It is suspiciously low. The last time I rented in a shithole town in the North West I was paying £450/month for a 2-bed terrace, that was 2018. Since then interest rates have gone up and rents went up as a result. £375/month for a top floor 1-bed flat today is mental.
Even in some dead end town in the middle of nowhere? I was paying similar to that in a good location in a decent city about 10 years ago, but i guess a lot could have changed in that time.
There are some 2bed terraced houses in Hartlepool for under £500pcm up on zoopla currently, so rents that low can exist. Definitely would have to be in a deprived area though.
It sounds like he did not bother doing regular rent increases because he had a tenant in situ. Which I could see some people doing if they did not buy the property to let, for example a first home and they've moved in with a partner?
OP gives an explanation in one of the comments, that it's his father's old flat and he "can't" sell it. He also offers a chronology of when the tenancy started and when he increased the rent; assuming it's true, it's always been extremely low.
My mum and I were on a fixed term lease and just before it was time to renew (which we were planning on doing anyway) the landlord offered us a renewal with £100 a month knocked off. We were good tenants, paid on time every month and kept the place clean, and my mum had an extremely secure job. There was a lot of redundancy happening in the area, so I think they were just so glad to have a paying tenant they were willing to take a reduction to keep us.
It's insanely low in 2024. So much so that I think this is fake. You're not getting anything for that unless you've lucked into a Housing Association/local council owned flat.
If you're paying £425 or lower to a private landlord in 2024, it's a room in a shared flat or a bedsit in some truly miserable run-down town like Blackpool or Greenock. Or your landlord is a saint who has not increased the rent since 2012, which feels...unlikely.
Even social housing rents are likely to be higher than that. I work for a council in Yorkshire and our rents are in the table for lowest of the country and while there are some below what OOP states it’s not may nowadays.
A friend of mine has been a long term (10+ years) tenant of a two bed flat in the Home Counties and pays £550. The landlord doesn’t have a mortgage so hasn’t increased the rent. They always pay on time and look after the property, so I guess the landlord doesn’t seem to want to risk the unknown for money he doesn’t need.
She does know how lucky she has it though and saves the ‘extra’ incase she has to move and find someone at market rates.
I'm living in London in a one bedroom flat (not a studio) for £1000 a month (£900 until 6 months ago).
That sounds like a lot compared to your friend or the OOP but it's ridiculous for London.
It's even got access to a little roof area. It's over a shop, but it's not in the middle of nowhere, lots of decent transport links etc. Big main room.
It's so low that it's £200 under the amount benefit will pay (I was working when I moved in, an currently claiming). That just doesn't happen.
I probably couldn't get a room in a shared house for that.
It's very run down (and appears to have been converted into a flat by the insane), but any real issues are dealt with (new boiler when the old one went etc). The place was shabby ten years ago when I moved in, and shabbier now. But the Landlord doesn't mind what I do to it.
It's worth a lot more in the current state, and a lot more with fairly minor work on it.
I've been here 10 plus years. The Landlord only put the rent up twice.
At some point he's going to sell up, and I'm going to end up moving out of London.
There are quite a few landlords like this, just no one is complaining about them. We haven’t raised the rent on one of our properties for 10 years, because the tenants are amazing and deal with the small things themselves. Plus they are super nice people.
Also, it’s really expensive to “turn” a property, so it’s much better to have tenants that want to stay. We might raise the rent by $100 this year, since the property taxes have gone up by quite a bit (it’s a 4 bedroom house.
Sure, we could raise it $1000, which would still be less than the market rent, but we’d rather keep the great tenants.
Also the rental market is really slow right now, so that’s another reason to make sure and keep good tenants happy.
Our flatmate/lodger has been with us over 25 years and I think he periodically gives a rent increase to himself. Utilities are separate and split based on actual cost. Mortgage is all paid now and we are only there part time now so he has the flat (except our bedroom) to himself half the week
Not sure we’d be able to find a similar arrangement with anyone else
Yeah, you're probably right. I was so enthused by the opportunity to use the famous Cleveland Browns quote as the title, that I must have ignored all the red flags. Sorry.
Oh no, it's totally worth showing up in this sub to discuss! No shade, I promise. Sometimes seeing something so outrageous just begs for the popcorn subs 💚
Plus on the off chance it's for real, the sheer audacity tho
Edit: there was a discussion about this a few months back I think. The consensus was that we can have them posted but generally don't post the ones that you specifically think we're fake I think? But that's there needs to be discussion and reasons not just disparaging the post and calling it fake.
Oh no, it's totally worth showing up in this sub to discuss! No shade, I promise. Sometimes seeing something so outrageous just begs for the popcorn subs
The problem is, the popcorn subs can encourage fake content. This is one of the reasons for some of the moratoriums here (such as tree law), as those subjects were creating a vicious cycle of outrageous stories getting traction here, prompting others to create even more outrageous stories for the same traction.
