[Ben Reeve Lewis is bored. Dead bored …]
Do you remember that mid-summer torpor when you were a kid, where you so craved the summer holidays in those last few weeks of the term but within days you were kicking your heels, getting under your mum’s feet because all your mates were on family holidays and saying to her “I’m boooooored”.
That’s exactly how I feel this week. Not that there hasn’t been plenty going on you understand.
A hive of activity (yawn)
My co-TRO has been off for a week leaving me on my own scrabbling around trying to deal with the problems of 30,000 private tenants on housing benefit alone, without counting those who are working, plus the usual round of people facing mortgage repossessions.
Went to court twice to stop warrants of eviction being executed with just minutes to spare, dealt with a brace of illegal evictions and yet another bloody cannabis factory in a flat.
Had to duck someone who took a swing at me after he had spat at another staff member and attended a delightful property where a tenant with mental health problems had been crapping on his own floor.
It may sound strange and interesting to many of you but for me it’s just another day at the coalface.
Training has also gone quiet lately as people take time off to look after their bored kids in the school holidays. It’s always like that around this time of year.
For Frazzy too who is a self employed travel agent as all her clients are corporate business types travelling to meetings across the globe, so they are off with their kids as well and she is twiddling her thumbs.
They call it the silly season
Most of the news stories this week also seem to be in the same mid summer doldrums, rehashing old issues about the ticking time bomb of the Help to Buy scheme, benefit caps, bedroom tax, housing crisis on the way up, housing crisis on the way down.
All singularly uninspiring and enough to send the reader into a hypnotic trance of tedium.
24 dash gave us the headline “Tenants warned over untidy gardens” (Yawn)….. and treated us to the stirring news that residents of Eastbourne have just received some successful training (Well fan my brow).
Over on Inside Housing, the fount of all knowledge, we learned that consultation over council powers in converting shops into homes has been published (You can feel your eyes getting heavier and heavier) …..
And we learned that a timber framed house in Peckham was responsible for the spread of a fire (and when I count to 3 you will be under).
I remember when I first moved from South East London to Taunton and I was thrilled to read in the local papers how little was actually going on compared to the usual round of stabbings in Deptford and New Cross.
Sheep story shocker
The first headline I remember concerned the problem of nuisance on an estate where children stayed up after dark “Practising their skateboards and swearing”.
One headline, and I’m not joking, ran “Dead sheep found in lay-by”. All very amusing but when the novelty wears off you get to realise that the sheep probably killed himself out of boredom.
So where are the inspiring stories this week in housing world? I don’t want to be the unfortunate suicidal sheep.
Hunting for stories
In desperation I turn to the normally excellent source of all things slightly odd Rat & Mouse, only to find that the author Ben Brandt is on holiday, so nothing happening there.
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Planet Property is always a good place to start for some inspiration but even they have gone a bit quiet, the main stories being the sale of 1940s Hollywood Star George Sanders house in West Sussex [but that lets me use a nice picture of Maralyn Monroe, who visited it – that should cheer you up – Ed].
Plus the story of unimaginative bureaucrats in Pembrokeshire Council who have told a couple to knock down their eco style Hobbit house.
Start preparing the lay-by for me now……
Giles and David over at Nearly Legal have only managed to trawl up some court cases on Leasehold Valuation Tribunals, a subject I know nothing about and have about as much interest in learning as I do golf, a game that I personally believe was invented solely so that stamp collectors would have someone to look down on.
I can only presume, looking around at the various articles that most of the authors pre-prepared them and are in fact on holiday themselves or are at least sitting at their keyboards dreaming that they were. As am I.
Mild excitement over a fan
The only thing I have seen this week that impressed me is James Dyson’s latest invention the hot and cold fan. If like me you have been sleeping with the fan on the past two weeks you might be intrigued by this strange design that blows cold in the summer and hot in the winter.
Not a propeller in sight though. He seems to have found a way of adapting those airblade fan dryers you get in motorway service station toilets.
Sorry but that’s the best I can muster this week.
My mates are on holiday, there’s nothing on TV, I’ve got my felt tip pens out but I can’t think what to draw and I’m bored.
Even disgruntled tenants trying to punch me out can’t pull me out of the lethargy. I’m too hot to get angry about bedroom tax again and I’m tired of reading about how house price rises might just be the first sign of a recovering economy.
