Right to buy: Housing Associations

ukcarper

cells wrote: »

The easy one would be to sell off homes as they become vacant. I think that's 4% of the stock per year. So about 5 million social homes so can sell off about 200,000 a year just selling the ones that become vacant.

To be honest I think even that might be too high a figure to be viable as its quite a flood of properties for sale!

Maybe limit it to the most expensive 50% so its 100,000 sales a year which night be more sustainable. The other 50% put up for rent at market price

This is actually one of my risks as a London investor. If the above was done I suspect London prices would go nowhere for 10 years as the state would be selling about 30-40k homes in London

Sell to BTL landlord and pay him almost £16k LHA a year for a 2 bed (single Parent)

CLAPTON

ukcarper wrote: »

Sell to BTL landlord and pay him almost £16k LHA a year for a 2 bed (single Parent)

LHA should be slashed as it has caused much of the increase in prices
however the only solutions are to increase supply and/or limit demand

cells

CLAPTON wrote: »

LHA should be slashed as it has caused much of the increase in prices
however the only solutions are to increase supply and/or limit demand

If the state rented out its stock at market prices and used an AST type let that would limit demand and reorder demand

With a benefit cap we would see a slow but long term shift of unemployed people and pensioners moving out from inner london to outer london or elsewhere in england helping reduce congestion and reducing the differentials between london and rest of England

patman99

cells wrote: »

If the state rented out its stock at market prices and used an AST type let that would limit demand and reorder demand

With a benefit cap we would see a slow but long term shift of unemployed people and pensioners moving out from inner london to outer london or elsewhere in england helping reduce congestion and reducing the differentials between london and rest of England

Errm, these are the very demographic who commute the least, so replacing them with in-work renters would increase congestion.

What is to stop a HA changing it's status from charity/trust to a Limited co. to avoid the change in rules ?. That's right, absolutely nothing.
As for HA's renting at break-even, the biggest one in my area turns a £2m profit each year from it's rentals. Mind you, it not only rents to LA tenants, but also has properties it rents at full market value to the private rental sector.

Over the last 5 years it has aquired by its own means the land and permission to construct 2 new estates of dwellings (all paid-for by the HA and not by the LA).

Another HA uses it's profits to purchase properties via auction and employes its own team to carry out repairs.

cells

patman99 wrote: »

Errm, these are the very demographic who commute the least, so replacing them with in-work renters would increase congestion.

What is to stop a HA changing it's status from charity/trust to a Limited co. to avoid the change in rules ?. That's right, absolutely nothing.
As for HA's renting at break-even, the biggest one in my area turns a £2m profit each year from it's rentals. Mind you, it not only rents to LA tenants, but also has properties it rents at full market value to the private rental sector.

Over the last 5 years it has aquired by its own means the land and permission to construct 2 new estates of dwellings (all paid-for by the HA and not by the LA).

Another HA uses it's profits to purchase properties via auction and employes its own team to carry out repairs.

If an unemployes person living in hackney swaps places with an employed persons in reading traveling daily to the square mile what you would find is that their combined trip goes from 300 miles train + zero miles to zero miles plus 10 miles walking.

You swap a 300 mile a week train journey to a dozen miles walking a week.


With regards to who's to stop a Housing Association stealing the States assets? Well seeing as the state writes the laws the courts must obey that doesn't seem too difficult a task. Also out of interest who do you propose will own this limited Company and what's to stop them selling the assets and paying themselves all the profits?

Jason74

cells wrote: »

If you pretend for a moment that private rentals are illegal or where never invented they simply dont exist

then you have just two groups. owners and council renters

What that means is if the council renters stock is high then the owner stock must be lower so they both add upto 100%

people who like and want a high portion of council homes dont realise that it has to be at the cost of home ownership to some degree

The only (fairly big!) problem with your logic here is that it doesn't currently reflect the reality of UK housing. As it stands, we have three main tenures in the UK. Ownership, social renting, and private renting. If one of those three shrinks, it's possible for the other two to grow.


Clearly both ownership and social renting provide people with a level of long term stability and security, while private renting in its current form does not. Therefore, if we're looking at things from the point of view of having as many people as possible suitably and securely housed, it is beneficial for social renting and ownership to increase, while private renting declines.


Sadly, what we have at the moment is the exact opposite. Private renting is growing, driven by the demands of investors rather than people who actually live in the properties while the other two tenures both decline. This is a major problem, and one that needs to be addressed. However, given that this Government has been consistently and spectacularly wrong in pretty much every area of housing policy, the chances of it changing are sadly remote.

wotsthat

If long term stability is important the government could bring in laws to increase security of tenure for private renters.

Building a load of council houses at taxpayer expense and subsidising the occupants in perpetuity to increase security of tenure is like taking the world's biggest sledgehammer to crack the world's smallest nut.

ukcarper

wotsthat wrote: »

If long term stability is important the government could bring in laws to increase security of tenure for private renters.

Building a load of council houses at taxpayer expense and subsidising the occupants in perpetuity to increase security of tenure is like taking the world's biggest sledgehammer to crack the world's smallest nut.

Increasing security of tenure in private rental sector without reducing supply is a balancing act.

There is no reason that new council housing rental contracts need to be the same as in the past and the existing LHA system is very expensive for tax payer.

leveller2911

MSD1970 wrote: »

A huge percentage of properties sold off under RTB are now tenanted as they were sold on to buy-to-let landlords. (I think the figure is around 50% of RTB sales). The rents are much higher. (I work for a Housing Association and know of a 3 bed house with a private rent of £575 per month which is £210 more than our rent for the same property next door. Both properties have rent paid by Housing Benefit, just the private one is enriching a BTL landlord who may or may not be maintaining the property to the same standard and has no compunction about serving a Notice to Quit thereby making a family homeless because he feels like selling up to cash in his investment.
Extending RTB to further Housing Association tenants is shortsighted, dogma driven societal vandalism and should be opposed at every turn.

But your happy with the status quo whereby HA fail to maintain the properties they own?.

Happy to employ surveyors,housing officers,maintenance staff who know naff all about maintenace etc , all on 6 month contracts whereby no one stays with the HA for more than a year or so?.

Fail to enforce tenancy agreements with regards to anti social behaviour , where tenants who make a complaint are forced to go through 3 stages of the complaints proceedures which can take 3yrs and finally onto the Housing Ombudsman?.

HA are worse than the old style council housing system at least in the old days the council maintained the properties, albeit poorly at times. HA just don't bother to maintain their housing stock and are as bad as any BTL landlord.

If they sell off the older properties that need modernising and make a decent profit on the sale (which they do) and then build new social housing with the money then this is a win win situation for everyone.

wotsthat

ukcarper wrote: »

Increasing security of tenure in private rental sector without reducing supply is a balancing act.

If people fled private rented because security of tenure increased that would indicate it's not as important to the tenants as we hand wringers might believe.

Instead of trying to solve a problem which may not exist and deciding how people should live their lives we could solve the root problem, allow more houses to be built and let the market decide the balance between short term private rented, longer term private rented and OO.