Tenants facing soaring rents staged a protest against “rampant profiteering” outside a landlord convention in London where investors were told how to “build a £25m property portfolio, using none of your own money”.
Dozens of renters chanted: “Landlords! Parasites!” outside the National Landlord Investment Show and demanded a rent freeze, as the average monthly UK rent has increased by £110 – more than 10% a year – according to the property website Zoopla.
Inside, landlords described how they had waiting lists of more than 200 people wanting a single property, allowing them to pass on interest rate increases.
Kane Andrews, 34, an investor who runs more than 60 houses of multiple occupation and calls his company “Rockstar”, boasted to an audience of what he described as “money-hungry investors” that his company had made £2m tax free in 2022 from refinancing.
He described the protest as “a shame” and said: “We’re trying to help people.”
The City of London police stepped in when Ranjan Battacharya, a property investor and TV presenter, challenged the protesters’ claims.
“They are misguided and there’s a lack of understanding of what we do,” he said.
The members of the London Renters Union included Peter Wood, who said he and his wife had to move out of their home recently because the landlord wanted to increase the rent by £8,000 a year – a jump of more than 30%.
“I have a serious neurological health condition and I was getting regular attacks when the rent increase was served,” he said.
Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, wants powers to freeze rents temporarily but the government is resisting. Rent controls are in effect in Scotland, but the shadow housing secretary, Lisa Nandy, said last week “rent controls that cut rents for some will almost certainly leave others homeless”.
Across England, the Citizens Advice Bureau estimates more than 300,000 private renters have had to move out of their homes due to a real or threatened rent increase in the last year.
Landlords said they were dealing with rising interest rates, the no-fault eviction ban and a tougher tax regime. But several conceded tenants had it worse.
Daniel Paterson, who lets out nine properties in Greater Manchester with his father, Floyd, said they were expecting a four to five percentage point interest rate rise on the business’s debt next year. “The tenant will pick it up,” he said, “because there is so much demand you can pass it on.” But he added: “It’s not right.”
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Within two days of putting a property on the market in the Tameside area of east Manchester, they had over 200 people wanting to rent it – including doctors, lecturers and social care workers, Paterson said.
Paul Shamplina, the founder of Landlord Action – which helps agents and landlords with “problem tenants”, said: “We have more tenants chasing one property. Rents are going up. The biggest losers in all of this are tenants … rents for tenants are becoming unsustainable.”
On Monday, Michael Gove pledged to make homes “easier to repossess” in forthcoming rental reforms in comments welcomed by landlords, who meanwhile warned further interest rate rises were likely to be passed on to tenants amid continuing high demand for homes.
The housing secretary has sponsored the renters reform bill, which will ban no-fault evictions but strengthen landlords’ powers to evict families for behaviour “capable of causing” nuisance or annoyance. Ben Beadle, the chief executive of the National Residential Landlords Association lobby group, described this as “a massive concession”.
In an article for the NRLA magazine, Gove said the government would be “making it easier for landlords to repossess [homes] where tenants are at fault”.
