Room Hunting

I have commented over the past few years how traditional modes of residence have come back into style as work in the UK has become more geographically concentrated, pay has fallen in real terms and the cost of accommodation has risen particularly rapidly.  I guess I am wrong to have ever thought that I should perceive what I think of as ‘old fashioned’ modes of living as such.  It is clear that they are, in fact, part of lifestyles of the 2010s and completely bury the myth of a ‘property-owning democracy’ that was once peddled in this country.  Thus, I guess it is unsurprising that as a man in my forties, I have lived with my parents: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.co.uk/2012/12/never-as-bad-as-we-had-it.html ; in a guest house: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.co.uk/2009/12/living-in-guesthouse.html  and as a lodger: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.co.uk/2011/02/living-withas-lodger.html  Working in London I am again looking for accommodation, a process which is fraught with difficulty.  I am more alert to the hazards of 419 scammers in the market place for renting rooms: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.co.uk/2011/08/419-scams-connected-with-renting-room.html  and so far, this time round seem to have only encountered one.  This was a very low-key one without all the grandeur and fake photos of those I ran into back in 2013. 

One lesson I learnt back in 2009 is that there is no point in me responding to advertisements for rooms.  There are a number of characteristics which rule me out.  First is my age.  I am now in my mid-40s and for some reason people letting rooms seem to feel that there is something sinister about a man my age renting a room.  Even when they say in emails that they are happy to have me, meeting me they change their minds and I suddenly find the room has been ‘allocated to someone else’.  I accept I am overweight and unattractive, but I am clean and tidy and do domestic chores.  However, I clearly do not fit the image that people have of a young, dynamic businessman.  If I did, then presumably I would not have to rent a room. 

I think part of the problem is that they think that I will not tolerate poor things about the room.  I certainly think that if I am paying rent for a room, I should get all that is advertised.  Perhaps I am overly demanding in expecting cooking facilities and heating.  If you have a cooker and a heater, then they should work.  However, maybe this is too demanding and is what rules me out when there are others who will accept no heating or no cooking facility.  For me it is rather selfish because I know it is far more costly if I eat out every meal and I find I cannot stomach living on sandwiches constantly. 

The other key factor is that I am a man.  Around 75% of the advertisements I see specify that only women can rent the room.  At least people say this now up front, whereas in the past you had to ring or go there to find out ‘well, we’re actually looking for a woman’.  Yes, it is prejudicial, but I would rather see the prejudice before I waste my time.  Of course, no-one is allowed to specify ethnicity.  I am a very pale Caucasian.  I find that other people in that category do not want to rent to people like me because of the concerns about.  I get on far better with landlords/ladies who are South or East Asian.  However, not being from that background myself I am sometimes jumped over by someone ‘from the home country’.  This happens even when I have said I like a room and want to rent it.  Of course, in some cases it is just because they have met me and now the other negative aspects kick in.

One key negative aspect for me is the company that employs me and the fact that I now do administrative work.  For some reason there is a prejudice against people who do not work in making earnings.  Strangely I was told that people prefer a salesman on commission to someone who does a solid administrative job day-in/day-out.  Again, I think this comes down to the sense that an administrator renting a room must be a serial killer.  However, ironically, I am actually a better lodger as my income does not fluctuate and I certainly do not have alcoholic lunches and noisy celebrations the way some people in sales still do.  However, it is clear that it is better for me to lie about where I work and the nature of my work or run up against this prejudice.

The other thing is people’s sense of geography.  If I say that I want a room in North London, then clearly I will consider places in North-West London or North-East London and having a car and a parking space at work, I am not tied to bus, tube or train lines the way that many people are.  However, somewhere in South London or East London are of no use to me and it wastes my time to have to deal with these people contacting me.  Conversely, when I put an advertisement about being in a certain radius of work, I found I got no responses.  When I took this criterion off, I then had loads of people contacting me with properties precisely within that circle.  It is clear that, certainly in London, that people have little idea where their house is in relationship to other areas or even points of the compass.  I suppose if you travel just from home to work you do not gather this information.

I accept rent by the week.  However, there is now this common thing of accepting weekly rent and then after a period of time requesting the ‘make-up’ rent for the months which have passed.  This is because, aside from February in non-leap years, months have 2-3 days more than 4 x 7 days = 28 days.  Rent by calendar month appears to have disappeared and rental weeks that go over months also appear to be too difficult for landlords/ladies to work out, so you have this cluster of days, which add up to 29 days in a normal year, 30 days in a leap year.  Thus, you can suddenly be charged with an additional four weeks’ rent.  Storage places pull off this trick as well.  A key problem is that some charge you for it even when only four or six months have passed, so you have only tallied up a fraction of this additional month. 

I have now tried to rent three rooms only to have my application rejected or reneged on at the last moment.  I know the competition for renting a room is very high in London, but it is clear that my optimism that as when living in Exeter and Uxbridge that I would be able to find a place within a few weeks, has been entirely misplaced.  Though my income has fallen I did think I could rent somewhere at the same kind of level, with a 25% leeway, as I did last year.  It is clear that I need to accept that I am not going to find somewhere even within those parameters now and will have to put up with an unheated room or one with no access to cooking facilities if I want to rent for £4-500 per month.  Saying that, at this moment, I cannot even afford that.  I am not clear how I can go any lower in terms of finding somewhere to rent.  A job outside London or with higher pay is clearly necessary but is as difficult to conjure up than an affordable room as a lodger.

419 Scams Connected With Renting A Room

Previously I have commented on my experiences of living away from home Monday to Friday in order to work: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2009/12/living-in-guesthouse.html  This has put me into circumstances that I have characterised as fitting in with those portrayed in Arnold Bennett novels.  Earlier this year, I also commented on issues around living as a lodger:  http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2011/02/living-withas-lodger.html  These experiences are again relevant, as having finally found work in London, a city where I could neither afford to rent a flat, I have gone back to being a Monday to Friday lodger.  With the recession still raging and impacting on different parts of the country differently, weekly commuting is becoming a common practice in professional jobs.  This may be why parts of the M25 have been experiencing even worse jams than usual, especially on Fridays.

I commute over 300Km each week but during the working week able to walk to my job.  I am fortunate that I have ended up lodging with a nice couple in a quiet, clean and pleasant house with an excellent wireless internet connection; in an area where few people seem to use such facilities.  Two other men, 10-20 years younger than me, are also lodgers in the house, but our daily schedules seem to complement each other, so there are not queues for the bathroom.  The only real challenge is that the landlord wants his monthly rent in cash meaning repeated visits to the cashpoint machine once I receive my salary and making sure it is kept safely until I can hand it over to him in one large lump.

What this posting is about, are the stages before I was successful.  I had learnt a lot from looking for a room in order to work at my previous job.  Originally there I had spent time looking online and in newspapers, day after day, and telephoning for rooms at lunch or in the evening only to find the room had gone or to be summoned to an hour-long interview not to be rejected, simply not to be called back.  In London I know it has been even worse with the pressure for rooms meaning that for perverse reasons people letting rooms not only conduct interviews as stringent as applying for a job, but even have evening events to which the ‘candidates’ are invited in order to carry out activities worthy of ‘The Apprentice’ in order to ‘win’ the room.

The main reasons I had been rejected for renting a room were because I was a man and because I was 42.  I accept that there are many women home owners who do not want a strange man lodging in their house, though they often cannot say that explicitly in their advertisements.  Often the gender or single/couple status of those letting is not revealed either.  Men letting rooms usually have no problem with a male lodger, but unless there are gay (and only 10% of men are) many would prefer to have a female lodger too.

As for age, people seem to prefer someone ‘exciting’ even if, ironically, they just come home from work and slump in front of the television themselves.  In the exercises to select a lodger this is the factor that is often focused on in particular.  Given that middle aged is officially 36-59, by the time you are 42 you cannot even pretend to be ‘exciting’.  Ironically, of course, they do not really want a 24-hour party person as a lodger, they want someone who is not seen or heard, leaves nothing in the fridge and manages never to be in the bathroom when they want to use it.  However, that is not what they think they want, certainly at the processing stage.

