Tenants distraught that buy-to-let landlords are in financial trouble

This is unbelievably upsetting...

I must once again be the bearer of terribly upsetting news.

It’s your favourite people after Tory MPs, British Gas bailiffs and Prince Andrew - the buy-to-let landlords, they’re in trouble.

I’m so fucking worried about them.

Thanks to increased mortgage costs and tax changes, 20% of landlords are saying they can’t afford the homes they commodified because they aren’t getting enough free money, even after price gouging their tenants to the point they’re visiting food banks to collect their weekly turnip rations. They simply refuse to accept it was stupid to borrow money they couldn’t repay without the help of someone much poorer than them.

Landlords sold 35,000 rental properties last year and there are fears the letting industry could collapse harder than the NHS during a pandemic winter, leaving everyone homeless. The number of houses built by landlords every year is precisely zero and the number of houses that will disappear if people stop being landlords is also zero. I’m no mathematician, but I think this means that if there are no landlords, there will be no houses for anyone. We would have to live in caves like those primitive people in Humberside.

The problem is so severe some landlords are facing cost increases of £300 a month and worried they might need to use their own money to pay their mortgages. Turns out the letting industry is not so appealing if someone else is not buying the house for you.

Apparently, tenants who can afford to pay your mortgage are harder to find than black-market tomatoes and I’m pretty sure Moroccan weather is to blame for this too, I’m just not sure how yet.

Letting used to be brilliant because a bank would buy you a house with a leaky roof and mouldy walls greener than the swamp Thérèse Coffey crawled out of. A poor person with a real job would then be forced to live in this decrepit property that gives their children respiratory illnesses. Even better, they would be forced to repay the bank loan for you, otherwise they would be homeless.

It was a glorious system of exploitation - the second-best money-making scheme in the country after dodgy PPE contracts - but now it’s falling apart because the industry is “over-regulated” according to society’s most vulnerable freeloaders who claim they are staring into the financial abyss. Heartbreaking.

Some landlords have complained they might have to get real jobs and become tenants themselves because they cannot budget with all this passive income. Kirstie Allsopp will be livid if she finds out they’ve got an active Netflix account and occasionally visit KFC.

The National Landlords Association says government plans are “spooking the bejesus” out of its members who are very concerned they could increase rents for tenants. Obviously, the number one concern of any landlord is to keep rent as low as possible and they are being totally genuine here.

Smaller landlords have expressed concerns bigger landlords with deeper pockets will buy up all of the housing stock. Don’t you just hate it when someone prices you out of the housing market, leaving you in a vulnerable financial position? Clearly, a system that allows exploiters to become exploited by bigger exploiters is not fit for purpose. Exploitation should and should not be a human right.

Personally, I can’t think of anything crueller than turning a landlord into a tenant. It’s yet another example of how there’s no justice in the world x

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