My comment isn’t really about this, but to the discussion it’s targeting.
I thought the general model for renting was that the lessee signs a one-year lease, with the option month by month to cancel at one-month notice. The landlord then is free to alter the lease after the year is up. However, I’ve only rented one apartment, and it was in a large building, and clearly they wouldn’t ever be expecting to sell the building and kicking out the tenants - the tenants would be the very reason one would want to buy the property. So I suppose single-family housing rental is different.
I do know that my uncle who gave up his mortgage during the housing crisis has had to move several times when the owner of the house he and his family were renting decided to sell it, but they are fairly well off other than having poor credit from walking away from a mortgage, and they didn’t have any problems finding another place to live - just the annoyance of having to move AGAIN.
So I assume that the tenant has to receive some notice to move out. At very least, they should be told when the house is going on the market and have until a buyer is ready to move in to get their stuff out. As to how much notice is required, I assume that’s a state law thing. I’m guessing my uncle could have been a hard-case and refused to move without eviction, but that would be fairly extreme when one could in fact easily move somewhere else.
I’ve been watching that same show, and all the eviction cases I remember, the tenants have had from 4-5 months to a year or more to get out, and just haven’t. They often seem to have been using various delaying tactics to hold off moving out.
And in most cases, as soon as they got notice that the lease would not be renewed, they stopped paying rent entirely – even if there were still several months to run on the original lease. So they all knew they were supposed to move out, and the date.
The tenants I had some sympathy for were those where someone rented a house, converted nearly every room into a bedroom, sublet those to various people (in violation of the lease), has been collecting from all of them, but stiffing the property owner of all the rent. These tenants actually were paying rent (though not to the owner), and may have had no idea that they were about to be evicted. (But in the USA, there is usually a requirement to post on the door of the house notice about the eviction case, where anybody entering would see it. Is this not required in the UK?)
I’m more concerned about some of the debt collection cases.
A lot of them seem to be from what we in the USA call ‘payday lender scams’, or shyster lawyers or business ‘consultants’ – people who know well how to use the court processes, and who prey on disadvantaged people who don’t understand this system.
While within the term of the lease, sure. But once that term expires, absolutely disagree.
It’s actually something I’ve noticed in the U.K. where there seems to be a sense of entitlement from tenants that a place is ‘theirs’ if they’ve been renting for a long time, even down to spending money on ‘improvements’ or not being willing to recognise an eviction notice at the end of a lease term.
I think it is a result of the UKs shortage of housing. Its led to legislation protecting the rights of tenants, on the assumption that it could be difficult for them to get other housing. Which would mean that they’d have to be housed on the governments dime. As a side effect this legislation has also protected tenants who are already on the governments dime, because you can hardly make an exemption for them.
Yes, but why is it so short?
Here in the US, that would promptly inspire a lot of builders to start adding more housing, to fill this market need. In a few months/year, there would almost be a glut of available housing. Is there some reason UK builders aren’t responding to this shortage?
Currently, here in Minnesota Twin Cities area, there is a real shortage of affordable housing. There’s a fair amount of available housing, both new & renovated places, but most are out of the price range for the poor. And it’s getting worse: the market is so active people are buying up older, affordable houses, renovating them, and then re-selling them at much higher prices.
That brings up something else I don’t understand about UK housing. What is it with people there renting for years & years? Why do they keep throwing money away on rent each month instead of buying a house?
Here in the US, renting is mostly confined to poor or uneducated people, or young people just out of school and getting started on their own (and sometimes the elderly, who need to move into care facilities for health reasons). But when people get into their mid-20’s, and especially as they get married and start a family, they will be actively working to buy their own house. Maybe just a small ‘starter’ home, that they will move on from later, but one they own. The idea of people in their 30’s or 40’s, but still renting, makes Americans wonder what is wrong with them.
Is there something about UK tax policies, or their housing finances, that keeps people from buying their own house? Do you still have Dukes & Earls owning all the land, and refusing to sell it to commoners? And the government doesn’t use eminent domain to force them to sell it?
Not being a UKer my guess is that it is mostly simple supply and demand since the UK is only slightly larger than Florida but has 3 times as many people, so housing will naturally be more scarce. Just looking around on Google Maps at small towns in England will show lots of construction of subdevelopments so I think that there are still houses being built, however people on subsidized rents will not tend to move there because they are far from both jobs and public transportation.