Having learnt these lessons, I adopted an approach which I repeated this time on coming to London.  Instead of chasing after advertisements only to get rejection after rejection, I put out a ‘wanted’ advertisement (using Gumtree London), detailing my age, gender, the profession I work in (something else people get exercised about, by definition civil servants certainly are seen as insufficiently ‘exciting’), what child and/or animal combinations I could tolerate and how far from work I was willing to be (even so, I always get offers 20-40Km from where I will be working, pretty much defeating the purpose).  Anyway, this has saved me a lot of wasted phonecalls. 

This time, however, I encountered a problem for the first time, the one which forms the focus of this posting.  All of us are aware that 90% of the emails we receive are not only junk but are, in fact, trying either to trick us into revealing details in order to hack into accounts or to trick money directly from us.  Such scams are often categorised as ‘419 scams’ a reference to the number of the Nigerian law which covers such criminal activity.  Once Nigeria was a major centre for such scams, but now it has spread to many other countries and many originate from within the UK itself.  Such scams constantly evolving; Wikipedia even has a whole page devoted to them.  We have seen the move away from those based on traditional confidence tricks such as trying to persuade you to part with a certain sum of money in return for a share of a larger sum.  Many now purport to be from banks or other online services you may or may not use, in order to tackle some supposed fault.  The ever changing variety of scams has now reached looking for rooms to rent.

I posted my advertisement twice in the space of a fortnight and among the eight responses I received, three were scams.  This might not seem a great deal, but when the supply of rooms is so scarce, this is three wasted opportunities.  The scams I received fell into two categories.  The first type may have even been computer generated.  The two messages came from a German Yahoo email account.  The first one suggested a room quite far from where I was working and I realised the sender had taken the area I stated I was interested in as the name of a street elsewhere in London and sent me a room available in that street.  The house holding the room was number 32.  I rejected that room straight off, saying it was too far away.

I only realised that this message was a scam when I altered my advertisement for inclusion the second week.  I got another email from a German Yahoo account, but using a different name and with an address close to where I work; it was only later that I noticed it was in house numbered 32.  What struck me, however, was that the photographs of the room were identical to those I had been sent before and then I saw the number was the same.  Looking back, I should have been suspicious immediately as the facilities on offer are far better than the standard for rooms right across London and the monthly rent was slightly below the norm.  In addition, in the emails they asked very quickly for details about me, whereas, as I have explained above, I had included a lot of personal detail in my original advertisement.  Given that both emails followed the same pattern, generating a response with a real address based on the area requested in my advertisement (though mixing up the area and street name in the first case), suggests to me that there is mechanical scamming going on.

The second scam was certainly with a human who I ended up in correspondence with.  Again, the facilities were slightly better and the rent slightly less than the norm for the area.  In addition, he would not give the name of the street the room was in though he sent photos of the interior.  Another noticeable characteristic was that after the initial email the level of English grammar and spelling fell away quickly.  Though, having dealt with officials from Newham Council over many years, I do know that this is not a great sign, because most communications I received from the council were more poorly written than the average scam email, as I often told them.  The Newham council worker Deanna Banks, has an unfortunate name for avoiding being suspected as a scammer, but the fact that she seems unable to use capital letters does not help either.

What aroused my slow to arouse suspicions was the story this scammer began spinning.  He said how he had people coming to the room and loving it so that he took it off the market only to find ultimately they could not pay the rent.  I offered to show him my current bank statement but he said he had been tricked in that way before.  I even offered to pay him a deposit of £200 in cash on the day I saw the room, if I liked it.  When he refused this and went on in detail about how I had to send money to my girlfriend using Western Union and then show him the receipt, I knew it was a scam.  Internet pages say that any transaction which involves Western Union should be avoided; they seem to only function on business done for scams.  Other money transfer companies are available and seem similarly exploited by scammers.

It was only some weeks after I had sent abuse to these scammers that I read in ‘The Guardian’ that scams around renting rooms have become so common and I recognised one of the ones listed as being the second one tried on me.  By definition someone seeking to rent just a room as a lodger is not rich, but these scammers are going to try to steal from you all the same.  The difficulties that people actually renting rooms put in place just drives you all the quicker into the arms of the scammers.  I was angered by how much time was wasted and how my hopes were raised and dashed.  I do also wonder about the poor people whose addresses get used by the scammers.  I guess at least some of them have had distraught people turning up at their door assuming that they are somehow connected with the scam, when in fact they have been just as exploited as the potential lodgers themselves.

Unfortunately Feeling Compelled To Be A 'Nimby'

For those unfamiliar with the term, 'nimby' comes from 'not in my back yard' referring to people complaining about developments in their area.  Such an attitude has caused immense problems for the UK and is one reason why we have a shortage of prisons, drug rehabilitation centres, social housing, wind farms and even graveyards.  UK residents despise change.  They do not like 'others' coming into their area.  This was noticeable in the new town, Milton Keynes, where I used to live.  The town is laid out on a grid pattern and one-by-one over the past four decades these grids are filled in with new housing.  The trouble is much of the housing is very middle class, fine for people who can afford it, but it has meant that shops like Tescos have to bus in lower-paid staff from Luton, 27 Km away as none of them can find affordable accommodation locally.  The sensible solution seemed to be to build social housing in one of the grids close to the large shopping centre in the South-East of the town.  This was too much for the residents of neighbouring grids who went and vandalised equipment on the building site in an attempt to stop social housing coming anywhere near their middle class enclaves.  It is fascinating how such residents portray the potential newcomers as feckless, drug addicts, alcoholics, noisy and dirty.  They do not connect them with the people who serve them their luxury delicatessen items in the supermarket or clean up when one of their offspring makes a mess.  The main concern for the residents was that the value of their houses is sliding as a result of these social housing areas.  There is no sense that if the supermarkets close for lack of staff then the price will fall anyway.  In Milton Keynes the districts are divided by dual-carriageway roads on which most of, cars travel at 70 mph, which is as good a ghetto forming barrier as any.

Having seen such a narrowly focused 'nimby' response and utterly despairing over the virulent attacks on wind farms in the place of nuclear or coal-fired power stations, I am always careful not to fall into that trap myself.  Yet, on a small scale, I find I have done and consequently feel like a hypocrite.  My own consolation seems to be that I am not actually stopping progress like most nimbys, but that I am trying to reduce a quite clear contribution to crime in my street.  I have moved the location of the computer in my house so that I now sit in a room facing out over the street.  Dead opposite the window is a detached house built in the 1920s.  It has been empty for over three weeks now.  It was split into two flats, both rented out by a local social housing company.  The residents moved out more than three weeks ago and a few days later all the windows were stripped from the house and the front door was left open.  We had assumed that the windows would be replaced.  However, as time has passed nothing as been done to the house, it has not even been boarded up.  Of course, this offered too much temptation to drunken men coming back from the pub and twice over the weekend they decided to simply walk into the property and trash it.

Despite the house being vacated a lot of things had been left behind including a vacuum cleaner, a fridge and the cardboard tubes from the interior of carpets.  These were distributed all over the street.  Inside the vandals did a pretty good job of stripping the plaster and breaking up interior fittings.  Naturally we rang the owners and they said they had no concern as the property is due to be demolished anyway to provide access to a new close that is going to be jammed in behind the current line of houses.  What this is going to do to the already congested street I live on, though for not much longer, I have no idea.  Of course, if cars went down it at the legal 30 mph, then it might be alright, but no-one seems capable of keeping their speed down that low or wait for people coming on to negotiate around the lines of parked cars down both sides of the road, leading to lots of incidents of shouting and horns hooting.

