Saturday 7 June 2008

Economic illiterate of the day (6)

They just keep on coming!

We moved last week because we found an equally nice house which costs £600 p.c.m. less to rent than our old one. Our previous landlady refused to budge on the rent so that was that, AFAIAC.

I spoke to the letting agent for the previous place yesterday, and she told me that the best offer that any prospective tenant had made so far was £300 p.c.m. less than what we were paying, which the landlady had turned down. Apparently, the landlady is now holding out for £300 more than what we were paying on the basis that 'she needs to cover her mortgage'.

She needs an urgent lesson on the difference between 'cost' and 'value', and a brief introduction to the concept of 'notional costs', methinks.

5 comments:

Longrider said...

'she needs to cover her mortgage'.

Actually, that's probably true. What she needs to be doing is talking to her mortgage broker. We are considering letting the Longrider abode should we not be able to sell (and that's looking increasingly likely). Our current mortgage payments are more than we could get from rent. A talk with a mortgage broker about a decent buy-to-let mortgage brings that down to within the monthly rental income. if your erstwhile landlady has had her mortgage for a while, then she should be looking for a better deal so that she can let more competitively.

Mark Wadsworth said...

Word on the street is, her 2-year fix expires just about now. To cover her mortgage, she has to re-mortgage at an interest rate of 5% or less, which ain't going to happen, or indeed re-let at a rental yield of nearly 5%, which ain't going to happen either.

Longrider said...

In which case, she got her sums wrong at the outset.

Henry North London 2.0 said...

I have to remortgage in November

Im planning to take a chunk out of it and hopefulyl get 6.5% Im currently on a fix of 5.99% from the Northern Rock..

Should I wait or should I get a deal now?

Mark Wadsworth said...

If it's not BTL and it's less than 75% LTV, there's no big panic.