HousepricesCrash has found a new website forum where those who engage in the kind of sell and rent back schemes revealed in recent press and TV articles (BBC Watchdog, Trevor MacDonald, The Truth About Property, GMTV, The Money Programme and others) are desperately trying to work out how to save their seedy image.
The site called National Federation of Property Traders (http://www.nfpt.org.uk/) features posts by worried sell and rent back merchants fearful of losing business and the impending regulation they all fear from the FSA.
Witness the bickering over how much they can get away with discounting from the true market value of your property, and even what the federation is called -
“Despite in my previous post me using the term “trader”/”trading” myself my team, when speaking to a prospective customer, are VERY careful to never use those words and to instead use the term “Investor” in order to better describe our intended relationship with them.”
So says one sell and rent back trader.
Of course the term trader does sound very much like the truth. Like horse traders, or share traders, these people view your home as a commodity to be bought and sold when the price is right, whereas those renting back have given up huge amounts of cash in the homes simply because they view them as homes and not as assets for speculation.
It won’t be long before the name this lot uses is academic – the Government WILL be forced to act and get the FSA involved to regulate the sell and rent back cowboys.
HPC
I think you are missing the point here
There are many genuine traders buying property with no intention of ripping anyone off. I am one of them. I don’t consider myself a cowboy and I offer a genuine service to all I purchase from. I am a member of the website you so quickly and unfairly dismiss.
If you actually took some time to read it, you would see that the whole point of website is to push for the regulation of this industry. All the discussions are around creating a code of conduct and looking for ways to enforce them. Mind you, that does not seem to have the same headline appeal as “sell and rent back cowboys on the run.” This just seems to scream “I want attention” and is a very biased view of the situation.
We are not all on the run and like you, despise the bad practice of the cowboys in our industry. Just like any industry you always get an element that is less than truthful and out just to get what they can for themselves. We also suffer from having a media that is obsessed only in presenting bad news. Rather that investigating the industry properly and talking to the many hundreds of people that are still living in homes that they would have lost if the sell and rent back industry did not exist. It seems that our media would rather lump all these peoples problems together rather than look at them individually and see through the bad press to the many genuine cases.
Having agreed that cowboys do exist, it is worth stating that it is completely possible to buy properties and rent them back to their owners, ethically. This is a real service. A service that the financial industry or our society does not yet want to acknowledge as being valuable. I have seen many cases where the answer from the financial industry, the local council and even the Citizens Advice Bureau are all the same when some one is facing repossession. “Sorry we can’t help” And when the same organisations are questioned about the BMV traders, their response is often. “Be careful, you might get ripped off”. Advice given by organisations that then go ahead and repossess the house and make someone homeless. You only need to look at the recent scandals over the major banks regulated SAM equity release schemes, to see that Barclays and the other banks have made more money selling these schemes and taken away more houses than even the most unscrupulous trader would ever achieve.
Very often the people we help are the people that these organisations don’t know how to help.
The financial services makes it money from selling debt at inflated prices; the council won’t acknowledge that its better to keep someone in their house, than have them repossessed and pay them housing benefits and the CAB just don’t have a clue.
And yes we do want the industry regulated and far from shying away from it; I personally would welcome the FSA and Governments involvement. I am meeting up with my local MP this week to try and get him involved and to back an investigation into the whole sell and rent back industry.
Please don’t assume that we are all cowboys, we are not.