After the second occasion I telephoned the police on their non-emergency line.  Being a low crime area two officers arrived as fast as they would have done to an emergency in many towns.  The perpetrators had fled.  Despite this nothing has been done to the house, it still remains full of debris (we pushed the stuff that had been thrown into the street back into its front garden).  My concern is less with the damage to the value of the property, as we have already sold it, but the hazard such a derelict site makes.  Are companies not obliged to board up empty houses?  These days the average building site is surrounded by defensive fences and is usually covered in alarms, though I gather that is more to dissuade people from stealing the scaffolding than from discouraging people from trespassing.  I know that development and letting companies are powerful in any town, their kind of people tend to fill councils the length of the country.  However, I have been surprised that there is no legal requirement to make a derelict property secure especially when it is so close to inhabited properties.  The house will be a wonderful refuge for rats and a source of bricks and other debris for vandalism elsewhere; the police officers expressed concern that cars parked within metres of the house would be damaged.  My concern is that the property will be burnt down; perhaps that is what the company is hoping in order to save on demolition costs. Whilst it is detached house, one wall lies less than a metre from an inhabited house, ironically owned by the same letting company.

These circumstances have turned me into a reluctant nimby.  I hoped the police would put pressure on the company, but days passed without change.  I contacted the local forum which seems to be a one-man organisation for complaining about students.  However, the forum's chair welcomed my complaint and it seems he has the ear of at least a few councillors.  The matter has to be raised at committees and so I imagine I will be long gone and the house burnt to the ground before anything is done.  I know that David Cameron's 'Big Society' is simply a sham to explain away cuts in local services, but it is bitter that, in fact, it is so apparent that at a local level residents have absolutely no control even over things that will be a focus of crime.  Developers and property owners are, as they probably always have been, the true power in a town and it allows them to ignore complaints and to adopt an approach that costs them the least even to the extent on saving on buying some boards and nailing them to empty windowframes for a few weeks before they get round to knocking the house down.  People complain that health and safety regulations are too obsessive, but it seems, that they can simply be ignored if that is done by those with money and influence.  Many people opposed the building of the new houses, saying they could not be fitted in.  I accepted that there was nothing we could do to stop the construction, but I do feel that in the meantime the derelict house should be made safe and not a draw for rats and vandals.  However, clearly, even that attempt at nimbyism is a step too far too succeed.

The End Of My Property-Owning Dream

Back in 2000 when I was buying my first (and only) flat, a Japanese friend of mine emailed to say that now I was entering the property owning class that he anticipated that I would not wish to communicate with him being simply an employee, at the time working in a record shop, subsequently when laid off for being too old for that work (at the age of 30) he became a carer.  I know there has always been snobbery in the UK around owning property, but no-one has ever said to me here that I should or should not talk to them because I was or was not an owner of property at the time.  I note this now because finally we have had an offer on the house, probably just in time because I am running out of money to pay the mortgage.  Of course, the offer is less than we paid for the house, by £25,000 (€28,750; US$39,500) and is £15,000 less than the asking price we insisted on (which itself was £15,000 higher than the price the estate agent recommended).  Aside from the slump of 1990-3 the UK, especially southern England, has been used to constantly rising house prices and in general property has been the best investment if you want a decent return on your money.  In fact as I have often noted, house prices have been an obsession in the UK and I can think of no other country where just a simple slowing in the rise of house prices, not even a fall, makes the news broadcasts.  With mass unemployment reappearing and a depression in full bloom, this has already begun coming to an end.

For me, of course, the profitability of owning houses never really turned into a reality.  I owned a flat in London for seven years.  It rose from £80,000 to £130,000 in that time, so I did very well out of it.  The only trouble was, with work taking me away from London on a series of short-term contracts in the Midlands and on the South coast, I was deemed to be running it as a business (I let it out so that I could cover the council tax charged on empty furnished properties) and so I ended up with a £16,000 capital gains tax bill and then, of course, Newham Council, which makes up charges for all kinds of things at a whim, charged me £16,000 as well for work done in the street and to the building which held my flat.  I was compelled to sell the flat far cheaper than the going rate.  It was a two-bedroomed flat but was sold at the price of a one-bedroomed flat, about £20,000 less, partly because the estate agents were in on some deal with buyers (often landlords in the area) and because I was being hassled by my own landlord to move very quickly.  Always remember that however nice estate agents appear to be, they are always playing off the buyers against the sellers.  As a seller, they will never even get you the price that they recommended, expect to lose many £10,000s on that price.  Buyers are also getting very greedy.  When I sold my flat, the buyer, who was being granted constant access to the flat by the estate agent, began demanding various £500 sums for things such as cleaning the flat, something I could get done for less than a tenth of that price.  Clearly informed by the estate agent that I was desperate to move the buyer felt he could twist lots of little bonuses out of me.  The estate agent actually broke the lock to the front door something I had to pay over the odds to have replaced hours before the contracts were exchanged.  I was angered by the buyer's arrogant behaviour and in the end did not pay for the flat to be cleaned; I left the toilet unflushed and a range of food items for the buyer's delectation when he arrived.  It was a small victory, but you can see I was desperate to get something back for all the hassle and lost money.

I suppose I should not complain that I came away with £20,000 profit from the flat.  What was worse was that with the landlord compelling me to move so fast, I had to buy a house (the woman who shared the house with me was sick of renting, but maybe with hindsight we should have done that for a period more) when prices and interest rates were at their highest; more time could have made a huge difference, but I am never lucky that way.  Consequently, of the £20,000 I made on my flat, I will take away about £12,500.  I suppose I should not complain.  I could be facing negative equity meaning that I would still be paying off a loan on a house that I no longer owned.  At least with this deal, I do not get the black mark of repossession against me and all my debts will be cleared.  A lot of people will be far worse off than me.  Of course, I will never own property ever again.  I am now 43 which means that even with the raised retirement age I could not pay off a 25-year mortgage before I retired.

So, after a decade of owning a flat/house, though only a total of four years of actually living in the property I owned, I am back into the rental sector.  Of course, it has worsened since even the bad landlord I experienced back in 2007.  Now you can pay £600 per month to rent a single room in a house.  In addition, you have to go through the humiliation of an extensive selection process.  I am not glamorous, I look peculiar and am told I taught too much.  Like a lot of people looking for a room, I am going to find myself going through fruitless beauty contests.  Landlords/ladies know that people are desperate for housing and so can use this against you.  People renting out property generally think their tenants are slovenly and filthy, no matter how hard they work to keep the place clean.  Rights to be informed of a landlord's inspection are often ignored and you get levied charges like £40 for dust in a drawer or £60 for soap residue in a sink or £400 for the lawn having grown.  I should go into business as one of these cleaners/handypeople who charges such high prices for rectifying these things.

In addition to being once again a tenant, I have also dropped down the social scale even further.  Now, I am a man who has been unemployed for 7 months and will be dependent on housing benefit.  This rules me out from even applying for the bulk of rental property in my area and I am restricted to only those offering 'social housing'.  Housing benefit is falling and will quickly be below the rate necessary for the region in which I live in.  Consequently I will be compelled to move into one of the 'benefit ghettos' that are liable to harden once the new rules of housing benefits really begin to bite.  It seems incredible that twelve months ago that my career seemed to be advancing and I had a house and a stable situation and now that has been stripped of me.  At 43 I am cast on the scrap heap.  My career has halted and I cannot even get manual work because there are too many younger people with the right NVQ to step into those roles.  I suppose pride comes before a fall, but I do feel, that rather than much to do with my efforts, this has been inflicted on me by a government which loves pushing people down the social scale so as to enhance the standing of its people.  I am harangued by the Job Centre to be positive and see some future, but, despite all my efforts, there is no work even in a 250 Km radius, that will take me, I am apparently too much of everything for these employers, too high, too low, too practical, too strategic, too involved, too detached and so on.  Before Christmas I was interviewed for a job and came in as first reserve.  Given unemployment levels it seems unlikely that the winning candidate will turn the post down.  However, I then found out that the funding for the post has not even been approved yet, they were just building up a clutch of potential employees.  I was not even applying for a real job, just simply the opportunity that if a job does appear then I will have a chance to get it.  How much more like disposable batteries can workers become?  'Keep some in the drawer if we need them; chuck those ones out: they're past their use-by date.'

