The number of landlords planning to sell rented properties has reached its highest rate on record according to new data.
Polling for the National Residential Landlords Association, conducted by research consultancy BVA-BDRC, found that in Q1 2023 some 33 per cent of private landlords in England and Wales said they planned to cut the number of properties they let out.
This is the highest proportion ever recorded by BVA-BDRC and is up from the 20 per cent giving a similar response in Q1 2022. By contrast, just 10 per cent of landlords now say they plan to increase the number of properties they rent out.
Some 67 per cent of landlords said demand for properties from prospective tenants was increasing.
In every region of England and Wales more than 70 per cent of landlords said demand had increased, with the East of England recording the highest levels of demand.
The NRLA is warning that the supply crisis is set to deepen further without action by ministers. It is call for the Government to undertake a full review of the impact of tax rises on the sector and develop new, pro-growth policies.
Alongside this, when ministers end Section 21 repossessions, landlords need confidence that where they have good reason to end a tenancy – such as for tenant anti-social behaviour or rent arrears - the courts will consider and process such cases swiftly. At present it takes an average of around six months between a landlord seeking to possess a property via the courts to it actually happening.
Association chief executive Ben Beadle says: “Renters are bearing the brunt of the supply crisis. Without change, matters will only worsen over the coming year. The government needs to reverse its damaging tax hikes on the sector, which have discouraged the provision of the homes tenants desperately need.
"Moreover, responsible landlords need to have confidence that they can take back possession of their properties swiftly and effectively when they have good reason to when Section 21 ends.”
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Almost like it’s been part if a long term grand plan
Where’s my tinfoil hat gone ?
The Government knows exactly what the consequences of policies are going to be (industry experts have been telling them for months).
The real question is “what is the actual Government agenda?”
Are tenants just COLLATERAL damage?
Are they just following the WEF orders!
What a bunch of fairy’s the landlord always have a good reason, he owns the property what could be a better reason than that.
What kind of cloud cuckoo land are they on, go buy your own enjoy your jam sandwiches for the next 30 years.
Abolishing Section 21 shouldn’t apply Retroactively we bought under current rules.
Whatever new rules they make to get rid of Section 21 should only apply to new Purchases.
Otherwise there is no bases or business plan, we bought under a raft of Government Laws and Lenders criteria now roped-in they move the goal posts. This is tantamount to confiscation.
None of these tax implication should be allowed retrospectively. It has crippled everybody’s business plan and it is no longer viable to house people. Maintenance costs have doubled for me traders costs have doubled, the interest on my mortgages have quadrupled, Council tax increases 5% every year, and with threats to increase capital gains tax and EPC levels everything we’ve worked for is being taken away. I’m shocked that nobody seems to understand what’s going on and even the media don’t spell out the obvious.
Increased taxes, increased maintenance, increased mortgage payments equals increased rents and less supply. It’s not rocket science
Well said both of you, the issue for me is Sections 24 and 21. Mortgage rates are still quite reasonable, but add section 24 to this and it fails as a business if you are mortgaged.
On top of this no business can afford to lose control to the customer, by removing Section 21 this is what is about to happen.
I am selling, though will look after and remain in partnership with 3 very good tenants. When they go I will likely sell unless this Government or any future Government waje up!
Very interesting data from NRLA. In my experience of purchasing some additional units over the past 12 months all of the sellers I've dealt with have been landlords in the 1-9 unit sector. I would imagine that this forms the bulk of the 33% of NRLA members considering sales at the moment. From anecdotal evidence I believe that the 10% of landlords now looking to expand their portfolios fall into the 10 plus unit sector. I think we are witnessing a market correction - nothing more than that.
I've seen this before in other businesses I've owned, where I've seen amateur café owners sell-up, amateur franchise owners sell-up and amateur FTSE stock owners sell-up. Running a business has been, and will always be, very challenging and is normally a full-time endeavour.
What - no boasting of how you have made all your properties EPC C for less than £1 & how the rest of us LLs are amateurs who the PRS is better off without?