In London the aristocracy angle might or might not be true: there are aristocracy that do own large swaths of inner London upon which are contained a lot of buildings on “long term leases” and I assume the government doesn’t take them over because this arrangement causes the least friction. The aristocracy has management companies that lease out their land for a profit and anyone who has the cash can lease it so everyone is more or less happy. The aristocracy also owns parts of the rest of Britain, but it’s still not a small island, so even if they did own (being liberal here) 20% of the land, there would still be a bunch of the rest of the land to build on.
The same thing happens in the US, although apparently not where you live. Come to NYC, where many people rent for their whole lives for a variety of reasons. But this is probably a big one. It’s a small house, in a not particularly fashionable neighborhood and you need a minimum of $60K for a down payment ( and $120K would be better). Not affordable for most couples in their mid-twenties -especially when you don’t actually need the 4 bedrooms and can rent a 1BR apartment for $1500 without needing to come up with the down payment or the extra expenses of owning.
Housing benefit can still be paid direct to the landlord, but the tenant has to request it. It should be the other way round IMO - it used to be.
If the tenant has children then yes, the council will be obliged to find them somewhere to live, but note that this doesn’t necessarily mean a proper home. It’s not uncommon for homeless families to be housed in a homeless hostel or a B&B where they all live in one room with a couple of beds and a tiny fridge and a shared bathroom (and although it’s called a B&B, they don’t get breakfast). They could be there for a couple of years depending on the area of the country they’re in. Or they’re housed in private accommodation (usually also smaller than they actually need, but better than the hostel) and the council guarantees the rent and pays the deposit.
If the council actually “set up” this property for the tenant then that’s what the situation would have been, so I assume this tenant actually just got the tenancy on her own and then applied for housing benefit. Well, actually it’s called “local housing allowance” if it’s a private landlord, and it’s always lower than the actual rent. £200pm is quite a large amount of money to find from your other benefits or income (basic jobseeker’s allowance is £73.10pw and the rent won’t cover utilities; she’d get money for each child, but it’s not a lot either; I’m not going to quote a lot of numbers because I don’t know this tenant’s whole situation and with Universal Credit it becomes even more difficult to estimate) so maybe that’s why the tenant decided screw this, I’ll get myself evicted then I can get somewhere more secure. It’s a crappy way to behave still, but somewhat more understandable IMO.
Also if the tenant paid a deposit to move in, which they probably did if it’s a private rental, then they’ll forfeit that.
Those evicted tenants don’t just get given a nice home straight away, basically, they’re just not left on the streets if they have kids and/or a disability. If they don’t meet the criteria for a vulnerable tenant the council won’t help them at all.
And they will only get even that crappy housing if they contest the eviction. Otherwise they’re classed as “intentionally homeless.” See here:
There won’t be many private housing options available to her with her recent history, and it’s difficult enough for anyone on benefits to begin with, so she’ll essentially be forced to contest the eviction so that the council will help her once she’s evicted.
Her choosing not to pay the rent could also mean she gets classed as intentionally homeless, though I suspect that, unless she’s an otherwise negligent parent, the council would be reluctant to do that because the kids have to live somewhere and taking them into care costs a lot of money.
That’s not true at all. Right to buy is only for properties owned by the council. See here. Some housing association tenants have what’s called “preserved right to buy” if they moved into the property when it was a council property and it was subsequently transferred to a housing association. It doesn’t apply to tenants private landlords at all.
Housing supply is short because we have a lot of people and not a lot of usable land because a lot of it is lakes, rivers, farmland that’s protected, mountains that would be impractical to build on, etc.
Mortgages are out of the reach of most people on average incomes and even many of those on higher than average incomes. Ignoring London, which everyone knows is expensive, look at, say, Manchester, which is not an expensive area but not the cheapest either (the cheapest areas tend to have very high unemployment rates). Average salary £26k. The average property price was £191,232. Mortgages are usually offered at 3x income (and they take student loans and childcare costs into account), so a couple both on average wage would need a deposit of £35k. Bear in mind that they usually have to rent while trying to save, and rents are increasing a lot, so it becomes difficult to save up for a deposit. Most people seem to rely on help from parents to get the deposit together.
