just been told the landlord is selling, the F**king b******s, third time this has happened. I am earning jack s*** after being made redundant beginning this year, this is turning into a F**king wonderful year!!!!!

BTL scum, scum, scum!!!!! I am getting sick of this moving

our landlords have changed 4 times in 2 years

will be out of the loop soon though hopefully

Oh dear 😐

Bad times 🙁

Is he selling to avoid the potential rise in capital gains tax I wonder?

Mmm bacon tomato and lettuce.

Bad times, bad luck. But I'm not sure you can really blame them, you agreed to the contract terms, they are doing it for a business, not for charideeee. Not fun for you anyhow, hope you find somewhere new soon. This is the reason I decided finally to buy, too much of a pain renting.

Multiple exclamation marks + 1
Swear filter evasion + 1
Other punctuation slightly lacking + 1

I'd prefer to see a bit more CAPS though, maybe some misspelt words due to sheer RAGE! Oh, and managing to separate it into paragraphs didn't do you any favours – if you were properly angry you would lose the ability to hit the return key.

Not a bad effort though, keep it up.

Lucky you Coffeeking….we would love to buy but rent for a reason. It pisses me off something chronic as without a deposit we can't get a mortgage and because we rent we can't save!!!!

The stupid thing is we've been paying rent for 5 years….and many mortgages are less than our rent right now.

Lucky you Coffeeking….we would love to buy but rent for a reason.

Yes, I'm not unaware of that problem, I'm fortunate enough to have been able to save while renting, but I did rent a very cheap place while saving, chose not to have kids, chose to run a cheap car not a nice one, never buy new bike parts, always buy second hand electrical goods etc and I have monthly combined elec and gas bills of about £35-40 average. I'm not suggesting everyone should do the same, but if you're going down the luck route…

Sorry to hear mate, same thing happened to us recently, managed to move to the flat next door and found out that ours isn't selling and will go back on the letting market afterall! :'(

Nickegg – keep the faith. High house prices are a ticking time bomb for this country, now we have a Conservative government swinging the cuts axe, houses may well become much more affordable to the average person over the next few years!
🙂

Coffeeking….Just out of interest, how much did you save and how long did it take?

You obviously made sacrifices and fair play to you. Not having kids is the least of our money problems though!

The trouble is the lack of 95% mortgages…….not everyone who borrows 95% is irresponsible. 5 years of paying rent proves we can make the repayments, surely?

Still seems an unattainable dream to us though 🙄

Our landlord decided to put the house on the market in January, but said they would love for us to stay until the house sold (and getting their rental income obviously!). They weren't willing to budge though on giving us a discount for putting up with the hassle of viewings etc. so we left. I take pleasure in the fact that the house still hasn't sold yet, nasty I know. No idea why they were putting it on the market, it went on at 5 grand more than they'd paid for it in 2003 and they'd extended it.

Co-op own current place and in the longterm will knock it down to get access to the greenfield land on the back to develop on, but not anytime soon 🙂

Surely the lack of 95% mortgages isn't the problem though? The prices are the problem… if prices were to drop, then your 5% deposit becomes more than 5%, and you can get yourself a lower LTV mortgage….

I reckon prices in this part of the world are pretty stable actually.

How can a lack of 95% mortgages not be a contributing factor?

Doesn't really matter anyway as it simply won't happen for us with 1 income at the moment!

Sacrfices like not going out and not buying luxury good were how i got our deposit together. I scrabbled together 17.5% deposit in a suprising time

nickegg – Member

I reckon prices in this part of the world are pretty stable actually.

😆

What timeframe are you talking about?

currently i have 10 grand as a redundancy payout and some savings, and the prospect of reasonable money in the not to distant future. So i am not far from being able to move out of the rental game. But i am not quite there yet, so it looks like i'll be paying out more on fees, deposits, removal costs etc. When i really don't want to.

mrmo – really sorry to see the bad news. Hope it works out for you soon.

i was told by the letting agent that the owner tried to remortgage and the bank wouldn't offer them a deal they could afford. Obviously secondhand so not quite sure of details.

mrmo – what leases are you signing up to?

An AST can get you a minimum 6 month uninterrupted term (regardless of the term of the lease). After that you're on 2 months notice IIRC.

LTVs (95% loans) arent the whole story. Its affordability ratios that play a big part, and with fixed rates still around the 6% mark, and housing continuing to fall as a proportion of domestic expenditure, capital values will stay toppy.

stoner, 6 months is up, everything is being done fairly, the agent rang to say to expect a letter, they said they thought it would be better to talk rather than just let the post deliver it. That we would get 2 months notice and that they would let us know if they have any suitable properties on their books.

I can't complain about the way they are handling it, just alot of hassle and really not want i want now.

Nick: You're not going to like this but…

We bought our first house (in Derby) with about a 102% mortgage. Pretty much walked in off the street, said "we'd like a house please, we'll have that one" and there didn't seem to be terribly much more to it than that. Didn't have a penny in savings. 18 months later, the value of the house had gone up by over £40,000. Then we sold it. And bought another one with our £40k deposit.

Sorry. Those times appear to be over! 😳

Thanks for that Stevo! I have a big ol' chip on my shoulder regarding owning a house, as you can probably tell!

I get so frustrated and depressed because around us friends and family have bought houses due to living rent-free with parents, financial help from parents or just not having a life for 2 years!

Unfortunantly, none of those options are available to us. Cutting out bikes from are life would probably save us £2.5k max a year, but give us nothing to do at weekends!!!! That and we are very low earners and a huge chunk goes into paying rent we'll never get back.