Fake stories in general can cause the same problem, but it's harder to make a rule against them as OP rarely has the ability to know for sure if a post is fake. It might be worth having a policy that likely fake stories will be removed, but that's a decision for the mods.
It happens. My rent for a one bed flat (kitchen, bathroom, living room, bedroom) was £425 from about 2012 to 2022 when I bought my own place. Commute 25 minute train from a city. Private rent, I just took care of any issues and we all quietly just lived in harmony. It probably helped that I was just a sad, broke 18 year old in a bad position when moved in and my landlord and his wife saw that and wanted a young woman to live somewhere safe. The OOP seems kind and they're taking advantage of that. Unlikely yes but not impossible!
It’s not just the rent but also the language - what UK landlord is referring to the building they own a flat in as a “complex”? Or the units as “apartments” for that matter? Either it’s a privately owned tenement/similar flat (in which case, wouldn’t the attic be communal anyway for roof access?) or it’s a purpose built block of rental flats owned by a single company.
Scotland doesn't have taxes like America does, the home owner has to pay (landlord insurance) a mortgage, if one is still outstanding, and pretty much nothing else. There are inspections so Scottish landlords need to have wired fire alarms, and similar things as up-front costs, and they'll get checked every few years.
Assume you inherited a property, or have no mortgage, then you don't need to worry about getting much income and cheap/stable is better than high but dealing with a lot of tenant turnover.
Very informative, thank you! TBF I was using 'taxes' kind of as a catch-all term, but I understand given that I'm American it could look like I was thinking every place was the same! I was thinking about general fees/council tax/etc. related to the real estate maintenance.
Council tax is usually paid by the occupant - not the landlord. It's often more coat effective to rent out a property for a small value than leave it empty. But I'm not sure of the exact details in Scotland.
There are some areas where it might be reasonable, but on the whole it's suspiciously cheap. There have been a few ragebaitey posts on LAUK and elsewhere recently of the "tenants are ungrateful bastards" variety, possibly because the law is changing in the tenants favour from next year and some landlords are completely losing their shit about it.
If it were true, and the tenants were planning to challenge the increase at the Tribunal, then they're exceptionally badly advised because the Tribunal sets the rent at the market level. So if the landlord proposes £425 and the market rent is £600, the tenants will end up paying £600 even though it's far more than the landlord wanted. There aren't many challenges to rent increases, for obvious reasons (this is one of the things that will change from next year).
There's 324 flats available on Rightmove for £450 across the north of England plus Scotland. I set the parameters at less than 450, flat, long term, min 1 bedroom, max 1 bedroom. That's out of 9378 flats meeting that criteria except for the max rent.
So... About 3.45% of Rightmove listed 1 bed flats meet that criteria, but that does include Scotland (never said how North...)
Basically I'm pretty sceptical. This feels a bit like one of those 'I, the landlord, am a saint' posts.
I dont know the exact exchange rate with dollars or the state of the uk housing market, but that apartment must be, like, made entirely of wasps, or in the shadow of an active volcano, right?
Anyway, assuming LAOP is just generous and the apartment is fine, imagine blowing up such an incredible deal.
Oh my gosh, made entirely of wasps is exactly what our attic was in the late 80s early 90s! We lived in a FOUR BEDROOM house with a finished attic for $200 and one of the problems was that we could not rid the attic of wasps. It would have been an 7 bedroom house but we never went up there, just left boxes of stuff. I used to sneak up there in the winter to snoop at all the journals and memorabilia, and the wasps crunched under my feet with every step.
It was how I found out my parents weren't married when I was born, and that my dad was a Catholic priest who had an affair with my mom that resulted in pregnancy. I found a journal entry dated after their wedding date the year before I was born talking about how she knew she couldn't be with my dad and I would be raised with love and she'd explain it to me later... Dad ended up finding out and asking her to marry him at 8 months along. They'd fallen in love over letters over the course of five years, and my mom still has them! I got to see the letter that he wrote right after they admitted they were in love with each other.
I'm soooo writing a book someday, probably a fictionalized version tho.
Yes, I tangented all of this off of wasps, lol
edit: just searched it up and it's worth 24k even in this inflated real estate time period now.
The only one bedroom for rent I could find in Volcano, HI (which isn't exactly in the shadow of Kīlauea but it's as close as you can get without living in the military camp) was $1400/mo, so.
“Have you got a child who likes to play ‘the floor is lava’? Like to collect pumice and obsidian? Have we got a property for you! Two bedroom, one bath occasional fixer-upper available now!”
Rents in Naples don't seem to be particularly cheap, either, despite Mount Vesuvius being only about ten kilometres from the middle of town.
None of Vesuvius's eruptions since AD 79 have been as large as that famous one, but two eruptions since then were big enough to drop ash all over southern Europe, and the much higher population of modern Naples could greatly increase mortality if Vesuvius has a "medium-sized" eruption now. For this reason, the Italian government has offered quite handsome payouts for anybody who moves away from the parts of Naples that are literally on the slopes of the volcano, but I don't think a lot of people have taken them.
