed from the rental market? It’s like landlords being forced to sell to tenants at a reduced price.
Because having your rental unit taken away from you does not remove you from the rental market. You might consider leaving the rental market and buying property if housing prices collapse, but outside of that most people are going to have to look around for a new rental unit in a now tighter market.
