1. Please introduce yourself. Say a bit about yourself and your company

I became chairman in January 2009 of the Residential Landlords Association which I helped form in 1998 as a national body to campaign for landlords.

The RLA belongs to its members. We provide advice, information, documentation including the RLA’s unique plain English AST, training and seminars, services including tenant referencing and credit checks, insurance, mortgages, inventories.

We represent members and lobby to central government and through our team of local government experts we are increasing our liaison with councils to develop accreditation policies and self-regulation.

We have a great team of professional help-line, trainers, lobby, editorial, admin and IT staff with an elected board of directors.

2. How did you first become involved in property?

Bought my first office in 1972 but started investing in shared houses in south Manchester with my wife back in 1993 – a good time to buy! There was a recession, but borrowing came from the bank in those pre-B2L days. Since then we have also built flats and houses and refurbished a number of properties.

3. What do you think is your greatest achievement so far?

It has to be the RLA – which continues to grow at around 20% annually.

4. Do you or your company have any exciting plans for the future?

The excitement is nurturing the growth of the RLA, which comes from the increasing membership and renewals. I have a particular “thing” about customer satisfaction!

5. What do you think are the greatest problems facing the private rented sector today?

The emergency budget has done very little for landlords and may have adversely affected those taking LHA.  Grant Shapp’s announcement regarding change to the planning use classes for small HMOs may be good news, but we need to ensure that landlords of existing shared houses are able to retain the preserved rights.  We shall also continue to lobby for direct payment of LHA to landlords

“Localism” is an issue that we have yet to get the measure of.

6. What do you think are the greatest opportunities?

It is estimated that we will need 270,000 new home a year by 2016. The Private Rented Sector (PRS) will be the only source of new homes for those 100,000 additional new households being created each year– up from the current 169,000. First time buyers can’t afford them, social housing funding is inadequate – so this is where the PRS meets the nation’s housing need. Fail, and we shall see over-crowding and a lowering of housing standards.

7. We have a new government. What would you like them to do for the private rented sector?

See 6 also above.

Capital Gains Tax is too good a source of revenue for the Chancellor to ignore, bearing in mind the amount of national debt they have inherited, but the top rate is less than we feared.

1 Restore taper-relief to encourage long term investment.

2 Introduce roll-over tax relief to encourage reinvestment. With 40% of PRS housing built before 1919 these are the houses needing refurbishment and energy improvement.

3 Tax allowances for major improvements, refurbishment and improvements to energy efficiency.

4 Allow residential investment in SIPPS.

5 Treat active landlords as a business.

6 Pay LHA direct to landlords

7 And this last one is probably a step too far – reduce the VAT rate on repair and renewal to 5% in line with Europe – but there is a strong economic case to be made for supporting the building trade and kick-starting the economy.

8. Do you use social media (blogs, twitter, LinkedIn etc)? What place do you think it has in the future of the property industry?

The RLA has always grown through the internet – we were the first landlord association with a website and all our services including training are available on-line.

With first time buyers’ average age at 34, new media are critical for landlords in the younger market. Frankly we have hardly seen anything yet! Keep your eye on the apps (applications)

8. What is the most important lesson you have learned during your time in property?

Look after your tenants, but be fair and firm, as you would with any customer. In order to be fair you have to know when you are right and they are wrong – but what would you rather do: win an argument or have a void?

10. What advice would you have to someone thinking of entering the property industry today?

• Know your market.
• Do your homework.
• Don’t get over-geared.

*****

Thank you Alan, and may you and the RLA continue to flourish and campaign for landlords.

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we have decided to amend the Town and Country Planning (Use Classes) order 1987 as amended to provide for a specific definition of an HMO. Planning permission will then be required, where a material change of use has occurred, for properties changing use from C3 (dwelling house) to the new use class.

What this means in practice, is that in future planning permission will be required before a property can be let to three or more unrelated people sharing.

We are told that the legislation will not apply retrospectively, but landlords seeking to let to three or more unrelated tenants sharing after 6 April should speak to the planning departments of their local authorities (who are no doubt going to be very busy).

It seems that you will not need planning permission to change a property back again to single use, after planning permission to let as an HMO has been obtained.  However the new rules will presumably make life difficult for landlords of properties which are sometimes let to families and sometimes to sharers.

There is no doubt that ’studentification’ where whole neighbourhoods are taken over by student HMOs can cause problems in certain areas. For example I wrote about this in my post on HMO licensing in Cathays Ward in Cardiff.  However are the steps proposed taking things too far?

This move has been roundly criticised by the landlords associations.  The National Landlords Association states that the move is misguided and will not achieve the governments goals:

HMOs play a vital role in providing much needed housing for students, young professionals and those on low incomes who rely on this type of affordable accommodation. Large cities across the UK greatly depend on shared housing as a first step. By making it more difficult and costly for landlords to provide this type of accommodation, these measures will reduce choice for tenants and increase pressure on local authority housing demands.

The Residential Landlords Association describes the move as ‘deplorable and draconian’. RLA chairman Alan Ward comments:

“This will be nothing to the economic decline of bars, restaurants and local shops if students and young professionals are deprived of the choice of locality in which they can live. Packing them into expensive halls of residence neither gives them the experience of independent living, nor integration with thriving communities. It will create student ghettos.

” This is the dangerous use of planning legislation for social engineering to stop students living close to their university, and other social groups such as immigrants.

The housing law blogs are also critical. The PainSmith blog feels that the government probably has not realised quite how many properties will be affected by this. It concludes:

We do not usually comment on political matters, but it is disturbing to see these measures, along with others, being introduced in very short order in April. It immediately gives rise to concerns as to the level of consideration that has been given to the measures and their likely effects. It also gives the appearance of measures being forced through prior to an election in order to score points with the electorate or simply on the basis that the Conservative party, should they win an election, will be too busy to reverse them. One hopes that is not what is going on but if it is then it is sad to see cheap political point-scoring at the expense of the private rented sector which houses a significant percentage of the population and makes a substantial contribution to, an already weakened, economy.

The other proposal from government, is to remove the necessity for local authorities to get the approval of the Secretary of State, where they want to introduce selective licensing (usually done to provide for licensing non-HMO landlords in areas of low housing demand which also have problems with anti-social behavior).

If you feel strongly about this, note that there is a consultation paper online, deadline for responses is 12 March 2010.