The Ordering of Energy Performance Certificate Recommendations to Reduce Energy Use Are Illogical The recommendations of things that homeowners can do to improve the score they achieve on their energy performance certificates (EPCs) look illogical in terms of the order in which they are presented – and no one in the media ever seems to have ever asked why. Also, too few are questioning the logic of attempting to implement some of the things. Solar panels, for example, take around 21 years to recover in energy savings on the cost of installation, in the example I show here – which is longer tha ..read more

The Home Energy Model (the Latest Stupid Plan to Make People Cold in Their Own Homes and to Shake Down Taxpayers for more Subsidies for Renewables) Thought the Nut Zero stuff on energy performance certificates had been canned with the PM’s announcement of abandoning plans for a minimum Energy Performance Certificate grade of C in all rental properties by 2028? Well, we did tell you not to celebrate too soon didn’t we. Under government plans, (no one seems to get a vote on this creeping nonsense in parliament), a new Home Energy Model is set to replace the Energy Performance Certificates (EPC ..read more

The Spring Budget – the Impact on Private Landlords So, what was in the Spring Budget for landlords? Well, not all that much really. It rather reminded me of the Dad’s Army scene where the platoon have to rest in a barn for the night. Captain Mainwaring asks Private Frazer to tell his ghost story about the “Old Empty Barn”. Mainwaring gets the half dozing platoon awake to listen. Frazer rolls his eyes for what seems an interminably long period, then starts, “Tis, the story of the auuuld empty barn”. He now has the full attention of his audience. His wild eyes look around the barn at the men wh ..read more

Conversations with “Normies” These conversations are a selection of real conversations that I had over a period of four years with people I have known a long time, apart from two of them. They reveal the depth of brainwashing carried out in the time of “covid” and after by the media and the government and which is still being carried out today. Each conversation was part of quite wide-ranging chats and in two of the conversations, took place over a period of a few months. I have selected the key issues of most interest from each conversation from my memory. Without doubt the most distressing t ..read more

Benefits Cap Puts a Lid on Housing Benefit Rise Though the Chancellor raised the level of housing benefit in the last budget, there are thousands of landlords who will miss out. Private landlords house 1.6 million tenants who get part or all of their rents covered by housing benefits. The payments are set according to local housing allowance (LHA) rates, which have been frozen at September 2019 levels since the start of the so called, “pandemic”. Since then, rents have risen strongly leaving many tenants with big shortfalls between what they need to pay landlords and what they receive from the ..read more

2024 Outlook, Looking Towards a Labour Government and Some More Reasons to be Cheerful Further to my recent blog, I thought of a few more reasons to be optimistic for 2024. First, landlord exiting means falling supply which means rising rents. Nimble landlords, especially those who are not over-leveraged, either with debt or someone else’s equity, should move fast before things change. Most new entrants will be setting up in a corporate structure, of course. The landlords exiting today are those most likely to be older and to not be in a company structure and who have maybe made their money an ..read more

Reasons to be Cheerful from 2023 Some good things have happened in 2023 for landlords. There are reasons to be cheerful. First, the government has put the ending of fixed term tenancies and the section 21 route to regain possession on hold pending improvements in the court system. With the usual glacial progress in any works done by the government, this could take a long time, Mr. Oates! The court system is not exactly known for being a change driver. Second, it has also kicked into the long grass a requirement for landlords to make their properties more energy efficient (grade C on the EPC sc ..read more

So I now read that in Scotland there is a proposal to force home owners to install a cold pump, (also known as heat pump), within two years of purchasing a property. I am sure sellers of warm overcoats that look just great when worn inside the home will be delighted at this news. Here is the story from the news wires: Scots could be “penalised” with tax hikes for refusing to install heat pumps in their homes, under proposals unveiled by a Green minister in Humza Yousaf’s government. A taskforce co-chaired by Patrick Harvie, the Zero Carbon Buildings Minister, (yes they have one of those), has ..read more

A long time ago I decided that, whilst my buy to let book was very successful and was often in the top one thousand books by rank of sales on Amazon (no mean feat when there are about 5 million books you could buy on Amazon) and whilst I did have a strong presence as a speaker at property shows and was often quoted in the media on residential landlord matters, I was never going to go to the trouble of building an all-singing all-dancing website encompassing “everything landlord”. It was just too much like hard work. And I hate that. People who do this often structure their sites to make lots o ..read more

Temporary Accommodation, Homelessness and Private Landlords, End of the Affair Here are some staggering figures for you. There are around 170,000 people in London who are homeless and in temporary accommodation – which is about one in 50 Londoners and one in 23 kids, (around 84,000 children). The number of households who are entitled to homelessness support from a London borough increased by 15% between 2022 and 2023. Meanwhile there has been a 780% increase in homeless families placed in B&B accommodation beyond the legal six-week limit. The actual numbers were 1,287 families in B&B t ..read more