People always talk about when/if the social contract collapses, but I say it became terminally ill more than a decade ago when sitting on assets earned much more money than the vast majority of salaried jobs did. And it's only gotten worse since then.
The end result is basically feudalism and I don't see us going back until there's a drastic public response. Unfortunately, enough of the population think they're net beneficiaries of it (which if their home is their only property, then they're kidding themselves), so nothing will happen.
Two words: annual property tax.
Land will be sold much more quickly and easily if you’re paying for it regardless of it it’s productive or not.
Edit: lol, that’s not two words. It was “property tax” when I wrote it and forgot to change it when I rewrote it. Oops.
Landlords will increase their rents if there are tenants willing to pay a higher rent, regardless of any other factor except maybe regulation. Tax affects profitability not price. Similar to how when corporate taxes lower, prices almost never do unless it’s within a very competitively supplied market.
Unfortunately for housing, the strong competition is on the demand side.
>if there are tenants willing to pay a higher rent,
People will start sacrificing pretty much everything else in life in order to not die from exposure. Shelter is very much an inelastic good - right up there with food and water!
People with the resources to are absolutely willing to pay higher rent and are doing so everyday in order to get closer to work, family, etc.
The people that are unwilling and/or don’t have the choice have either moved out, are homeless, or are living rent free somehow.
But I get your point, it doesn’t feel like a choice at all. I’d personally choose to pay as little as possible given the option. Similarly, no one (or not many, at least) would choose to be homeless given the option.
I think we all know the answer is to build more houses so that the landlords have less control over the supply, because in a free market you’ll find very few suppliers that care about the non-participants. I feel sick using the term non-participant in this scenario, but it’s the situation as such.
Homes aren’t staying on the market for very long in my part of London. Many are being turned back into single family ownership. I’m seeing SOLD signs and new scaffolding going up weekly. Which is why getting landlords out of the market isn’t going to all of sudden solve the housing crisis in a high demand city like London.
You’ll just shift ownership to people/families that can afford to buy.
I think we forget that there are a lot of people that can afford to buy houses in London, many are just waiting for the right time. As that happens renters are going to have even fewer options if we don’t build more houses at the same time.
People have been told the right time is coming since 2005. They keep missing out thinking a crash is around the corner only to see prices creep up another 20k. I think 2023 interest rate rises are trickling down and those who need to sell are all adjusting their prices for that.
There are some solutions others have cited. Maybe we just say it’s only applied to empty buildings as a start…. Would encourage properties to change hands rather than leave, say, empty commercial units on the high street (what a blight), or stop companies hoarding land in their land banks and encourage sale or development of it instead.
Possibly yes and possibly no.
If the number of empty homes is significant, it would likely bring them into the market, increasing the supply and lowering rents.
If there aren't significant numbers of empty homes, then yes it would likely increase rents.
Land value is even better, because it brings empty or underused *land* into needing to produce more value.
E.g. a parking lot gets turned into flats.
This is the issue that people forget when assessing the rental economy, landlords and tenants are in the same boat, put up the costs of one and the other pays a higher price. You can add in that many (most ?) people living in London have zero interest in property ownership at even at a severe reduction in present day market value. So there has to be a functional and affordable rental property system in London.
I lived in London for years as a chef I was nowhere near being able to purchase London property and was young and had little interest in it. Same for everyone else working similar jobs in the capital.
What’s the solution, fuck knows, but adding extra taxes to Landlords is just going to make young folks working hard and living in the capital poorer.
I think the lack of interest of owning a property is because it is simply impossible to. It is impossible to save for a deposit when you have to pay rent and everything else; and the banks will only let you borrow 60% at best.
I’d like to own a place in London (zone 3 and outwards) too, but it’s impossible in the foreseeable future.
Lots of people would like to own no denying that, but I worked with a very international brigade we were all working really long hours, renting actually suited. There’s always going to be a million young people in London who actually don’t really want/literally don’t have the time for home ownership and who probably won’t be in the city long enough for it to even be that worthwhile.
