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Steven Spowart

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Maybe shelter should try actually living up to their name and prevent rather than increase homelessness. No way I would ever donate to this lot of clowns. They need to start purchasing properties and letting them to homeless people. Maybe when they start getting properties wrecked they will stop slagging off landlords. If section 21 goes, I sell up, and I have yet to evict without good reason. I wouldnt sell if I had a sitting tenant unless I was forced to for example by a lender, or large service charge bill. I would however use the section 21 rights in order to reduce my costs and time evicting a non paying tenant, although in practice I only actually used this once against a drug dealer who wasnt paying. It is the landlord that then has to clean up the mess left behind by previous tenants, this takes time and money. Any mandatory 3 or 5 year tenancy will mean I will not have another tenant, and will sell when any existing tenant move out. The risk of making it much more difficult to remove a bad tenant is simply too great. Good luck getting all those tenants into either the purchase or social sector. Their are hardly any properties left in the social sector thanks to Maggie Thatchers right to buy policy, and even if all landlords sold their entire portfolios the cost of purchasing a property would still be far too high for a lot of tenants. This would ultimately cause an increase in homelessness. Wait, arnt shelter supposed to be reducing homelessness, seems they have their donors wrapped round their finger under false pretences doesn't it.

From: Steven Spowart 05 August 2017 18:35 PM

As a landlord myself, I agree with a ban on letting agent fees to tenants. The landlord can just choose a different agent if the fees are too high, the tenant will have to choose the one that has a suitable property. They should still be allowed to charge for referencing, although this could be deducted from the first months rent. This would stop the landlord having to pay for lots of referencing only to have the tenant go elsewhere anyway. With regards to leashehold charges, any bill to stop unreasonable charges is long overdue. My local council slapped me a bill for over £25K to have the walls re-cladded. a) I didnt ask them to do it, in fact I said I didnt want it and they did it anyway. b) The price far exceeds the value of the works they did, I had the place surveyed and the surveyor put a figure of more like £8K. c) That figure came to 20% of the value of my property. I didnt put that much down as a mortgage deposit and they asked me to pay within 28 days. I refused to pay a penny until the price has been significantly reduced, and am now in a legal battle with them. This has made me seriously consider throwing my tenants on to the street with a section 21, and selling up which I didnt want to do, and franctly why should I sell just because of un reasonable service charges. My flat is in a block of 4, and the other 3 are still local authority owned. There should be a limit to what can be charged to a lease without unanimous approval of the work going ahead. They didnt even tell me how much I was going to have to pay until the bill dropped through the door. Once this legal battle is over I intend to push to have the head of my councils housing department removed from her post for this.

From: Steven Spowart 26 March 2017 00:08 AM

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