Oh well, we have our health and a holiday to The White Room to look forward to 8) …..

Of course – we used to have protected tenancies in this country – as they do in many parts of the world – where you had a lot more rights than you do under the tenancies you get now – guess who got rid of them and made all rentals insecure? Yes you got it – the previous tory government

What about part ownership? Smaller deposit required maybe even zero due to the shared nature of the investment. Worth looking just to get you on the Market.

I have to say my parents (who now live abroad) are horrified that the Tories are back in.

Wrightyson – How does that work exactly?

We bought our first house (in Derby)

My gf's cousin left uni last year and did pretty much the same thing in Derby – picked up a 3 bed house for £95k! You wouldn't get a treehouse for that down in these parts though.

Yes you got it – the previous tory government

I assume this is a troll, or an attempt to win the prize for being the first in the thread to blame Thatcher. But I'm bored so I'll rise – the rise of the amateur landlord has been very much a Blair/Brown phenomenon and the OP's problems can hardly be blamed on the previous Tory government – that was 13 years ago ffs, you might as well blame William Pitt the Younger. Good article explaining some of how we got into this mess here – "This shows a government more than happy to benefit from the feel good effect of rising house prices yet unconcerned about reigning in the negative social consequences".

And the problem with buy to let is what, exactly? Someone who has a bit more cash than tyou and saw an opportunity to invest their cash in a potentially more rewarding way than playing the stock market or savings? I can't argue that a fair number of people went into it with only eyes for potential profits etc and have been stung because they over extended themselves or didn't think about how they would manage if they couldn't let. And I also agree that a fair number of them are pretty crap "landlords". But that's not really the fault of buy to let. That's because they are cocks. Probably cocks in other areas of their lives too.

I know a few people who have invested in second properties as an alternative to a traditional pension fund as they feel it is a better potential return on their investment. Over the long term it quite possibly is.

Doesn't help the OP though and can appreciate that life can be a pain if you cannot afford to buy your own place and have to suffer the incompetencies of owners / landlords.

Our previous landlord was most certainly of the 'in it to make money' tyope but he was a nice bloke too. He bought it cheap (for £100k), rented it out for 3 years or so and sold it for £165k in early 2007.

Oddly, after we had moved out it re-appeared on the rental market for the same monthly rent we had been paying, only for prices in the area to drop £20k!! Prices still aren't up to what the purchaser paid 3 years on.

Nick there are various schemes involving the government ,private housing associations or (nown again) new build companies. You basically go 50 50 on the ownership therefore requiring half the purchase price, and in turn a much lesser deposit. You would be in a strong position being able to show previous rental payments, council tax etc. Only downside is less profit if you come to sell but a great way to get started if things (no offence) are a bit tight.

Literally did a quick google and up came barrats. Big house builder. 70% yours and no deposit req'd. Better deals definately out there with less ownership so get googling. All the best in getting a place of your own! 🙂

I get so frustrated and depressed because around us friends and family have bought houses due to living rent-free with parents, financial help from parents or just not having a life for 2 years!

Unfortunantly, none of those options are available to us. Cutting out bikes from are life would probably save us £2.5k max a year, but give us nothing to do at weekends!!!! That and we are very low earners and a huge chunk goes into paying rent we'll never get back.

Oh well, we have our health and a holiday to The White Room to look forward to …..

Cake and eating it. Sorry for no sympathy but thats life my friend, you want something you may need to make sacrifices or accept that until you are prepared to do so you can't have it. For the record we sold basically everything inc our car to buy our first house, scraped like hell to stay in it with no holidays etc for about 2 years. When i setup the first business it was same deal – sold and saved lived very much on the breadline for 12 months to get it going. Thats risk vs reward. I think you have to stop whingeing and either make that sacrifice or just mtfu.

Rio – when I was renting properties in the early 80s you had far more security than you have now as a tenant. Sure labour didn't improve the situation for tenants but it was a tory government that removed security of tenure – precisely the thing that the OP needed. Radical change in the whole rental market.

What's this crack with feeling like you 'have to buy a house'? Does owning a home make you a better person perhaps?

It pains me to see people overstretching themselves in recent years, selling themselves into years of mortgage slavery for a shoebox size flat – just so that they can say 'we're on the market'.

Been renting for years now and never found it a hassle – providing you do your research and rent wisely. We love the fact that we can move anywhere at the drop of a hat. Love the fact that the landlord fixes anything that breaks and stumps up the ground rent. No dealing with plumbers, gardeners etc, no house repairs, no worry over whether we can pay a long term mortgage or not.

Will buy a house one day of course, but at the moment we love the flexibility that renting gives us and don't want to give that up for anything.

Just a different way of looking at it that's all 😀

Nzcol….I didn't intend to sound like i'm whinging and i wasn't looking for sympathy 🙄 It's just painful to not earn much and feel like we're pissing it away in rent. Don't tell me 'thats life'…i've had some shit to deal with in my time (especially now) so i'm entitled to get down about things from time to time.

Northernstar…As above really, when you don't earn much it would be nice to know that at least what we're paying every month is something we'll get a return on. You're right though, renting is good. We have a lovely cottage with a massive garden, close to some nice riding. Things could alot worse. Thats how i look at most of the time TBH.

With house prices what they are, people can struggle to afford to buy anything despite scrimping and saving. Not true for everyone but look at average salaries and then the deposit required for the cheapest house then try and tell me that some people are just not trying hard enough.

Some people have just been priced out the market, that's not a problem in itself if decent alternatives exist but there is no security of tenancy in the UK.