🤦🏻♂️
You may or may not be correct on your points, but ultimately no business can survive on gross returns that are almost inline with the cost of debt. It's just basic economics.
If you've really been buying more properties, what gross yield are you buying at? How are you funding it? What levels?
Property is massively capital intensive, with generally low yields, and with base rates at 4.50% it becomes less and less viable especially if leverage isn't an option and with no capital growth on the horizon.
Martin, thanks for your thoughts. The point you are missing is that a lot of us whom started in this endeavour are sole traders. I'm guessing that you are a Limited Company and probably a good few years younger than me.
If the Government were to introduce Section 24 on your properties I believe you'd have a different View point.
The goal posts have well and truly shifted and wait until you get a few tenants whom don't pay their rent and hide behind the law before you are able to get them out of your property.
Just thought i'd add some balance to your thoughts.
tbh Martin - I do not think I have ever said anything rude about someone on this forum but you come off as something of an A*s
So why in my area are tenants refusing to leave after receiving an S21 notice and saying they cannot find anywhere else to live, while falling over themselves to make sure the rent is paid on time despite a large increase. There were only 2 properties for rent in the area, 3 large towns, on Rightmove when I looked, which were above their price range. I want to sell, but do not want to make them homeless.
You can buy all of mine with good tenants in place if you wish.
I find it harder and harder to believe that this slow motion car crash is continuing, it's clear to the whole of the country we losing the vital private rental support to the market. More rental homes are needed, more landlords are needed, yet every incentive has gone. Fewer homes available means higher rents, this is not my opinion its a fact. We can all see this on a weekly basis, if any further proof of bad government intervention is needed look what has happened in Scotland.
What is needed to encourage the people in power to listen to facts and not fiction? If you cannot build enough affordable homes, if you do not have sufficient social housing, you NEED private landlords, embrace and incentivise them, do not expect them to spend their own money subsidising the market, because we won't.
The Government knows exactly what the consequences of policies are going to be (industry experts have been telling them for months).
The real question is “what is the actual Government agenda?”
Are tenants just COLLATERAL damage?
Are they just following the WEF orders!
Well said Terry and I had hoped that the Government would come to their senses, but now i'm leaning towards Gromit's view.
The Government appear to have an agenda to win votes no matter the cost to Landlord's and tenants. We are too easy and able to be a target.
A Dr Peter Marshall wrote a very interesting article which Landlord Today published. I think he sums up the situation perfectly, therefore I see no U-turns in this arena.
The mainstream media are now taking hold of this story and showing that more and more PRS LLs are selling up.
Government and Greedy Councils need to realise the PRS LLs are the people who prop up and have been for years, the rental market.
Once these properties are gone from the rental market they are gone forevermore.
They need to start cosying up to the B&Bs and Cheap Hotels because these are the next stop for families due to the massive PRS sell off.
It’s as if the government and councils have simply buried their heads in the sand and don’t care what massive issues are hurtling down the road towards them.
But Hey Ho they know best.
Bye Bye BTL
Sums it up well.
They can’t rely upon the cheap hotels etc…. They are full to the brim with migrants 😱🆘
As said above, this is like watching a train 🚂 crash….. we will survive, but thousands of tenants will not 👎🏻
Its a deliberate savage attack on Private Landlords.
Following on from the 2015 De-Regulation Act, more rules, obstacles and Compliance Costs added every year. Introduction of Section 24 divisive, discriminate treating people differently its disgraceful .
Why is there nothing said about licensing Costs which is a huge burden it’s just to drive up Rents and free money for the Council’s a Computer exercise that’s sub-let.
All we hear about is the high cost of Renting how about exploring all the Costs, I won’t get that in a text.
Say a small Portfolio LL with a dozen properties (not the one’s with scores or hundreds) re-licensing every 5 years now mandatory HMO’s, App’fee alone £1550. approx, just leave all the thousands of £’s Compliance Costs ever increasing as well as the thousands of initial costs of actual physical work to one side for another day.
£1550.00 x 12 = £18’600.00 every 5 years divided by 5 = £3’720.00 every year rotating for ever and we had 4 renewals already 2006, 2011, 2016, 2021.
