Why do people pay such high rent?

halogen

I've had both sides of this.
My mortgage ( 3 bed semi) is £250. 3 years ago I had to move with work. Best I could find renting was one room for £750 and I'm still paying off the dent in my savings that made.
I would hate to be renting again. No ability to decorate, have to keep it tidy, expensive, always at the whim of landlords...
I've rented 4 times in my life...twice my landlords kept the deposit and never even explained why- just disappeared.

lookstraightahead

halogen wrote: »

I've had both sides of this.
My mortgage ( 3 bed semi) is £250. 3 years ago I had to move with work. Best I could find renting was one room for £750 and I'm still paying off the dent in my savings that made.
I would hate to be renting again. No ability to decorate, have to keep it tidy, expensive, always at the whim of landlords...
I've rented 4 times in my life...twice my landlords kept the deposit and never even explained why- just disappeared.

I suppose sometimes it's whether you feel vulnerable or not with renting. To me it's the other way around as a tenant. I'm the landlords customer and the landlord needs to be at my whim (fairly I mean). If you had wanted to find out why your deposit was kept you could have.

lookstraightahead

Retired_Mortgage_Adviser wrote: »

I guess there are many reasons.

My daughter got a well paid graduate job and moved to London after university. She stayed in central London, in house-shares and later a small pokey flat, all the while saving up diligently. Once she had enough for a deposit, she bought a nice 2 bed flat in Zone 4 West London, because that was what you did.

Within a little more than a year, she got thoroughly fed up of the commute and the limitations her home placed on where she could work (without an even longer commute) and her social life, so she got a consent-to-let, let her flat out and is now back to renting a small pokey flat in central London. She is happy with that and has moved to a better job as well.

In time she might want to get back to being a home-owner but at the moment she appreciates the flexibility that renting gives her and the option to not have a commute.

Completely understand where your daughter is coming from. Mine would feel the same. So much more to life. Who cares about pokey when you have friends! And she's been used to student accommodation :rotfl:

Crumble2018

lookstraightahead wrote: »

I suppose sometimes it's whether you feel vulnerable or not with renting. To me it's the other way around as a tenant. I'm the landlords customer and the landlord needs to be at my whim (fairly I mean). If you had wanted to find out why your deposit was kept you could have.

You have probably been lucky with your landlord. We have so much that needs doing where we are, but the landlord can't afford to do anything about it!! In the 3 years we have rented, it has never really felt like home. The fact that we can't change anything bothers me - I guess that contributes to the feeling that it's not "mine".

SouthLondonUser

I am not surprised to hear the usual smug, judgmental, one-size-fits-all criticism against renting (money down the drain, etc.). The truth is that, as with most things in life, IT DEPENDS, and any opinion which doesn’t take this into account but tries to infer some universal rules about how and why renting is better is idiotic.

Buying comes with HUGE fixed costs. Especially in the South East where houses are more expensive. Generally speaking, if you know you will most likely stay in the same area for a very long time (10+ years), then buying is almost always better than renting, even if property prices were to stay flat (i.e. to go down in real terms=, ie net of inflation) or go down a bit.

In all other cases, it depends. On many many factors.

Stamp duty, especially in the South East, is expensive; there are many parts of London where stamp duty alone would correspond to 12 to 24 months worth of rent.
If you buy somewhere, then need to move somewhere else after a few years because of a new job, it is quite easy to lose money or break even vs renting, unless property prices go up massively in a very short time. This doesn’t mean a life-changing decision to move from Brighton to Scotland – if you live in East London and get offered a dream job in South West London, good luck with the commute, unless you decide to move.

Lots of people compare the mortgage instalment vs the cost of renting. That’s totally the wrong comparison; you need to compare all the fixed costs (especially stamp duty) and, also, capital repayments are not a cost because they add to your wealth, that’s money you are repaying to yourself. I wonder how many people who come up with their smug judgmental nonsense would even be able to properly run the numbers to asses the cost of renting vs buying.

Renting for very, very long periods will almost never be cheaper, unless you have a genuine need to move somewhere else every 18 months for 10 years. But, for shorter periods, there are a gazillion reasons why renting doesn’t only make sense but is easily cheaper than buying:
your career is unstable or at the beginning and you don’t know where you’ll end up;
you may want to try out an area before deciding you want to buy there;
you may want the convenience of a certain area now (eg easy commute now that you are childless) but may want to move to an area with better schools once you have kids.

halogen

lookstraightahead wrote: »

I suppose sometimes it's whether you feel vulnerable or not with renting. To me it's the other way around as a tenant. I'm the landlords customer and the landlord needs to be at my whim (fairly I mean). If you had wanted to find out why your deposit was kept you could have.

Indeed. I felt very vulnerable. I tried several times to find out about my deposit but they never replied.

JC9

In summary: there are a multitude of valid reasons to rent or to buy and people really shouldn't need to justify their choice to anyone else but themselves.

If it makes sense to you personally and financially, it's very likely the correct decision.

Morbier

What a can of worms the OP has opened!

Having read through the replies, I think there's an obvious attitude problem, peculiar to the UK, which isn't seen in Europe, where renting is more the norm.

It's seen as some sort of failure to be renting instead of buying, when there are all sorts of reasons for doing so. I've a friend who tells me that the monthly rent I pay is 'dead' money, whereas I see it as money that provides me with a very nice house in a quiet area, that I really enjoy. Yes, I'm retired and (according to the majority) I should own my own home by now. But life got in the way and, similar to a previous poster, a divorce left me unable to afford a mortgage and put me back at the bottom of the ladder, at a time in my life when it was to late to 'catch up.'

We're not all drinkers, smokers, party-goers etc who squander every penny we have!

Rant over.

eddddy

I know a number of people renting in central London. They would love to buy, because...

• Monthly mortgage payments would be much less than their monthly rent payments

But they can't because...

• They don't have the deposit, and/or
• They don't pass mortgage lender's affordability criteria (i.e. 5 times their income plus a deposit isn't enough money to buy a central London flat.)

Ironically, they do pass landlord's affordability criteria, even though the rent is much higher than mortgage payments would be

epinjy

Morbier wrote: »

What a can of worms the OP has opened!

Having read through the replies, I think there's an obvious attitude problem, peculiar to the UK, which isn't seen in Europe, where renting is more the norm.

It is so easy to have a negative attitude to renting, when it is so easy to have a negative experience renting. Unfair deposit deductions, inadequate housing standards, no respect for privacy/ landlords/agents letting themselves in whenever they feel like it, rip off fees pulled out of some agents a... (thank god that's over), and now being told you can't afford to buy a house when you are already paying much more each month in rent. It is like you are a second class citizen when renting.