Btl Scum Regrouping And On The Offensive. -- Merged

[Bland Unsight]

Little niggle. The PovertyLater brethren call him Osbourne but he is Osborne.

[Inoperational Bumblebee]

goldbug9999, can you contact me privately in some way please? Let me know if you can't through here.

It's for your benefit!

[goldbug9999]

goldbug9999, can you contact me privately in some way please? Let me know if you can't through here.

It's for your benefit!

There doesnt seem to be any pm facility that I can find

[Neverwhere]

Preview site here, tenanttax.net doesn't resolve to it yet since the DNS entries take a while to propagate after registration.

Excellent stuff!

[goldbug9999]

I was thinking that the last paragraph is a bit emotive wheres the rest is quite factual. Maybe we could replace it with something that merely state the intent of the rules which is to restore OO-BTL parity of taxation.

EDIT - have done an update in this vein - comments welcome.

Edited May 15, 2016 by goldbug9999

[Bland Unsight]

I was thinking that the last paragraph is a bit emotive wheres the rest is quite factual. Maybe we could replace it with something that merely state the intent of the rules which is to restore OO-BTL parity of taxation.

You've done the work, so you get to make any editorial choices IMO, but what I really liked about EC's post was the unpretentious conversational style. Also, this is all statute law now. It received cross-party support in the committee stages of the bill's passage and has been well-received by voters, as far as I can tell, hence EC's post is commentary to paint a different supporting narrative to the narrative favoured by Wing Commander Cooper and the other bloke who's getting all the free advertising for his business.

I'd argue that the idea of owner-occupier vs BTL parity of taxation is a complete non-starter.

At points in the past (for example, prior to the 1963 abolition of Schedule A, AFAIK/DYOR) owner-occupiers did pay tax on the imputed rent derived from their homes. Hence MIRAS for owner-occupiers formed part of an older taxation framework.

Hence in order to restore parity, you'd need to start taxing owner-occupiers on their imputed income, (or stop taxing BTLers on their rental income). You'd need to harmonise the CGT framework too - where owner-occupiers enjoy extraordinary reliefs.

My understanding of the attempt to "level the playing field" is not to institute taxation parity but to reduce the investor's access to leverage so that they can no longer outbid people who aspire to become owner-occupiers using only a quarter of the house price and an interest-only loan serviced by the people who aspired to become owner-occupiers. As I understand matters, the playing field is the auction for the house not the house construed as an investment opportunity. The idea that the context is the house as an investment is the PovertyLater narrative.

My understanding of the why of it is two-fold. Firstly, we already have a large enough PRS to ensure labour mobility and house people who don't want to buy so there is no political advantage accruing to Osborne from favouring a bunch of spiv speculators and enabling them to price out a generation of potential Tory voters. Secondly, we need to reduce the ratio of secured lending to GDP - it's too high. That can't be done if tax structures are driving every mug idiot into leveraged investments in property. We need to do this because of how excessive leverage, recessions and house prices act in concert to make bad things much worse when things go to shit.

This is contentious, and I'm not sure I've managed to sell the idea to many people here, but my take on it remains that the banks had the opportunity to move a huge chunk of the existing stock of residential property onto interest-only mortgages. This is great business for them, so they've done it. For a long time the guiding narrative on the regulation of the banks was that they knew best and that if they decided we should all be servicing interest-only mortgage from our first day as householders onwards then the optimal outcome. That narrative died spectacularly in 2008.

However, you can't just roll ten years of aggressive mortgage lending out of the economy overnight.

My take is that HMT and the Bank are weaning the crackhead banks off their interest-only fantasy. Section 24 sits in that narrative. Whilst it is a bit big picture for the tw@ts at PovertyLater, IMO opinion the financial stability angle is the most important part.

[Inoperational Bumblebee]

There doesnt seem to be any pm facility that I can find

Email the attached throwaway email address.

[EDIT] Ah, you've done it. Attachment removed as I quite like the email address.

Was going to suggest you make your registrant details private as they were still showing up on the WHOIS last night.

I'll put the first anchor text for the tenant tax website in here then.

Edited May 15, 2016 by Inoperational_Bumblebee

[goldbug9999]

You've done the work, so you get to make any editorial choices IMO, but what I really liked about EC's post was the unpretentious conversational style. Also, this is all statute law now. It received cross-party support in the committee stages of the bill's passage and has been well-received by voters, as far as I can tell, hence EC's post is commentary to paint a different supporting narrative to the narrative favoured by Wing Commander Cooper and the other bloke who's getting all the free advertising for his business.

