I was having a most interesting chat the other day with a Maidenhead landlord when we were looking at a property. As I am sure you are aware, I am always happy to cast my eye over any potential buy to let purchase in Maidenhead, be that you emailing me a Rightmove link, a brochure in the post or even treading the carpet and seeing it together. I don't charge for that, and you don't even need to be a client of mine. We got talking about the Maidenhead Property Market and this landlord brought up the subject of a report he had read from the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) that stated almost 1.8m new rental homes are needed by 2025 to keep up with current demand from tenants. He wanted to know what this meant for Maidenhead.
Well my blog reading friends, some commentators said last
Winter that buy to let was about to die, what with the new stamp duty changes
and how mortgage tax relief will be calculated. Others even said 500,000 rental
properties would flood the market nationally in the 12 months after the new
Stamp Duty rules came into force on the 1st April 2016 as landlords left the
rental market. Well, all I can say is, I wish all the landlords of those half a
million properties would hurry up and put them on the market – because I have
plenty of other potential landlords wanting to buy them!
Back to the matter in hand.. if the RICS and PwC are indeed
correct, what does this mean for Maidenhead? The fact is, as a country, we are
facing a precarious rental shortage and need to get Maidenhead building in a
way that benefits a cross-section of Maidenhead society, not just the fortunate
few. I call on the Prime Minister to drop the higher stamp duty tax on buy to let
purchases to ease the pressure on the rental market.
Of the 25,400 households in Maidenhead, currently 9,100
tenants live in 3,600 private rented properties. If we apportion those 1.8m
households equally around the Country, that means in nine years’ time, the
number of rental properties in Maidenhead needs to rise by 1,600 (i.e. 42.8%)
.. taking the total number of rented properties in the town to 5,200.
That means Maidenhead landlords need to buy around 200
properties a year between now and 2025 to meet that demand – because according
to my calculations, an additional 3,900 people will want to live in all those
'additional' Maidenhead rental properties – so why is the government penalising
landlords?
Thankfully the new housing minister Gavin Barwell detached
Teresa May's new administration from the Cameron/Osborne laser-like focus of
just home ownership to solve our housing issues, saying "we need to build
more homes for every single type of person needing a home and not focus on one
single tenure". The private rented sector became a stooge under David
Cameron's watch and still, with increasingly unaffordable Maidenhead house
prices, the majority of new Maidenhead households will be relying on the rental
sector in the future to house them. I can only say Westminster must put in
place the measures that will allow the rental sector to flourish. Any
restrictions on the supply of rental property will push up rents (bad news for
tenants), thus side-lining those members of Maidenhead society who are already
struggling. Let's hope this new Government continues to see the contribution
landlords give to the country as a whole.
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