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Readers from abroad might not know that Conservative Boris Johnson was elected to be the new Mayor of London on 2 May 2008. The previous and legendary position holder Labour Party Ken Livingstone took transportation to another level. Will Johnson do the same in housing?

Of course, the promises given before the election are always exaggerated but you should know what his goals are. Boris’ manifesto on improving the housing conditions can be obtained HERE (*pdf).

Here are the 4 most important promises that affect the rental sector directly:

1. Provide more affordable quality homes for low-income Londoners (50,000 more affordable homes by 2011) – it might be easier for today’s tenants to get a home of their own in the future.
2. Protect private tenants from unscrupulous landlords by publishing an online ‘Fair Rents Guide’ to help Londoners determine whether or not they are getting a fair deal.
3. Explore the possibility of a tenant deposit scheme (for rent paid up to £25 000 a year) with a guaranteed arbitration period of one month – Boris thinks that 1 months rent worth deposit is just way too much.
4. Spend £60 million on renovating empty homes (ca. 84 205 of them in London!) to be used by those in need.

Four years with a budget of a little over £1billion a year to spend on housing – a lot can be done. I do agree with Empty Homes Agency Chief Executive David Ireland, who says that at least the bar is high, and that should be a good sign in itself.

Keep an eye on the Mayor of London website!

An anguishing story ran through the newspapers last week. About a negligent landlord from Richmond, who has been found guilty for a young girl’s death of carbon monoxide poisoning following a gas leak in his Wimbledon rental’s faulty boiler.

Please make sure that your landlord has a safety certificate for each appliance and/or flue, not older than 1 year, and only from a CORGI registered gas installer. Always assume that there are no certificates, until you have seen them!

HSE advises tenants:

1. Allow your landlord access to the property to carry out maintenance or safety checks on appliances and/or flues that they provide for your use.

2. Gas appliances and/or flues you own should be regularly maintained and a safety check carried out at least once every 12 months by a CORGI registered installer.

3. If there is any doubt about the safety of gas equipment it should be turned off and not touched until checked by a competent installer, and remedial action taken as necessary.

CarbonMonoxideKills.com recommends you buy a detector for the ultimate safety.

Always enjoyed the Homes & Property magazine column “Diary of an Estate Agent” – written by different agents, about their weekly happenings. It must be popular, as I’ve been reading those stories since 2004 already. The last diary, from this past Wednesday edition, was written by Marc von Grundherr, the director of residential lettings at Benham & Reeves.

Remember his odd encounter with an obsessive tenant who wanted to rent his own flat in Earls Court? Apparently he just found a tenant for that place. Another interesting note there for those looking for an apartment in Mayfair, Fulham or Kensington – his diary reveals that he just got a new bunch of rentals in these areas:

MONDAY
On my way to the office, I had a call from a client who wanted me to take on six of her rental apartments, in Mayfair, Fulham and Kensington. One of the Kensington flats has been empty for eight months, and one of the Fulham flats has not been let for more than a year. Both were in a dreadful state. In Fulham, I found broken furniture and filthy carpets. The Kensington flat had not been touched since it was bought 10 years ago, when swirly marble-effect wallpaper was the last word in style. I need to send in decorators — as soon as possible.

Read the full entry.

Notting Hill W11

RICS has released a report on UK residential lettings in Q1 2008. Read the 16-page survey HERE (*pdf).

The truth about London is in the comments section:

Christopher Ames MRICS Best Gapp & Cassells (Belgravia)
“The market appears to be dead.”

Richard Cotton BSc FRICS Cluttons (Tower Bridge)
“We find there are lots of fallthroughs on lettings as people pull out of the lets due to job losses.”

Edward Reeve BSc FRICS Edward Reeve (Pimlico)
“More tenants are moving, so there are more flats to relet. Rents on reletting are increasing substantially, e.g. a two bedroom flat was £1650 per month, but relet at £2060 per month – an increase of 24.85%! Yields are increasing as rents are up and values down, but if property is owned, the rental increase is being matched or eroded by a value decrease.”

