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Ros Beck

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Their offers are so poor because they have no idea of business and no understanding of the sector. Wow! They will pay you a low rate and tie you into that low rate for 5-20 years! And they wonder why we don't bite their hand off... In addition, I too, have heard of landlords having their properties subsequently wrecked and the council not honouring their commitment at all to put it right. To landlords, in the main, 'the council' is the enemy. They persuade and cajole us into taking on risky tenants and then when things go wrong they are fiercely on the tenants' side, tell them to 'sit it out' during eviction processes, meaning terrible stress for landlords and what can be a huge financial loss. Maybe if they completely change their attitude, treat landlords like human beings, guarantee landlords against all losses, pay the market rent and so on we can talk - but that will be no time soon.

From: Ros Beck 20 May 2022 09:37 AM

Unfortunately for those of us living in the Principality, we are being led by morons.

From: Ros Beck 17 February 2022 20:22 PM

Yes, I have critiqued Onward reports before. They didn't, for example, understand how Section 24 works and advocated that we should not be able to offset costs of furniture in furnished lets, as 'owner-occupiers can't.'

From: Ros Beck 11 May 2021 12:16 PM

Apart from one comment saying landlords would face financial ruin, this article only gives a voice to this group of extremists. In future, can you make sure you ask the NRLA or any other landlord spokespeople to give a detailed rebuttal of these anti-landlord views? Clearly the idea that all rent and/or arrears could be written off by a third party (the Government) is outrageous. It would overturn our civilisation if this happened. Landlord today must make sure there is at least balance in the articles or if there is to be bias, let's have it in landlords' favour please.

From: Ros Beck 13 May 2020 10:19 AM

In other words, students are far better off renting from traditional private landlords, where affordability is clearly the best. So the Government fetes the large institutions which charge significantly more and slams us with huge taxes so that we are forced to up our rents. My student rents have gone up a lot since Section 24 was announced, so that I can take the extra tax levy from the students to give to the Government. They're not just hammering us; they're hammering the students.

From: Ros Beck 07 January 2020 09:34 AM

This is so ridiculous. Government at all levels attack the PRS in every way they can think of and then a semi-state organisation calls on us to help. I'd like to see what Cadwyn has been doing in terms of lobbying Government to reverse the war on landlords. When they can prove that they are on our side, maybe we will help.

From: Ros Beck 14 August 2019 12:19 PM

Hopefully Boris Johnson will listen to sense and abandon this. What we really need is a strengthened Section 21, so that it doesn't take 6 months to evict a non-paying tenant as it currently does - despite nonsense about Section 21 enabling landlords get their properties back with 'only' 2 months' rent owing. Theory is irrelevant in this context; in practice Section 21 has just been the least awful repossession route used mostly to get rogue and 'criminal' tenants out. I say 'criminal' as they clearly effectively steal thousands from landlords which we invariably cannot get back.

From: Ros Beck 22 July 2019 12:08 PM

Not allowing property to be used for financial gain is ridiculous. This should also mean that anyone making their living from property - including employees of councils and Housing Associations should also not be allowed to receive a salary for it; as the profit of private landlords, as with all business people, sole traders, the self-employed (whatever you want to call it) is what pays their salary. The idea that money should not be made out of a necessity is also ludicrous. This logically means that there should be no shops or supermarkets or even farmers - as they make their money from charging for a necessity. The fact that the authors also want to provoke a housing crash - what they euphemistically call 'stabilisation' - shows their true colours. The additional fact that they think the State can manipulate and then keep a handle on house prices in the open market is fantasy economics.

From: Ros Beck 02 July 2019 09:13 AM

It is very annoying that they say they have a 'better offer' than traditional landlords. There is no proof of this alleged superior provision. The only big differences which could clearly be evidenced is that they only cater for a certain category of tenant - and are not interested in providing much needed homes for the wider market - and they charge loads more, with the justification that they sometimes provide things like gyms, which are not essential aspects and which many tenants would not use after an initial honeymoon period. They want traditional landlords to be targeted by the Government, but they want to be let off. Why should there be one rule for them and one rule for the rest?

From: Ros Beck 26 June 2019 09:38 AM

Ha! So we give them huge documents, can be fined huge amounts or be precluded from being able to issue a Section 21 if we don't and then they don't read them! Far easier and environmentally-friendly if the tenancy agreements could just list a website where they could read this information if they wanted to (which obviously they don't). It would save a few forests, wasted money on paper and cartridges and a whole load of wasted time. It would also stop these disproportionate penalties on landlords for not issuing something which tenants don't want. The RLA and NLA should be suggesting this to Government.

