Price gouging is legal in the UK?
Landlords Are Jacking up Advertised Rents to Dodge New Tenants’ Rights Law
Submitted 2 weeks ago by okwithmydecay@leminal.space to unitedkingdom@feddit.uk
Comments
Jaysyn@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
fakeman_pretendname@feddit.uk 2 weeks ago
Sort of. Only by landlords and large corporations.
Armand1@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Maybe I’ve just been lucky, but in many years of renting I have never seen someone advertise one rent, then raise it before you close the deal.
jumping_redditor@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
how is that a loophole? is that not wat the law was meant to do?
AnyOldName3@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
The law was meant to allow tenants to see the real rent up-front so they wouldn’t waste time they didn’t have on viewing properties then get pressured into paying more than they were expecting. That should have driven real rents down because people could skip things out of their budget upfront and know what they found for less was genuinely available for less. Instead, landlords are just displaying huge numbers they know they won’t get, and totally obfuscating the real price.
FishFace@piefed.social 2 weeks ago
It’s a serious improvement, because it prevents drip pricing, which exploits human psychology to charge people more than they would have paid had they been allowed to judge the price from the beginning.
It still leads to price uncertainty which is inefficient for renters.
In spite of that, it will bring rents down, because advertising a massive rent will put a lot of people off - especially those who are primarily looking on rightmove and filtering. So landlords who do this will have a smaller pool of potential tenants, and so won’t be able to charge quite as much.
At the end of the day, the rental property market is still a market. The point of it is that landlords try to get the highest price and renters try to pay the lowest price for something they accept. We need to realise while criticising the rental market or measures aimed at making it work better that this legislation was never intended to dismantle it and replace it with Soviet-style social housing for everyone, and how big of a change it would be to prevent landlords from charging what they think they can get away with one way or another.
Even if you think that the country would be improved by a change on that scale, I think it’s good to acknowledge the very significant improvement the Labour government made to renters with this sorely-needed change to the rules. It puts on the path to being a country more like our peers where renters aren’t second-class citizens and, even though renting may be expensive, at least it provides a more secure home.
zwerg@feddit.org 2 weeks ago
As always, they found a loop hole: reverse auctions are apparently still legal. I hope they fix this ASAP.
TIEPilot@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
People mad about this need to understand:
“Don’t hate the player, hate the game”
Otherwise they won’t rent like in NYC because the tax write off is worth more than the renovation.
fakeman_pretendname@feddit.uk 2 weeks ago
Sometimes you can hate both the player and the game.