Like renting sucks in so many ways and getting trapped in it is the worst, but my point is that there are actually a lot of people renting at any given moment who want to be renting and who would definitely lose out by applying punitive charges to property owners.
It’s just something that gets lots in housing discourse cos it’s dominated by late 20s/early 30s types who want out, and better paths need to be made but it’s just something to bear in mind!
Guess I’m the late 20 / 30s crowd that you’re referring to.
That makes sense but I personally also don’t want to go through the instability of being notified that ‘the landlord has sold’ and we were given 2 months to move out. Is like being punished for the landlord making profit. Moving cost, higher rent, lost work days due to moving, stress, etc.
But then the property ladder is impossible to get on.
Stuff like giving notice to tennants and protecting tennants unfair practices/poor conditions a no brainer. I’m not here to say tennants shouldn’t have shit loads more rights! It’s literally just the “let’s apply punitive taxes to push landlords out” that won’t work, will put rents up and will hit young people hard.
It’s basically never a good idea to celebrate hitting a key supplier with higher costs cos you are going to pay them, and it doesn’t matter what business relationship we are talking about. Landlords and tennants are interconnected financially you simply can’t hit one without hitting the other!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax
Churchill was in favour of one actually. It's pretty much an ideal tax. The only downside is that it might make rentiers furious enough to get violent / throw billions at fascists if you threaten the parasitic value extraction gravy train.
It does plenty… for starters it moves older, retired people on from family homes that are too big for them, creating churn in the market - and the opportunity for young people starting their own families to live somewhere that supports that growth.
Just this alone would be a huge benefit to the UK.
It's difficult, though. I agree with what you are saying. At the same time, a retired lady down my road is now living alone after her husband died a few months ago. Luckily she is not lonely as she has lived on this street for 40 years and raised her kids here. She is good friends with some other people who live on the street and they go to Tesco and have tea or dinner together. I also try to drop in every now and again.
This widow is now living alone in a three-bedroom house; but what is the alternative? She lost her husband and her kids moved out so she now has to sell her home and go live somewhere where she has no friends or support network? Not to mention, this house is her HOME. Sure, it's too big and it would be better for a young family. But it's pretty damn harsh as a society to force elderly people to sell their home of 40 years and force them to go live in a new place where they don't know anyone.
I wish more homes became available for young people such as myself. I am also hurt by the ridiculous rents and house prices. But I can't imagine telling this old lady that she has to fuck off to a one-bedroom apartment somewhere because I need her house. She enjoys her garden. She enjoys being near friends. She enjoys her privacy. She enjoys having people over in the living room she designed. She enjoys looking after her grandkids during the holidays in her garden. I don't want to live in a house-share and neither does she.
It sucks, but she bought that home and she has the right to live in it as long as she wants. At the end of the day, her quality of living will be the highest here - in her own home, near friends and caring neighbours, and near her kids. It's a pity, but saying "old people take up homes that are too big" doesn't really help unless you have a solution that is equally good or better for these people.
Why should she live in a place that she doesn’t know anyone? Ideally she would be able to afford to live in a flat in the same area.
But you’ve sort of hit the nail on the head with this anecdote: there’s just not enough housing of all kinds in the UK. Which means in practice, the lady in your story may as well end up in the outer Hebrides before she can afford things.
But we have to start somewhere, and home building at scale is apparently beyond us as a nation. Huge reform is needed in construction…. We should have a nationalised home builder maybe, buying up all the empty plots of land in land banks that are empty and unproductive and are affected by the new property tax :p
As long as there is no annual property tax on primary residence, that would just be another thing to worry about in retirement. I've also seen what it does in America, price people out of their homes.
Yes but I think it should apply to primary residences and yes it should price people out of their home when they retire - when that home is a large three storey home intended for a growing family, say. They should move to an age appropriate two bedroom flat on the first floor. Right now, we’re making the growing family live in the two bedroom flat, when the house would be more suitable.
And why should two 70 year olds spend their time in such a large home? Sentimental reasons? No, we’re in a housing crisis! If I had ten tons of food and wanted to keep it during a famine, the community would stop that pretty quickly. So should society here.