We're much more able to predict volcano eruptions today than the Roman Empire was, of course, and even in AD 79 a large fraction of the population of Pompeii and Herculaneum saw the signs that a big one was coming, and left, and survived. But I bet the main reason why people continue to live in the danger zone is just complacency.
(I live in Australia, which is quite geologically inactive; our deadliest earthquake was only of magnitude 5.6. I am completely fine with that.)
The only reason why Australians allow foreigners to continue to believe that this country is full of deadly dangers is to stop Americans from moving here. :-)
(Quite a lot of Australia is very difficult to survive in, but the population of the Nullabor Plain, for instance, is quite close to zero. There are a few weird edge cases, though, like Coober Pedy, which wouldn't exist if it weren't a great place to mine for opals. Coober Pedy is famous for its underground houses, which let people get away from the killing heat.)
was gonna say... when I was stationed in HI on the big island, Kīlauea took out a small neighborhood. Some of the locals were selling their land after instead of trying to rebuild... and getting a LOT for it.
I mean, if it just doesn’t suit your needs at all, and it’s in the property the landlord lives in so it’s not like you’re going to sublet it to someone else secretly, the best golden handcuffs in the world won’t keep you there.
A bit late to the party, but yes, in Tokyo you pay 150000 Yen or 750 GBP / 1000 USD for a 75m2 house with two full-size bedrooms and a small garden. It also has a small tatami room, and a largish living room. The train station distance (most important factor around here) is a comfortable 12 minutes.
There are indeed fears that Fuji might erupt in the next years. No wasps though, just hornets.
LocationBot is busy making and flying paper airplanes.
I have rented out a small 1 bed property to a couple. They have since had 2 children and are now claiming I must make adjustments to the property (an attic refurbishment split into 2 extra bedrooms) because of overcrowding.
I've rented out a home to a couple for 8 years now. Long term tenants.
During this time they have had two children currently aged about 3-4 and 6-7.
The property is a small 1 bedroom property that's ideal for a single person or a couple, but not ideal for a family. It's a top floor apartment with an attic above.
Rent was originally £295 per month back in 2018. It has been increased to £375 in 2022 and remained at £375 ever since.
I've got two issues to deal with:
1.) I informed tenants that rent would be going up to £425 per month due to increased management company fees, increased insurance, and increased mortgage with my 5 year 1.2% fixed-rate expiring back in October. They were informed of this in March 2025 with it due to take effect in October 2025.
The tenants have informed me that they will be taking this rent increase to tribunal. I've been doing some research and it seems they can keep paying the old rate of rent until the tribunal has made their decision? Does anyone know if this rent gets backdated if the tribunal agrees with me? Other apartments in the same complex are renting for £600 per month on average, so a small part of me is wondering whether a tribunal would just bump it up to match?
2.) As the tenant's family has grown their house is now overcrowded. They are demanding that I refurbish the attic and split it into two bedrooms.
I'm not going to be doing this. I advised them that they may find bigger accomodation elsewhere, but they've said they can't find somewhere as cheap as this place that they can afford.
I've since received a letter on Saturday written on headed paper from a solicitor's firm instructing me that my home is overcrowded with each child counting as half a person (what?) and that I must make immediate alterations to the property to facilitate this overcrowding.
Cat fact: in nature, there have been documented examples of predators & prey becoming allies or even apparent friends, and several of those examples include Big Cats.
This1 recent-ish articles highlight one of those instances with an ocelot and an opossum.
If you dare to brave the ad-infested ridiculousness, here’s2 another writeup with several examples, with at least a few big cats mentioned.
Anyway, just like some of the animals mentioned above, I’m not taking the bait on this LAOP.
Absolute monstrosity of a link that I have my doubts will actually work…
I couldn’t even get through that whole thing. It glitched like mad trying to scroll, and the ads drove me nuts.
So people in the UK may know Giles Brandreth. Outside way less likely. He used to be an MP, now he’s kind of TV personality. Can be a bit aggravating (he will ramble on and on and on).
But when he was an MP one of his responses to abusive mail was to send a reply saying something to the effect of “dear sir, someone has sent me a very abusive piece of mail and signed your name to it. I’m writing to let you know in case you’d like to take legal action”.
I like him in quite small doses, he genuinely does have good anecdotes (like how he is banned from dressing as or promoting Snoopy because he did it back in like the 60's for a book release, and for the release, they did the release with something like playboy bunnies, not realising that the author of Snoopy was a born again Christian with very strong views) and some great jokes on occasion.
But even a single 30 min ep of QI can get a bit draining if it becomes too much a Giles ep.