I'd argue that the idea of owner-occupier vs BTL parity of taxation is a complete non-starter.

At points in the past (for example, prior to the 1963 abolition of Schedule A, AFAIK/DYOR) owner-occupiers did pay tax on the imputed rent derived from their homes. Hence MIRAS for owner-occupiers formed part of an older taxation framework.

Hence in order to restore parity, you'd need to start taxing owner-occupiers on their imputed income, (or stop taxing BTLers on their rental income). You'd need to harmonise the CGT framework too - where owner-occupiers enjoy extraordinary reliefs.

My understanding of the attempt to "level the playing field" is not to institute taxation parity but to reduce the investor's access to leverage so that they can no longer outbid people who aspire to become owner-occupiers using only a quarter of the house price and an interest-only loan serviced by the people who aspired to become owner-occupiers. As I understand matters, the playing field is the auction for the house not the house construed as an investment opportunity. The idea that the context is the house as an investment is the PovertyLater narrative.

My understanding of the why of it is two-fold. Firstly, we already have a large enough PRS to ensure labour mobility and house people who don't want to buy so there is no political advantage accruing to Osborne from favouring a bunch of spiv speculators and enabling them to price out a generation of potential Tory voters. Secondly, we need to reduce the ratio of secured lending to GDP - it's too high. That can't be done if tax structures are driving every mug idiot into leveraged investments in property. We need to do this because of how excessive leverage, recessions and house prices act in concert to make bad things much worse when things go to shit.

This is contentious, and I'm not sure I've managed to sell the idea to many people here, but my take on it remains that the banks had the opportunity to move a huge chunk of the existing stock of residential property onto interest-only mortgages. This is great business for them, so they've done it. For a long time the guiding narrative on the regulation of the banks was that they knew best and that if they decided we should all be servicing interest-only mortgage from our first day as householders onwards then the optimal outcome. That narrative died spectacularly in 2008.

However, you can't just roll ten years of aggressive mortgage lending out of the economy overnight.

My take is that HMT and the Bank are weaning the crackhead banks off their interest-only fantasy. Section 24 sits in that narrative. Whilst it is a bit big picture for the tw@ts at PovertyLater, IMO opinion the financial stability angle is the most important part.

I'll think about the wording some more, maybe switch parity for "remove some of the advantages"

EDIT - now updated.

Email the attached throwaway email address.

[EDIT] Ah, you've done it. Attachment removed as I quite like the email address.

Was going to suggest you make your registrant details private as they were still showing up on the WHOIS last night.

I'll put the first anchor text for the tenant tax website in here then.

Yeah, thanks for checking it out anyway. TBH I'm not saying anything on there that I'm not already to saying to people in real life anyway but of course I don't want to encourage spammers and whatnot.

Edited May 15, 2016 by goldbug9999

[Digsby]

Brilliant. If I can summarise into 140characters do you mind if I tweet this?

Not at all, go for it.

[Digsby]

Reviewing the lyrics of the Busted masterpiece, it appears that the lyricist had to some extent anticipated changes to the taxation of enterprises categorised as property businesses under the Income Tax (Trading and Other Income) Act 2005

Obviously extending the lyricist some poetic licence, the year 3000 is taken to be 2021, and to live under water is to operate a 'business' that is haemorrhaging cash like Immelda Marcos in a shoe shop.

So that's a dank tune is it? Was that a good thing or a bad thing?*

* My use of the word "was" as opposed to "is" here is grammatically correct: when an adult identifies a hip word, it's hipness dissipates, therefore hip words are unobservable by adults since the act of observing them changes their status as hip word. Thus, once observed, the staus can only be discussed in the past tense.

The description of the phenomenon, known as "Digsby's Law", goes on to say that any attempt by an adult to use the previously hip word in the context within which it was previously hip, renders the word positively unhip.

Certain adults, such as politicians, have been known to induce vomiting in the young by such attempts to actually use hip words.

[dugsbody]

So that's a dank tune is it? Was that a good thing or a bad thing?*

* My use of the word "was" as opposed to "is" here is grammatically correct: when an adult identifies a hip word, it's hipness dissipates, therefore hip words are unobservable by adults since the act of observing them changes their status as hip word. Thus, once observed, the staus can only be discussed in the past tense.

