Tom’s tips: 2022 – it’s been a roller coaster but what did it mean for landlords?

Tom Entwistle, a residential and commercial landlord since the 1970s and founder of LandlordZONE, provides his perspective on a topical issue.

In this article, Tom reviews the key events of 2022 and offers his insights into how landlords can best navigate the considerable changes that lie ahead.

For more analysis reflecting on the past year and looking ahead to 2023, you can also read Total Landlord’s round up of what 2022 has meant for landlords and their economic and property market update for 2023. 

And to hear LandlordZONE Editor Nigel Lewis’s pick of the top property stories of 2022 that have captured our readers’ attention, listen to the latest episode of The Property Cast.

Tom’s thoughts

What a year it’s been already, and we’re not done yet. The country has gone through the mill and is still going through it, the worst turmoil since the financial crisis of 2008. And the Bank of England has predicted the longest recession in UK history – a depressing prospect.

No sooner had the clearer blue skies started to emerge as we became more and more confident of being freed from the restrictions of a two-year Covid pandemic, and the country to start to reap some of the long-awaited de-regulatory benefits of Brexit, than on 24 February 2022 Russia invades Ukraine in a major escalation of the Russo-Ukrainian War, which began in 2014. It’s the biggest conflagration in Europe since WW2.

This event sent shock waves around the world, particularly in relation to its effects on energy and food price rises, fuelling an already rising inflationary environment brought about by the world-wide supply shortages after Covid.

Prime Minister Johnson was forced to resign in early July following a wave of ministerial resignations from his government, after publicly voicing their lack of confidence in the Prime Minister, bringing an acrimonious end to a nearly three-year premiership that had been beset by controversy and scandal.

This was followed by a summer of high profile campaigning for the new leader, with Liz Truss MP appointed the new Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. She was appointed in one of the Queen’s last official acts, before her sad death two days later on 8 September 2022 at the age of 96.

With the passing of the Queen and a new monarch in place, the Truss government embarked on an ambitious growth and spend strategy in the face of rising inflation and growing unease in the financial community about her planned level of unfunded borrowing.

Ultimately the financial markets reflected the uncertainty, with a collapsing pound and rapidly rising bond yields (turbocharging mortgage interest rates) and ending one of the shortest lived UK governments in history.

Another leadership campaign, this time held over just one week, appointed Rishi Sunack the new leader, with Jeremy Hunt remaining as Chancellor, having been appointed by Liz Truss, after she sacked her first Chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng.

November saw Jeremy Hunt presenting his Autumn Statement, another budget following on the heels of Truss’s disastrous “mini budget” – which turned out to be too radical for the times, in late September 2022.

Throughout all of this the UK economy held up with virtually full employment, high house prices and exceptional demand for rental housing. However, there were clouds on the horizon: the UK economy contracted by 0.2% in the third quarter of 2022, signalling what could be the start of the long recession – in mid-November The Bank of England forecast the country’s longest recession since records began.

Unemployment is likely to rise and a cost of living crisis is likely to put both landlords (due to higher mortgage rates) and tenants under pressure with higher living costs, higher taxes and wages failing to keep pace with inflation.

With Jeremy Hunt’s Autumn Statement, plus the prospect of more stringent regulations in the pipeline for housing, planned for next year, it promises to be an even tougher regime for private residential landlords in England in the near future.

Scotland and Wales have to some extent stolen a march on England where the reform of their rental laws is concerned. Scotland has decided to freeze rents until next March, and this is likely to be extended, and Wales is to introduce their Renting Homes Act, the biggest change to housing law in Wales for decades. From 1 December 2022 when The Renting Homes (Wales) Act 2016 comes into full force it will change the way all landlords in Wales rent their properties, says the Welsh Government.

Autumn Statement

We know that personal taxes will rise steadily over the next few years as allowances are frozen in an inflationary environment and corporation tax is scheduled to rise from 19% to 25% next April, along with council tax and dividend tax. This all goes along with reductions in capital gains tax allowances from the current £12,300 per person to £6,000 from April 2023, and down to £3,000 from April 2024.

Mortgage rates have risen considerably, reducing the profitability of buy-to-let businesses for those with mortgages, and the ability of new investors to raise finance for mortgaged purchases. It will not be helped in the future by the stamp duty regime being lowered from the current £250,000 starting point introduced by Kawsi Kwarteng, down to £125,000 from April 2025.

With the growth in short-term letting there are mutterings that the Government might pursue a consultation on whether to update its policies on short-term lets, which are typically properties that have tenants for six months or less, and often just a few days or weeks.

Some of the options that are said to be under discussion for rule changes include increasing the rates of council tax for short-term rentals, and also assessing whether there is a need to create a mandatory registry for English holiday property rentals.

