Private Renting set to grow by 1,600 Harlow households by 2025
I was having a most interesting chat the other day with a Harlow
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 Harlow, 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 Harlow
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 Harlow.
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 Harlow? The fact is, as a country, we are
facing a precarious rental shortage and need to get Harlow building in a way
that benefits a cross-section of Harlow 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 34,700 households in Harlow, currently 9,100 tenants live
in 3,800 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 Harlow needs to rise by 1,600 (i.e. 42.8%) .. taking the
total number of rented properties in the city to 5,400.
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 Harlow house prices,
the majority of new Harlow 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 Harlow society who are already struggling. Let's hope this new
Government continues to see the contribution landlords give to the country as a
whole.