The description of the phenomenon, known as "Digsby's Law", goes on to say that any attempt by an adult to use the previously hip word in the context within which it was previously hip, renders the word positively unhip.

Certain adults, such as politicians, have been known to induce vomiting in the young by such attempts to actually use hip words.

A beautiful post. In one, summarising Digsby's Law as well as exhibiting it in action, by repeated use of the word "hip". Bravo!

[Digsby]

A beautiful post. In one, summarising Digsby's Law as well as exhibiting it in action, by repeated use of the word "hip". Bravo!

Thank you. Perhaps revealing my age as a member of the generation who had to suffer the previous generations insistence on using the word "hip" and their attendant failure to notice the winces it evoked, or the irony in that.

I'm working on expanding the theory to account for the exaggerated effect of the phenomenon when the previously hip word is a synonym for hipness itself.

[Venger]

Or gestures.

[Bland Unsight]

Dr Rosalind Beck . says:

14/05/2016 at 09:55

The tide is turning, with some very good coverage of our side of the argument in the press. I am pleased that the RLA ‘leaked’ the discriminatory comments made at the Treasury. Words like ‘crackdown’ and landlords ‘squealing’ make us sound like a combination of criminals and rodents. I did ask the RLA some time ago to commission some research on prejudicial language in the press regarding landlords – this could be very important for the legal case and for the campaign in general if we could show how policies are emanating from pure anti-landlord prejudice and not from any rational basis.

On the plus side, we are seeing some new people wading in to the debate, exposing this outrageous nonsense:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/investing/buy-to-let/buy-to-let-tax-will-push-up-the-rents-of-sitting-tenants-says-lo/

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/05/13/landlords-should-be-squealing-under-george-osbornes-crackdown-tr/

http://home.bt.com/lifestyle/money/mortgages-bills/who-will-be-the-bigger-loser-in-the-buy-to-let-crackdown-11364060781176

I'm not sure the tide is turning.

[Bland Unsight]

Any juxtaposition of Clarkson giving it a loser gesture and the thoughts our esteemed friend from over the way is, of course, purely coincidental.

[Si1]

This guy is yet another Poverty Later 'ideas man' and 'straight shooter', with TWO solutions which are to put up the rents and then when the tenants arise "on mass" the government will repeal Section 24, hence he is offering ONE solution, which is to put the rents up.

Maybe he misheard someone referring to him as a boso who doesn't understand basic maths, and instead heard something to do with the Higgs boson and the fact he's actually very good at maths.

Tennants rising on mass may refer to their rising in awe of his business skills being likened to the mathematical level of a Nobel prize winning theoretical physicist who discovered the mechanism behind which most mass is created? That's how I like to see it personally.

[Ah-so]

I'm not sure the tide is turning.

Instead of penning this crap, Ros could have used the past few months offloading her properties prior to the stamp duty charges coming in - potentially her last opportunity to sell on to some mug punter. She had missed it, blinded by a mistaken belief that the 118 campaign has a realistic chance of success.

[Bland Unsight]

Instead of penning this crap, Ros could have used the past few months offloading her properties prior to the stamp duty charges coming in - potentially her last opportunity to sell on to some mug punter. She had missed it, blinded by a mistaken belief that the 118 campaign has a realistic chance of success.

If your 'business' is a play on the terms of secured lending, you'd better understand your lenders.

Bosher has a first-rate training in talking balls about balls, but banks deal in accounting entries, not balls.

Sell now, sell everything.

If you can't sell because you don't have the equity to pay the CGT you were already f**ked, and nothing has really changed, so quit bitching and acknowledge your insolvency.

Time for a repost/dank tunezzzz combo I reckon.

[dances with sheeple]

So that's a dank tune is it? Was that a good thing or a bad thing?*

* My use of the word "was" as opposed to "is" here is grammatically correct: when an adult identifies a hip word, it's hipness dissipates, therefore hip words are unobservable by adults since the act of observing them changes their status as hip word. Thus, once observed, the staus can only be discussed in the past tense.

The description of the phenomenon, known as "Digsby's Law", goes on to say that any attempt by an adult to use the previously hip word in the context within which it was previously hip, renders the word positively unhip.

Certain adults, such as politicians, have been known to induce vomiting in the young by such attempts to actually use hip words.

