Ben Reeve Lewis shines a light onto the little known and shadowy world of ‘rogue’ or criminal landlords and organised crime.
Over the years that I have been contributing to Tessa’s blog I have written several articles trying to get across to people the kinds of issues that enforcement officers like me have to deal with.
I have also spoken on numerous occasions to landlord groups, explaining how different the world I occupy is from that of the normal landlord, often to the annoyance of the reader or delegate and the frustration of myself.
Rogue landlords – a recent terminology
When Shelter introduced the previously unused term several years ago I openly criticised it for being ill-defined and unhelpful for people like me dealing at the sharp end.
Personally, I hate the term and still view it as misleading on a day to day level, but can’t deny that the idea has gained traction in the public’s consciousness.
So fair play on that one and I find myself routinely using the phrase, despite my own annoyance.
Is ‘rogue landlord’ a fair term to use?
It’s a term of convenience but it fails to communicate what is really going on out there in real “Rogue landlord land”.
To accurately reflect the true situation these people should be deemed to be ‘criminal landlords’ with outright criminal intent.
The London Underworld still exists
In London at least (my stomping ground in 4 different boroughs) it is so often linked to people trafficking and exploitation, including links to cannabis farming, illegal DVD production, brothels, housing benefit fraud and what HMRC calls the ‘Hidden economy’.
I operate in a world far removed from a defective section 21 or a deposit protection certificate.
Regular criminal events
On a recent 7am visit with a London authority, accompanied by UKBA Borders Police 2 coachloads of people fetched up from abroad to be met by landlords queueing on the pavement to sign them up, not only for accommodation but presumably cash in hand jobs, given that none of the tenants were interested in talking about their parlous overcrowded accommodation travails.
One enforcement officer for a Norfolk based local authority who spoke to me reported connections between employers in agricultural gang-master scams, providing overcrowded and unauthorised HMOs where the officers couldn’t get a look in because nobody would talk to them for fear of losing their jobs.
Rent to renter scams
Then there are the other groups of landlords and agents exploiting the vast need for affordable housing in an economy gone mad with out of control rents creating a veritable feeding frenzy of greed.
Rent to rent scams abound here with tenants finding properties through online portals that offer no protection or checks for anyone and are seemingly happy to allow their services to be used by a variety of crooks.
Why would a rent to renter, posing as a landlord bother with repairs when it isn’t even their property?
Greed is ever present in an underworld of exploitation
If the agent isn’t actually involved with the scam, and often they are, they have no cares other than receiving the agreed rent of say £1,800 per month, the rent to renter filling a 3 bed house with 12 people, paying their £1,800 rent to the agent whilst pocketing another £1,000 per month per property from the occupants.
And that is where they aren’t renting out the rooms on a shift basis to day and night workers, doubling up on the total rental income, effectively renting beds at an hourly rate rather than a property, for which they are paying no tax.
When the local authority enforcement crews rock up with queries about licensing, HMO standards and trivial things like fire safety precautions, landlords stealing computers in lieu of rent and women being sexually assaulted but too fearful to complain (the clipboard jobsworths as we are sometimes called) the agents deny all knowledge.
The rent to renter having done a runner without protecting anyone’s deposits and everyone is pointing the finger at everyone else whilst denying responsibility.
With rogue landlords – who are the losers?
The only losers being the occupants and sometimes even the owner, ignorant of the liberties that agents and R2R people are taking with their properties.
Often the tenants report that both agent and landlord have visited the property at various times and knew full well what was going on and just as often the back-hander arrangement between the agent and the rent to renter goes awry when the R2R stops passing money over to the agent, amassing thousands in rent arrears.
The agent then goes for possession against their tenant, the R2R, without referencing the real tenants who carry on oblivious to proceedings whilst still paying their rent to the R2R, who only know about the problem when High Court enforcement officers turn up to change the locks.
Said HCEO won’t divulge information of the proceedings when questioned by enforcement officers and housing advisers because enforcement officers and housing advisers have no ‘Locus Standii’.
Check it out for yourselves…..
Anyone doubting how this works should do a bit of research on the history of dodgy HCEOs and High Court Writs on Nearly Legal. Although it is believed that the particular practice described in that article has now ceased.
Often the clueless tenants have to make a homelessness application paid for by us through our taxes.
Justice evades the victim
All of the above raises complex legal and procedural arguments.
