I know, it can be annoying to read this column every week and witness us landladies having a great time. Even when tenants trash the place, things usually turn out for the best. So, in the interests of balance, here is the cautionary tale of author and landlady Jane Wenham-Jones, who started out at the bottom of the market and grew to regret it.
Wenham-Jones, who lives in Broadstairs, Kent, bought her first buy-to-let house in the neighbouring town of Ramsgate in 1991. “I got a straight mortgage because there were no buy-to-let mortgages around then. Banks were wary of developers, so I pretended I was buying it for my aged mother,” she says brightly. At £28,000, the four-bed house was a bargain, particularly as it was already half-divided into two flats. Wenham-Jones made the conversion sound, and started on a journey towards a portfolio of five similar houses, all of which she converted into flats. After five or so years, she had 13 flats.
“Ramsgate was cheap, and you could buy these houses for a song,” she says. “And I did the bare minimum: cord carpets, magnolia paint, and B&Q kitchens. Well, I was at the bottom end of the market, so I was advised by people to go for cheap rents.”
What happened was not good. “I discovered that if you have a certain type of tenant, one who is on housing benefit, they just don’t care, because they don’t have to do anything to pay their rent,” she says. “I’ve heard that the filthy rich are the same.” Her experiences were enough to fill the pages of a novel; indeed, after a few years Wenham-Jones sat down and invented a new genre: chick-landlady-lit.
It would appear that Ramsgate tenants have a peculiar zeal for grim living. “I had flats trashed. I had drugs raids. Once, when one of my tenants left, he forgot to empty the chest freezer which was full of meat. He just turned it off. It was two or three weeks before we got in there, and it was July. The smell was unbelievable. Another tenant disappeared on me, and when I inspected the flat I found it full of nicked televisions and replica handguns. The tenant turned up in Maidstone jail.”
At this point, most landladies would sit down and take a long, hard look at where things were going wrong. Not so Wenham-Jones. “I had a professional rent-dodger, who seemed ever so nice. He came with his wife and daughter. After three months, the rent didn’t come. The next time we went round I was greeted not by a lovely wife, but by a snarling Doberman. We tracked him down to Dover, and found that he had done this all over the place, moving into a flat, paying the rent for three months and then knowing it would take at least six more months to get him out. I had to ring him up late at night and threaten him.”
Yet the worst was to come. “I decided to sell two of my houses, the two in worst repair. Well, one of my tenants was dealing in heroin.”
How did she know? “He was always white and sweaty when he answered the door. And when he left, I found a box of needles.” Oh, great. “But the other three houses seemed to tick along, they weren’t too bad. I used the money from the sale of the first two houses to buy a share of a wine bar in Broadstairs. The night it opened, we had a big party. I was on the door in a glittery black dress, handing out champagne, when my mobile rang. It was the police, saying there had been an incident at one of my houses.”
An understatement; a friend of one of Wenham-Jones’s tenants had been murdered. He had tried to break up an argument between two of her other tenants who lived on the floors above.
“He went upstairs to calm things down, whereupon one of my tenants picked up a carving knife and stabbed him,” she says. A week later, her remaining tenant, the friend of the murdered man, hanged himself in his flat.
“So I lost all three tenants in one fell swoop.” How unfortunate.
“No, I was quite upset when he died. It cost me £3,000 to clear the place up, because there was blood all over the walls. And do you know, I didn’t get any money back from the insurance. There is a clause saying if the damage is self-inflicted you don’t get any money back.”
Apart from the vagaries of insuring your flat against damage due to murder, Wenham-Jones at last seems to have learnt that selecting decent tenants is crucial to successful landladying.
“I realised I needed to go for a different market. I’ve made the flats much nicer and I’m much pickier. I’ve started getting people with jobs; I’d say that’s the key for me. Or someone who is on benefit, but a certain form of benefit. Single mothers, say. Or people who have retired on medical grounds. My personal experience of young jobless men is that they have absolutely no interest in keeping the flats clean.”
I have no idea what drives Jane Wenham-Jones, but she is certainly a stickler for keeping her glass remarkably half-full, no matter how dreadful the outlook.
“Buy-to-let is my pension, and I got my first novel, Raising The Roof, out of it.” Any regrets? “No, I’m really glad I did it. My first three houses are now mortgage-free. I just wish I had been tougher with the tenants. In fact, it’s made me a lot more right-wing. I used to think everyone was wonderful. I now realise that some people are just f****** horrible.”
And for Wenham-Jones, at least, the story does have a silver lining. “Ramsgate is regenerating, there is a lot of new money coming in and I would say it’s a place to watch. People say it’s going to be another Whitstable.”