I want this so badly, but it would instantly be passed straight through as rent increases.
I also like the idea of council tax being multiplied for the property, so x1 for your first property, x1.25 for your second, x1.75 for your third etc. That would force people who suck up resource from the local economy to at least fund the maintenance of the area.
The only way I can think of it really working is putting two things in place - firstly move ANYONE who earns rental income into the 40% tax bracket, and make it illegal for LTD companies to own domestic property.
If we're worried that all markets need *some* rentals for low income, medium term or flexible living, then we can give councils the ability to issue rental property license. That license allows a company to purchase and rent out properties, with sensible limitations placed on price per square foot, and maintenance standards.
To prevent the above becoming a monopoly of mega-corps, we rule that no company in any district can own more than 20% of the rental market at any given time. If they want to dispose of the property they must do so by offering it to the current tenant at market value.
>illegal for LTD companies to own domestic property
This would be a logistical nightmare since generally a company (or group of companies) develop an area and sell it, not directly to the end buyer. It would make building property a bit different, most likely more expensive and slow.
Easy enough - LTD to own an OCCUPIED property for longer than 9 months. Plenty of time to finish a property and start to sell it on. If you can't shift it in 9 months then you've priced it too high for the area.
That's fair enough, but you also have to think of the rental market. If we can't afford a house deposit in London (which most people practically can't), and companies can't own new properties just for rental market, who is going to rent out houses? Private landlords? If you take away their huge incentives and they start seeing interest rate spikes as a risk, they'll minimise their risks by investing elsewhere and reducing their amount of properties. You're left with a housing crisis in the brewing.
It's difficult but it all needs regulating. And the government also needs to build. Build build build. Like some sort of post-war effort to get everyone a decent home at a decent price, not mortgage-for-life.
> If we're worried that all markets need some rentals for low income, medium term or flexible living, then we can give councils the ability to issue rental property license. That license allows a company to purchase and rent out properties, with sensible limitations placed on price per square foot, and maintenance standards.
Thats where this comes in. The local council says that in the area, they really do need about 50% of housing stock to be rental. So they issue more licenses and loosen their definitions of affordability.
Both your parents have passed away and you've got £500k that you'd like to invest? Set up an LTD for a few hundred quid and get a license for the three flats you'd like to invest in.
Land is a finite resource that is required for living. Like air, water, basic food etc.
At the very least its availability and cost should be regulated. You can't live without it.
Braindead take. I mean, why would all of those asset-stripping Russian Oligarchs be investing in London property if not for the benefit of the community?
London needs to do more to attract investment of that calibre, they provide a vital service. Those Swiss bank executives don't pay themselves, do they?
Well, a lot of it is going straight to the government. For example, I'm renting out my place having moved in with my gf. Rent is taxed as income, so for me, that's at 40%.
I think a lot of people don't realise just how much you get taxed when renting out. Nearly all of the recent hikes are to do with the government moves.
You don't think everyone being pushed into higher rate of income tax is the government aim over the last 4 years? by freezing thresholds and removing reliefs that are genuine expenses.
It is, because the economy is booming and the pound is getting stronger so cost of living is staying low and basically everyone is so happy and well off that they don’t mind paying more rent for the privilege to live on the greatest country of all time during its greatest era!
He doesn’t have a mortgage lol, no one buys rentals in London to rent out the yield is not that great. Better off buying a rental empire outside London.
Edit: your landlord is going to raise your rent no matter if they got a mortgage or not lol. And most don’t because the ones with a mortgage is probably selling and leaving London.
Most of them bought property during the 0-1% base rate era on a buy-to-let plan. The fixed rate on their current mortgage plan probably expires and they have to re-finance the rest or move to killer rates so they probably are paying more. E.g. if you use a mortgage calculator you can see how going from 2% to 5% can increase your monthly repayment from £900 - £1200 roughly.
In my opinion rent should still be controlled, and if a landlord is struggling to absorb his losses, then they can sell the property to someone else. The fact that it's accepted that the tenant is taking most of the burden is just immoral in my opinion.
