BTL tax changes to cost London Landlords over £1B a year

cells

lisyloo wrote: »

I totally agree and I'm personally very familiar with the dilemma which basically boils down to a compromise between time (commute), space (property size) and money.
What I dont' agree with is that we're at a point where people have no choices and landlords have carte blanche.

people have a lot of choices but on the margin renters are bidding more and more to rent somewhere because the number of renters (due to population boom) are increasing quicker than the number of properties built

Think of the opposite, imagine the UK was going down in population by 500,000 a year. surely you would agree that if the population was decreasing that fast then rents would get lower and lower in real terms?

Renters are setting the price not landlords. There are many landlords that would be happy to accept 1/3rd the price if that's what the market could bear


In Germany the situation is very different, many more homes exist, a static population and they continue to build homes. The result is that the rent on an average 70sqm apartment is 390 euros (~£280pm) which is a world away from the 5-10x as high rents in London

cells

Thrugelmir wrote: »

If you think that rents have any correlation to GDP then you shouldn't be in business. As simply put they don't and never will do.

a large portion of GDP (about 15%) IS rents..........real or imputed.

Actually that's just the residential rents, with industrial and commercial and rental of land it will be higher maybe towards the 20% mark

lisyloo

I think it works the other way around.
Tenants drive rents rather than landlords.

You could have stopped here :-) (but thanks for your efforts).
I agree tenants can (and probably will) put upward pressure on prices.
What I disagree with is that landlords can unilaterally say "oh my tax bill has gone up x% so I'll just put up the rent". As you say landlords don't dictate the rents, tenants do.