Administration Fee Replacements

Hi

Since the admin fee ban has come into place the company is losing lots of income obviously. Do people have any smart suggestions to how to recoup these losses up front as opposed to simple rent increases which are not always possible?

Thanks

Cut down on overheads,… no more perks and no bonus …dont pay any mileage…, take a wage cut,… no more parties,Shop at Lidl Eat rice pudding

1 Like

You won’t be able to increase rents to recoup loss’s shortly as they are talking about rent caps , The only time you will be able to recoup is against an incoming new Tenant where you can set the rent to what ever level you like …Both major parties are out to stitch the Landlord up and I understand the exodus from the sector has already started. It’s totally ridiculous how Landlords are now being treated especially in a housing crisis when local authorities can’t offer any of their housing stock to people urgently needing a hone
home.

1 Like

Hey Geoff, I’m not convinced that we’ll see rent controls in the immediate future. On a national level, there are already controls on rent increases and tightening them would be a major piece of legislation, meaning it would probably take a year or two to pass as well as having some kind of grandfathering implementation so that it would only apply to new tenancies.

It’s possible that some Local Authorities (particularly Metro Mayors) will have the powers and the political will to implement rent controls. But then the devil is in the details, and there are dozens of different rent control schemes to choose from.

So a complex and uncertain scene!

Hi Sam, I don’t know where all these restrictions are going. It’s almost like a vendetta against Landlords. Little wonder rents are escalating with all the tax cuts and daft proposals.
If the hidden agenda is war on bad landlords why have the good ones got to suffer? If we don’t offset costs through increasing rents then we may as well sell up or is that intentionally where all this is going? We are supposed to be in a housing crisis yet the Government don’t offer any assistance or incentive to Landlords.
I heard that the Labour idiots were proposing compulsory purchase of private property if it had remained empty over a predefined period yet as we all know it can sometimes take a while to get “the right” tenant

1 Like

I think that the housing policymaking community has shifted towards wanting to shrink the private rented sector over the last 5 years. There could be a few reasons for this but the one that always seems salient to me is that politicians fear large, sudden house price deflation, and having a large number of buy to let investors makes house prices more volatile. This is because of the different incentives of owner-occupiers and buy-to-let properties if house prices begin to drop.

If prices begin to turn down, and you are an owner occupier, then you are likely to not want to sell. It’s your most valuable asset and you don’t want to lose large amounts of money on it. Plus it’s your home and moving home is not easy. Therefore, you don’t put your property on the market. Therefore supply to the market drops, helping keep prices up.

If, on the other hand, you are a buy to let investor, then as soon as prices begin to move down, you can assess whether you’d like to sell before your investments depreciate. If the property has already increased in price a lot since you bought it, then you might think that now is a good time to dispose. Lots of BtL investors doing this at the same time floods the market with new properties for sale, making supply shoot up, and so prices drop even faster.

So policymakers could be thinking that having fewer buy-to-let properties means less price volatility and less risk of voters blaming the Government for the depreciation of their biggest asset.

Avoiding house price deflation seems to be a bigger housing policy priority for the last few governments than anything else, including the state of the private rented sector. See all the new demand side policies like Help to Buy, etc. for more evidence.

So it could be that the rented sector is a victim of the UK’s obsession with keeping house prices high?

Would be interested to hear your thoughts on that!