Some of which can be remedied but many not and even if they are open to challenge the process of clarifying and resolving issues is so long winded and arcane that in the doing of it the victim tenants usually lose interest and just move on, voicing the opinion that justice has not served them – and I totally agree.
Rogue Landlords blatantly flout the law
Your average Rogue Landlord is not bound by any laws that they care about breaching and are dismissive of any threats of effective enforcement action. because they exploit the procedures that enforcement officers have to abide by that leave us lagging 100 yards behind them at all stages,
Because they exploit the procedures that enforcement officers have to abide by that leave us lagging 100 yards behind them at all stages. Because we have to play by Marquis of Queensbury Rules, while they just execute a swift kick in the nuts and run away.
Decent hard-working landlords are oblivious to the rogue landlords
Whenever I write about rogue landlord enforcement I get shouted down, because normal, decent landlords, who are probably 90% of you, don’t get what is really going on out there.
Admittedly these people aren’t landlords in the sense that they simply earn their living building an investment portfolio by providing homes for people. I don’t even count Fergus Wilson as a rogue landlord. People like him are not my concern.
Neither are clueless amateurs breaking rules they didn’t even know existed, which with respect is probably a large amount of Landlord Law Blog readers. This is why you read the blog, to educate yourselves.
Cash is king is rogue landlord-land
True criminal landlords don’t give a Rats about legal requirements. They also don’t care about repairs and will happily let a property run down rather than spend out on maintenance – because for them it’s all about immediate cash flow, not investment.
Title to the land is the important thing at the end of the day for ordinary landlords, especially in London. If all goes tits up they still have a hold on a significant wodge of cash.
But these people, the rogue landlords, don’t operate by conventional rules of self-interest. They have different agendas to people like you.
To these people, the Private Rental Sector is an untended field to be harvested and used to bleed dry of any last ounce of cash.
An unguarded herd of cattle to be rustled, whether it be by installing electricity and gas meters stolen from demolished properties whilst charging tenants rent inclusive of bills that aren’t actually even registered or running an unofficial housing waiting list for homeless people sleeping in their cars in a nearby car park, paying the landlord to have showers in the morning whilst waiting for tenants to move out so they can move in.
This is reality
All this stuff is real and all of it I have dealt with in the last few months. For me, in the past 27 years, this is just bog-standard stuff.
To understand the mind of the rogue landlord you have to abandon any sense that they operate with the same concerns as you and you also have to accept that much of what is going on out there is serious, committed and organised criminal activity, only marginally related to the day to day business of landlording.
Renting properties is merely a portal, an access point to other means of income, often backed by and supporting organised crime.
People need to wake up to what is really going on.
Don’t disagree with that, I’ve seen it happen over decades, increasingly getting worse.
My beef is that the (bigger picture) answer is invariably to hit good landlords under the pretence of doing something about it rather than tackle the real problem.
It is certainly clear that you operate in a different world to normal landlords or you would not make such nonsensical statement as “economy gone mad with out of control rents creating a veritable feeding frenzy of greed”. The economy has not gone mad. There is a shortage of housing in some parts of the UK, so the price of housing has risen as the law of supply and demand predicts. That includes rents and house prices though rents have lagged behind house prices making it uneconomical to operate as a “normal” landlord in London and areas around it.
Bet you didn’t expect someone to say rents in London are too low.
By “normal” landlord I mean someone looking to make money from the business of letting accomodation. I have a stocks and shares ISA I took out in 2007 that has averaged 5.5% returns. After I lost my job 4 years ago I invested in property near Manchester and have been averaging just over 7% returns. I have also let my former home in Reading but that returns ony around 4% though it fetches the highest rent of all my properties. The only reason I haven’t sold it is that due to Crossrail the expected capital gains more than made up for it. I plan to sell it in 2 years time anyway.
In London it is worse. Unless they are operating a HMO legal landlords in London are barely going to beat the rates on current accounts ftom rents and house price rises of only 2.4% last year won’t make it up to what could be done from other means. I would expect the normal PRS in London to decline over the next few years. Unfortunately that is likely to leave more space for the criminals.
Reading made 6% last year, enough for me to keep to my plan of selling in 2019. Tameside grew by 3% passing 2007 levels – a nice bonus but largely irrelevant to my plans.
There are two ways to properly deal with the housing market in London – increase the supply or reduce the demand. i.e. build more homes or persuade people to live elsewhere. Neither will be easy to do.
