74 Saturday December 18 2021 | the times
Money
financing very difficult and could affect
the value of let properties.”
He said that the new rules would trig-
ger a sell-off of poorer quality proper-
ties, which could be bought by unscru-
pulous landlords who end up renting
them illegally.Newer home bias
Marion Money, 69, a landlord from
Kent, took advantage of low mortgage
rates to add another property to her
portfolio but because of the new rules,
she bought a house in near-perfect con-
dition in an affluent area.
“It is ten years old and well insulated
and already a C rating,” said Money,
whose properties will fund her retire-
ment.
The National Residential Landlords
Association, the industry body, said
that the decision to rush landlords intoimproving their properties ignored the
fact that most buy-to-let owners are not
professional investors but amateur
“dinner party” landlords, who own
between one and two properties and
will not be able to afford widespread
renovations.
According to the private landlords
survey, carried out by the Ministry of
Housing, Communities and Local Gov-
ernment in 2019, 45 per cent of land-
lords own one property and 38 per cent
own between two and four — making
up a combined 83 per cent of the sector
in total.
Investors with multiple properties
own 48 per cent of rental properties
(2.2 million) but account for only 17 per
cent of the total number of landlords.
“The government needs to recognise
the difficulties in improving the energyThis will trigger a
sell-off of older and
unsuitable properties
that will be bought by
unscrupulous landlords
‘The bill to go green will
cost me £10k per house’
They lost their tax relief, had to pay extra stamp
duty and now landlords are being forced to
improve energy efficiency, writes David Byers
now making their payments on time.
Yet there are more dark clouds on the
horizon because the government has
given investors just over three years to
make their homes more energy effi-
cient or face fines of up to £30,000 a
property.
Blanco, who has been the star of the
US TV series House Hunters Inter-
national since 2014, is furious.
Under the proposed changes, which
are now the subject of a consultation,
landlords would have to make sure
their homes reach Energy Perform-
ance Certificate (EPC) level C or better
by 2025 for new tenancies and by 2028
for all tenancies. Mortgage lenders will
have to have an average EPC rating of
C across all of their buy-to-let books by
the end of 2030.
It means that banks and building so-
cieties will restrict new lending to
homes with high EPCs to offset the
loans already given on properties with
low ratings. This will make it even
tougher for many landlords to get
loans.
The EPC system ranks homes from A
for the most energy-efficient property,
down to G, which are the least. Ordi-
nary homeowners can expect to be af-
fected by changes down the line too.
Here’s what you need to know.Race for greener homes
For Blanco and many other landlords,
making these changes could be hugely
expensive. The government expects
landlords to pay the first £10,000 of the
renovation costs needed to bring each
property up to scratch.
Blanco’s properties are all Victorian,
in good condition, but ranked D or E.
This is far from exceptional; the gov-
ernment believes that 7 out of 10 of all
landlord-owned properties in the
country are ranked below C, with 8 out
of 10 pre-1919 homes being D or lower.
Blanco doesn’t think he will be able to
do the work for less than £10,000 per
property. If he can get quotes for the
work showing that it would cost more
than that, though, he could be granted
an extension to the 2025 deadline.
He said that a two-bedroom flat he
has in east London is rated D. One way
to improve its rating would be to insu-
late the wall. “But I wouldn’t do that
because it is half of a Victorian house
and I don’t own the flat below or the
freehold.”
His next option would be to put in
double glazing, which would cost
£6,000. “But this wouldn’t improve my
EPC enough on its own to get the flat to
a C,” he said. He could replace the boiler
for £3,000 but that would mean remov-
ing the tank in the loft and running new
pipes everywhere, which would push
his budget well over £10,000.
Blanco said he has another property,
an end of terrace house rated E, which
would be “almost impossible” to get to
C without ripping out and reinsulating
all the walls, a process he said would
also cost well over £10,000.
Blanco said that for many properties,
he would have to get three quotes from
tradespeople to prove that repairs
would cost more than £10,000.
“Tradespeople are going to be sick of
giving landlords quotes,” he said.
Blanco fears that buy-to-let mortga-
ges will also begin drying up. “Lenders
won’t approve properties with an F or G
rating at the moment. Presumably they
will stop lending to properties between
D and G soon, which is going to makeL
ife was beginning to return to
normal for Richard Blanco, a
landlord with 14 properties in
the southeast of England.
After months of being
lenient with some stricken renters who
could not afford to pay during the
pandemic, he says all his tenants are