Ben Temple BSc MRICS Temples Limited (Clapham)
“The supply of properties has increased substantially over the last quarter, but although we have
seen some easing of rents, good properties are still letting at approximately 5% to 10% higher than last year. We are not experiencing substantial voids as there remains good tenant demand and we expect this to continue in to the summer when we expect the usual boost to tenant numbers. We therefore remain positive about the market, although we are having to do 90% more viewings for the same number of deals!”

Inventory Providers are professionals, who’s job is to document the full description of the property and everything in it. The service is intended for landlords, agents or even tenants, who do not have time or knowledge to put together a complete report for a property that is being rented out. The inventory providers can be ordered for a regular “inventory report”, a “check-in report” or a “check-out report”. Some of them have invented more interesting reasons, like “mid-term report” or a “snagging report”. The letting agents used to do this but now that ARLA, too, is setting up an association APIP, we’re not sure where this is going.

Here is a couple of Inventory Providers in London:

Property Inventories
Inventory preparation for furnished 2-bed – £100
Check-in report for furnished 2-bed – £75
Check-out report for furnished 2-bed – £80
See an example of what you’ll be paying for HERE (*pdf).

Inis Inventories
Example of their inventory report HERE (*pdf)

We’re skeptical because the service is not cheap, yet the document they provide is quite basic, really (the template might need some work). We understand that ARLA is concerned about the incompetent people offering this service, as it is SO EASY to do. But shouldn’t they be concentrating on training the letting agents instead?

PS! There already IS an association for inventory providers in UK – Association of Independent Inventory Clerks AIIC.

(c) The Conran Shop

ARLA is setting up a new organization from June this year – the Association of Professional Inventory Providers (APIP):

The aim is to offer practicing inventory providers an accessible route to professional development and a ready source of information and guidance. Inventory providers will need at least 6 months practical experience and pass a multiple choice accreditation test to join APIP. They will also be required to attend a set number of hours training each year on subjects relevant to their profession or attend relevant seminars as part of their continuing professional development.

Sounds expensive, for everyone. Before you know it – they want a license, too. In any case, there is a slight pressure to use a professional inventory provider from now on, and it is not a very cheap service.

England’s total rented housing stock since 1976.

Selected Committee released the Rented Housing Report today. The aim – to identify the state of the market, to note the needs for increase in the quantity and improvement in the quality of the supply of rented housing in UK. There is lot’s of information there, so read it if you want to know more about the rental sector.

ARLA says the report is too shallow, mainly because it failed to tackle the problems with licensing of Houses in Multiple Occupation.

We’ll dig into it and write down our perceptions soon enough.

Download the Rented Housing Report (*pdf)

llustrative photo: Great West Road, Hammersmith, W6, 2-Bed, Price: £2,600 per month
(c) Featherstone Leigh

BBC talks to a tenant who’s rent has risen, and a landlord, who has put up rent in his property:

Landlord EuGin Song owns 20 properties in the London area, valued at more than £4m.

In one of them, at the top of a huge mansion block in Hammersmith W6, he confesses that he is among those who have been increasing rents.

“Last year, I was charging £700 for a two-bedroom flat in West London. Now I get up to £800.

“The reason, he says, is increased demand. People are reluctant to buy houses while prices are falling, and many are deciding to rent until the market improves.

“As a result, more and more people are coming into the market for rentals. Some people are even selling to rent.”

The article also suggests that there is particularly strong demand in Sourth East London. With new jobs at Heathrow’s Terminal 5, as well as at the 2012 Olympics site, there is particular pressure to find a place to live.

Just a suggestion – try to avoid paying individuals (especially in cash) before you have seen the apartment you are going to rent …

A bogus estate agent who sweet-talked would-be tenants out of thousands of pounds each has been jailed for eight months.

Building site labourer Nuruazzaman Miah described the luxury apartments in such glowing terms that his wealthy victims did not even ask to see their future homes before happily parting with their hard-earned cash. In exchange they got sets of fake keys and tenancy agreements not worth the paper they were printed on. It was only when they turned up at where they hoped to live that they found the keys did not work and the places already occupied, London’s Southwark Crown Court heard.