Anyway, I suppose returning to the rental sector will give me issues to post on here, assuming, that is, that I can get internet connection in whatever cramped flat I can get and hear myself think over the noise of screaming neighbours.  What about the woman and nine-year-old boy who have shared my house through the past few years?  Well, with the little money derived from the house sale, they are emigrating to Germany.  With the EU and online sales, small business have a lot more ability to relocate.  Apparently Berlin is desperate for people to rent there and is offering particular breaks.  There are a string of bilingual English-speaking schools there too.  Being an entrepreneur relocating is one thing; an unemployed office manager who does not speak German is something different. 

I am glad that they are getting out of the UK because the future here is going to be incredibly nasty.  As I have noted before people these days often ask: 'why did people not flee from Nazi Germany sooner?' and seem to think that they were naive or foolish.  For my views on this see: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2008/05/respect-difficulties-of-escaping.html  Sitting here in the UK with a new regime, which I trust will never come close to the horrors of Nazi Germany, but certainly seems well on the path to something like the Francoist regime in Spain (1939-75), I can see how hard it is to flee.  You need lots of money and know how you are going to access it in the new country.  You need to be able to speak a foreign language, very well, and to be able to handle all the bureaucracy of the destination country.  You have to try to get some of your belongings out with you.  You have to think about the welfare of your children and how they will be educated when you arrive.  You have to think about what you will do for work.  You have to learn a new set of not only laws, but also customs and expectations.  If you think how challenging a lot of this is, even when you move from town to town in the UK (supplement accent for language in that case), think how many more times it is moving abroad.  I wish I had the ability to go.  Given the damage to UK education that is already beginning, I am glad the boy is getting out.  His mother seems to have paid heed to the warnings I have given about going abroad, see: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2008/09/british-people-dont-be-foolish-in.html and finding a school that was English-speaking, was her first task.  Berlin is very different from the rest of Germany, more international and at the moment welcoming to immigrants from western Europe.  The EU makes things a lot easier for moving around than was the case in the 1930s, but it is still a challenge.

A couple of years ago I wrote on this blog that life does not 'begin at 40' as many have claimed, instead it 'begins to end', see: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2007/09/life-begins-to-end-at-40.html  It is clear now that through bad luck, probably not being assertive enough, and living in particular times, my future is going to be a lot worse than the life I have lived so far.  I have had a brief period owning a house and having a kind of family, the type of lifestyle that the Conservatives are supposed not only to support but to foster.  That period of my life is over.  My one shot at establishing myself in the middle class has gone and now I am an over-aged, over-educated something that will be pushed around by bullying landlords and officials simply because I failed to scrape together enough money to keep a house or said the wrong thing to a question at one of my interviews.

If you have the means to get out of the UK, I advise you to do it now.

The Steady Path to Repossession of Our House

Early on with me posting to this blog, way back in 2007, I wrote a lot about the agonies of being booted out of one house by a landlord and then buying another house quickly.  Now, almost three years on, I am in a position to see how much of a mistake that rapid house purchase was.  December 2007 was the worst time to move, with house prices and interest rates seeming to be going to rise inexorably, we felt lucky to get a fixed-rate mortgage at 6% and a 3-bedroomed house at less than £240,000 (€283,800; US$372,400).  Now, of course, with interest rates at almost zero for 18 months, such a high rate of mortgage seems insane, and the house, well, that is worth somewhere around £205-£210,000.  Saying that though, even with a £900 per month (€1,060; US$1,390) mortgage repayment, it was already below the rent for a house of the same size in my town and now, three years later, renting the same type of property locally would cost £1200 per month, so there were savings.  In addition, I was fortunate that after Newham Council had taken its £14,000 cut from the sale of my flat in their borough; HM Revenue and Customs £16,000 for capital gains tax as I had been unable to find work near my flat and so had been compelled to rent it out, and the estate agents sold the 2-bedroomed flat to a friend of theirs at a price you could have got a 1-bedroomed flat in the same area for, I had quite a bit of money to put into the house.  I reckon I will come away with around £30,000 of that, which means I have lost £20,000 (€23,600; US$31,000) in house purchasing since 2001 and am unlikely ever to be able to afford to buy any kind of house or flat again.

The main problem for me at the moment is selling the house before I run out of money to pay the mortgage repayments.  Having applied for 40 jobs in 16 weeks and attended 11 interviews without success, it looks like I am going to be unemployed for a pretty long time; structural unemployment, 1980s-style is back.  I have enough saved from my last redundancy package to pay two more months repayments.  Where money for deposit on a flat and rental payments will come from, I have no idea.  Knowing that I will soon default on the mortgage repayments I have contacted my lender twice in the past four months, first when I was made redundant and again now.  However, both times I have been told they can do nothing, I am not yet desperate enough.  I need to have only one month's repayment money left before they can even begin considering any options such as moving me to an interest-only payment scheme.  I have noticed that at the job centre (even though many of the staff at my local branch are in line for redundancy themselves come December), the building society and the estate agent's, people are still thinking that we are only experiencing frictional unemployment, i.e. people being out of work for three months or less as they move from position to position.  In fact, at a Back-To-Work session run by the job centre they said as much.  People need to wake up to the fact that certainly in public sector work and, I feel, more widely, we are now facing a pretty quick progression to mass, structural unemployment as seen in the 1980s.  The principles of the late 1990s and 2000s do not apply in such circumstances.

I applied for mortgage interest benefit.  I was advised by my job centre that, given that I have been unemployed for more than three months, I should apply for such help.  I did.  I was then told that because the woman in my house works more than 24 hours per week, I was not entitled to it.  To make matters worse I was also told that my jobseeker's allowance, which currently is paid to me on the basis of my contributions, will stop in December because the 'household income' must be too high because the woman in my house works more than 24 hours per week.  Given the current economic climate and the fact that she is self-employed she is working more than 40 hours per week to try to make more money.  She is angry that her business which usually turns a profit of £12,000 per year, i.e. little more than the £8,400 needed to pay just the mortgage (let alone utility bills and food costs) if she was paying it alone, impacts on what I can claim.  To make matters worse, she has been told that whilst she is a single parent, because I am part of the household, even though I have no income apart from my jobseeker's allowance (and even that will stop in less than three months). she is entitled to only £15 ( €17.70; US$23.27) per week in 'in-work' tax credits, i.e. payments for people working but on a low income who have children.  If I leave the house, this would apparently rise to £200 per week.  I have spoken before about the hazards of inadvertently becoming a family if you live with someone of the opposite sex: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2008/05/i-now-pronounce-you-inadvertent-husband.html  Despite that, it is clear that it is much better to be living alone or just with a child if you want to claim benefits.

My efforts then to reduce the steady drain of my savings and the inevitable default on the mortgage has only one possible redemption, one which the building society keeps on talking about, which is to beg from your family.  This assumes that your family is richer than you and willing to bail you out.  I am estranged from my brother who lives abroad and the bulk of the family of the woman who lives in my house live overseas, the rest are in the same situation as her.  I persuaded my parents to pay the mortgage three months from now so the house is not repossessed before it can be sold and they would get that money back immediately from the sale price of the house.  However, they cannot do this indefinitely, and six months seems the maximum.  I am very grateful that I have that, most people would not.  Given how slow the market is, however, it seems very possible that come next summer, especially with more people having to sell up the way we are, the house will remain unsold and the building society will take it over.

Whether I lose the house to repossession or manage to sell it first, the experiment of being a property owner will be at an end and I will be back at the mercies of the unregulated rental sector, which under the current government is likely to be freed even further of its restrictions.  Given how I was kicked out of two houses at the whim of the landlord and had one intimidating myself and the woman and child that lived there, with no notice paid to that behaviour by the police, I have a very bleak view of my future in terms of finding a place to live.  In many ways I have been lucky and I am sure we are all going to hear more stories of people pushed from pillar to post as unemployment rises to new records and landlords/ladies exploit those people who have no choice but to come to them.