Mint sauce
I shall lay my fatigued body down in the lay-by of tedium and prepare to end it all……….how exactly would a sheep commit suicide anyway? Maybe drown themselves in a vat of mint sauce.
Ben, you missed the largest property forum of them all, the only one which is an official Google News Publisher.
If you are not already laying in that layby, take a look at this ….
Intro …..
WARNING – this article might make you want to cry, it might make you want to laugh and it will probably make you angry, and for many different reasons depending on who you are. Licensing – Raising Standards or Raising Funds?
This is one of those articles which I would like to be read by every landlord, every letting agent, every tenant and especially every Politician.
I would also like every person who reads this article to leave a comment, share it and help turn it into a HUGE debate.
So what is it all about?
My friend Mary Latham recently wrote a book about the storm she see’s brewing which is heading towards the Private Rented Sector with potentially catastrophic consequences. One of the chapters in Mary’s book is called “Raising Standards or Raising funds”.
There have been many discussions about the effectiveness of licensing which is being introduced into the PRS in it’s various forms and on many occasions, landlords have concluded that licencing has very little to do with raising standards and more to do with Local Authorities raising funds to create “jobs for the boys”
Well you may be pleased to hear that the DCLG have asked Local Authorities to complete a survey about licencing. Have they read Mary’s book one wonders?
When I heard about the survey, intrigue and curiosity got the better of me – what questions were the DCLG asking?
To my surprise, I managed to get hold of a link to the survey questionnaire and DCLG had used ‘open source’ software for their survey. Being the curious type I obviously felt compelled to take a look, fully expecting to be met with a security screen where I would have to enter a User Name and Password to get any further. I’d have given up at that point as there’s no way I would attempt to hack a Government website. To my surprise though, there was no security! They were using Survey Monkey and that awoke the little monkey in me.
To see the questions being asked I needed to complete the page I was looking at to get to the next set of questions, so I began to fill it in. This is the point at which my curiosity transformed into mischief as I was having a lot of fun with my answers 😉
Here was my opportunity to tell the DCLG what I really think about landlord licencing in the most cynical and mischievous way possible. What an opportunity!
Now before you think about attacking me with some “holier than though” type comments, please remember the DCLG are responsible for the drafting of all of the legislation which has caused the PRS so much grief. Anyhow, enough said on that, it’s done now.
I took screen shots of every page as I completed and I have put them together in a slideshow below.
Do take a look and whether you laugh or cry and for whatever reason you get angry, please post a comment or join in the discussion below this article 😉
If I mysteriously disappear, you might just find me at the Tower of London LOL
I hope you will appreciate the irony of my answers!
Read more here >>> http://www.property118.com/licensing-raising-standards-or-raising-funds/42155/
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This was a pretty big story in the property world, hit all the national media: http://www.housesellingadvice.com/2013/08/07/quick-sale-sector-benefits-customers/
Thanks for pointing me in that direction Richard. I have seen a couple of quick sale people hanging around my clients lately.
a month ago I went to court with a client who had a warrant of eviction on less than £2,000 and equity of £170,000. He was accompanied by one of these people who had pestered him and even driven him to court to see what would happen. He was offering to clear his debts of £20,000, buy the old guy a flat in Leeds (he lives in South London) for £32,000 and give him £2,000 for a car, all in just a few days.
£52,000 for a property that the day the guy moved to Leeds netted him £120,000 profit? Nice work if you can get it.
I told him that I knew what he was up to and advised him to sling his hook. He waited until we came out of court and then said to me “I know people who will kill you if you try to block this sale”.
Nice people.
Still bored though 🙂
Hopefully he’s one of the 3 the OFT are investigating further!
Nope, he was like all the ones I have come across so far, just a lone bloke acting as a middle man for a cash buyer.
The OFT may look at dodgy companies but they miss the individuals I know, hanging around the fringe laundering drug money on other people’s misery.
Companies are out there who gather information about people facing repossession and financially difficulty, these leads are sold on to investors as what the industry terms “Motivated sellers”.
What galls me the most is that in 90% of cases I can and do, save their home without selling it at all, let alone at a discount, because people dont know their rights and the lenders try to pull the wool over their eyes to encourage them to throw in the towel before they need to