INTEREST rate rises have seen tenants squeezed by landlords who are demanding huge rents for housing of increasingly poor quality, a campaigner has warned.
Mr Poser, who heads Priced Out, a national campaign for affordable house prices, said: “Unfortunately, as interest rates have gone up, we’ve seen a lot of landlords leave the market, which has meant that fewer properties are available to rent, we’ve obviously not been building any properties for decades.
“So that combined with cost of living means that renters are seeing a huge amount of their income go instantly out the door straight away. And I don’t see it getting better soon.”
Speaking to Tom Harwood on GB News, he said: “Cheap money tends to inflate the headline price of the house, but it’s also on the flip side, in that case, easier to get a mortgage. But a significant portion of that is just sheer under-supply. We haven’t built enough homes.
“This is bad for both renters and people who are trying to get on the housing ladder as well. I know friends who have recently just got on the housing ladder, and they got a three-year fix and they’re looking at their rates going up massively as well. These massively increased house prices, that nothing’s going to get better unless we build more homes.”
He added: “The fact is that people are being forced into smaller and smaller accommodation of lower and lower quality…as you mentioned, there are lots of videos of people with damp, for example, throughout their whole house, a completely unliveable situation, but because there’s no competition in the market, landlords know that they’re going to be able to get a huge amount of rent out of frankly unacceptably bad properties.
“I’d love it if there were simple solution like cap rents, that’s not going to work. The problem is that we know that if we cap rents, we massively reduce the incentive to build any new homes…
“It’s also likely that landlords will simply stop renting out the flats…in the end, we need people who currently own property to rent it out.
“Part of the recent rise has been landlords leaving the market. It simply won’t make anything better. Certainly not in the long run. We’ll get a class of tenants who are protected like New York under rent freezes, who can’t move, but also pay ridiculously low rents compared to everyone else who’s not protected.”
Mr Poser said: “Even if you reduce the demand, you still got a massive under-supply, we need to build over a million homes just to catch up with the demand that we’ve already got, let alone the future growth.
“I don’t think you want to reduce the demand in a significant way. Actually, if you look at the demographics of the country, we’re going to need immigration to keep our economy vibrant and working well as the population ages.
“What we could do is if we build more houses, we’d have a massive economic boom, which would make life better for everyone across the country, including those who already own homes.”