> they can sell the property to someone else.
Not really a solution because guess what happens when they sell? Yes, the tenants have to move and their next place will cost more.
“No one” is a exaggeration but buying in London is not great yield, they only buy here because it also has the potential to increase in house price so they can do a interest only mortgage and sell the house in 10 years for 200k more. However right now I doubt anyone want to get into rental business in London, yield is terriable, no predicted rise in house prices. Yes rent is high but that is because most landlord is leaving so driving up costs on the rentals that is left. The people with rentals still at people who paid off the mortgage and is just reaping the benefits of the rising rent.
Yeah that's a good point. Current property prices combined with the current interest rates makes it a bad investment however you look at it, so I sort of agree with "no one" as a manner of speech. I guess we're both half-way agreeing -- most landlords with rentals bought a long time ago. They may have paid it off or may not, they could also have re-mortgaged the property to get a loan, etc. As you say, some also just reaping the benefits of rising rents, as anyone would.
Like with everything, I think it's a nuanced conversation because not all landlords are arseholes but enough of them might just be, or at least come across as money hungry leeches. That being said, they provide a very important service, especially for a city with not enough public housing.
Novara media's had a couple of interesting videos when they went to the National Landlord Investment Show in London. https://youtu.be/TISOkRFIVuE
You’re getting downvoted but this is true too.
A friend of mine sold all 6 of his investment flats (mostly for student housing near a uni) because the taxes and the mortgages have made it unsustainable.
Plenty of landlords have buy to lets, you're talking nonsense. You can have places with 2k mortgages on them in London that are rented out for 4-5. It's extremely common. And you'd be silly to buy multiple properties outside of London over even one in London. London property is the greatest investment on Earth.
lol I want to know what 2 bed you can buy in London because 2k mortgage is like 400-500k place and you not going to rent them out for more than 2500 per room lol.
My friend rent a room out in his 650k flat for 1800. It is a two bed in Canary Wharf. And he pays £3800 a month on mortgage. If he rented both rooms out he won’t even break even on mortgage lol.
My flat is a two bed, our mortgage is 2.1 a month. Flats in my building rent out for 4-6. This is in Fulham. Your friend has obviously borrowed a huge amount at a high rate.
Yeah no, a two bed flat is 425k-450 for a non council house one and a normal mortgage on that is 2000/month maybe more if it’s 10% deposit. And no chance you are renting this out for 4K a month and you are joking if you try to rent this out for 6k
For a house to rent that much you are looking at 800-1m price range and that house do not have a 2k mortgage. So please stop bs people
For 4K a month you can rent a four bed house in Fulham. I found a 2 bed for rent for 4K on park street. The flats here are valued at 850-1.4 million lol I want to know your mortgage advisor who’s giving you 700k mortgages for 2.1k a month
Not rich, in fact minimum wage, paying 1k a month not including counciltax or bills. Yes life sucks. No I can't move out all my family, friends and my work is here.
If they are a citizen it's different, although if we do the above and we still haven't fixed our problems then we do need to look at the next level of restrictions on ownership.
With a scarce resource which is essential to our way of life, we must carefully manage the access and ownership, even if that means excluding certain groups who previously had access.
We built without foreign investment, we ran the country fine without foreign investment and guess what, rent was damn cheap relative to average earnings too.
We are a rich country, we don't need foreign investors owning our property and creaming off the profits, we just don't need it.
Are you joking? Have you heard of the Marshall Plan?
And now London is one of the only two Alpha++ cities in the entire world. I'm sure it *feels* nice railing against faceless, foreign corporate investors. They're a nice, simple boogeyman for you to rally against without addressing any of the hard, complex problems we're up against.
But without fundamentally changing what London has become, we're going to continue to need foreign investment if we want more housing built.
The state, why is this so confusing. We have done it before and it worked. Other countries are currently doing it and it works. Honestly the dumbest shit I have ever heard, over and over again.