On a more positive note, for those landlords able to navigate these challenges – inflation, stagnating wage growth and higher income taxes – it will mean that peoples’ ability to save for deposits and pay higher mortgage rates will maintain the demand for renting. Recent studies have shown that higher interest rates mean it’s still less expensive for the average young person to rent rather than taking on a mortgage.

Abolishing Section 21

The three-year clamour by the homelessness charities and tenants’ bodies for a ban on Section 21 continued into 2022. Shelter suggested in January that government data showed landlords ending private tenancies were to blame for 20% of rental households finding themselves homeless, or at risk of being made homeless by their council. Something of a huge exaggeration I would suggest.

Following Michael Gove’s reinstatement as Housing Secretary, to the great disappointment of residential landlords, the new government reaffirmed its commitment to abolishing Section 21. This will come as part of its radical overhaul of the private rented sector (PRS) in England, due to be on the statute books some time in 2023 – the Renters Reform Bill. The Bill introduces one of the most significant developments for English landlords in 2022,  a white paper to introduce the following major changes:

– Abolishing Section 21

– Rights for tenants renting with pets, and the right to redecorate

– A new private renter’s Ombudsman

– A legally binding Decent Homes Standard (DHS)

– An end to rent review clauses and rent repayments orders for below standard rentals

– Doubling rent increase notices and more powers for tenants to challenge increases

– A new national online Property Portal for landlords and tenants

– Extending grounds for repossession on Section 8 and streamlining court processes

– Stronger powers for councils to tackle rogue landlords

– An end to fixed term assured shorthold tenancy agreements

– Banning blanket bans on tenants on benefits – ‘No DSS’ ads.

– Making it easier for landlords to remove tenants for anti-social behaviour

It appears that the idea of creating lifetime deposits to ease the financial transition for tenants when changing tenancies has been dropped.  Other deposit innovations do exist, such as the HFIS group’s own version via Ome’s deposit replacement option where tenants replace their five week deposit with a small, monthly subscription, but keep the same protection. Eddie Hooker, CEO of HFIS  had this to say on the issue:

“There’s been a lot of innovation in the deposit protection marketplace, but ultimately landlords feel more comfortable taking a physical cash deposit. And for most tenants outside London and the south east, finding a deposit isn’t a huge ask, notwithstanding the kind of vulnerable person who will always struggle to find any deposit.”

You can watch a video of Eddie explaining why lifetime deposits were dropped by the Government here.

Amendments to the Smoke and Carbon Monoxide Alarm (England) Regulations 2015, came into force from 1 October. These are important changes that landlords need to know about, whether in the private rented sector or social housing – they apply to the latter for the first time

You should make sure there’s a working (ideally hardwired and interconnected) smoke alarm on each storey of the rental home, ideally top and bottom of a staircase. A carbon monoxide alarm must be provided in any room used as living accommodation which contains a fixed combustion appliance, but excluding gas cookers, though no harm in providing one anyway where there’s any type of combustion device.

As with smoke alarms, carbon monoxide alarms must be working, so provide hard wired or 10 year battery operated units and check regularly on inspections or if a tenant reports a fault. These regulations have now been extended to the social rented sector for the first time. Read more in the article, Ultimate guide: Fire safety in a rental property

Energy efficiency

Another really significant change in 2022 was the continuation of a move on tightening the Minimum Energy Efficiency Standard (MEES) rules. There’s also to be a review of the EPC rating system to straighten out some of its anomalies. For example, under the current system, installing a heat pump or LPG boilers can make some properties appear less energy efficient because replacing a traditional gas boiler automatically cuts an EPC rating: “We are already looking at ways the system can be improved through our EPC Action Plan to ensure they are as accurate and effective as possible,” said the Government. They certainly were not before!

Currently, a rental property must have a minimum of EPC rating “E”. It’s not law yet, but the Government has proposed that for all new tenancies beginning in 2025 this minimum rating should go to a “C”. It has also said it would like to see a minimum “C” rating across all rental homes by 2028, even for those that have long-standing tenants. It has even been suggested this level could rise to a “B” after 2030. Personally I think many rental properties will struggle to reach an EPC rating of “C” never mind a “B”.

Build-to-rent

The build-to-rent sector, weather new-build or retrofit, is still a minor segment of the lettings market compared to that operated by small-scale landlords, most of whom have just one of two properties, but nevertheless it is growing and in some locations, mainly in the big cities, the competitive force in some locations is becoming significant.