From: Ros Beck 24 June 2019 09:34 AM

It is very misleading to cite the German market. It is completely different to the UK one. My sister rented there for many years and you are expected to bring and install your own kitchen and do most repairs yourself. You are given a shell. In the UK, landlords can be called upon to go an fit a new light bulb. Even tiny maintenance issues have to be sorted by the landlord. If not, the likes of Shelter will come running. In addition, in Germany finance costs are still deductible when calculating profit. If Healey wants us to have the German model then he should be petitioning for the abolition of Section 24 for starters.

From: Ros Beck 11 March 2019 11:50 AM

It would be helpful if the journalists at Landlord Today could refer to Section 24 differently, and not as the removal of interest relief. Landlords don't get 'interest relief' - that is a deliberate misnomer - we deduct costs - including finance costs, which are often our biggest cost - before calculating profit, just as all other businesses do. This cost is now bizarrely redefined as profit.

From: Ros Beck 31 December 2018 09:26 AM

What hypocrisy. The councils evict for the same reasons as private landlords - primarily rent arrears, damage and anti-social behaviour and the levels are very similar. Because their processes are different they can make out that they have a valid reason and that landlords don't. The ending of a tenancy doesn't cause homelessness; the reasons behind the ending of the tenancy do.

From: Ros Beck 10 October 2018 09:14 AM

More often than not in my experience, when a house is tenanted it does not look its best. It is only rarely that I have had a tenant that has improved the look of a property or garden - and the vast majority leave it worse than it was at the beginning of the tenancy. So the price is likely to be better for the vacated property which can be spruced up - this would more than offset the loss in rental income. That is why landlords do it!

From: Ros Beck 20 September 2018 18:15 PM

Incorporation for many landlords with portfolios would cost hundreds of thousands of pounds - so not a simple solution.

From: Ros Beck 07 September 2018 10:05 AM

It is my understanding that BTR now constitutes 2% of the PRS. Big whoop. The real story is how the traditional landlord still dominates the sector completely and provides the whole range of housing needed - and yet has been hammered by Government as though they have done something wrong - while BTR is feted and fiscally favoured.

From: Ros Beck 23 August 2018 09:25 AM

I'm noticing the demand now in my small town - receiving loads of applications for one house. The first person - who eagerly paid a deposit - was clearly lying about his income and rent payment record, with statements he made, not making sense, so his deposit was returned sharpish. People will be checked with a fine tooth comb and only the best tenants accepted. The traditional rogue tenant is going to end up roofless - including another tenant of mine who has stopped paying and is damaging the house. He will get a CCJ on his record and good luck finding somewhere else to live.

From: Ros Beck 12 July 2018 09:30 AM

Andy Golding talks a lot of sense. I would however dispute the implicatiion that putting properties into limited companies is in any way correlated to professionalism.

From: Ros Beck 15 June 2018 10:58 AM

We won't be envious of the regulation that's been brought in up there though which is going to make it very difficult to regain possession of properties.

From: Ros Beck 03 August 2017 16:35 PM

Yes, there is a lot of flawed work coming out of the Cambridge Centre, commissioned by the JRF. The main problem is usually the whole concept - and it goes downhill from there. Earlier in the year, these two collaborated on a study with the idea of us learning lessons from how the private rented sector in the Republic of Ireland. The basic assumption behind the whole report was that this was a model we should emulate. In fact, my impression of the Irish private rented sector is that it is a shambles and reminiscent of '70s Britain, with poor quality housing and very conflictual landlord-tenant relations. Similarly, with this report, the whole concept was wrong - based on only looking at the private rented sector, and not the social sector - where evictions are at a similar rate - and assuming that 'no fault' eviction is the equivalent to landlords evicting without any reason when we evict for the same reason as the social sector (usually 'crap tenants'). We all know that Section 21 is used because it is a faster and more reliable way of getting rogue tenants out and minimising our huge losses at the hands of these criminals. In the eyes of Generation Rent, Shelter and now Shelter Mark 2 (the JRF will now follow Campbell Robb's anti-private landlord obsession/vendetta) rogue tenants are 'vulnerable' tenants, whom we 'turf out' for no reason. As if we would evict good tenants when change of tenancies, legal action and voids cost us money. It makes no sense. They also, in the report, call them '2 month' notice periods - when we also all know that the average is closer to 6 months. They are only 'theoretically 2 months' but 'actually 6 months.' These destructive reports based on anti-private landlord sentiment continue like a juggernaut damaging the PRS. If they carry on like this, we will be like the Irish setup and God help the decent tenants and the decent landlords - both of whom are in the majority and both of whom will be hammered by all this destructive policy-making.