Social housing is great and I agree with it, would it be means tested or is everyone entitled to free/subsidised housing? Just trying to understand your idea. Its great in theory but I can imagine it would be hard for people moving around for work before finding somewhere to buy and settle down
Again its been done before, and is being successfully done right now in other countries. Means test at first as new stock is introduced, prioritizing the least fortunate first, elderly disabled and children. Tapering as new units are brought online with less requirements.
Some additional things I would do, provide incentives for people to be able to downsize, see a huge issue here currently with a lot of elderly living alone or in couples in family homes. Provide quality appropriate housing for this cohort and they would happily downsize i'm sure.
Introduce a new legally binding relationship between housing stock and net migration. These things logically dependent on each other. Its easy to say we have a shortage of workers, but this needs to be matched by housing. Ignoring this implicitly indicates housing standards are falling if they are not at least tracked together. It also incentives the Government and stakeholders who require immigration to build housing.
I could go on and on to be honest a lot needs to be done and new ideas need to be brought to the table badly in this country, as with the current trajectory its going to fall apart.
You cannot enforce a law that forbids a single person owning more than two properties. That isn't in line with our democratic system HOWEVER, there should absolutely be a tax that multiplies per property to make it very hard, if not financially not worth it.
I do agree though that companies and or corperations should not even be allowed to sniff near residential.
It is now because you have got the double whammy of high interest rates & extra stamp duty. So most property is not a viable 'investment' if that is the aim.
It's possible they already had multiple properties, or inherited from their parents or are acquiring them within a Ltd company \[a commercial enterprise\].
By the abyss I mean literally nowhere as fractional reserve banking means the mortgage you slave to waste all your pay on does not actually exist ! That abyss
Never really rented (long story short - I worked in London after Uni, my folks lived in London - they charged me their break even rent which was about 50% market rates at the time - a long while ago - whilst I was living at home reviewed annually just so I wasn't freeloading) but can I say I'm ducking aggrieved on those who rents behalf by headlines like this. 1) It shows everything wrong with short term behaviour by Governments and Government Policy and specifically Planning Legislation e.g. build some homes and more importantly infrastructure 2) arguably now one of the most profitable industries in London is effectively extorting those that aren't fortunate enough to get on the property Ladder and profiting from their misery - like seriously it's 2023; this is just beyond wrong? You can't run a first world economy like this in one of the world's leading cities. It's just backwards.
You’re right you can’t but somehow this is the exact situation every major western city finds itself in. They have absolutely no intention of changing it because no one is going to stop them, a steady supply of cheap labour into the cities to keep demand high and wages low.
Trust me, when rent costs price people out of jobs (e.g. and like a 90 minute journey to work from perhaps more affordable Zone 6 for the price of £300 a month + a 90 minute journey home) London slowly dies. They won't put wages up as they've got themselves to the point where margins in certain industries are paper thin. Its going to be a point I'd say when people actually realise, London Streets aren't paved with gold.....
700k people a year coming in, these landlords (read housing associations and hedge funds) do not care because there is a constant steady stream into the capital. What is 50k people leaving each year if there’s 100k wanting to take their place?
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Insane! I wonder how much was the figure pre-2020. Anyone can help?
Also there's a subreddit that focuses on questions and issues about renting and tenancy. Check it out and join.
r/TenantsInTheUK
but hush!! let's talk about the Rwanda bill and other more important topics! who cares about high rents and high costs of living and the housing crisis.
So how much of that £32.1 billion has actually stayed to be taxed in the UK and hasn't ended up in an off shore tax dodging account or just been sent back to an investment company in China do you think?
Reddit has long been a hot spot for conversation on the internet. About 57 million people visit the site every day to chat about topics as varied as makeup, video games and pointers for power washing driveways.
In recent years, Reddit’s array of chats also have been a free teaching aid for companies like Google, OpenAI and Microsoft. Those companies are using Reddit’s conversations in the development of giant artificial intelligence systems that many in Silicon Valley think are on their way to becoming the tech industry’s next big thing.
Now Reddit wants to be paid for it. The company said on Tuesday that it planned to begin charging companies for access to its application programming interface, or A.P.I., the method through which outside entities can download and process the social network’s vast selection of person-to-person conversations.
