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Tuesday, June 28, 2011

Landlords need more support

Industry expert John Heron MD of Paragon Mortgages has used his position of Chair at the Council of Mortgage Lenders (CML) annual conference to call for more government support for private landlords.

He concluded: “Based on Government household formation projections and economic forecasts, it is estimated that there will be 4.1 million households living in the private rented sector by 2016, a significant jump from the 3.4 million we have today. The existing stock of private rented property is already under great pressure, so there needs to be a major expansion in the supply of privately rented property to ensure the sector can cope with the number of renters already in the pipeline.”


My thoughts are that what landlords really need is to be generally left alone.  No more legislation or regulations such as the idiotic landlord licence of the like that the previous government constantly threatened.

From my point what would be more useful would be a tax regime that allowed landlords to off set improvement costs to their properties against rental profits.  This to me would encourage landlords to improve their property and de facto the condition of their tenants.

Currently capital costs can only be included in a landlords expenses where they are for repair or renewal.  In any other business there are a full range of capital allowances available which can be off set against profits.  This to me has always struck me as unfair. It does nothing to recognise the genuine role of private sector landlords operating a rental business.  Interesting to hear your thoughts?

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1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Surely the difficulty is the apparent inability - perhaps it is unwillingness - of the government to understand that private lettings are a business. To the government lettings are not 'any other business' because they because they do not see lettings as a business, so the change required is somewhat more substantial than you are suggesting.