Bringing in rent caps as a way to control the rental market would ‘scare the life out of landlords’ and cause many to exit the sector, Landlord Action founder and TV star Paul Shamplina has warned.

His comments were made during a recorded ‘election special’ podcast with Eddie Hooker (main image, left), Group CEO at Total Property and Sean Hooker (right), Head of Redress at the PRS.

The trio were brought together to discuss what a Labour government may mean for private landlords, and one of the key topics they tackled was rent controls.

Shamplina pointed out that Angela Rayner, the new housing secretary, has said Labour would only bring in mandatory annual rent reviews as the mechanism by which landlords could raise their rents, with increases coupled to inflation and/or the base interest rate.

Eddie Hooker said even this would be problematical because many landlords increase rents only occasionally, particularly if a tenant is a good one who pays the rent on time and looks after a property and, therefore, a compulsory contractual annual review “would damage that relationship”.

Rapport

Shamplina agreed, saying: “If you've got good tenants who have been living in your property for years then you build a rapport up with them”, going on to say that putting up the rent sometimes leads to tenants moving out, which means landlords then have the cost and hassle of finding a new tenant, and the likely expense of refurbishing the property.

But more hardline voices within the Labour government want rent caps and freezes not reviews, both of which effectively set an upper limit for rents for a set number of months or years, a tool that London Mayor Sadiq Khan backed only a year ago.

It was also pointed out by Sean Hooker that if you restrain rents, then mortgage rate increases would also have to be regulated for landlords.

He suggested that if there were to be another ‘Liz Truss’ moment and rates increased significantly, hundreds of thousands of landlords would be left with monthly losses because they would not be able to raise their rent to cover the increased mortgage payments.

Listen to this latest Property Cast during which Eddie, Sean and Paul discuss other key topics now in Keir Starmer’s in-tray including scrapping Section 21, greater landlord regulation, raising standards and tax incentives.