When the UK property market hit the fan at the end of 2007, it looked like the end for buy-to-let. The sector was – quite rightly – reviled for its part in the escalating financial emergency, and seemed mired in a double-sided ethical crisis.
Linton Chiswick, CityWire.co.uk – 29 January 2010
On the one hand, its dishonesty, the widespread mortgage and valuation fraud that police described as ‘an issue in every major city’, was a factor not only in the loss of a number of personal fortunes, but the banking industry’s pain. But even when honest, it was seen as encapsulating an unsustainable, pre-credit crunch, greed-is-good attitude to bricks-and-mortar that perverted the right of the younger generation for an affordable roof over their heads and turned them into drones for paying off less deserving people’s mortgages.
By the height of the crisis, there was talk of the buy-to-let mortgage, the buy-to-let landlord, both becoming extinct.
At the very end of the 2009, however, Housing Minister John Healey, in a speech to the Fabian Society, painted a portrait of a fairer, more robust 21st Century housing arrangement, that seemed to not only include a larger and more active private rented sector, but that might have hinted at tax breaks for landlords too. Is buy-to-let officially rehabilitated?
