Can A Landlord's Mortage Refuse To Rent To A Disabled Person On Benefits But Accept Retired People?

theartfullodger

Carrot007 wrote: »

You knew what I meant MR Pedantic ;-)

Errr... am I a mind reader? You stated

Being retired is not benefits.

westernpromise

onwards&upwards wrote: »

I get that lots of landlords won’t and I believe they all think it’s totally reasonable, I just don’t think access to safe and secure housing should be based on the prejudices of private landlords and mortgage lenders!

The point is that it's not prejudice. Prejudice is judging matters in advance of the facts. It's risk and experience.

The risk is that the worse off a tenant is, whether on benefits or otherwise, the lower the chance a landlord has of recovering any money from them if they default on the rent or damage the property. As they have no money, there are no real consequences to them of doing either, so there is an obvious higher risk of one or other of these things happening. There is no downside to drinking or otherwise squandering the rent, because they'll never have to pay it. If they're on benefits the landlord may, at great expense, persuade a court to make them pay £1 a week, but neither is going to be around for 10,000 weeks.

If OTOH they're on £35k a year in a salaried job and were to accumulate £10,000 of damage and / or arrears, a landlord can get their salary attached.

Then there's experience. 4,200 landlords in the survey - the 52% of 8,000 surveyed who won't accept benefits recipients - have average experience of 11.5 years as a landlord, and own on average more than 2.5 properties each. That amounts to a judgement formed after the facts of what tenants on benefits are actually like, based on a very large body of first-hand observation and direct experience. And it appears that, to 52% of landlords, they are so much trouble they aren't worth letting to in the first place.

Any individual benefit recipient may be a perfectly acceptable tenant, but that 52:48 split suggests that it's a coin toss whether you get a good one or a bad one.

Ordinarily you'd charge more for a higher risk, in the same way that insurance companies charge more to risky drivers. But the market sets rents, so you can't do this. The market rent for a given property is whatever it is, and the landlord can either get £200 a week from a higher-risk tenant for it or £200 a week from a lower-risk tenant. What's s/he obviously going to do?

davidmcn

Accepting a higher risk may constitute a "reasonable adjustment" for the purposes of the Equality Act. Obviously there'll be some sort of limit on that, but you can't reject requests for reasonable adjustments purely because there's a cost involved.

K80_Black

I find it hilarious that I couldn't find a rental property through normal channels as I'm disabled on benefits. These benefits are not due to be looked at again for a number of years, and the landlord can have my housing benefit paid directly to them. That's too high risk.

Compare that to any working person who can be let go with very little notice - and just because they're working doesn't mean they have savings. Their situation can change on a dime - mine is very unlikely to.

I was working, and had considerable savings - which got wiped out when I was hospitalised for 6 months and had to continue to pay rent - during this time my landlord threw away or sold all my possessions, so I had to then replace everything from clothes to computers. I was unable to claim any benefits in this period due to being too unwell. I could not bare to write a list of everything in the flat that I'd lost in order to take him to court to regain some money. This could happen to any of you. No matter how prepared you THINK you are.

onwards&upwards

westernpromise wrote: »

If OTOH they're on £35k a year in a salaried job and were to accumulate £10,000 of damage and / or arrears, a landlord can get their salary attached.

That person with the 35k salary could be up to their eyeballs in debt and if they lose their job will just go bankrupt and you won’t see a penny.

There is no risk free tenant.

Where do all the landlords who turn down disabled people on benefits think they should all live?

westernpromise

onwards&upwards wrote: »

That person with the 35k salary could be up to their eyeballs in debt and if they lose their job will just go bankrupt and you won’t see a penny.

Quite, but the credit check should surface the debt. Meanwhile, anyone with a job is a better bet than someone on benefits, because the former may or may not have any money, but the latter definitely hasn't.

onwards&upwards wrote:

There is no risk free tenant.

Of course not, but some are manifestly riskier than others. Nobody takes a high risk if exactly the same reward is available from a lower one.

Suppose I offered you the choice of two betting games. In one we toss a coin and you either win £10 or lose £10. In the other we toss a coin and you either win £10 or you lose £50. Nobody would choose the second game because you can only win £10 in either case, but in the second you could lose £50. Higher risk for same reward = bad idea.

onwards&upwards wrote:

Where do all the landlords who turn down disabled people on benefits think they should all live?

When did it become landlords' responsibility to think about this? One might equally ask Fortnum and Mason where they think people who can't afford F&M caviar should buy caviar.

gary83

onwards&upwards wrote: »

That person with the 35k salary could be up to their eyeballs in debt and if they lose their job will just go bankrupt and you won’t see a penny.

There is no risk free tenant.

Where do all the landlords who turn down disabled people on benefits think they should all live?

Know your not going to like the answer, but most private landlords are running a property or two as an investment, not as some kind of charitable act. They don't have any obligation to do anything other than look after their investment in the best way they can, any mistake in selecting the wrong tenant can be very expensive when it comes to eviction. Most people that have spent hundreds and thousands of pounds on property have done it to make money, not to house disabled people on benefits

onwards&upwards

gary83 wrote: »

Know your not going to like the answer, but most private landlords are running a property or two as an investment, not as some kind of charitable act. They don't have any obligation to do anything other than look after their investment in the best way they can,

Do you not think maybe this is the whole root of the problem?

onwards&upwards

westernpromise wrote: »

Quite, but the credit check should surface the debt. Meanwhile, anyone with a job is a better bet than someone on benefits, because the former may or may not have any money, but the latter definitely hasn't.


Of course not, but some are manifestly riskier than others. Nobody takes a high risk if exactly the same reward is available from a lower one.


When did it become landlords' responsibility to think about this? One might equally ask Fortnum and Mason where they think people who can't afford F&M caviar should buy caviar.

Caviar is not a basic human right, a place to live is.

How do you manage to do full credit checks on your tenants?

gary83

onwards&upwards wrote: »

Caviar is not a basic human right, a place to live is.

How do you manage to do full credit checks on your tenants?

It's not a private landlords responsibility to fulfill other people's basic human rights is it though? Why isn't your anger or frustration directed at the government for not providing adequate social housing?