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Why would anybody be a landlord?

2011 at 19:37 by Liz Hodgkinson

Many media commentators, particularly in The Guardian Money section, have inveighed against landlords, depicting them as greedy grasping moneymakers, intent on squeezing all they can out of poor hapless tenants. For most of us it's not like that at all. We became landlords for no other reason than we wished to secure some kind of reasonable income for ourselves in our old age. Pensions didn't do it, savings didn't do it, and the expectation that we would be able to work and earn money into our dotage, didn't do it either. So, we invested in property because there seemed nothing else, quite simply, on offer. So we bought properties which we hoped we might be able to rent out for a reasonable return. There was not much money involved; tenants only paid so much and there were endless rules and regulations to follow and properties had to be kept up to attract decent tenants. The situation now is that if there was any other way we could get a decent return on our money, virtually none of us would be landlords. It is a thankless task. You expend huge sums of money on buying your property, then come up against a raft of legal obligations which, quite honestly, negate the whole thing -- 'protecting' the deposits -- yet another way that insurance companies and the like can cream off huge sums from tenants or landlords - and then there are all these daft certificate, all of which cost money. If there were any other way of getting a decent return on our money, we wouldn't bother. It is simply too much hassle and we don't want to be bothered. We have not chosen to be in the hospitality industry, and we don't really want to be bothered with tenants' queries and complaints. So many people have entered the buy to let market thinking it's a way of getting good returns on capital and hen discover they have entered a ghastly minefield they could have avoided if only they could have got a decent return on interest at the bank. so -- please don't blame all the amateur landlords in the country fo ripping off tenants. It just is not the reality.
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