No Access to the Law

As regular readers will know I am facing another round of legal problems with the representative of my former landlord. He seized the £1000 deposit back in September and now is claiming anout £400 to do up the garden and £1000 additional rent. So, I needed advice on how to deal with this. Solicitors (equivalent of attorneys in the USA and notaries in other European countries) cost about £300 (€405; U$585) per hour, some as much as £800 per hour, so well out of the reach of even well off people to consult. In the UK we have a system called Legal Aid but in 2004 limits were introduced on who could access it as it was felt it was becoming too expensive a system to run. Trying to find out the top limit is difficult. The government has a Legal Aid Elibility Calculator: http://www.communitylegaladvice.org.uk/en/legalaid/calculator.jsp Legal Aid is still available for those on benefits or very low incomes but for anyone in a job or comfortably off you are not longer entitled. It has been denied increasingly to asylum seekers too. Consequently access to the legal process is now barred to the bulk of the population. Only the very wealthy can easily access legal services. Even when you have to use solicitors as when selling or buying a house you find they give very poor service for the thousands of pounds you pay. I have already outlined on this blog how little service we received for paying £3500. There are only two solicitors companies in my town that will handle legal concerns of tenants, all the others will only take you as a client if you own a house and pay their fees. Today I met a woman, a first-time buyer who had used the same solicitors as I had done and came off even worse, they missed many legal traps in the lease she signed and she has found herself repeatedly liable for a whole range of charges costing hundreds of pounds on each occasion which the solicitors had not alerted her to.

The only other option for legal advice even (not representation, increasingly you have to represent yourself in court and battle against people using high-paid lawyers who know all the tricks) is to go the Citizens' Advice Bureau. Now, they are a wonderful charity staffed by volunteers but as a result of 'rip-off' Britain with rapacious landlords and so many scams they are terribly overworked. I tried emailing my local branch on Monday and telephoned them constantly through yesterday and so today went to their office. I was seen within 1 hour of arriving which was pretty good. It was a very unnerving situation though as the advisor laughed my concerns off as 'just a story' and said I was wasting his time. Eventually I made him see how afraid we are of people demanding money and how terrifying it can be when debt collectors turn up at your house. By the end of the meeting he seemed to take me more seriously. I guess I am in not as severe a position as many people who come and see him, no-one is trying to evict me yet or take my children into care or those things. However, it took time to emphasise to him that to us it is important and we do not have the money being demanded and if we had to pay we would begin the spiral into other problems such as being unable to pay the mortgage.

One piece of advice if you are going to a Citizens' Advice Bureau, turn up with as much paper-based evidence as you can muster. There were people in there with box files about their cases. The advisors seem to expect this and it means they are less likely to perceive what you are talking about as 'a story' and nothing more. Include all the letters you have received and all of those you have written. Despite us being in this electronic age, emails do not count. On the other hand do not make my mistake and write an explanation of what has happened to you, rather explain it orally. This will allow the advisor to engage fully with you and ask questions as you go along.

Anyway, it turns out that however much the police dismissed our concerns, we were being harassed under the 1997 Freedom from Harassment Act when the landlord's representative sat outside our house and repeatedly kept calling especially as it was causing visible stress to my housemate. We were apparently in our rights to refuse to talk to the man and should have insisted he only communicate on paper. Apparently neither phonecalls (unless recorded) or verbal statements or emails count for anything legally. We should have similarly got a letter from the bank telling us about the steps to repossess. We should have tried to get the landlord's representative to write down that he insisted on us moving out in a 2-week window of his choosing as apparently they cannot get you to move out with less than 2 months' notice. Of course people somehow make an assumption that being middle class you know all these rules, but of course we do not and landlords and letting agents always know far more than we do.

As it turns out we are liable for the £1000 rent for January as these fixed-term contracts can never be broken even if you give notice or even if new tenants move in. They are great for landlords because they can get two incomes from the same property. The issue over work on the garden apparently has no legal guidelines and though we had vacated the property we were still legally responsible for it to the end of our contract so the grass which has grown up should have been cut by us. In court, we could contest the £400 charge for cutting grass on such a small area. In addition, the landlord cannot apparently demand extra charges on top of the £1000 deposit he took from us, so even if £400 is soaked up by the garden, he has to use the £600 remaining towards the rent charge meaning we have to still find another £400 but no more. Of course this is not how the landlord's representative sees it as he took our deposit for us causing him difficulties, not to cover expenses.

Apparently the best thing for us to do now is to get the landlord to take us to court. Of course we cannot afford legal representation (you only get it free if you have been charged with a crime, not in a civil case like this) so I will have to defend myself. Fortunately once I had managed to get the Citizens' Advisor to see how much trouble we were facing he advised me to come back for further advice about the legal documents once they are issued, so I did not feel so guilty about seemingly wasting his time. People need to understand that legal threats are frightening; the law is incredibly confusing and seems to be very imbalanced to the bulk of the population. We need help to deal with it or there is no point in having laws we might as well simply go back to Stone Age society in which the strongest one in a fight comes out on top.

Sorry this posting has gone from a general issue back to talk about my housing woes. However, it is a slice of the challenges that UK people face in dealing with the law. There were ten people in the waiting room at the Citizens' Advice Bureau when I arrived there this morning and I am sure they could tell similar stories of how hard it is to contest things legally in the UK, in fact two of them did tell me.

As I have noted before, power in the UK is in the hands of the very wealthy with the bulk of the population stripped of rights to oppose the bullying we get put under. It is no different to the Victorian times, we are simply supposed to put up with our maltreatment and be grateful for it. Our landlord's representative clearly believes that we should be so grateful for him letting us live in the house and that we should keep paying for the privilege of the months of pressure he put us under. Fixed-term tenancy contracts should be banned, they are not feasible to work with in a country where jobs are ever changing. It is perverse to be able to charge people rent for a house they are not living in. Greed seems to have become king in this country and (lots of) money is the only definition of power. As our rights and access to the law are regularly eroded it simply exacerbates this situation further in favour of the rich. Is it no surprise that people turn to rage to get some kind of recompense when there are no longer any legal means open to them? The British are too passive to revolt, but I am sure increasingly frustrated people will strike back locally against these fat cat lawyers and Rackman landlords and who can blame them?

Property in the UK 8: Problems Rise from the Dead

For much of 2007 this blog had me ranting about the constant problems I faced renting a house and trying to sell a flat and buy a house. By December it seemed that everything was resolved. I had sold my flat, though for less than it was worth, I and my housemates had got away from the rented house where the landlord's representative had incessantly harrassed us and I had bought and moved into a new house jointly with said house mates. It seemed to be all sorted and we all looked forward to a quiet year ahead. We were careful not to leave any details at the old house because we knew how nasty the representative was, what a fantasist he was and how he believed he had the right to bully us to keep paying him hundreds of pounds. He had taken our £1000 (€1350; U$1950) deposit off us even though we had left the house in an immaculate condition and we hoped that would satisfy him. The letting agent encouraged us to raise a complaint of harassment against him for constantly phoning us, telling us we had only a 2-week notice period at some date selected by him and sitting outside our home photographing it. However, we wanted to draw a line under all that and hoped to move on to our new place without hassle.

Since late December we seemed to have achieved that until today. The letting agent called my housemate's mobile phone saying the representative was demanding our details so he could bill us for a further £1400 (€1890; US$2370). Apparently he is demanding £400 to have the grass on the back lawn cut and the garden weeded and another £1000 in rent he claims we are due for January. The garden was left in a good state, but of course with the warm weather the UK is experiencing plants have not stopped growing and given we left the house seven weeks ago it is not surprising it is all grown up. It does not cost £400 to have that work done. We had three trees chopped down and removed for £80 when we first moved to the new house, much more work than a small bit of mowing (the lawn is 2m x 2m) and some weeding. He is also claiming for a glass lampshade which is broken. The thing fell down one day all most showering us with glass. It is a small sphere that could fit in your hand which was made in the 1980s and no longer made. Surely out of the £1000 he could pay to have the whole light fitting replaced. We do not have the £1400 he is asking and we feel we are not obliged to pay him, but you can guarantee he will soon have debt collectors after us.