It’s nothing to do with Dukes and Earls owning land!
Very high population density -in the areas where people want to live most. While the population density of the UK don’t look too bad at a glance, a lot of the area is Scotland and the north of England. While there are nice places in Scotland and the north, most people want to live centrally. Rural areas also happens to be some of the prime agricultural land. Some areas are so heavily built that they speculate this has led to increases in flooding, as there isn’t enough exposed land to drain properly any more.
That also leads to spiraling house prices -if more people want to live in a place than there is room for, house prices will soar out of reach for many people.
If your job and friends are in Seattle, it does you very little good that the house prices are low in rural Alabama.
The last two decades of the 19th century saw house prices soar dramatically. Analysing the effect of this would probably be a good subject for a PhD but one effect was that it made getting onto the bottom rung of the housing ladder impossible for many people. This, in turn, created a demand for rental properties, which made being a landlord very attractive. Many landlords used the house(s) they already had as security for a loan to snap up any moderately priced housing - a so-called Buy To Let mortgage. They had the added advantage that this was treated as a business loan which got them favourable tax arrangements.
The tax loophole has been plugged now and house prices are rising at less than inflation, but it will take years for the market to right itself. In the meantime, whereas my generation usually left home in late teens/early twenties, often to get married and buy a home; young people today stay with their parents much longer. The people next door to me are a fifty-something couple with their twenty-something son. He has a nice car and has a busy social life - no way could he afford that if he was buying a house and supporting children. What incentive does he have to even leave home? If and when he does, it will probably be to a rented flat. The chances that he will accumulate debt and end up back with his parents are, sadly, quite high.
When I watch the bailiffs evicting some poor single parent with two or three children, I do feel sorry for them. I also feel for the owner of the house, who hasn’t had any rent for many months and probably faces a large repair and cleanup bill. I also think about the taxpayer who is supporting her and the children. It isn’t simple - some people end up in these situations for no fault of their own: They lose what they (and their creditors) thought were good jobs; families break up and I have thought sometimes that, there but for the grace of Om go I.
Some would say she is playing the same game as the rich ‘man’, some others would say she is playing the same game that the ‘rich man in the house that is white’ has mastered. Who is more damaging - IDK.
I didn’t say it applied to private landlords at all, the whole paragraph was in reference to council housing. And I missed out the ‘some’ which was floating around somewhere, I’m sure, before I pressed send.
Obviously you can’t just compel a private landlord to sell.
In some areas though, large chunks of the council housing- in a few places all of it- has been transferred out of council ownership, to associations (though people tend to still refer to it as council housing); the council don’t own it any more, but they still have to pay for the ‘right to buy’ for their former tenants. A friend of mine just went through the process, a few months ago- the house was bought from a housing association, not the council.
Not forever (leases have terms), and which exact rights are transferred varies with location.
Most (over 80%) of the Swiss housing market is rentals. Most (over 80%) of the Spanish housing market is ownership. Whether people rent or own has a lot to do with local culture.
In cases where there’s been a full stock transfer, and the tenants therefore have preserved right to buy, the council doesn’t have to buy it back to sell it to the tenant - the tenant simply buys it from the housing association, like your friend did. The council don’t have to pay anything. Right to buy is one of the factors that housing associations take on when they do a stock transfer, and it eats into the profits of the housing association but doesn’t affect the council at all. (See here.) The council are only involved in selling the property when they’re still the owners - sometimes they are, if they’ve done a partial stock transfer or set up an ALMO. There’s never an occasion where they have to buy back property they’ve already sold at a discount in order to sell it again at a different discount.
That’s a popular misconception. Feudal leasehold isn’t all that common - probably no more than 15% of UK households - and the quirks of the system have mostly been ironed out. The 1995 reforms banned regimental conscription and jus primae noctis from new feudal leasehold agreements; as most of these run for no more than 25 years, there are very few people left who still have to worry about that sort of thing.
I don’t believe that there is any evidence that the English nobility has ever benefited from Droit du seigneur. What went on North of the border or over the channel is open to speculation… George Orwell and Braveheart notwithstanding.
George Orwell and Braveheart notwithstanding.