And while some of the anecdotes are good, some do infuriate me. Like when he was an MP, one of the other tories was too drunk to walk himself to vote on something where the outcome wasn't certain. So he and another MP carried him. I heard that and was thinking "so you're admitting to fraud in the house of commons?"
Damn, I was going to post this with the title "LAUKOP's tenants are looking to upsize".
This whole thing smells fishier than a sardine sandwich.
The rent is unbelievably cheap. I literally don't believe a solicitor would write anything so groundless. And OP stopped responding after the first half dozen responses.
Yeah, you're probably right. I was so enthused by the opportunity to use the famous Cleveland Browns quote as the title, that I must have ignored all the red flags. Sorry.
Right? So much "I'm a good landlord" stuff. Suspiciously cheap rent. "It's my dad's old flat, I can't sell it (For Secret Reasons)". Solicitors letter quoting irrelevant laws. Then OP stops responding after the first half an hour.
Well, the Solicitor isn't completely wrong - some people on LAUK seem to think he's making up the point about children counting as half a person, but that is how overcrowding is calculated - but he's wrong about how it applies (on the facts stated it doesn't, because it's the result of shagging natural household growth).
A few people have suggested that the tenants haven't given the Solicitor all the facts and he's given bad advice on that basis, but I guess you could also say that it might be LAUKOP who's doing that - if the overcrowding isn't the result of natural growth he's potentially in real trouble.
all that's missing is "and my tenants Muslimed all Muslimly in my direction while being not white, due to being immigrants upon our fair shores, and also they used their evil magic in order to make me be fifteen years overdue for child support despite being a virginal and pure soul who hath ne'er touched another but because i, a regular British guy, exist, the government has decreed that i am the father and must pay fifty bajillion pounds. did i mention they Muslimed all over my home?" (edit for good measure, if not enough just add the following: "then one of those transgenders demanded i use the right pronouns or else i would be sued. it made the pictures of Thatcher and Churchill on my wall weep real tears about what they've done to our green and pleasant land, it did" until even the saltiest slices of gammon are nodding with approval)
it's me riffing on the type of obvious trolling that usually rolls in from lauk and how this is an incomplete example of the form, hence the "all that's missing" at the start of my post
coordinated and consistent agitprop campaigns, probably originating outside of the UK, in order to generally promote bigotry because bigotry is inherently catastrophically inefficient.
boy i wish there was an answer that didn't make me seem ready for a tinfoil hat but unfortunately, it's a thing that's happening. at least LAUK trolls tend to make it very obvious, lol
oh it's been coming on with increasing frequency for two years minimum i think? it's just very much jumping the shark.
you could probably make a graph correlating frequency to, idk, how well the war was going in Ukraine for Putin, or how many votes UKIP got, or the amount of black mould in JK Rowling's house telling her that her only fault is not being more of a tory piece of shit, or just the general rise on fascism worldwide tbh
belated edit: just gonna say again how much i hate that i say this type of shit and it's not me being completely doolally with a conspiracy board full of pictures connected with string and a tinfoil hat as i mumble about aliens. nope that's just real shit. real shit really happening and i hate it. ...okay maybe the black mould hasn't fully colonized Rowling's brain but goddammit we gotta find meager joy in this nonsense when we can
I’m in the USA & it’s the same here. Stuff I was reluctant to talk about 10-20 years ago because it sounded like the most unhinged conspiracy rambling is just common knowledge now that we have a dude who carts rotting whale heads around on his car as part of the government (RFK Jr).
I tend to think that if this is real, then the solicitor is made up. The tenant is shooting themselves in the foot here. A landlord can't evict you for having children (directly) but they can evict you you create conditions that are "dangerously overcrowded". The tenants are effectively making this argument for him here. Any decent solicitor should be able to tell them that this won't go the way they want it to.
I cannot imagine renting out a small place like that, choosing to reproduce with no plans to eventually move to a place more accommodating once those children get bigger, and instead demand that my landlord just refurbish the place for my family.
£425 for rent? Is that typical in the UK? I thought I was getting a steal with a 1 br for $675.
It is suspiciously low. The last time I rented in a shithole town in the North West I was paying £450/month for a 2-bed terrace, that was 2018. Since then interest rates have gone up and rents went up as a result. £375/month for a top floor 1-bed flat today is mental.
Even in some dead end town in the middle of nowhere? I was paying similar to that in a good location in a decent city about 10 years ago, but i guess a lot could have changed in that time.
The cheapest one bed flat near me in Fife, which is about as nowhere as we get, is £495 a month, without an attic. Rent is just ridiculous.
There are some 2bed terraced houses in Hartlepool for under £500pcm up on zoopla currently, so rents that low can exist. Definitely would have to be in a deprived area though.
Currently in a dead end town, I pay just a bit more than in the OP but I'm under a housing group and not a private LL.
I’m in social housing (council owned) in drug gang hell and a small 2 bed is £90 a week. A private rental for about the same? No chance.