The greed of the man is astounding and the sense that he can still keep charging months after the tenants have left indicates how avaricious he is. He has taken £11,000 from us in one year and yet this is not enough for him, he effectively wants us to pay to do up the house so he can sell it. The obligations of tenants do not extend that far whatever he and so many other landlords believe. By definition tenants are not the richest people in the community so why should we be pressed for more and more money for very spurious reasons? I suppose it is because it is actually more expensive to be poor in the UK than it is to be rich. We have to cough up many charges that richer people never do. If I could threaten this man with my own lawyer then I am sure he would not think twice about even trying to press these costs on us. It seems that the next stop is court and my housemate is bullish to face the representative in a legal setting. However, before then I am sure we will have to face debt collectors and all the pressure they can bring plus the damage to our credit ratings and attempts to seize items from our house. In the UK you have no defence against a financially more powerful person who just keeps on squeezing. What makes it worse is that this man lives in a fantasy world and cannot disassociate his lust for revenge on us from business dealings. He cannot be negotiated with the way a more sane person could. How I curse the day we ever saw that house to rent and how I wish the other people who wanted it had beaten us to it. I do not know how the representative would have dealt with a lone mother with five children, but she should be grateful she never had to face him.

I thought this strand of my blogging was dead and buried, but it seems to have risen up and come back to plague us even when we thought we had escaped. In the UK do not dare be even comfortably off let alone poor, you have no rights; no power and the greedy will consequently exploit you.

Property in the UK 7: The Housing Market Begins to Collapse

I mentioned in the previous posting that this was a bad time to buy a house in the UK and now I am going to outline the reasons behind that. Earlier this year I predicted that house prices in the UK were far outstretching the average income we would soon hit a period when prices would have to fall. Estate agents were unconvinced by this, but I am now being proved correct. In the UK people get nervous when the rate of increase of house prices simply slows so you can imagine how worried they are if they start falling as they have done for the past 3 months. For some reason buying a house is a key status activity that was particularly encouraged during the 1980s to the extent that now some lawyers will not represent you if you are simply a tenant (I have experienced this when trying to employ a solicitor and being turned away not because I could not afford their fees but because I was not an owner-occupier of a house). So everyone tries to buy a house, meaning demand especially in regions where there is work, is very high and house prices just keep rising and rising. This is exacerbated by familes fragmenting, more people living alone and the birth rate of the UK middle class rising for some reason. This year they reached a level that the International Monetary Fund (IMF) felt was 40% over-priced. Of course because so many people invest so much money in their property about 4-5 times more than their counterparts in France, Belgium, Germany, etc., they cannot afford to see the price fall.

Despite all of these factors there is a limit how far house prices can keep rising. People for some reason ignore their pressure on inflation which is wrong as the cost of houses also influences the cost of rents, house insurance and many other house-related factors. To reduce inflationary pressures the Bank of England has used its only economic tool and has repeatedly raised interest rates this year. However, its governor feels inflation is still too high and so rates may have to rise further. For the first time in decades in the UK people have started looking beyond interest rates to manage the economy and there have been murmurs of other credit controls, and though for a couple of months some credit cards were restricted with the retail sector apparently weak, these have been lifted again. The threat of such controls is enough to unsettle consumers. All of this stuff has come far too late. If it had been introduced gradually after the last serious dip in the UK economy in 1993 or even when Labour came to power in 1997 it would all be well-established now, to bring it in now abruptly is just going to be a shock to the system.

So we have a situation of the worst of both worlds. Interest rates are rising making repayment of mortgages harder and yet house prices are dropping which means people cannot rely on selling their house at a hefty profit in order to cover the costs of the money they borrowed on it. You can see why I am personally worried. I have over-paid on my new house, under-sold my old house and have cleared out my savings just at the time when the market is turning to slump. Look forward to a nice blog of a man with negative equity (i.e. owning more on the property than the property is worth in itself). This happened all over the UK in 1990-3 and is clearly going to happen again, I guess in the next 12 months.

The UK's addiction to every rising house prices and the Major, Blair and Brown governments' lack of imagination in terms of economic tools and lack of courage in adopting and applying them is going to condemn the UK to a cycle like this at least every 15 years, maybe more regularly, depending on how far the upcoming slump takes prices down this time. It impinges on the middle class whose wealth and in turn their consumption is based on their property often rather than their incomes (which have been rising far slower) and so a crisis in housing will mean an immediate retail crisis as we may already be seeing as people tighten their belts (even at Christmas when they usually spend the most). It impinges on the working class as well, as those who own property will suffer like their middle class counterparts but also as landlords/ladies either raise rents to cover increased interest payments or sell off unprofitable rental property (as I have experienced) so reducing the availability and raising demand and so rents as well. In addition, those working in the retail and transportation sectors will suffer from retail lay-offs and reduction of business and those in the small-scale building tray, eventually from the decrease of people wanting work on house (though this may be balanced in the short-term by people improving their houses in an attempt to increase prices).

My advice is do not try to buy a house at the moment, wait for prices to fall next year. Pay off as much of your mortgage as you can (most now permit over-payments these days) and tighten up on Christmas gifts, especially those bought on credit. If we batten down now there may be some funds left to benefit from the post-slump recovery when you will be able to snap up reposessed houses (though banks these days tend to sit on them until they can be sold at a set level, often above the prevailing average price in the district - another aspect which has pushed prices upwards, rather than disposing of them cheaply as they did in the 1980s and 1990s). Though I could see the problem on the horizon, because of other human pressures I have been pushed right into the trap and am anticipating that it will be a couple of decades before I return to the level of prosperity I once had; I also anticipate I will not be an owner-occupier for long and that I will lose my house to repossession in about 2 years' time so will be back in an even more cutthroat rental sector very soon.

Property in the UK 6: My Personal Housing Saga Drags On

I started making postings about housing and all the difficulties I have got into with being charged heavy charges by Newham Council for the flat I own in London and how the house I am currently renting is in line to be repossessed. Since the start of July I have been trying to sell the flat and buy a house close to where I now live. Four months have passed and still no progress. Newham Council took over a month to respond to a request from the potential buyer of my flat and the buyer (I am now on to my second as the first one's mortgage lender changed its mind about lending him money) is now trying to squeeze more money out of me, the seller. The first buyer tried this too. I will call this one Mr. A to avoid confusion. Well, after making an offer which was £5000 (€7150; US$10,500) less than the asking price but which I accepted as I was keen to be rid of the flat, Mr. A then started demanding that I totally refitted the bathroom, even though that had only been done two years before. Mr. B, the current buyer knew that the flat came with furniture and in the 3 months since he put in his offer, has not said anything about it, then suddenly this week just as the exchange of contracts seemed ready to happen, he demanded it was all removed and that I pay him £545 (€779; US$1145) to him so that he could do this. What has become apparent is that in East London (where Newham is located) not only do the council try to squeeze as much money out of home owners as they can, but anyone buying your property is going to prevaricate and demand extra bonuses as if you were trading in some Third World market.

Taking four months to sell a house makes it almost impossible to move for work. The only people who benefit are the lawyers who pick up fees on everything. Local authorities also seem eager to tap into the money swilling around in Britain's overheated property market (though for the past two months it has begum to cool, though not as much as the 40% that the International Monetary Fund claims British houses are over-priced by; the average house now costs 9 times the average salary in the UK, meaning most average people cannot afford anywhere big enough for them), that new charges are appearing. Many people in older towns are now being charged for the upkeep of medieval churches in their town no matter whether they are Christian or not. The government finally introduced the HIP (Home Information Pack) after one failed attempt because they had failed to train sufficient people to produce them. You have to buy one of these in order to sell any property with 3 or more bedrooms. They take a month to produce and cost another £3-400. However, many local authorities, are insisting that buyers (in some places sellers) also have to pay for a locally created pack on all properties (my buyer had to get one for my two-bedroomed flat) which again costs hundreds of pounds, the exact charge depending on where the property is. All of these things slow up the UK housing market even more and in fact bump up prices further to cover these costs.

