Buy-to-let landlords: behind the bad image | Money | The Guardian

Buy-to-let landlords: behind the bad image | Money | The Guardian

According to most things that I read in Guardian Money, I'm one of the evil property-owning elite. As a buy-to-let landlord, I'm automatically lumped in with notoriously bad landlords, living in luxury while my tenants pay extortionate rents to live in slums. Tenants tell of their stories of despair at the hands of people like me, while I'm blamed for, well, pretty much everything.

So I'm here to tell the other side of the tale – what being a landlord is actually like. For starters, many landlords aren't rich.

I became a landlord when trading up the property ladder. Put simply, holding on to my one-bed flat (which I'd owned for six years), while purchasing a two-bed flat, made me chain-free and, therefore, a much more attractive buyer. Back in 2006, when the property market was going crazy, this was almost essential if I didn't want to get gazumped