Are we that desperate to get on the housing "ladder"?

[Ignis Fatuus]

If the UK rental market was anything like the German one, I'm sure there'd be much less desire to buy. Although my family owns a few places, growing up in Germany has no doubt added to my reluctance to buy.

I found the greatest advantages of renting in Germany to be that you simply have a lot more rights as a tenant, and that you get a lot more stability and little risk of eviction. Also that you're allowed to decorate the place as you see fit, and in most cases keep whatever pets you like. All these things are a huge hassle when renting in the UK.

In other countries, when you rent a house, it is your home. The physical object may belong to the landlord, but you have a home there and so you do have rights and security in it. In the UK, it simply belongs to the landlord.

ISTM that in other countries landlords expect to make a serious long-term investment in the property. I don't know about Germany, but in France much of the rental stock is owned by large and stable institutions, who don't look for an above-market return on it. So rents are reasonable, and tenants have rights. Like decorating your own home as you want, and knowing that you can keep living in it if you want to.

In the UK much of the stock seems to belong to private BTL landlords, who want to turn a substantial profit on minimal input, and would be appalled at the idea that the property wasn't simply theirs to dispose of as they please. The government has caved in to this (perhaps well-intentioned, thinking that it would encourage the rental sector) and created the Assured Shorthold Tenancy, which forces most tenants to live in somewhere that they can never safely call home.

That is why I bought a house a few years ago. I came back to the UK after 15 years in France, and naturally thought of renting a place. I did rent somewhere, but didn't like the setup, so I bought somewhere, out of distaste for British renting.

[Ignis Fatuus]

I might add that, aside from the question of a reasonable rental sector, most other countries seem to realise that if you have more people wanting houses than there are houses, there are only 2 possible results of that. Either you build more houses, or houses are in effect rationed by price - the price rises until a sufficient number of people can't afford them. That is not a problem of shortage of money or lending, it is a shortage of houses.

In the UK you don't build enough houses, so prices are seriously inflated as an automatic stringent rationing system. But instead of understanding that, and either accepting it or fixing it by building more, governments imagine or pretend that they can "help people on to the housing ladder" by some sort of financial tweaking. Doh! If you do that without building more houses, every household helped on to the housing ladder is another one excluded from it. A further result is a twisted economy: which is referred to by those who own a house as a "healthy" housing market.

[SueEllen]

easy to avoid with some very basic financial planning...

assuming you can trust your offspring.

Seeing and hearing what I've heard if you are lucky there is only one of your offspring you can trust and that child may not be your favourite.

Then after you are gone they all have a massive fight and fall out over it.

[SueEllen]

In other countries, when you rent a house, it is your home. The physical object may belong to the landlord, but you have a home there and so you do have rights and security in it. In the UK, it simply belongs to the landlord.

You do have rights in the UK as a tenant but unfortunately these rights aren't written down properly in law.

If you are a bad tenant in the UK you can destroy the house, and make it very difficult and expensive for the landlord to evict you. While this court action is going on you can prevent the landlord from coming near the property let alone enter it.

ISTM that in other countries landlords expect to make a serious long-term investment in the property. I don't know about Germany, but in France much of the rental stock is owned by large and stable institutions, who don't look for an above-market return on it. So rents are reasonable, and tenants have rights. Like decorating your own home as you want, and knowing that you can keep living in it if you want to.

In the UK much of the stock seems to belong to private BTL landlords, who want to turn a substantial profit on minimal input, and would be appalled at the idea that the property wasn't simply theirs to dispose of as they please. The government has caved in to this (perhaps well-intentioned, thinking that it would encourage the rental sector) and created the Assured Shorthold Tenancy, which forces most tenants to live in somewhere that they can never safely call home.

When I rented in the UK the majority of the landlords I dealt with understood their responsibilities and tenants rights. They worked out if they were reasonable then there would be no reason why the tenant wouldn't be reasonable back. Then again these people had been landlords for years.

[d000hg]

You need to factor the lifetime cost of renting versus buying.
If you pay off your mortgage in 25 years, assuming you buy at, say, 30.
By 55 you are debt free and have about 20 years left to live, with no major outgoings, mortgage or rent.