From: Ros Beck 26 July 2017 17:06 PM

The Joseph Rowntree report just out has spotted that evictions are taking place mostly in London on tenants who are paying way below the market rate. We have been predicting this as a consequence for two years now, of Osborne's assault on the private rented sector. How do they think we can house people on really low rents when we are having potentially infinite effective tax rates imposed on us? The JRF report didn't mention that. It was an ideologically-driven report to please those who commissioned it - so the narrative is to implicitly blame landlords for being 'greedy' rather than addressing the reasons why landlords are starting to increase rents wherever they can in order to not go under.

From: Ros Beck 26 July 2017 15:57 PM

I am very pleased to see the RLA's intervention here. This fake analysis of data of research and data is so damaging to the private rented sector and the economy as a whole. I have forwarded this article to all my contacts at the national newspapers in addition to writing a piece on the issue myself, which I hope might be published. People like Dan Wilson Craw seem to be able to get their flawed thinking showcased in national newspapers, whilst the truth of these matters is not reported nationally.

From: Ros Beck 26 July 2017 09:02 AM

It would be good if the RLA could set up a legal fund to fight this. I would be happy to contribute. It's the thin end of the wedge. How outrageous to fine a third party for someone's nuisance behaviour. This constant scapegoating must be confronted.

From: Ros Beck 25 May 2017 09:02 AM

We won't be 'pocketing' the money soon as many tenants on benefits will be evicted because of Section 24. They won't be able to say it anymore! Instead, they will start begging private landlords to invest more and take on more benefit tenants and they'll probably start offering incentives! These politicians really don't know their a from their e.

From: Ros Beck 05 January 2017 10:23 AM

Not just a register is needed but also treating crimes against landlords the same as crimes against other people. We recently had a house trashed by a tenant turning it into a cannabis factory - this has happened to us twice in the last two years. The police were even told by neighbours that they suspected the house was being used to grow cannabis; the police did nothing. The person was left free to continue to wreck our house and sell his cannabis - netting himself possibly tens of thousands of pounds whilst we then paid for the damage, were owed rent and had a void while the house was repaired. The tenant has got off scot-free. If a person somehow got access to an owner-occupied house and did this, the police would take it very seriously. So I think it is even more important that the police should be ordered by their superiors to take these crimes seriously, just as they had to be made to do this years ago in the context of 'domestic violence.'

From: Ros Beck 03 January 2017 10:00 AM

I think that just as some portfolio landlords will not be able to recoup all of the cost of Section 24 by increasing rents and that therefore the burden will be shared between landlords and tenants, this change will mean letting agents absorbing a lot of the cost whilst also attempting to pass on some to landlords. As a landlord I was unaware of the extent of charges letting agents imposed on tenants - so if I pay them £800 (2 weeks rent) to let a 6-bed house, I thought that was plenty for sometimes only having to show a few groups around (admittedly, other times they might do 20 viewings for all I know and no-shows are a real pain and they have a certain amount of paperwork to do) - I didn't know they would charge a fee of 6 x £100 to the tenants as well. They tend to keep that aspect hidden from the landlord and I think it's because they realise it is too much - the tenants probably also don't realise that the landlord pays a big whack as well. Banning fees is ridiculous Government interference in business, though. They should just set some reasonable limits so that letting agents can't take the p*ss.

From: Ros Beck 29 November 2016 10:01 AM

And they can also cash in on the discriminatory treatment by the Government against current landlords. This has also been key to their 'success.;' as has been and will be charging rents which grow through the roof. They will gain more dominance as well so renters will have little choice if the cheaper landlords are driven out. As many institutions like these donate to the Conservative Party it's a case of 'you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours.' It's a disgrace. Grainger had better watch its back. If Labour gets in (and we live in a strange world now), they'll most likely disallow institutions' finance costs and tax them on turnover as well. If I had the money to spare I wouldn't touch Grainger with a barge pole.

