Is there money to be made in renting?

[Deleted User]

funnyvideo said:

The sad reality is that the idea we can keep ourselves in employment until we're 65 and then get paid a pension we can live on for the rest of our lives doesn't really exist.

The pension age has already gone up and will probably go up even further for people of my age (40). We don't know whether the state pension will even exist by then. We're being encouraged to put our spare cash into a private pension without really knowing what happens to the money or whether we'll ever see it again.

At the same time job security doesn't exist for many people and we don't know if ill health will prevent us from working in the future. 

Therefore some of us do what we can to reach the point in our lives where working becomes a choice rather than a necessity. Buying a property is a logical first step in the knowledge once the mortgage is paid off that's our largest outgoing taken care of. Buying a 2nd property is another step to future proofing yourself. It's a gamble, but what's the alternative?

For the record I don't own a second property but I know people who do or have done in the past. The ones who appear to do best from it is those who moved out of London but kept their London property to rent out. I know of one person it was a disaster for, it was a flat in a cheap part of the country so rental income was low and they had to pay service charge on top of everything else and ended up selling the property for less than they bought it for.

This is what it boils down to. People thinking that they have no alternative except buying to let. They are probably right too.

Thing is, while people your age can just and afford to do it sometimes, the younger ones won't be able to. It's just storing up problems for later when you have large numbers of people without an adequate pension, dying at their desks 

Thrugelmir

[Deleted User] said:

They have the right idea in Germany. Just take the rental stock into public ownership.

Little choice given 90% of the housing stock was destroyed in the war.  At least they had the land to space the blocks out well. 

jimbog

rigolith said:

They have the right idea in Germany. Just take the rental stock into public ownership.

This never happened

[Deleted User]

jimbog said:

rigolith said:

They have the right idea in Germany. Just take the rental stock into public ownership.

This never happened

It is happening right now.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/sep/29/berlin-vote-landlords-referendum-corporate

SpiderLegs

[Deleted User] said:

jimbog said:

[Deleted User] said:

They have the right idea in Germany. Just take the rental stock into public ownership.

This never happened

It is happening right now.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/sep/29/berlin-vote-landlords-referendum-corporate

No it isn’t 

jimbog

[Deleted User] said:

jimbog said:

[Deleted User] said:

They have the right idea in Germany. Just take the rental stock into public ownership.

This never happened

It is happening right now.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/sep/29/berlin-vote-landlords-referendum-corporate

Have a read of your link

Crashy_Time

Getting_greyer said:

andy444 said:

Norman_Castle said:

[Deleted User] said:

It's also immoral as someone else could buy your house and pay much less on a mortgage than they will pay you in rent. There is a shortage of housing to live in and letting property makes it worse.

That assumes "someone else" could finance the mortgage and it remains cheaper than rent. It also ignores ongoing maintenance costs.

How does letting properties reduce the number of available homes?

At the end of the day you're making money from other people's hard work. I can understand why people do it but it's not the most moral pursuit.

This is what most employers do. 

And mortgage lenders.

Crashy_Time

[Deleted User] said:

Norman_Castle said:

[Deleted User] said:

It's also immoral as someone else could buy your house and pay much less on a mortgage than they will pay you in rent. There is a shortage of housing to live in and letting property makes it worse.

That assumes "someone else" could finance the mortgage and it remains cheaper than rent. It also ignores ongoing maintenance costs.

How does letting properties reduce the number of available homes?

Do you know what the biggest reason people can't get a mortgage is? It's because they can't save a deposit due to paying 2x the monthly mortgage payment in rent.

If that was true no one would doubt that they can make money as a landlord.

Norman_Castle

Crashy_Time said:

Getting_greyer said:

andy444 said:

Norman_Castle said:

[Deleted User] said:

It's also immoral as someone else could buy your house and pay much less on a mortgage than they will pay you in rent. There is a shortage of housing to live in and letting property makes it worse.

That assumes "someone else" could finance the mortgage and it remains cheaper than rent. It also ignores ongoing maintenance costs.

How does letting properties reduce the number of available homes?

At the end of the day you're making money from other people's hard work. I can understand why people do it but it's not the most moral pursuit.

This is what most employers do. 

And mortgage lenders.

And Building Society savers.

Getting_greyer

Norman_Castle said:

Crashy_Time said:

Getting_greyer said:

andy444 said:

Norman_Castle said:

[Deleted User] said:

It's also immoral as someone else could buy your house and pay much less on a mortgage than they will pay you in rent. There is a shortage of housing to live in and letting property makes it worse.

That assumes "someone else" could finance the mortgage and it remains cheaper than rent. It also ignores ongoing maintenance costs.

How does letting properties reduce the number of available homes?

At the end of the day you're making money from other people's hard work. I can understand why people do it but it's not the most moral pursuit.

This is what most employers do. 

And mortgage lenders.

And Building Society savers.

And butchers, brewers and bakers.