“Whenever I write about rogue landlord enforcement I get shouted down, because normal, decent landlords, who are probably 90% of you, don’t get what is really going on out there.”
Ben I have shouted you down in the past but not because I don’t know that there is a problem or that I don’t think something badly needs to be done about it but because, in my opinion, none of the things you have ever suggested to solve the problem would work and usually involve expense and time for us 90% and will be completely ignored by the 10% you should be targeting.
Has landlord licensing had any effect on these serious problems in areas where it has been introduced? Do any of the blatant criminals described in your article bother to register? You will know better than me but I suspect not.
“none of the things you have ever suggested to solve the problem would work”
That is hardly fair Dave, this is a cracking idea for those genuinely wanting to tackle the problem;
https://www.landlordlawblog.co.uk/2014/05/09/developing-a-rogue-landlord-multi-agency-taskforce-in-lodon/
Unfortunately most councils prefer licensing as it ‘creates’ jobs, grows careers and builds empires. Politically it makes great headlines, gets public support and is seen to be doing something about it.
The fact that licensing doesn’t actually work is a side issue for most councils.
Unfortunately most councils prefer licensing as it ‘creates’ jobs, grows careers and builds empires. Politically it makes great headlines, gets public support and is seen to be doing something about it.
The fact that licensing doesn’t actually work is a side issue for most councils.
Absolutely 100% spot on. Licensing is just another money making scam for the ever more greedy, grasping, lazy public sector and in reality it achieves very little to absolutely nothing at all, except for lining the pockets of the various Local Authorities.
We have properties in a London borough where they are, at present, trying to introduce licensing and the officers involved are virtually on the brink of telling lies in order to force this through, one even thinks that “48% of people” constitutes a majority, laughable.
Expensive licensing schemes may make life easier for criminal landlords by driving out law abiding ones.
Fair point HBW – sorry Ben I am letting my annoyance with council licensing schemes cloud my judgement.
Ben I am actually a big fan of a lot of what you do and often quote from this post to people who have no idea of how bad the situation is in some parts of the country:-
https://www.landlordlawblog.co.uk/2014/03/21/ben-reeve-lewis-friday-newsround-146/
Your comments ref. EDF and BG in the comments section are particularly interesting.
I would be interested to know if this type of operation was continued and what the results were.
Ben will correct me if I am wrong but I don’t think this post is really about the benefits of licensing. He is just trying to make people aware of the seriousness of the rogue landlord threat.
Councils now have new enforcement powers under the Housing & Planning Act 2016 and I would expect them to start using these more – particularly as they can now keep the money!
I can say categorically, although I dont expect to be believed here as usual, that licensing is proving a real boon for the tracking down of rogue landlords and slum properties, especially in the areas I work in where there is across the board licensing.
In one borough the database is extensive and we go out on all the addresses that dont have them and find exactly what we are looking for, because the licensed properties have already been visited. It also throws up a list of names on unlicensed properties who are the usual suspects on other ones as well.
Can it be done without licensing? Yes. During my tenure in Lewisham rogue landlord enforcement team we benefited from a multi agency approach, that involved sitting around a table with planning, environmental health, ASB teams, building control HB Fraud, the Police and officers from neighbouring boroughs, chucking out names and addresses and seeing who knew who.
Basically everyone was everyone else’s eyes and ears in the community, which gave us slum properties, illegal conversions, overcrowding, unlicensed premises and HMO’s and added bonus’s of brothels and cannabis farms.
My idea in the creation of that system was based on leaving decent landlords alone and going after the crims but where you dont have that extensive information sharing network the data thrown up by licensing schemes is a decent tool.
Having said that my experience in the rogue landlord multi agency network completely changed my perception of the previous 24 years prosecuting some thug for harassment and illegal eviction and I now realise, when you look at the big picture, as I have been since 2013 now, that in fact the situation is as I have written about in the article above is what is actually going on. Whether I was simply previously naive to the true state of things or in fact the situation has gotten to this state because of the amount of money that can be made from renting these days I couldnt tell, although I suspect the latter.
Forget Big Ron with his baseball bat, most people view of a rogue landlord and get the notion, as I have written about here, of organised criminal gangs using rental properties in parts of wider activities such as people trafficking, sex trade, housing benefit fraud, dodgy agents using properties for a range of criminal activities that the owner isnt aware of.