You may say the UK housing market needs to slow down a bit. However, that hampers people trying to move to where work is (something the government usually encourages) and trying to get their children set up well in school (some schools now refuse to take pupils who arrive mid-year and they have to commute back to their old school, hardly beneficial for their education). Thus, soon it will be incredibly difficult to move house in less than half-a-year, something that is reinforced by the fixed 6- and 12-month contracts so many landlords/ladies are insisting on which make the rented sector as inflexible as the purchase one. The lawyers, the landlords and the local authorities all simply gain more money and the average person has to put their life on hold for months. The UK housing market needs adjustment and not simply in terms of prices. I curse the day I ever thought it was a good idea to buy a flat, I should have purchased a caravan instead.

Property in the UK 5c: The Beginning of the End or Just the End of the Beginning?

Well, in my long-running saga of our landlord's representative things become more bizarre. On the plus side we have found a house we like and have found out we can borrow enough money to buy it. However, the other-worldly behaviour of the landlord's representative continues. Now he says that we cannot leave the house we are renting early (because obviously the landlord would lose the rental income and be liable for council tax on the empty property) but we can stay no longer than the day before he exchanges contracts to sell the house. He feels he has been generous in offering us a two-week warning of the sale of the house (I guess rather than being hard on us and just telling us the day before). However, there is no indication of when the house will be sold, so we cannot plan anything.

At least now we can probably move to the house we are buying rather than having to put all our stuff in storage and stay in bed-and-breakfast accommodation while we looked for a house. The fastest we have been able to move in the past is about six weeks. Having to go through all the hoops and checks by letting agents and the various utility companies makes it harder to move faster in the UK, not even factoring in the time it takes to look for a house and apply to live in it.

The landlord's representative has now said he will not speak to us. He has been by-passing our letting agent who is supposed to handle these things and now has cut off communication because he is angry with us. Following the meeting he had with my housemate, we thought he was going to put our proposal (for some payment in return for breaking our contract which runs to January 2008) to the landlord, but apparently he thinks he never said that and is angry as we were supposed to be considering his offer (read threat - obey all my demands or face legal action) and ring two days later to confirm our acceptance of that.

We are actually now looking forward to getting a letter from his lawyers as we expect (maybe wrongly) that they will not be fantasists or work in a schizophrenic way and we can negotiate some deal with them, rather than simply being lectured by them the way the representative does (literally he will go on for 30-60 minutes about how his family is suffering [they own a £350,000 house, have an excellent job in Texas and so on], how his daughter-in-law is useless, how experienced he is, how he wants to treat us like family, but thinks we are behaving illegally and so on). The police say him sitting outside the house in his car and calling us repeatedly on the phone does not constitute harassment and cannot understand why everything is not covered by the contracts (well it is for us, but the representative feels he is not bound by them).

The worst situation for us is if we buy the house and still have to keep paying the rent on our house until January 2008, so we are seeking a deal now in which we can leave when we want and in return will let the representative put the house on the market, have people view it, etc. (even though in the contract we do not have to permit this until the end of December 2007). The representative keeps getting more and more estate agents to market the house so we get even more phonecalls coming in. We have had backing from estate agents and advisors on housing in the town that we are doing the right thing. However, one lawyers' firm we contacted said they never represent tenants only landlords.

The representative now wants to evict us but, of course, not so quickly that he will be liable for council tax. This mad system in which we are being compelled to stay in the house until the precise moment the landlord's representative decides we must leave, with no thought of how disruptive that is to our life, just re-emphasises how powerless we are even when we adhere to the law. In addition, he is going round estate agents and letting agents in the town literally lying that we have always been late with our rent, so making it harder for us to find a place anyway, and defaming us, knowing we lack the funds to challenge him in court (especially now that legal aid is only available for the poorest people). So, we are very much in limbo and with our reputation being hammered.

They wonder why the British labour force is so inflexible, well it is no suprise when you face such hassle and lose so much money just renting a house. My housemate and her son will have lived at 4 addresses in 2 years by the end of 2007 and we are not like Will Smith's character in 'The Pursuit of Happyness', I have a well-paid, established job and she runs her own successful business and yet we lack the power to stop ourselves being kicked from pillar to post as part of landlords' economic whims.

Property in the UK 5b: The Landlord's Representative Turns Up the Heat

Taking a break from the writing on counter-factuals in this post I return to probably what blogs are supposed to be about, day-to-day life. The ongoing saga of the problems with housing for me and mine continues. To recap, we have rented this house since February. We had to leave the previous one after only 16 months as that landlord split with his wife over Christmas 2006. Now, having been in this new house only 5 months we have been told we have to leave despite our 12-month contract.

The landlord has emigrated to the USA so he has appointed his father as his representative. With interest rates reaching 5.75% this month and set to rise further the £1400 (€2040; US$2800) the landlord pays on his mortgage each month is rising quickly. This man told us lots of lies trying in some way to get us to like him. The key one was that he would not put the property on the market until Monday 2nd July when he returned from the USA himself. In fact he put it on the market immediately, Monday 18th June. I was angered by his lie and my housemate who works from home would not accept people coming to view the house and disrupting her life. As she pointed out, in the contract it says we only have to permit this in the final month of our tenancy, i.e. January 2008. She certainly wanted to negotiate some kind of deal so we did not have people turning up at any time with the estate agent simply letting themselves in without warning. Of course to the landlord's representative this house is simply a business and we are an illegal obstacle to his plans whereas to us it is our home and we feel violated to be treated this way.

The landlord's representative has a major problem, his mind is in a fantasy world in which he owns 47 properties and used to be a lawyer and is somehow a nice man. Even the estate agents are irritated by his attitude. He clearly expected the house to be sold by the time he returned from the USA and us to have disappeared from his concerns. Even if we had been willing to leave without complaint, in my experience it takes a minimum of 4-5 weeks to move to a new property (you have to find a place, sign contracts with the new landlord, get credit checks, get a day when removal people can come, get a day off work, etc., etc.) but of course the landlord's representative sees this as none of his concern, we should simply have gone.

Right, so the landlord's representative's fantasy world where tenants disappear in a puff of smoke when they are no longer needed (we pay £1000 (€1460; US$2000) for this house, so have provided the landlord a good income) has run up against the real world. What is his reponse? To call my mobile 'phone eight times in two hours; to ring my housemate at 08.00 when she is trying to leave the house to take her son to school; to park his car outside our home and watch us go about our business. We want to negotiate with him, but he will provide not telephone numbers or contact details and will not keep the letting agent informed. Ourselves and even now people coming to the house, look up and down the street, uneasy to think he is watching them. He will not listen to what we are saying, that we need time to move, we need a reduction in rent or a lump sum to recompense us for being turfed out early and having our lives disrupted by people tramping round our home. He says we are breaking the law, that we have not kept up the house and garden properly (it has rained incessantly for three weeks in the UK, weedkiller is ineffective in such weather and they left the driveway not properly surfaced so weeds keep getting through) and that we have been late with our rent each month. We were tricked one month. My salary comes on different days each month sometimes as early as the 27th sometimes as late as the 31st so paying out on the 28th each month was sometimes hard. We were told that if we paid an additional £100 we could move it to the 1st of each month. We did exactly in line with what we were told and then were told we were late and should pay a £25 per day fine. We have gone back to the 28th but have lost the £100 and the landlord's representative has said we have been late every month, which is a lie, but the landlord's representative's fantasy world can only see as trying to cheat him at every turn, when in fact the landlord has tricked us out of an additional £100. A letter from the lawyer of the landlord has been promised outlining all that we have done wrong in the house and what legal steps are going to be taken against us.

The landlord's representative keeps talking at us and has never listened to what we have said. We are treated as if we have no rights and are even illegal in asking questions. He has said things blatantly like 'I will find a loophole to get you out'; 'I will do what I have to do', that latter one verging on sounding like a threat of violence. Even if we had rolled over to his demands immediately, he would have been dissatisfied as we could never have moved on in 2 weeks as he wants. We now feel under siege with him parked up outside the house and ringing at all times. My housemate has been made ill by the worry of all of this. She has an appointment on Monday on neutral ground with the letting agent as mediator, but given the landlord's representative's fantasies I fear her words will fall on deaf ears. The man is stupid because if he had not lied to us, and had listened to us, he could have avoided all this hassle and cost of lawyers, but clearly he loves to throw his weight around.

