Think-tank urges for a ban on landlords buying new-builds! Landlords are too wealthy and should be banned from buying new-build homes and have a buy to let mortgage lending cap to stop them growing even richer, urges a political think-tank! There should also be a ‘three-year rule’ that bans newly-built homes being rented to ensure they become owner-occupied, according to the ‘Whose Home’ report by the Strategic Society Centre (SSC). There is a wide disparity in wealth between tenants and their landlords, found the study, which looked at the effects of landlords on the housing market. Private landlords are twice as likely to be earning more than £2,000 a month (60% rather than 30% of renters) and more than twice as likely to have saved £5,000 in the last two years (19% compared to just 9% of renters). The mean financial wealth of private landlords is £75,103, and the median is £20,500, whereas the equivalent financial wealth figures for private renters are just £9,506 and £398, according to the report’s research. A quarter of private landlords have financial assets worth £70,000 or more and two in five have financial assets worth £30,000 or more. James Lloyd, director of the Strategic Society Centre said: “The Government champions ‘aspiration’ and getting people on to the property ladder. But the last decade has seen the unending growth of the private rented sector, with more and more private tenants trapped renting seeing their dreams slip away. The Government should urgently bring forward plans for new home-building and shared-ownership schemes. But building new homes will never be enough for the government to help people’s aspiration for home ownership without new restrictions to ensure that new-build homes go to new homeowners.” The last two decades have witnessed a huge rise in the number of households living in the private rented sector, with ownership dropping among 25-34-year-olds by a third since 2001. The number of people who rent their home from a landlord has almost doubled to 8.5 million people over the past 15 years, according to research from housing charity Shelter. While the number of private landlords as a proportion of the population has more than doubled. The number of buy-to-let mortgages stood at just over 1million in 2007, according to the Council of Mortgage Lenders (CML) and made up 8.7% of all mortgages. By 2012 the number had jumped by nearly 50% to 1.45 million and made up 12.8% of all mortgages. In this year’s Budget, George Osborne announced Help To Buy, a set of measures to help first-time buyers on to the property ladder. It included a guarantee, which will be introduced next year, to help aspiring owners buy a home with a deposit with only 5%. The proposals have been met with fierce criticism with critics arguing that the scheme will create another house price bubble.
Posted on: Wed, 10 Jul 2013 11:33:49 +0000
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