where are all the houses to the rent?

depends where the houses are located ...

I do a lot of work in a new build area in cambridge called Orchard Park

the houses have 4-5 bedrooms (3 floors)

landlords buy them, and place international students in the rooms .... expect to pay £140-£160 per week for a furnished room ...
maintenance costs are 0 as the houses are new (the village is approx 3 years old)

here is a brand new one for £304 000 ... has 4 bedrooms (but if you look at the floorplan, there are 4 bedrooms on the 1st floor, and 2 on the top floor, so in total there are 6 bedrooms) ....
http://www.rightmove.co.uk/property-for-sale/new-homes/property-15242820.html

so, assuming a 100% mortgage, with an interest at 7,5%, monthly repayments would be £2247 (£26 964/annum).... if you rent out 4 bedrooms at £120 per week, you would receive £24 960 per annum .... so, you would own the propery, but only have to pay £2004 per annum out of your own pocket (£167 per month) ... I have worked out the figures on a 100% mortgage so it is the worst case scenario

and there is a waiting list for rooms

not the best to live in a shared home, but if you are single, and trying to get on the property ladder, this is the answer

another of my clients owns several old large victorian/edwardian homes .... at one of his homes, there are 10 bedrooms .... all of them are rented to Polish / eastern european workers .... He charges £150 per week per room .... in the 3 years that I have been tending to the garden at that home, there has never been an empty room .... when someone leaves, he places an advert on gumtree and the phone rings non-stop

if I had loads of cash, I would buy houses in Cambridge and rent the rooms

 

"if I had loads of cash, I would buy houses in Cambridge and rent the rooms"

And that's the point - cash!

Once you hit three people (not of the same family) you are subject to HMO regs. On a buy to let mortgage it makes things marginal. On a standard mortgage it is prohibited.
Not to mention income tax...........

 

not sure how the guys do it, but I am certain that they are not paying loads of tax, as they repay all the income received on their mortgage, or perhaps they just don't say anything to the regulators?

the other guy I work for who owns several properties does declare all, as I have been there when inspectors came to check the smoke alarms/fire extuinguishers etc

 

Don't know whether it differs from place to place, Longk, but here you can have up to five people under one roof before HMO regs kick in. There really is very little regulation to cover this difficult area, as I found out when the two-up two-down house next door to me was filled with scumbags. And believe me, there should be very, very stringent regulations. I wonder how many landlords give a thought to the owner-occupying families who have to live next door to a house which never sleeps, where people come and go all the time and nothing is maintained properly? If the people who do this sort of thing are finding it 'marginal', then all I can say is - good. None of them ever lives next door to the problems they create. I was usually asked, when I complained, 'why don't you just move?', as though (a) I had the money and (b) it was perfectly OK for my life to be disrupted in this way so that someone else could turn a dubious profit and (c) someone would buy a house next to one which had rap music blaring from every window and piles of rubbish outside. After we had spent so much time renovating our house, it was truly devastating. Eventually (and here established forum users will start to yawn, as I tell the same old tale yet again) our problem house next door was turned into a hostel for tagged prisoners on early release. Incredibly, there is more or less nothing in British law to stop a house being used in this way. Theoretically, it could happen to anyone.

Fortunately, there is now a very nice family living next door to us. I can't tell you what this means to us after what we have experienced in the past. We were quite literally sent mad - and in a very, very short space of time, too. I'd like to tell you that my endless badgering of the local council, the police, the MoJ and anyone else who would listen got things stopped. In the end, however, I think it had more to do with the fact that the agent who was letting the house went bust without paying the landlord. Poetic justice of a sort, I suppose.

 

Two of my friends lived in a building like that Clara, shared house it was huge but the problems they had were too much for most people, Monday morning updates usually consisted of fights, damage to the building, police turning up, gangs, drugs, illegal imigrents, and so on. I used to love hearing the stories coz it was a mad house but if it was me would rather sleep in a wheely bin outside. The blue ones are always cleenest around here but the green ones are bigger.
They have moved into a nice little council flat now right next door to the booze shop in the middle of a dog rough estate. But at least It's there own...well kind off.

 

Thin Lizzy

 

Many years ago I was renting this room near Hide Park and I had some Portuguese in the same corridor.

The noise level was more or less allright during working hours but in the evening it was like party time every evening: loud music for a good two hours and talking loud. Very hard to bear!:wallbang:

 

Its funny the cards life deals you, i was born in a slum area of Liverpool, never went to far and never really thought about loud noise,
But now we live deep in the countryside and every day "7 days aweek" no matter what the weather's doing we take the 3 dog's for walkies if we see more than 3 cars or a few tractors going past us we're thinking its a "gone mad sort of day with little peace to be had"
A bit like the M25 to us.

The feeling of peace perfect peace is well worth the work we've had to do making this place into a home.

 

if you still lived there, and joined them for a party every night, you most prob would look like this now:

 

That's per calendar month Zig plus gas (bottled for cooking/water) and electricity, we pay water and rates.

 

Is that your Mrs Dim?? :D

 

A friend of mine lived below a flat where the occupants + numerous, friends, visitors, whatever, etc. would engage in the use of khat every single night, making so much noise that he could only sleep during the day.

 

I'm afraid our experiences have changed our view of terraced houses for ever. The next house isn't going to share party walls with the neighbours, that's for sure.

 

I understand this to be true but as I live in the country cannot confirm it. Here in Algarve as many locals work in the 'tourist trade', ie, bars/restaurants/hotels/etc they only have the late evening/night to socialise. They also eat dinner at 10pm as a 'norm'! I would never entertain living in an apartment ... although my two apartments and townhouse are quite quiet, bearing in mind all partition walls are all breezeblock and concrete here.

 

I owned a 3 bedroom flat on the beachfront in a holiday resort in South Africa .... noise never bothered me ... everyone was always on holiday and always jovial/happy .... beats living in a village where everyone walks around with a long face always complaining about trivial things like dogs barking or smoke pollution from someone having a BBQ

was the best place I have ever lived at ... noise was till about 11pm, ... struggled the 1st few months, but you soon adjust (and join in on weekends)

I can now sleep with the radio playing loud music all night