From: Ros Beck 28 November 2016 09:37 AM

Brit Sixteen Sixty Four: By 'professional landlords' do you mean the institutional ones which, for example, in the student market, charge three or four times what traditional landlords charge? On the one hand you want low rents and on the other you imply you prefer those who charge much higher rents. And you call the sector that charges lower rents 'greedy gearing speculators.' You don't make sense. As for saying landlords put rents up when interest rates have been at record low rates, many of us didn't, actually. Again, you don't know what you're talking about. Rents are really low in loads of parts of the country. Or are we to all agree that certain parts of London are the centre of the universe and all policy and debate should take this as their starting point? Also, if landlords sell to owner-occupiers (unlikely in many areas as people don't meet the mortgage lenders' criteria, don't want to buy and so on), then that house IS lost to the rental market. What or who will replace that rented house? As landlords who have not put the rent up - I have had one tenant paying £325 for 11 years and never put the rent up - why do you think we can't? The risk of voids isn't high in many areas as demand is so high. Also, if it weren't for the BTL model of leveraging - often at about 85% LTV in the past - (compared to owner-occupiers of 95%) - there would be an even worse shortage of rented housing now. Cash buyers or accidental landlords wouldn't be able to expand housing to anything like the same degree. Borrowing finance in business is normal. Do you think finance should be banned for all business or just that BTL mortgages should be made illegal? You say it's risky to borrow to buy houses, but that is the way people buy houses in this country. Should all mortgage lending be banned maybe? The points you make are highly contradictory and if followed would lead to a much worse housing crisis.

From: Ros Beck 03 November 2016 12:08 PM

Where is Wales? Has it disappeared from the 'UK'?

From: Ros Beck 16 September 2016 15:58 PM

Not just the stamp duty hike, but the abolition of landlords' right to offset finance costs and the re-definition of costs which have been paid to the mortgage lender as 'profit' to be taxed (bizarre), has already led to landlords going into survival mode. We will not buy any more houses in this insecure taxation environment, so for example, I would not buy a terraced house off an owner-occupier who may want to buy a more expensive new-build. In many of these cheaper areas, there are no 'first-time buyers' as often people don't have the work or lifestyle to have saved for a deposit... these potential sellers will be stuck with far fewer buyers around and the demand for new-builds will drop. Anything wrong with that logic?

From: Ros Beck 04 December 2015 10:02 AM

Yes, Barry. It is important to sign the petition and to write and/or visit your MP to protest against this measure - it is going to cause chaos for landlords and tenants. And before people blame landlords for increasing rents, what are we supposed to do when the Government wants us to pay massive amounts of tax even if our business makes a loss? Housing Associations receive subsidies from the Government; we don't. It's a bonkers tax which will drive landlords into the ground and this will mean massive disruption for tenants. Reverse the 'tax relief restriction.' (it's not tax relief - it's offsetting the costs of running our business and no other business in the UK is being asked to pay tax on their turnover - because it's a mad idea)

From: Ros Beck 17 September 2015 09:16 AM

It is also important to note that self-report surveys can be very unreliable. If anyone asked my most recent 'tenant from hell' had I been abusive towards her she would say 'yes' even though it was her screaming down the 'phone at me. She didn't seem to believe she had a responsibility to pay the rent and was not happy when she was therefore given her notice. So, if Shelter only surveyed and interviewed tenants then they only got one side of the story. Even more landlords could have been 'abused' than tenants, but Shelter wouldn't report those figures even if they collected them (which they wouldn't, of course). It is so ridiculously biased that they have a nerve publishing this one-sided nonsense as though it were 'truth.' I'd like to get right to the bottom of this and expose Shelter for what it is - an organisation that thinks it champions tenants when all it really does is attack landlords and damage the PRS. It is partly through its successful lobbying that the lunatic tax grab decision was made in the Summer Budget. We must get it reversed and pronto. Sign the petition and pass it on over social media etc. Here is the link: https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/104880

From: Ros Beck 13 September 2015 22:57 PM

Yes, Mike. You are quite right. It is taking a long time for people to grasp all of the facts and the one you mention is the most serious - a tax which rises the less money you have left to pay for it - a tax that can be applied even when you've made a loss. It's outrageous and iniquitous and it should not be accepted. We all have to fight to get it reversed. Here is the link to the petition: https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/104880 And also to a site which explains it all: http://saynotogeorge.co.uk/

From: Ros Beck 30 August 2015 22:08 PM

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