The concept of "young" and "hip" as related factors disappeared some time ago, it isn`t possible for someone who walks about with a phone in their face all day and who thinks Rihanna or whoever is "hip" to be hipper than someone who shagged their way through the 80`s, there has been a reversal, the white rabbit is loose, we are now in the realms of Science Fiction, there has never been a worse time to be young and hoping to be "hip".

[Digsby]

QED

[rantnrave]

Half the number of landlord buyers now than a year ago

Landlords are looking to buy cheaper properties in the wake of the 3% Stamp Duty surcharge.

Countrywide said this morning that the average price paid by an investor last month was £178,000 – down from £194,000 in March, and down from £188,000 in April last year.

The average price paid by an investor in London last month fell from £436,000 in March to £365,000, meaning that landlords paid 16.4% less on a monthly basis and 8.2% less than in April 2015.

April also saw fewer landlords purchasing homes after the Stamp Duty stampede of the first quarter of this year.

There were about half the number of landlord purchasers this April than last.

Countrywide said that at the same time the number of sales to first-time buyers rose by 19%.

Average new rents across Britain were 2% up on last April, but with huge regional differences. The average rent in central London was £2,499 per month, up 3.5% year on year, but £643 in the north, up 1.4.%.

http://www.propertyindustryeye.com/half-the-number-of-landlord-buyers-now-than-a-year-ago/

Edited May 16, 2016 by rantnrave

[rantnrave]

Buy-to-let valuation instructions plummet 40% as ‘dodgy’ deals put in an appearance

Buy-to-let valuation instructions have dropped like a stone since the Stamp Duty surcharge kicked in on second properties – and there are signs of a sharp rise in potentially ‘dodgy’ deals.

In March – with the April 1 Stamp Duty deadline too close to make completions viable – instructions plummeted by 30.6% on February.

The fall continued in April, with buy-to-let valuation instructions down 40% when compared with February.

The report is from Landmark Quest.

With a majority of mortgage valuation instructions being handled between lenders and valuation surveyors via Landmark Quest’s technology, it is in a unique position to be able to analyse instruction volumes across the bulk of the mortgage market.

Peter Stimson, managing director of Landmark Quest, said he is anticipating that volumes of buy-to-let instructions will be low this month.

As part of its fraud screening services, Landmark also monitors the property market for potential threats, and following changes to the Stamp Duty rules it is reporting a rapid increase in the number of investment properties now appearing on ‘sale under value’ and ‘property club’ websites.

In particular there are a lot of new-build developments now appearing offering buyer incentives.

Stimson said: “With any significant changes like we have seen with the Stamp Duty rules, we do typically see a change in behaviour.

“Currently, we are seeing a sharp rise in the number of new-build developments either offering ‘Stamp Duty paid’ deals or appearing in property clubs offered at ‘discounted rates’.

“Particularly worrying is that rather than just one or two properties at the end of a development phase, in some instances we are now seeing entire developments appearing for sale ‘under value’.

“Lenders and surveyors really need to do their due diligence and be fully aware of such incentives and schemes to manage and control the risks associated with these.”

The most infamous property club was Inside Track, which collapsed in 2008. An estimated 20,000 signed up to it, paying hefty subscriptions to gain access to properties supposedly at below market value rates.

http://www.propertyindustryeye.com/buy-to-let-valuations-plummet-40-as-dodgy-deals-put-in-an-appearance/

[Lavalas]

Lengthy account of where they're at with the Judicial Review process and fundraising...

https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=1156382234404779&id=1077700412272962

Far from comprehensive as it contains no legal detail on the governments response but it is insightful in terms of their mindset and fundraising efforts.

They've realised the obvious fact that crowd funding through word of mouth isn't going to get them anywhere near so they're spending any sponsorship money they manage to get on PR and telemarketing.

I'm sure this may get them a bit more sponsorship and possibly much more press but good luck manipulating that popular opinion. Word of mouth is still strong but only if it's on your side.

[daviduk]

From the comments on that Facebook page they genuinely seem to believe they can just raise rents. Its incredible.

[MississippiJohnHurt]

I'm not sure the tide is turning.

I think it is turning,just in the opposite direction to Ros....the government seems pretty comfortable with overtly and publicly targetting btl now, as the on the record quote in the article Ros mentions proves.

Of course silly old Ros is too busy getting emotional about someone allegedly using mean words to see the real danger....a calm statement from the government confirming that btlers should expect some pain is a very ominous sign for your average highly leveraged chancer.

Edited May 16, 2016 by MississippiJohnHurt