New analysis published at the end of October 2022 by the British Property Federation (BPF) shows the total number of build-to-rent (BTR) homes either in planning, under construction or completed in the UK is up 15% between Q3 2021 and Q3 2022 from 209,313 to 240,202. This compares to something like 4.4 million privately rented homes (18.5% of total housing) in England, down slightly since peaking at 20.3% in 2017.

Build-to-rent’s approach is often to provide a premium tenancy experience, as well as ensuring the location and neighbourhood is prosperous and integrated. As one such provider states: “Good quality homes aimed at general or targeted demographics, with longer term tenancies and predictable rents. They are mainly in larger towns and cities, and often situated near good public transport interchanges.”

What are the consequences for landlords?

A recession is looming. It means that unemployment will probably rise into 2023 and this, coupled with high inflation (which will hopefully be down to mid single figures by next summer), the highest tax rates since the World War two and rising, and the biggest cost-of-living crisis since records began, means more rent arrears and repossessions will be inevitable.

Faced with the changes we see more landlords have been selling up. Many of these have been renting out property for many years and are ready to retire, and the Chancellor has just added impetus to the incentive to sell before next April, when the capital gains tax (CGT) allowance drops from £12,300 to £6,000.

All these changes, and especially the removal of Section 21 and the reduction in capital gains tax (CGT) allowances, have given those landlords who were planning to leave a real incentive to do it now. They will use the time left with Section 21 to evict, sometimes long-stay loyal tenants, to try and meet next April’s CGT cliff-edge. It’s hard to understand the Government’s thinking on this.

The other side of the coin to this situation is the opportunities it creates for others to enter the market, especially as demand for rental looks like it will remain high. New landlord investors entering the field could pick up some bargains as property prices drop back during a recession and with mortgage rates peaking. If new blood can cope with the labyrinth of letting regulations, buy-to-let still offers a very competitive return compared with other types of savings and investment – it just needs a committed management effort.

I worry about the way the Government is going about implementing these drastic regulation changes. I was not convinced by the minister’s performance at a recent scrutiny committee hearing on the Renters’ Reform Bill. 

Glib and not convincingly enthused talk about mediation and making courts “efficient” as the answer to all the eviction issues is “cloud cuckoo land” to me. With the courts already overstretched, taking a tenant through mediation or the courts when it is in six months’ arrears, and patently can’t afford the rent, or making neighbours lives a misery, will just drag things out unnecessarily.

As we’ve seen, what most judges will do in this situation is give tenants another chance. They probably won’t, and indeed many can’t, change. It simply prolongs the agony for landlords, leaving them faced with double the length of time to evict a tenant, quite possibly into 18 months with no rent!

I can see the sentiment in giving tenants more security to complain about conditions without fear of eviction, but it just gives the bad ones even more ways to exploit landlords. What should happen, in my view, is that councils inspect every single tenanted property in their borough and the council officers should then enforce the housing standards on landlords.

The irony is, most councils don’t even know how many rentals they have, and few of them fully enforce the regulations they’ve already got. What resources would it take for ONE housing officer to work his or her way through inspecting the whole of a borough’s housing stock? Enforcement to follow!

The other worrying aspect to this performance was the fact that almost every measure the committee brought up to solve a problem involved a “small fee” from the landlord.  Also, how many rogue landlords will be honest when providing details for the “Landlords’ Portal”? Not too many I’d wager.

The whole approach to replacing shorthold tenancies and Section 21, which has been valued by landlords for the past 40 years or so, is a “can of worms”. Realistically, there are no easy solutions to landlord-tenant issues, but to my mind much of this proposed legislation won’t do it, and it could easily make the sector worse, not better, for both landlords and tenants.

Wise and experienced landlords will be extra cautious with pre-tenancy checks in the future. When all these new regulations apply, you need to think very seriously about taking guarantors and rent guarantee insurance. The amateurs will get themselves into trouble and many will just give up. The Tenants’ Reform Bill has the potential to make life more difficult for tenants as well as landlords.

Conclusions

I guess change is inevitable in any business sector these days. This year has been a real roller coaster for landlords and with over one hundred and fifty laws, rules and regulations to comply with already, there are always more to follow; the residential landlord’s lot is never going to be an easy one.

The economic environment over the next few years in the UK will be a challenging one. But with change comes opportunity and for those landlord investors who invest wisely and are willing to study up on the rules, follow the changes and make sure they are meeting the requirements, there’s no reason at all why they can’t prosper.

Professionalism is the key to success in this business now. Do your homework, make sure you are on top of the rules and regulations – not too difficult if you put your mind to it – and make sure your properties are up to standard. 

Read more about what 2022 meant for landlords and how the economy and property market is looking for 2023.

View Full Article: Tom’s tips: 2022 – it’s been a roller coaster but what did it mean for landlords?