Dear land­lords,

I know that Homes Under the Ham­mer prom­ised you the world. Just buy the house, they said. It’s easy, they said. Buy on Monday and by Thursday you’ll be rolling in end­less piles of cash! What could be bet­ter? Noth­ing, you thought, as you applied for the mort­gage and waited for the money to roll in.

But what they didn’t tell you was that the trouble starts when the ten­ants move in; the end­less unreas­on­able requests. Can they have a cooker with all of the knobs on? Can they have a hoover that sucks up dust? Can they have a ward­robe that can hold a few hangers without col­lapsing? It’s really quite unreas­on­able — If you bought all of that it would cost 3% of your annual profit!*

But I’m here to ask if you would, for a minute, think of the ten­ants. You don’t need to think of them nicely – I mean, they’re mostly money machines to you, but they are people-shaped money machines. They call the flat home, and they look after it for you – they have almost as much to lose if the place goes to rack and ruin as you do, home­less­ness not being an awe­some option. So I was just won­der­ing if you could take a minute out of your account­ing to think about whether or not you would live in your own buy-to-let prop­erty. Really?

You see, fire alarms are not, and will never be, “fea­tures”. Double glaz­ing is a fea­ture, that I admit, but only if it’s actual double glaz­ing and you haven’t just fit­ted per­man­ent pan­els of Plexi­glass over the win­dows so that if that fire­al­arm has to do any work it’ll take us four hours and a set of screw­drivers just to be able to jump out of the win­dow (and you’ll notice a wee flaw with that plan, too, a flaw that sounds a lot like “burn­ing to death”).

And you should prob­ably know that freez­ers ceased to be lux­ury items in the sev­en­ties, and if you were just to pop down to Tesco you can pick up a microwave that wasn’t carved out of stone for less than £40. Ser­i­ously, look around your flat: the 80s didn’t die, they just moved to Bruntsfield.

And this isn’t all your fault, I know. You pay for a let­ting agency to sort out things like fur­niture that has deas­sembled itself and car­pets that look like Jack­son Pollock’s inspir­a­tion. And they’re miser­able, those let­ting agents; it’s not like you want to make friends with them. But I do have to spend fif­teen minutes trapped in a small flat with them, and some­times get in a car with them. And it would be nice if, for those fif­teen minutes, we could all put on our happy masks and pre­tend that this isn’t the worst. Job. Ever. Because in what other job do you just turn up fif­teen minutes late, let some people into a flat, wait until they’re in the liv­ing room and then phone a friend for a chat?

Still, thanks for hav­ing some money to pay for a flat that I can rent from you for an extor­tion­ate amount – no, really, I’m genu­inely grate­ful, because home­less­ness doesn’t look very fun (although don’t think I haven’t noticed that if I would home­less I would be allowed a dog). I appre­ci­ate that. It’s just that I’m not a huge fan of spend­ing hun­dreds of pounds a month to live in ram­shackle pig sheds.

Love,
Sarah

*Sid­e­note: our cur­rent land­lord genu­inely does cal­cu­late this stuff and quote it at the let­ting agency when we do selfish things like point out we have a couch that the let­ting agent “wouldn’t give to his cat”. And then he says no. I will sorely miss him.