It sounds like he did not bother doing regular rent increases because he had a tenant in situ. Which I could see some people doing if they did not buy the property to let, for example a first home and they've moved in with a partner?
OP gives an explanation in one of the comments, that it's his father's old flat and he "can't" sell it. He also offers a chronology of when the tenancy started and when he increased the rent; assuming it's true, it's always been extremely low.
That makes sense.
My mum and I were on a fixed term lease and just before it was time to renew (which we were planning on doing anyway) the landlord offered us a renewal with £100 a month knocked off. We were good tenants, paid on time every month and kept the place clean, and my mum had an extremely secure job. There was a lot of redundancy happening in the area, so I think they were just so glad to have a paying tenant they were willing to take a reduction to keep us.
It's insanely low in 2024. So much so that I think this is fake. You're not getting anything for that unless you've lucked into a Housing Association/local council owned flat.
If you're paying £425 or lower to a private landlord in 2024, it's a room in a shared flat or a bedsit in some truly miserable run-down town like Blackpool or Greenock. Or your landlord is a saint who has not increased the rent since 2012, which feels...unlikely.
Even social housing rents are likely to be higher than that. I work for a council in Yorkshire and our rents are in the table for lowest of the country and while there are some below what OOP states it’s not may nowadays.
It’s possible, but rare.
A friend of mine has been a long term (10+ years) tenant of a two bed flat in the Home Counties and pays £550. The landlord doesn’t have a mortgage so hasn’t increased the rent. They always pay on time and look after the property, so I guess the landlord doesn’t seem to want to risk the unknown for money he doesn’t need.
She does know how lucky she has it though and saves the ‘extra’ incase she has to move and find someone at market rates.
I'm living in London in a one bedroom flat (not a studio) for £1000 a month (£900 until 6 months ago).
That sounds like a lot compared to your friend or the OOP but it's ridiculous for London.
It's even got access to a little roof area. It's over a shop, but it's not in the middle of nowhere, lots of decent transport links etc. Big main room.
It's so low that it's £200 under the amount benefit will pay (I was working when I moved in, an currently claiming). That just doesn't happen.
I probably couldn't get a room in a shared house for that.
It's very run down (and appears to have been converted into a flat by the insane), but any real issues are dealt with (new boiler when the old one went etc). The place was shabby ten years ago when I moved in, and shabbier now. But the Landlord doesn't mind what I do to it.
It's worth a lot more in the current state, and a lot more with fairly minor work on it.
I've been here 10 plus years. The Landlord only put the rent up twice.
At some point he's going to sell up, and I'm going to end up moving out of London.
There are quite a few landlords like this, just no one is complaining about them. We haven’t raised the rent on one of our properties for 10 years, because the tenants are amazing and deal with the small things themselves. Plus they are super nice people.
Also, it’s really expensive to “turn” a property, so it’s much better to have tenants that want to stay. We might raise the rent by $100 this year, since the property taxes have gone up by quite a bit (it’s a 4 bedroom house.
Sure, we could raise it $1000, which would still be less than the market rent, but we’d rather keep the great tenants.
Also the rental market is really slow right now, so that’s another reason to make sure and keep good tenants happy.
Our flatmate/lodger has been with us over 25 years and I think he periodically gives a rent increase to himself. Utilities are separate and split based on actual cost. Mortgage is all paid now and we are only there part time now so he has the flat (except our bedroom) to himself half the week
Not sure we’d be able to find a similar arrangement with anyone else
Yeah, my landlord has barely raised my rent in 8 years, and it was a bit low back then even.
It's also insanely low in 2025!
Yeah, you're probably right. I was so enthused by the opportunity to use the famous Cleveland Browns quote as the title, that I must have ignored all the red flags. Sorry.
Oh no, it's totally worth showing up in this sub to discuss! No shade, I promise. Sometimes seeing something so outrageous just begs for the popcorn subs 💚
Plus on the off chance it's for real, the sheer audacity tho
Edit: there was a discussion about this a few months back I think. The consensus was that we can have them posted but generally don't post the ones that you specifically think we're fake I think? But that's there needs to be discussion and reasons not just disparaging the post and calling it fake.
The problem is, the popcorn subs can encourage fake content. This is one of the reasons for some of the moratoriums here (such as tree law), as those subjects were creating a vicious cycle of outrageous stories getting traction here, prompting others to create even more outrageous stories for the same traction.
Fake stories in general can cause the same problem, but it's harder to make a rule against them as OP rarely has the ability to know for sure if a post is fake. It might be worth having a policy that likely fake stories will be removed, but that's a decision for the mods.
maybe the mods could give us an optional flair for posts that OP thinks are fictional.
It happens. My rent for a one bed flat (kitchen, bathroom, living room, bedroom) was £425 from about 2012 to 2022 when I bought my own place. Commute 25 minute train from a city. Private rent, I just took care of any issues and we all quietly just lived in harmony. It probably helped that I was just a sad, broke 18 year old in a bad position when moved in and my landlord and his wife saw that and wanted a young woman to live somewhere safe. The OOP seems kind and they're taking advantage of that. Unlikely yes but not impossible!
