Property

Along with the hedge fund managers, the other people to have benefited from the financial crisis are landlords. At least in London. As cheap credit has dried up and banks have become more cautious about who they lend to, the number of people moving into their first bought home has plummeted. As a result, the rentals market has suffered a capacity crisis. In such a seller's market, prices will inevitably increase, reducing the amount people can save for deposits, increasing the number of people looking to rent and pushing up the price of rent. This viscous circle will probably not increase indefinitely, as higher rents will eventually lure more landlords into the market, but it is a taste of things to come. We are never going to build enough houses in this country for everyone to become a home owner, so the government wants more people to get used to renting for life, or at very least much later into life. I have no issue with this in principle. As a nation, we are obsessed with home ownership to the point where thousands of people a year (more so in recent years) have bankrupted themselves chasing the ideal of homeownership: their desperation to own the roof over their heads has left them with no roof at all. So renting must form part of the new more sober economic reality. However, if we are to change our societal habits, shouldn't we also review the rules that govern them?
I am a long term renter. I have no desperate desire to own my own house. However, I am an adult, so I do desire to decorate my house in a manner that I see fit, which at my time of life is a bit more involved than putting up a few posters. Equally, I understand that when I relinquish my tenancy, my landlord should not be burdened with the task of letting a flat decorated to my idiosyncratic tastes. Rented accommodation should start and end a blank canvas, what happens in the interim should be up to the tenants. To be fair to my landlord, that is basically what they told us, although I'm not sure how they'd feel if we repainted the place a non-white colour. Still, any major adjustments would need to be reversed before the end of our tenancy, which would tend to discourage anything like, say, putting up shelves.
I suppose the problem from a landlord's point of view is that by allowing your tenants to make your property into their home absolutely, you run the considerable risk that they will be absolute slobs, whose idea of a home is a pigsty. Maybe longer term rental agreements would give people the security to want to invest properly in a rented flat, but then, really such agreements already exist, and buying a leasehold property is almost as expensive as buying a property outright. The other problem with such arrangements is that they don't suit the purposes of most landlords, who want to be free to do what they like with the property, and any long term letting arrangement precludes that. Perhaps some sort of happy medium could be reached, perhaps landlords with more than a certain number of properties should be obliged to let a portion of them out on a medium-term basis, in much the same way as inner-city developers have to provide an amount of key worker housing.
Along with the obligations, better incentives could exist for landlords who take a less short-term view. For example, there is currently no incentive for landlords to make their properties energy efficient, as they do not have to pay the related energy costs. The result is that they install lowest common denominator boilers, white goods and insulation. The costs to both the tenants and the environment are not insignificant and should be considered if we are to move to a society of long term lettings. Perhaps some form of tax incentive broadly equivalent to to the energy savings could be applied to rental income.
Of course there are some landlords for whom no incentives are required. They will fit a flat to the standards they would expect in their own home, and work with their tenants to make it a home that is well maintained and well decorated. These people are unfortunately the exception and are hard to find; they tend to be private landlords with only the one property. For bigger landlords, the market leaves them with little incentive to make any effort, and the law discourages them from even letting properties unfurnished. It is an arrangement that suits them very well, and it's perhaps time it was modified.
I have just started thinking about this and I've managed to come up with some ideas already. As buying a house becomes less of an investment and more of a risk, more people are likely to think about it. If the culture of renting is to become engrained in our society, the culture of letting needs to change. Whilst property law is notoriously tricky, that shouldn't discourage those who need to think about how to change it.