There is never a lack of housing news so lets see what the Landlord Law team have seen this week. Firstly with candidates vying to be the next Prime Minister we go straight to housing.

Solving the housing crisis

The two candidates, Rish Sunak and Liz Truss, were asked on the CH4 debate how they would look at solving the UK’s housing crisis. They all had very different views.

Rishi Sunak was keen on modular housing as a solution to the housing crisis. Sunak said the government is looking at the best ways to “unlock” brownfield sites to facilitate more homes.

Liz Truss was keen on the prospect of the UK having different housing policies for different areas of the country. She says

I also think we need to look at housing together with industry, infrastructure as communities rather than housing estates plonked in the middle of nowhere.

Lots of different views there, you can read the full article here.

War on holiday lets

Labour is keen to have a UK wide licensing scheme for holiday lets to maintain the coastal and rural areas. Lisa Nandy, Shadow housing secretary says they want to allow areas to ‘reap the rewards of thriving tourism’ while avoiding ‘ghost towns’ in the winter seasons. She goes on to say

With a stronger licensing system, communities will be able to reap the rewards of thriving tourism but end the scourge of communities becoming ghost towns when holidays end and people are priced out of their own neighbourhoods just for homes to stand empty for months. By trusting the community, working with the community, we can find the right balance to bring growth and jobs and income, but protect the spirit and the fabric of a community that matters so much.

In Wales, councils will shortly be able to control numbers of second homes and holiday lets with a licensing scheme for home owners and landlords who want to operate short lets, such as Airbnbs.

Read what First Minister Mark Drakeford and nationalist party Plaid Cymru leader Adam Price have to say about the new classes of property scheme Wales are bringing in.

Bricks & Mortar v Classic Cars

The Stripe Property group are saying that bricks and mortar are now, by far the best investment. James Forrester, Stripe’s managing director says

The property market has boomed during the pandemic and continues to do so in 2022. As a result, you’ll struggle to have made a better investment in the last year or two. While there are a select few investment options that have yielded a larger return, the actual increase in value is likely to have been far lower than the level of capital appreciation seen across the average UK home.

Property also remains accessible to the masses and those without specialist knowledge or connections within an area such as fine wine or art. Not only is it the most straightforward investment you can make, it’s also one of the safest, as the property market isn’t susceptible to the same erratic, boom and bust nature of other investment options.

Want to know what gives a greater return than bricks and mortar? Click here.

Do we need to re-think our UK buildings?

With excessively high temperatures this week many UK buildings have been unbearable in the heat. Chris Bennett of Evora Global says

The climate emergency has huge, long-term implications for the real estate market. There is much evidence of an increased incidence of overheating in buildings without air-conditioning, particularly in offices, blocks of flats and individual homes during heatwaves. This is especially true of a temperate climate like the UK where the retention of winter heat has always been the main focus of thermal design.

Overheating has been particularly notable in new-build homes and in office and housing existing stock. And as we have been constantly reminded this week, excess heat affects the health and wellbeing of occupants, especially if sleep is degraded.

Many modern buildings are built mainly of glass and it is only through using air conditioning that you can actually inhabit these buildings in extremely hot weather conditions. Which in itself does damage to the consumption of electricity, energy efficiency and climate control. This is clearly not sustainable long term.

Read more here about what the leading experts in this area have to say about what we needs to be done to buildings in order to meet hotter weather conditions.

Nightmare tenant and lack lustre police

A landlord tells of her woes and desperation at not having enough evidence for a criminal conviction against her tenant.

She slams her police force for failing to deal with her nightmare tenant who intimidated the neighbours, threatened her with a hammer and caused £30,000 of repairs and cleaning up. Read the full article here.

Snippets

Newsround will be back next week.