What about all the Documentation and Certificate requirements to accompany to Application costing fortunes this is all apart from what I call actual work.
Any of this couldn’t possibly affect Renting could it ? Just add insult to injury and Remove Section 21.
If you look at buy to let market as a whole it was aided by selling off of council houses and creating the AST and buy to let lending - conservative policy.
Now taxing landlords and driving them towards ltd company ownerships - Conservative policy
Next is Large corporations owning and renting properties.
So the conservative governments have effectively created a large enough market for their friends to benefit from.
What do the alternative government in Labour do - just keep whining.
Most of us Landlord’s have been taken for a ride.
The simple fact is no government cares about what happens to landlords or that matter tenants.
I had to laugh.
Saw Shelter saying Govt. should hasten -not further delay- abolition of Section 21 because of it recently being used to evict so many more tenants.
But they have cause and effect the wrong way round.
They are just too stupid to realise: its the prospect of S21 abolition, on top if other anti-landlord policies, that is causing LLDs to leave. And to do that they have to evict tenants.
This research shows the sell-off, on top of the recent prediction of half-a-million LLDs selling.
Gove and Govt. won't be able to say (unless lying) they weren't warned.
Just like Govt. was warned about Smart Motorways: they've now at last realised the safety problems with those and so have now halted new ones. A few people had to die first though, sadly.
Remember the Poll Tax? Had to be scrapped some years after introduction by Tories who were warned at the time how stupid it was.
These examples don't bode well for PRS legislation. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news: don't shoot the messenger!
I fear (nay know) you’re right 🤐
These criminally corrupt idiots never learn. I think they ate deliberately trying to make everything worse to give Labour more to do when they win, because they know that they sre now unelectable.
I'm not sure on this, I thought Labour would have done a lot better in the recent elections. The problem is Labour are just not good enough, I say this as having voted for Labour in the past.
At best Labour will get a hung Parliament.
We're all doomed with these muppets running the show and all we have is other muppets waiting to take over!
David Lammy on the front bench
Says it all really
Pat. My friend a few different aspects here.
The Sell off of Council Houses to their Tenant occupants at a massive discount started in 1980 following the pledge to get elected in 1979.
I am a Landlord since 1978 so I have seen it all happen.
The 1988 Housing Act brought in AST’s and Section 21 to encourage Private Landlords to house people as there was none available at all, caused by Sitting Tenants Laws if you let anyone into your property they immediately became a sitting Tenant and the value of your Property halved instantly, so no one was fool enough for that, are we going back there again.
The Buy 2 Let lenders didn’t start until 1996 long after S 21 and the 1988 Act so they are 3 separate events separated by time. The latest ones caused today’s problems the buy 2 let coupled with Government giving control to the B of E of interest rates, they kept reducing Base Rates abolishing Savers over night, so they were all scratching around looking for some where to put their money to stop it devaluating before their very eyes, they all went buying property with cheap money all bidding against each other, the rest is history.
Perhaps we need to mention the current legislation, Criminalisation Bill, Re-payment Orders, Deposit debacle, Acid Confiscation, Pay for Licensing Schemes and endless Compliance, that’ll do for now.
Bang on the money Michael, BTL in the early days with a minimum of 15% deposit was a good working model, however self certification and 100% lending just was a bad bad idea.
In fact for a period you could get a mortgage for 125% of your property. Crazy!
Spot on Michael
Gordon Brown changing the tax laws on pensions also had an effect making it impossible for the self employed to invest in a pension that would be worth the money they put in!
Micheal,
I purposely left out the detail dates etc you mentioned. The point I am making is simple. The conservatives created this BTL boom over a period of time but if you take out the time period, the sinister behaviour will be clearly visible to most people.