Read further from The Press Association
Photo: beautyfield.com

The Times ordered a survey from Hometrack to determine just how much the rents have risen in 2008 (to April). The outcome for 2-bed flats and houses – 14% rise in rents for London. Just last week Foxtons announced that the rents have gone up 10-20% for the properties they handle.

Is this talking rents up? The commentators in Times sure seem to think so:

- I live in desirable part of London and have not seen rents rise for 3 years. Nor have friends/ colleagues. So, is the survey honest?

- This is intolerable.
If it isn’t bad enough the little guy having to pay for the big guys greed, now you are trying to ‘talk’ rents up.
In my area, there have been NO rent increases, and there is a stack of properties to chose from. I look forward to house prices dropping 50-60%, along with rents.

You have to realize, that the Hometrack survey was for the overall trends for 2-beds in London. Now, it’s a big city, and you’ll have to look at the exact type and location to determine if the price rise affects you. If your landlord takes action after reading the article – do check the statistics from LondonPropertyWatch (choose “historical prices” from the menu) graphs for offering prices in your postcode area – the trends are different depending on location and type of the rental. Here are some examples:

Alright – on average London 2-bedrooms really have gone up.

Stratford E15 2-beds, around where the Olympics 2012 will be held, have seen rise in prices.

Chelsea SW3 prices for 2-beds have gone down…

…yet 3-beds have gone up.

2-beds in Central London W1 have gone down as well.

HBOS is selling all it’s shares in Rightmove Plc., the firm that operates Rightmove real estate portal. The company that founded the website is reportedly selling more than 16 million shares for a bit less than £60 million.

HBOS said that the sale was the end of a “strategic investment”, and that it was not a sign of any concern about the company.

Source: Financial Times

PS Rightmove floated on the London Stock Exchange in March 2006. Click here for it’s profile in FT Markets Data.

(C) Howards Estate Agents

Meet the new President of the Association of Residential Letting Agents (ARLA) – David McMaster (40), who took over Robert Jordan’s job last week. McMaster has nearly 20 years of experience in lettings. Most recently in Howards Estate Agents in Norfolk as a Residential Lettings & Property Management Chief Executive.

McMaster has said that his personal mission in ARLA is to ensure landlords and buy to let investors understand exactly what they should expect from professional letting agents.

What should tenants expect?

Congradulations and good luck!

Stumbled on one those “sell and rent back your home” company websites and their blog just the other day. Truly a pleasant read with your morning coffee.

If you don’t know what the scheme is about, then simply put – it’s selling your home under it’s real value, and then renting it until you are able to buy it back. The blog we mentioned states that the price they pay for your home is about 80-85% of the real value, and that there are no guarantees for how long you can stay on renting.

How much are they really buying those properties for, and more, will soon be revealed by the Office of Fair Trading, who is now researching this troublesome scheme.

Foxtons Park Lane office. Photo: Foxtons

Ed Phillips, lettings director at Foxtons, says that the rental prices in London have gone up over the last 9 months between 10-20% on new tenancies. Even tenancy agreement renewals have gone up by approximately 7%. On average they have about 4-5 applicants for each property, and they are seeing things go quickly.

Source: Aboutproperty.co.uk

(c) reformu.com

We feel for Hounslow landlords, who have to take a moment to wonder whether their tenants are as sweet as they seem.

In the last financial year Hounslow police has closed 25 cannabis factories, and recently 5 landlords were duped into renting their properties to tenants who turn them into drug-making dens:

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In all 5 cases landlords had rented their property to a single tenant or couple of eastern Asian or south east Asian origin. The tenants provided references which checked out perfectly and the rent arrived in advance each month for several months and inspections revealed no problems. But after several months of good behaviour the tenant started ripping holes in the walls and fitting industrial coolers and gardening equipment associated with cannabis cultivation. Because of the amount of electricity used the cannabis factories can become a major fire risk and power surges are often the first clue for police that a factory has been set up.

Power surges, ay? Read more from Richmond & Twickenham Times.