That's our thinking too, however when we ran our budget just last month we found that we needed an annual income of £30k to live as we are now, WITHOUT rent factored in. We don't live extravagantly or have kids but it was quite scary... £30k is a decent salary for most people (basically what the wife earns as a teacher) but on the current standing if we paid of a mortgage and retired, we'd need the equivalent of a full-time salary still. Rent accounts for only 1/3 of our monthly budget!

[Ignis Fatuus]

You do have rights in the UK as a tenant but unfortunately these rights aren't written down properly in law.

If you are a bad tenant in the UK you can destroy the house, and make it very difficult and expensive for the landlord to evict you. While this court action is going on you can prevent the landlord from coming near the property let alone enter it.


When I rented in the UK the majority of the landlords I dealt with understood their responsibilities and tenants rights. They worked out if they were reasonable then there would be no reason why the tenant wouldn't be reasonable back. Then again these people had been landlords for years.

I know that bad tenants can make life difficult for a landlord, but I don't think that's particularly relevant here. I wasn't talking about good or bad relations between landlord and tenant, I was referring to the fact that a tenant doesn't have real security. Typically, after the initial 6 months tenancy is up, it defaults to a rolling 1-month notice. If you want to feel that you will still be in the same place 2 or 10 years from now, you are dependent on the landlord's goodwill. I'm not going to spend thousands on furniture to go in a house, with someone else always able do decide at any moment that I will be out in a month.

And you normally can't decorate it as you wish. Of course a reasonable landlord will be happy to let you decorate it any reasonable way that you want - but again that's not your home, it's somebody else's. It's not like that in other places, for example in France we let the 2 teenagers paint their walls as they liked. One did an op-art effect and the other did a full-size cartoon on one wall. When the landlord's agent checked out out the place as we left, he merely nodded his slight approval for the op-art over the gothic cartoon. But it didn't matter, it was accepted that the tenants would decorate as they liked, and the landlord would redecorate before a new tenant.

And there are other rules, and it all goes one way. Most rented places specify that smoking is not allowed. IMHO that's my choice, not my landlord's. But in the UK it seems to be taken for granted that it is the landlord's choice. I know there is an argument that future tenants might not be indifferent to that, what I have a problem with is that it is just naturally taken to be the the landlord's decision, end of story. As if it is his home, not mine.

That in fact was the last straw that made me go and buy. Having the house inspected by the agent every 3 months, having to tidy up and hide the ashtrays FFS, I felt like a child again; worse, my parents were never like that, they let me have my own life.

Sorry, but renting in the UK is not the same as renting in other places, to the gross detriment of a sane rental sector and thence of the market as a whole. I have rented in France, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Germany, and the US, and none has been as distasteful to be a tenant in as the UK.

[formant]

God, yes, the house/flat inspections! I'm pretty sure that doesn't happen anywhere other than in the UK. It's utterly ridiculous.

[Pondlife]

One word: Makler.

You want HOW MUCH just for someone's phone number?

[darmstadt]

One word: Makler.

You want HOW MUCH just for someone's phone number?

Never used one here. The first place I got off the wall at work, the second I stuck an advert in the paper and the 3rd one I got from an advert by the builders of the apartment in the paper, but yes, Mäkler is a horrible word here. Not only do you have to put down your 2-3 months deposit but you also have to pay them around that much for doing bugger all. Think about what it is like buying a house here, its bloody difficult and I've been through the shennanigans...

[vetran]

ok if you removed private landlords who would own the properties?

Big business in tax haven PLC.

They would lobby to raise rent quarterly. They would arrange notice periods so short that you would need an atomic clock to measure them. Of course no tax would be paid in UK and the maintenance team would be on ICT visas.


Possibly its your choice to smoke, however being a non smoker I notice the minute I go in a smokers house and it lingers in all the soft furnishings forever. So if you have tenant that is a smoker you need to wash or repaint everything 2-3 times. Same for pets. One assumes you don't want this cost taken out of your deposit?