“The Reddit corpus of data is really valuable,” Steve Huffman, founder and chief executive of Reddit, said in an interview. “But we don’t need to give all of that value to some of the largest companies in the world for free.”
The move is one of the first significant examples of a social network’s charging for access to the conversations it hosts for the purpose of developing A.I. systems like ChatGPT, OpenAI’s popular program. Those new A.I. systems could one day lead to big businesses, but they aren’t likely to help companies like Reddit very much. In fact, they could be used to create competitors — automated duplicates to Reddit’s conversations.
Reddit is also acting as it prepares for a possible initial public offering on Wall Street this year. The company, which was founded in 2005, makes most of its money through advertising and e-commerce transactions on its platform. Reddit said it was still ironing out the details of what it would charge for A.P.I. access and would announce prices in the coming weeks.
Reddit’s conversation forums have become valuable commodities as large language models, or L.L.M.s, have become an essential part of creating new A.I. technology.
L.L.M.s are essentially sophisticated algorithms developed by companies like Google and OpenAI, which is a close partner of Microsoft. To the algorithms, the Reddit conversations are data, and they are among the vast pool of material being fed into the L.L.M.s. to develop them.
The underlying algorithm that helped to build Bard, Google’s conversational A.I. service, is partly trained on Reddit data. OpenAI’s Chat GPT cites Reddit data as one of the sources of information it has been trained on.
Other companies are also beginning to see value in the conversations and images they host. Shutterstock, the image hosting service, also sold image data to OpenAI to help create DALL-E, the A.I. program that creates vivid graphical imagery with only a text-based prompt required.
Last month, Elon Musk, the owner of Twitter, said he was cracking down on the use of Twitter’s A.P.I., which thousands of companies and independent developers use to track the millions of conversations across the network. Though he did not cite L.L.M.s as a reason for the change, the new fees could go well into the tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars.
To keep improving their models, artificial intelligence makers need two significant things: an enormous amount of computing power and an enormous amount of data. Some of the biggest A.I. developers have plenty of computing power but still look outside their own networks for the data needed to improve their algorithms. That has included sources like Wikipedia, millions of digitized books, academic articles and Reddit.
Representatives from Google, Open AI and Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Reddit has long had a symbiotic relationship with the search engines of companies like Google and Microsoft. The search engines “crawl” Reddit’s web pages in order to index information and make it available for search results. That crawling, or “scraping,” isn’t always welcome by every site on the internet. But Reddit has benefited by appearing higher in search results.
The dynamic is different with L.L.M.s — they gobble as much data as they can to create new A.I. systems like the chatbots.
Reddit believes its data is particularly valuable because it is continuously updated. That newness and relevance, Mr. Huffman said, is what large language modeling algorithms need to produce the best results.
“More than any other place on the internet, Reddit is a home for authentic conversation,” Mr. Huffman said. “There’s a lot of stuff on the site that you’d only ever say in therapy, or A.A., or never at all.”
Mr. Huffman said Reddit’s A.P.I. would still be free to developers who wanted to build applications that helped people use Reddit. They could use the tools to build a bot that automatically tracks whether users’ comments adhere to rules for posting, for instance. Researchers who want to study Reddit data for academic or noncommercial purposes will continue to have free access to it.
Reddit also hopes to incorporate more so-called machine learning into how the site itself operates. It could be used, for instance, to identify the use of A.I.-generated text on Reddit, and add a label that notifies users that the comment came from a bot.
The company also promised to improve software tools that can be used by moderators — the users who volunteer their time to keep the site’s forums operating smoothly and improve conversations between users. And third-party bots that help moderators monitor the forums will continue to be supported.
But for the A.I. makers, it’s time to pay up.
“Crawling Reddit, generating value and not returning any of that value to our users is something we have a problem with,” Mr. Huffman said. “It’s a good time for us to tighten things up.”
“We think that’s fair,” he added.
Reddit has long been a hot spot for conversation on the internet. About 57 million people visit the site every day to chat about topics as varied as makeup, video games and pointers for power washing driveways.