It’s not just the rent but also the language - what UK landlord is referring to the building they own a flat in as a “complex”? Or the units as “apartments” for that matter? Either it’s a privately owned tenement/similar flat (in which case, wouldn’t the attic be communal anyway for roof access?) or it’s a purpose built block of rental flats owned by a single company.
But the child = half a person for calculating overcrowding is correct. So they've definitely looked up something if they're not from the UK.
At that point aren't taxes high enough that you don't break even?? It has to be fake.
Scotland doesn't have taxes like America does, the home owner has to pay (landlord insurance) a mortgage, if one is still outstanding, and pretty much nothing else. There are inspections so Scottish landlords need to have wired fire alarms, and similar things as up-front costs, and they'll get checked every few years.
But the "taxes" are paid by the tenants:
Assume you inherited a property, or have no mortgage, then you don't need to worry about getting much income and cheap/stable is better than high but dealing with a lot of tenant turnover.
Very informative, thank you! TBF I was using 'taxes' kind of as a catch-all term, but I understand given that I'm American it could look like I was thinking every place was the same! I was thinking about general fees/council tax/etc. related to the real estate maintenance.
Council tax is usually paid by the occupant - not the landlord. It's often more coat effective to rent out a property for a small value than leave it empty. But I'm not sure of the exact details in Scotland.
They'd only be paying £820 per year in tax from that rent if they're a basic rate taxpayer.
UK council tax (property tax equivalent) is paid by the occupier.
Yeah that's what I was wondering, if stuff like council tax could end up being a significant portion of what the low-ass rent is at that point.
Council tax is a separate bill, we don't think of it as part of the rent/mortgage here.
There are some areas where it might be reasonable, but on the whole it's suspiciously cheap. There have been a few ragebaitey posts on LAUK and elsewhere recently of the "tenants are ungrateful bastards" variety, possibly because the law is changing in the tenants favour from next year and some landlords are completely losing their shit about it.
If it were true, and the tenants were planning to challenge the increase at the Tribunal, then they're exceptionally badly advised because the Tribunal sets the rent at the market level. So if the landlord proposes £425 and the market rent is £600, the tenants will end up paying £600 even though it's far more than the landlord wanted. There aren't many challenges to rent increases, for obvious reasons (this is one of the things that will change from next year).
I was paying £650 for a 1 bed flat in 2018, although that was in Edinburgh. I want to know where OP's property is because £425 is crazy low in 2025.
There's 324 flats available on Rightmove for £450 across the north of England plus Scotland. I set the parameters at less than 450, flat, long term, min 1 bedroom, max 1 bedroom. That's out of 9378 flats meeting that criteria except for the max rent.
So... About 3.45% of Rightmove listed 1 bed flats meet that criteria, but that does include Scotland (never said how North...)
Basically I'm pretty sceptical. This feels a bit like one of those 'I, the landlord, am a saint' posts.
I paid for that when renting a ROOM outside of the city nearly 10 years ago. This is ridiculously cheap.
Maybe it’s over a bowling alley or something.
and under a bowling alley
I dont know the exact exchange rate with dollars or the state of the uk housing market, but that apartment must be, like, made entirely of wasps, or in the shadow of an active volcano, right?
Anyway, assuming LAOP is just generous and the apartment is fine, imagine blowing up such an incredible deal.
Oh my gosh, made entirely of wasps is exactly what our attic was in the late 80s early 90s! We lived in a FOUR BEDROOM house with a finished attic for $200 and one of the problems was that we could not rid the attic of wasps. It would have been an 7 bedroom house but we never went up there, just left boxes of stuff. I used to sneak up there in the winter to snoop at all the journals and memorabilia, and the wasps crunched under my feet with every step.
It was how I found out my parents weren't married when I was born, and that my dad was a Catholic priest who had an affair with my mom that resulted in pregnancy. I found a journal entry dated after their wedding date the year before I was born talking about how she knew she couldn't be with my dad and I would be raised with love and she'd explain it to me later... Dad ended up finding out and asking her to marry him at 8 months along. They'd fallen in love over letters over the course of five years, and my mom still has them! I got to see the letter that he wrote right after they admitted they were in love with each other.
I'm soooo writing a book someday, probably a fictionalized version tho.
Yes, I tangented all of this off of wasps, lol
edit: just searched it up and it's worth 24k even in this inflated real estate time period now.
Well that's an adorable tangent
Holy shit lol 💖
What a great story!
The only one bedroom for rent I could find in Volcano, HI (which isn't exactly in the shadow of Kīlauea but it's as close as you can get without living in the military camp) was $1400/mo, so.
