Broken Housing Benefit System
November 7, 2017
We are seeing an increasing number of press reports about housing benefit where the landlord is cast as villain. Today BBC London reported on a house that had been converted into an HMO housing five tenants on benefits. The tenants were receiving the one bed LHA rate and the story argued that the landlord was receiving housing benefit for five studio flats. I’m not a great fan of converting houses into grim HMOs with lockable doors and austere communal areas and I don’t condone greedy […]
Have you seen ‘The Week The Landlords Moved In’ on BBC1? Chris Norris, Sarah Davidson and I reviewed episode one on radio show and podcast Inside Property this week. Some of the opening salvos were a parody of landlords that wouldn’t have been out of place on a sketch show. Successive investors tell us to “let it and forget it” and “buy low, rent high.” “We buy property for one reason and one reason only – to make money,” one landlord proclaimed, as if a property […]
I’m staying in New York this week, as ever the city offers some insights into trends that might be heading our way. I’ve just had a look around a state of the art gym that is huge but borrows design ideas from the boutique hotel and offers one to one sit down sessions on your metabolism to aid nutritional understanding. That’s as well as a personal trainer.
1. Regulation of Buy To Let Mortgages
According to NLA research, 57% of landlords use letting agents. Of these 37% are regular users, 19% occasional users and 22% use full management. So a big whopping 43% are choosing not to use agents and many will be taking advantage of the wide range of services out there now for this part of the lettings market.