Let’s take the 1979 election pledge to sell council houses at substantially reduced prices. On the face of it, it looks like a good policy to get the poor on to the housing ladder. Land ownership has helped distribution of wealth all over the world. So that in itself is not a bad policy. But no one thought of its consequences. If the policy was to sell at discounted prices and replace each sold with new developments such as sell one and use the money to build two new ones would have been progressive. Instead the policy was sell one do nothing, which created a shortfall of council houses increasing the need for private housing for rent. Once that environment is created, then you make it attractive for people to buy and rent using ASTs, to help this along further provide financing for ASTs. Now that we have a large enough market for the big boys to get involved. Curb the small landlords and the millionaire friends of the conservatives have a market they can be bothered to invest in.
So how did this affect the ordinary people. The people who relied on council housing found their children didn’t have enough council houses for them - so they lost out.
The average household found the house prices have gone up so much that their children can’t afford to buy houses and living with parents longer- so the children of average families lost out.
The individual landlords made some money.
The banks made a lot of money financing these properties
The government made Money through various taxes
Now the big developers are making money from their multitude of built to rent.
This is happening in Britain in NHS for example, slowly NHS is using more private services to run it, more agency nurses, surgeons working for private medical services, private care homes and the list goes on.
So, the government policies are not about helping tenants or Landlords, it is simply about creating environment to make money for their friends.
If the the Labour Party is there to look after the poor then the could have corrected the housing issue by building council houses. They didn’t do it either as their interest is to take money from the rich give to the poor. - bit of a Robin Hood idea as opposed to fair and decent efforts to rectify the housing crisis.
I can go on but, I don’t think there is any need. Understand what is happening and use it if you can, otherwise move on to pastures new.
Gordon brown, former PM, was noted for his black rages, ie he is mentally ill. Tony Blair former PM is running a type of alternative government/ business with a turnover of £60 million+.
We have received Interesting feedback from landlords who have sold their UK properties and are now providing homes in Europe some have being doing this for 4-5 years some more recent the most noticeable difference is they are treated like any other business ,the highly toxic environment which pervades housing in the UK is absent the various government do not change the rules every few weeks so landlords can reasonably plan for the next 5 years
However the most revealing difference is " the tenant organisations" yes they have them there as well but ! and its a big but they accept when costs go up rents go up there is of course some kickback on the size of the rent increases but the need for increases is not in dispute none of these tenant groups is saying rents must never go up in any circumstances and there is an acceptance that the property owner has the right to their property back , it should be noted that a number of countries have a minimum three year tenancy but I can live with that
Voting tory has backfired for you lot now hasnt it haha
It has made the likes of you homeless. Keep on laughing. Sad example of the people of envy.
You sound like someone who deserves a S21.
Joe,
I see other sites as well as LLD Today.
You might be surprised that not all landlords vote Tory: some even were going to vote Labour at the last election when Corbyn was leader. And there are fervent 'Corbynistas' I know who understand the realities of letting; and that hurting Landlords doesn't help tenants.
I hope you are not a tenant.
If you are, in the long term it may be you who is backfired upon. Enjoy.
Remember: Section 21 is NOT 'no fault'; it is no fault stated/given.
Only the most stupid, and very rich, Landlord will wish to evict for no reason at all.
There are plenty of things we can blame many Tories for.
But with your attitude, I am pleased I'm not providing a roof over your head. Though I have even done so for Covid deniers, at some actual health risk to myself; as well as plenty of nice tenants.
The Great Sell off and HMRC Landlords Review just a couple of Articles in the last 2 days.
The Great Sell off have attracted 4’525 reads
The HMRC review attracted 3’754 reads so that’s 8’279 people mostly Landlords yet only 50 Comments, so that’s only one person per 166 are prepared to stand up for their business and be counted, even far less than this when it’s the same respondents making a number of Comments.
What’s the matter with you all are you waiting to see what happens and then its too late.
Please come out and stop hiding behind the bush.
NRLA becomes lazy and political. There is no power, no inspiration in their words.
GET OUT NOW, BEFORE THE RUSH
Edmonton County Cournts
19 weeks to open an email or letter
(was quoted as 57 working days, but 19 sounds smaller)
Judge given tenants 7 months to complete a defence and counting.
Will be well over a year, with 20k arrears
(equal to a year and a half living for free)
PUT YOUR MONEY WHERE YOU ARN'T HATED!
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