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.