I was having a most interesting chat the
other day with a Dartford 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 Dartford, 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 Dartford 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 Dartford.
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 Dartford? The fact is, as a country, we are
facing a precarious rental shortage and need to get Dartford building in a way
that benefits a cross-section of Dartford 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 37,700 households in Dartford, currently 11,200 tenants
live in 4,700 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 Dartford needs to rise by 2,000 (i.e. 42.8%) .. taking the
total number of rented properties in the city to 6,700.
That means Dartford landlords need to buy around 200 properties
a year between now and 2025 to meet that demand – because according to my
calculations, an additional 4,800 people will want to live in all those
'additional' Dartford 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 Dartford house
prices, the majority of new Dartford 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 Dartford society who are already struggling.
Let's hope this new Government continues to see the contribution landlords give
to the country as a whole.