“Have you got a child who likes to play ‘the floor is lava’? Like to collect pumice and obsidian? Have we got a property for you! Two bedroom, one bath occasional fixer-upper available now!”
Rents in Naples don't seem to be particularly cheap, either, despite Mount Vesuvius being only about ten kilometres from the middle of town.
None of Vesuvius's eruptions since AD 79 have been as large as that famous one, but two eruptions since then were big enough to drop ash all over southern Europe, and the much higher population of modern Naples could greatly increase mortality if Vesuvius has a "medium-sized" eruption now. For this reason, the Italian government has offered quite handsome payouts for anybody who moves away from the parts of Naples that are literally on the slopes of the volcano, but I don't think a lot of people have taken them.
We're much more able to predict volcano eruptions today than the Roman Empire was, of course, and even in AD 79 a large fraction of the population of Pompeii and Herculaneum saw the signs that a big one was coming, and left, and survived. But I bet the main reason why people continue to live in the danger zone is just complacency.
(I live in Australia, which is quite geologically inactive; our deadliest earthquake was only of magnitude 5.6. I am completely fine with that.)
Only thing in OZ not trying to kill you is the liquid rocks...
The only reason why Australians allow foreigners to continue to believe that this country is full of deadly dangers is to stop Americans from moving here. :-)
(Quite a lot of Australia is very difficult to survive in, but the population of the Nullabor Plain, for instance, is quite close to zero. There are a few weird edge cases, though, like Coober Pedy, which wouldn't exist if it weren't a great place to mine for opals. Coober Pedy is famous for its underground houses, which let people get away from the killing heat.)
was gonna say... when I was stationed in HI on the big island, Kīlauea took out a small neighborhood. Some of the locals were selling their land after instead of trying to rebuild... and getting a LOT for it.
I mean, if it just doesn’t suit your needs at all, and it’s in the property the landlord lives in so it’s not like you’re going to sublet it to someone else secretly, the best golden handcuffs in the world won’t keep you there.
But yeah, this is wildly beyond plausible.
A bit late to the party, but yes, in Tokyo you pay 150000 Yen or 750 GBP / 1000 USD for a 75m2 house with two full-size bedrooms and a small garden. It also has a small tatami room, and a largish living room. The train station distance (most important factor around here) is a comfortable 12 minutes.
There are indeed fears that Fuji might erupt in the next years. No wasps though, just hornets.
Have you seen "My house is haunted but the rent is cheap"? Yeah, they are living in that kinda situation.
Maybe it’s downstairs from a bowling alley (the attic is where the balls roll down to be retrieved).
LocationBot is busy making and flying paper airplanes.
Cat fact: in nature, there have been documented examples of predators & prey becoming allies or even apparent friends, and several of those examples include Big Cats.
This 1 recent-ish articles highlight one of those instances with an ocelot and an opossum.
If you dare to brave the ad-infested ridiculousness, here’s 2 another writeup with several examples, with at least a few big cats mentioned.
Anyway, just like some of the animals mentioned above, I’m not taking the bait on this LAOP.
Absolute monstrosity of a link that I have my doubts will actually work…
I couldn’t even get through that whole thing. It glitched like mad trying to scroll, and the ads drove me nuts.
Edit to fix formatting & a typo
Funny thing from the title here.
So people in the UK may know Giles Brandreth. Outside way less likely. He used to be an MP, now he’s kind of TV personality. Can be a bit aggravating (he will ramble on and on and on).
But when he was an MP one of his responses to abusive mail was to send a reply saying something to the effect of “dear sir, someone has sent me a very abusive piece of mail and signed your name to it. I’m writing to let you know in case you’d like to take legal action”.
I'd say he's incredibly aggravating. But that is quite a good response.
I like him in quite small doses, he genuinely does have good anecdotes (like how he is banned from dressing as or promoting Snoopy because he did it back in like the 60's for a book release, and for the release, they did the release with something like playboy bunnies, not realising that the author of Snoopy was a born again Christian with very strong views) and some great jokes on occasion.
But even a single 30 min ep of QI can get a bit draining if it becomes too much a Giles ep.
He'd be so much funnier if he didn't think he was so funny.
I've mostly only seen him on QI in the last few years. And I agree.
Yeah, he does have a pretty sizable ego.
And while some of the anecdotes are good, some do infuriate me. Like when he was an MP, one of the other tories was too drunk to walk himself to vote on something where the outcome wasn't certain. So he and another MP carried him. I heard that and was thinking "so you're admitting to fraud in the house of commons?"
Damn, I was going to post this with the title "LAUKOP's tenants are looking to upsize".
This whole thing smells fishier than a sardine sandwich.
The rent is unbelievably cheap. I literally don't believe a solicitor would write anything so groundless. And OP stopped responding after the first half dozen responses.
Yeah, you're probably right. I was so enthused by the opportunity to use the famous Cleveland Browns quote as the title, that I must have ignored all the red flags. Sorry.
