Is all the bad press we landlords get justified? Are we really devils incarnate, chasing filthy lucre and ignoring the rubbish scattered around our precious investments? Do we have zero concern for communal gardens, and a lack of regard for the community and first-time buyers? Are we always looking for a way to benefit from other people’s misery via a repossession or four?

Ostensibly, backing up this stereotype is a perfect example close to home. A four-storey house next door to mine has been converted into three flats, all of which are owned by the occupiers. The neighbouring house on the other side has been similarly converted; two of its three flats are rented out. The occupants of one of these two buildings are clearly more concerned about keeping up appearances. Guess which is which?

On the mainly rental side, the garden is a riot of long grass and weeds, even a fallen log. On the owner-occupiers’ side, the garden is an immaculate sward of bright green, and months have been spent redecorating the outside. My neighbours the renters, however, sometimes find it hard to marry bin liners with a dustbin.

So, is it a clear-cut case of selfish, lazy renters? In a word, no: the owner-occupiers’ perfect garden was, for a long time, a mud bath. It has been spruced up only because one of those owner-occupiers wants to sell. One-bedroom flats in Islington are going for a bomb, and they want to cash in, which is perfectly understandable. But why are one-bed flats so valuable? Because buy-to-let investors like me want to buy them. The benefits of the buy-to-let boom haven’t been felt only by greedy landlords.

BACKGROUND

• Tales of a landlady: Tax reforms

• Into the sunset

BACKGROUND

• Tales of a landlady: Degrees of success

• Tales of a landlady: It pays to shop around

• Tales of a landlady: Residents only

• The ties that bind

• How low can you go?

BACKGROUND

• Tales of a landlady: Avoiding the agents

• Tales of a landlady: In the dock

• Tales of a landlady: the age of reason

• Tales of a landlady: Heroes and villains

• Tales of a landlady: High maintenance

BACKGROUND

• Back to the ’burbs

• A waste of energy?

• Tenants like gardens, but not tending them

• In the doghouse

• Parking mad

It’s eviction time

Can investors profit from the rise in repossessions?

• It’s eviction time

BACKGROUND

• Do property workshops work?

• A letting gamble

• Spread betting

• When buy-to-let turns from a hobby into a living

Tales of a landlady: Persistent complaint

How can lettings agents justify annual renewal fees, asks Rosie Millard

BACKGROUND

• Landlords: halo or horns?

• Bidding wars

• Time to quit the ring?

Closer examination of the largely rental property, meanwhile, reveals that, even though the garden is messy, the landlord who owns two of its three flats has repainted his windowsills and repointed the brickwork. The owner-occupier in the top flat, however, has not followed suit.

In my experience, landlords are paranoid about their buildings falling into disrepair. Who wants to rent a filthy building? Tenants, faced with a huge private market and competitive rents, are quite picky, as well they should be. I can’t think of anybody who would rush to sign up for a house with damp, abandoned mattresses littering the pavement outside (as recently shown in the press, illustrating another evil landlord story – yawn). The managing agents of the east London block in which I own a flat are for ever moving boxes, old bicycles and litter away, as they know such detritus gives landladies like me the vapours.

And what of allegations that landlords and tenants alike lack community zeal? Rather more tricky to defend, I grant you. Buy-to-let landlords, by definition, do not live where they invest; and their tenants might not be highly motivated to campaign for the local school or join Neighbourhood Watch. But I only say “might not”. Who knows what the individual community spirit of a tenant might be?

There is not a scrap of reliable evidence to show that, just because you are paying rent each month rather than a mortgage payment, your community ethos goes out the window. Paris is a city almost wholly inhabited by residential tenants, but they seem to have quite a lot of communal zeal. Indeed, rather more so than London, if the uptake of independent shops and local state-run schools is anything to go by.

I would say that any sense of community spirit in Britain has been fundamentally undermined by a growing disaffection from local amenities across the board, and not just because of the right to buy for council tenants. Why campaign for local schools when you send your children private, or for your local swimming pool when you are a member of a private health club?

Or, indeed, why bother supporting the library when huge chains of booksellers are open for business virtually 24 hours a day?

I suppose the wider issue of whether investing in property is fundamentally immoral hinges on whether or not you believe property to be theft: if you do, you should probably go and live on a camp site, or in a squat.

“Do we trade on other people’s misery?” asks Marcus Locke, who owns more than 40 properties in London, many former council flats or repossessions. “If I buy a repossession, the damage has already been done and the creditors have seized the asset. What I am doing is taking a property that is in disrepair, spending money on it and representing it to the market.

“If you have one appalling flat in a block that has had difficult tenants in the past, it affects the whole block. So, if you can buy it, refurbish it and put responsible people in it, surely that enhances the environment. All we are doing is putting an asset back into the economy.”

And making a profit out of it. Locke cheerfully admits that he is a millionaire, which is, of course, what sticks in some people’s craw, even though we live in a capitalist society. No matter that giant corporations make zillions on an hourly basis, and that their employees earn spectacular bonuses – the buy-to-let landlord is “immoral” for doing the same, according to some. And, even though most of my tenants earn quite a lot more than I do, that doesn’t matter, either. I am a landlady, and so my grass, my community spirit and my morals are unkempt. QED.

buytolet@sunday-times.co.uk

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