For us, the sense of powerlessness that I have been talking about for the last two months is again re-emphasised. We are a well-off household, with intelligence and good networks. If we still suffer such bullying, heaven help people in similar circumstances who are not blessed with these things.

I have just realised the date is 07/07/07, well I hope someone out there has had some luck today, if you have done, have one on me.

Property in the UK 5a: Treated like a Football

Well, new twists in the latest saga of our landlord seeking to kick us out because we are simply an obstacle to his desire for money. I know you ardent capitalists out there argue I should simply accept my role in the economic system and allow myself to be manipulated by market forces and the people who embody them. However, it causes problems for my day-to-day life and I think I have a right to protest about that. After all, I am only asking to be treated with respect and be left alone. I fulfil my obligations but that is not enough apparently, I have to recognise my role as nothing more than an element in a bigger economic process and I should be grateful that someone deems to rent me a house to live in.

Anyway, it turns out that everything the landlord's representative told me and my housemate on the telephone was a lie. He is apparently well known in my town. He has never been a lawyer only a clerk (in the UK sense of the word, someone who does low level administrative work, not the US sense of a shop assistant), in a legal company. He does not own 47 houses, at most he owns 1 and maybe not even that. He said that there would be a 2-week pause in putting the house on the market while he was in the USA and that he would come and discuss it with us when he returned, but that turned out to be an immediate lie as the estate agents turned up after the weekend wanting immediate access to photograph everything and start bringing people through our house, when we told them to slow down, they got angry and telephoned the representative immediately. In addition, we were told that there would be 2 companies selling the house, our current letting agents who we know quite well (they are not very efficient but are not as nasty as these other people) and one other company. In fact this second company that we do not know has been given sole rights to sell the property.

The landlord's representative (who said he was the landlord's father but given he lied about everything else in his almost 2 hours of whining at us on the telephone I cannot even believe this) said that he could have us removed from the house in 2 months by giving proper notice. This is a lie too. As is increasingly common in the UK we are locked into a 12-month contract which we cannot break even if we wanted to; if we leave the house we are still liable to pay the rent on it even if they get new tenants in there. I encountered this kind of contract in Milton Keynes and got advice from the Citizens' Advice Bureau and they confirmed you can do nothing about it, even though it means paying thousands of pounds for a property you no longer live in.

Now we are anticipating that the landlord's representative will start playing all the tricks landlords do such as changing the locks and causing other problems for us; accessing the house when we are out and breaking or taking possessions of ours. Anything to force us out quickly, because he knows that a house (as opposed to a flat to which different economic rules seem to apply) with sitting tenants is unsaleable and even if it was not, we are not willing to have people tramping through what is our home, at any hour of the day. I know as tenants we should not become attached to a property, but in that horrible American phrase we are very much home-makers (and garden-makers) and treat where we live as a home, not a hotel room. I think we are going to suffer both emotionally and financially but my housemate has taken the lead and is challenging the landlord's representative. She has taken legal advice from Shelter (a charity to help homeless people, but it gives excellent free legal advice on issues around housing in an effort to stop more people being screwed by landlords and becoming homeless. Most people in the UK who are homeless do not live on the street, they are families put up in cheap hotels by local authorities) and so is ready to challenge what the landlord is trying to do to us for simple economic gain.

In contrast I am certain that we cannot win. The UK law is always on the side of those with money and power. An ordinary UK, even middle class person (we are not citizens in the UK apparently, just subjects of the Queen) has little chance of getting a fair deal, so I think we should cut and run before the landlord and his henchmen start doing nasty things to us. I think standing up to him will just make it worse and we will lose even more. It is increasingly clear that you have no rights as a tenant in the UK (unless you have the money to employ lawyers; one quoted me an hourly rate of £800 (€1184; US$1600) and now unless you are really poor you are no longer entitled to legal aid to fight cases of this kind). The difference in view on what to do is obviously causing arguments in the house and I was called 'Judas' today for not supporting the more aggressive policy towards the landlord.

I accept that my job which comes with responsibilities and my reasonable income have fooled me into thinking that I have some power over what happens in my life. This incident has proven me entirely wrong. I have no power even to decide where I live and for how long. Contracts are worth less than the paper they are written on when you face those with money and influence. So you will not be surprised that I feel like a football (for US readers, I am thinking of a soccer ball, unless the landlord starts thinking he is going to pick me up and dump me down somewhere like the river) on the pitch of the UK economy, feeling every kick that is layed into me.

Property in the UK 5: Caught in the Crossfire

I never intended this blog to simply be about houses, I expected a mix of politics and some personal observations, favourite films and books and things. However, I suppose the political and the personal are coming together in the latest instalment of my housing woes. Every time I encounter a problem, I think it must be tough for me, but there must be hundreds of thousands or maybe millions of UK citizens who are suffering this and worse and have less cash and family support to ameliorate it. I am solidly middle class, I earn 50% above the national average salary and yet I am being kicked around as if I was some homeless person. I am grateful that I am not homeless, but, maybe though, you will say I should not expect my comparative wealth to protect me from the harshness of people and the marketplace. This was the mistake the middle class made in the 1920s and so when all their money disappeared in the Depression they resorted to dictators like Mussolini, Hitler, Franco, etc.

As I have noted before, when you feel powerless you turn to despair or anger and this week it has been anger. With my car having broken down last week I was fortunate to get a lift from my boss who lives about 10 miles away to where I was working, about 46 miles away. I could have gone by train but in the rush hour it would have literally cost me as much as how much I spend for the family on groceries each week. Whilst in my bosses' car, as I have outlined in 'Property in the UK 4', I was telephoned by my landlord's lawyer father telling me the house we have been renting for three-and-a-half months is now going on the market. As landlords now have to pay council tax on empty properties they keep tenants in them until the week they sell the property and it seems clear now that it was the landlord's intention to sell the house as soon as he could. So we have to deal with people walking through our house looking at us as if we are zoo animals and for no personal benefit for us. We will effectively be sold on as part of the fittings of the house. The sale will likely to be quick, fortunately, it will probably go straight to another landlord. However, we have no guarantee that we will be allowed to stay because with 2 months' notice we can be kicked out (we can leave with 1 month's notice).

Now to complicate matters the letting agency who are supposed to run the house on behalf of the landlord rang to say that we did not have allow people to view the house and in fact our contract is one of these unbreakable leases (these are increasingly common in the UK and mean you are liable for 6 or 12 months rent even if you give notice and move out after one week). He wants us to refuse to let people see the house. It seems clear that the agency and landlord have fallen out. The agency are angry they are not sole estate agent on the property as selling it would earn them £5000 (€7,300; U$10,000) compared to £840 (€1225; US$ 1680) if they continue renting it (they only charge their landlords a 7% fee rather than the 13-16% which is usual among UK letting agencies), so being a small company are seeking to deny the sale fee to a rival company. The agency say no-one will be a family house with sitting tenants anyway.

So, now we are in the crossfire. Do we go with what the landlord says and face being moved out in a couple of months (the third move in 23 months) or go with the agency and deny the landlord ability to sell the house meaning he will move to kick us out anyway? We are just a football in the argument between the two sides. No-one considers that this is our house where we have put in work keeping it clean and have lots of crops coming up in the garden. It is clear we are counted as nothing by either side, despite paying £1000 per month rent, we are just here to be disposed of as fits with the plan of the landlord or the agency. Despite my income and status I have absolutely no power over what happens to my family this year. Each time we move it costs us about £1000 and we have already paid that this year just moving four streets to this house in February. Everyone thinks about their profits and squeezing a few thousand more, what about our basic cost of living? It counts for nothing.

People keep saying to me: 'well why don't you just buy a house?' as if I had never thought of it, but with a good salary like mine struggling to afford to buy a two-bedroomed flat let alone a family house, that is just getting annoying. An increasing number of people in the UK are becoming tenants and it is clear we are just counters in some economic game, not perceived as humans trying to live a quiet life in a half-decent house. I have never started a campaign, but I feel someone should to give tenants some rights.