Don't worry, you've nothing to apologise for. I was going to post it too but you beat me to it.
Well that was part of the advice, to contact the lawyer and if it's true repost the following morning with the letter's text.
I’m just surprised by the lack of thinly veiled racism.
I thought this was LAUK, damnit!
"We can't find anything this cheap that meets our needs!"
That's because this doesn't meet your needs!
That's bait
Right? So much "I'm a good landlord" stuff. Suspiciously cheap rent. "It's my dad's old flat, I can't sell it (For Secret Reasons)". Solicitors letter quoting irrelevant laws. Then OP stops responding after the first half an hour.
Well, the Solicitor isn't completely wrong - some people on LAUK seem to think he's making up the point about children counting as half a person, but that is how overcrowding is calculated - but he's wrong about how it applies (on the facts stated it doesn't, because it's the result of
shaggingnatural household growth).A few people have suggested that the tenants haven't given the Solicitor all the facts and he's given bad advice on that basis, but I guess you could also say that it might be LAUKOP who's doing that - if the overcrowding isn't the result of natural growth he's potentially in real trouble.
used to be believable
all that's missing is "and my tenants Muslimed all Muslimly in my direction while being not white, due to being immigrants upon our fair shores, and also they used their evil magic in order to make me be fifteen years overdue for child support despite being a virginal and pure soul who hath ne'er touched another but because i, a regular British guy, exist, the government has decreed that i am the father and must pay fifty bajillion pounds. did i mention they Muslimed all over my home?" (edit for good measure, if not enough just add the following: "then one of those transgenders demanded i use the right pronouns or else i would be sued. it made the pictures of Thatcher and Churchill on my wall weep real tears about what they've done to our green and pleasant land, it did" until even the saltiest slices of gammon are nodding with approval)
they were waiting for the update to throw that in
but there's literally nothing about that, so who are you fighting with?
it's me riffing on the type of obvious trolling that usually rolls in from lauk and how this is an incomplete example of the form, hence the "all that's missing" at the start of my post
why is LAUK such a cesspit all of a sudden
coordinated and consistent agitprop campaigns, probably originating outside of the UK, in order to generally promote bigotry because bigotry is inherently catastrophically inefficient.
boy i wish there was an answer that didn't make me seem ready for a tinfoil hat but unfortunately, it's a thing that's happening. at least LAUK trolls tend to make it very obvious, lol
I mean I understand the agitprop thing, but why did it all just start suddenly and aggressively instead of how it's normally done (gradually)
oh it's been coming on with increasing frequency for two years minimum i think? it's just very much jumping the shark.
you could probably make a graph correlating frequency to, idk, how well the war was going in Ukraine for Putin, or how many votes UKIP got, or the amount of black mould in JK Rowling's house telling her that her only fault is not being more of a tory piece of shit, or just the general rise on fascism worldwide tbh
belated edit: just gonna say again how much i hate that i say this type of shit and it's not me being completely doolally with a conspiracy board full of pictures connected with string and a tinfoil hat as i mumble about aliens. nope that's just real shit. real shit really happening and i hate it. ...okay maybe the black mould hasn't fully colonized Rowling's brain but goddammit we gotta find meager joy in this nonsense when we can
I’m in the USA & it’s the same here. Stuff I was reluctant to talk about 10-20 years ago because it sounded like the most unhinged conspiracy rambling is just common knowledge now that we have a dude who carts rotting whale heads around on his car as part of the government (RFK Jr).
oh i am also on this side of the pond, i just uhhh know how to make fun of tories thanks to my UK friends LMAO
because making fun of fascists is a fun group activity!
but i also use pictures of Thatcher to scare them into logging the fuck off and going to sleep so maybe i should not be applauded.
lol yeah
I absolutely commiserate with UK friends.
One of the kids ages was 6-7
Has anyone checked Unethical Life Pro Tips for the corresponding thread from the tenants? This feels like someone is taking bad social media advice.
Is this just fantasy? (Yes)
🎼Caught in a landslide, no escape from reality 🎶
Open your eyes, look at the market values and SEEEEE
I'm just a poor landlord, I need your sympathy
Tenants are easy come, easy go, rent is low, rent is low
I tend to think that if this is real, then the solicitor is made up. The tenant is shooting themselves in the foot here. A landlord can't evict you for having children (directly) but they can evict you you create conditions that are "dangerously overcrowded". The tenants are effectively making this argument for him here. Any decent solicitor should be able to tell them that this won't go the way they want it to.
Sounds like someone is trying to pull a fast one while living in a dream world where rent is magically low and logic doesn't apply.
They admit they are paying below-market rent, but somehow still want the landlord to pay to renovate the unit?
I cannot imagine renting out a small place like that, choosing to reproduce with no plans to eventually move to a place more accommodating once those children get bigger, and instead demand that my landlord just refurbish the place for my family.
Man. This sub is in a tailspin with the comments on this thread.