This has affected my attitude towards landlords and it shows in my writing. Its not that I’m anti landlord. I have friends who are landlords and meet many who I have max respect for but my insights into the scale of the real problem and what is truly going on out there, the stuff I see day in day out is my main concern.
If decent landlords object to licensing and being made to pay to enforce against the bad ones, then I’m sorry guys. I can live with that. If licensing can give people in my position a few extra tools, and it does, then to me that is an acceptable price
“If decent landlords object to licensing and being made to pay to enforce against the bad ones”
I would happily pay if that were the case.
But there is not one shred of evidence that landlord licensing works, only anecdotal claptrap from council workers with a vested interest in their careers.
In my areas I know who the rogue landlords are and the council knows who the rogue landlords are.
Licensing is not the solution nor even a small tool. It is a smokescreen to hide the problem.
https://www.landlordlawblog.co.uk/2014/03/21/ben-reeve-lewis-friday-newsround-146/
“I would be interested to know if this type of operation was continued and what the results were.”
Ben has diplomatically declined to answer so let me hazard a guess;
It was successful. Very successful. Too successful.
If there had been a similar success rate with the remaining 68 properties the council would have had a big problem to deal with.
.
Around 500 people who had just lost their (illegal) livelihoods and who were now homeless.
So they did what councils do best, they held a meeting. At the meeting it was decided after due consideration that whilst hard targeting the rogue landlords was excellent in theory, the practicalities vis-a-vis a real world situation made it impractical. The project was shelved for further evaluation in the very distant future.
But they still had a rogue landlord problem and needed to at least be seen to be doing something.
Which is generally the cue for some clipboard jobsworth to pipe up-
“what about running a licensing scheme for all the good landlords?”
Genius!
At least they tried.
I’ve no objection to licensing provided Councils don’t use it to “milk” good Landlords but fund it through fines of rogue Landlords, plus a small nominal fee to all Landlords.
@Barryn, you misunderstand the system. Licensing is not there to pay for enforcement. the income from licensing is ring-fenced and can only be used to fundng a licensing scheme, it cant be used for enforcement. Thats why the regime has changed to allow councils to keep penalties to pay for enforcement, which previously had to come out of council tax.
@HB I wasnt diplomatically avoiding your question. I just didnt read it. I renounced that particular pleasure some time ago
Ben:-“Licensing is not there to pay for enforcement. the income from licensing is ring-fenced and can only be used to fundng a licensing scheme, it cant be used for enforcement.”
If that is the case please explain how Liverpool can justify the following fees:-
Fit and proper person check:- £50
First property £400
The fit and proper person fee does not seem excessive but £400 to file away a landlord completed form for a property is ridiculous. A licence is issued with no visit to the property to verify any of the boxes ticked by the landlord on the application form so what are they doing for the £400?
I think hbWelome:-“Unfortunately most councils prefer licensing as it ‘creates’ jobs, grows careers and builds empires.” has hit the nail on the head.
Ben I know you didn’t make the rules but please don’t try and defend such a charge by saying it can not be used for enforcement. If it was used to shut down some of the criminal landlords who exploit vulnerable people I wouldn’t object.
Derek how is a fit and proper person test or a 1st property fee categorised in your mind as enforcement?
I’ll say it for the last time the rule of licensing schemes is that the revenue cannot be used for anything other than running the licensing scheme, it cant be used for enforcement.
Your complaint here, as every landlord’s is concerns the fairness of licensing and the fees charged which will vary from council to council depending on their running costs which will be determined by a range of local factors. Remember a council cannot introduce additional or selective licensing without getting approval from the government.
I have written here about a very serious problem of organised criminal activity in rental properties that affects tenants and landlords alike and yet as usual the topic gets hijacked and the only concern of posters here is the perceived unfairness of licensing fees.
I’ll say this directly and undiplomatically for once I am heartily sick of the whining and have no sympathy for the position. As long as licensing helps people in my position to track down more rogue landlords and slum properties it will always get my vote.
I shall not post further on this.
Can everyone please note that as this post is NOT about licensing but about a serious problem we have with criminal landlords – I will not be approving any more comments on this post on the subject of licensing.
Further to my comment above, we have now done a separate post specifically on landlord licensing – so can any comments on that topic please go there (although read the post first! It may answer your questions).
You will find the licensing post here https://www.landlordlawblog.co.uk/2017/07/10/licensing-landlords-really-good/