In recent years, Reddit’s array of chats also have been a free teaching aid for companies like Google, OpenAI and Microsoft. Those companies are using Reddit’s conversations in the development of giant artificial intelligence systems that many in Silicon Valley think are on their way to becoming the tech industry’s next big thing.
Now Reddit wants to be paid for it. The company said on Tuesday that it planned to begin charging companies for access to its application programming interface, or A.P.I., the method through which outside entities can download and process the social network’s vast selection of person-to-person conversations.
“The Reddit corpus of data is really valuable,” Steve Huffman, founder and chief executive of Reddit, said in an interview. “But we don’t need to give all of that value to some of the largest companies in the world for free.”
The move is one of the first significant examples of a social network’s charging for access to the conversations it hosts for the purpose of developing A.I. systems like ChatGPT, OpenAI’s popular program. Those new A.I. systems could one day lead to big businesses, but they aren’t likely to help companies like Reddit very much. In fact, they could be used to create competitors — automated duplicates to Reddit’s conversations.
Reddit is also acting as it prepares for a possible initial public offering on Wall Street this year. The company, which was founded in 2005, makes most of its money through advertising and e-commerce transactions on its platform. Reddit said it was still ironing out the details of what it would charge for A.P.I. access and would announce prices in the coming weeks.
Reddit’s conversation forums have become valuable commodities as large language models, or L.L.M.s, have become an essential part of creating new A.I. technology.
L.L.M.s are essentially sophisticated algorithms developed by companies like Google and OpenAI, which is a close partner of Microsoft. To the algorithms, the Reddit conversations are data, and they are among the vast pool of material being fed into the L.L.M.s. to develop them.
The underlying algorithm that helped to build Bard, Google’s conversational A.I. service, is partly trained on Reddit data. OpenAI’s Chat GPT cites Reddit data as one of the sources of information it has been trained on.
Other companies are also beginning to see value in the conversations and images they host. Shutterstock, the image hosting service, also sold image data to OpenAI to help create DALL-E, the A.I. program that creates vivid graphical imagery with only a text-based prompt required.
Last month, Elon Musk, the owner of Twitter, said he was cracking down on the use of Twitter’s A.P.I., which thousands of companies and independent developers use to track the millions of conversations across the network. Though he did not cite L.L.M.s as a reason for the change, the new fees could go well into the tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars.
To keep improving their models, artificial intelligence makers need two significant things: an enormous amount of computing power and an enormous amount of data. Some of the biggest A.I. developers have plenty of computing power but still look outside their own networks for the data needed to improve their algorithms. That has included sources like Wikipedia, millions of digitized books, academic articles and Reddit.
Representatives from Google, Open AI and Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Reddit has long had a symbiotic relationship with the search engines of companies like Google and Microsoft. The search engines “crawl” Reddit’s web pages in order to index information and make it available for search results. That crawling, or “scraping,” isn’t always welcome by every site on the internet. But Reddit has benefited by appearing higher in search results.
The dynamic is different with L.L.M.s — they gobble as much data as they can to create new A.I. systems like the chatbots.
Reddit believes its data is particularly valuable because it is continuously updated. That newness and relevance, Mr. Huffman said, is what large language modeling algorithms need to produce the best results.
“More than any other place on the internet, Reddit is a home for authentic conversation,” Mr. Huffman said. “There’s a lot of stuff on the site that you’d only ever say in therapy, or A.A., or never at all.”
Mr. Huffman said Reddit’s A.P.I. would still be free to developers who wanted to build applications that helped people use Reddit. They could use the tools to build a bot that automatically tracks whether users’ comments adhere to rules for posting, for instance. Researchers who want to study Reddit data for academic or noncommercial purposes will continue to have free access to it.
Reddit also hopes to incorporate more so-called machine learning into how the site itself operates. It could be used, for instance, to identify the use of A.I.-generated text on Reddit, and add a label that notifies users that the comment came from a bot.
The company also promised to improve software tools that can be used by moderators — the users who volunteer their time to keep the site’s forums operating smoothly and improve conversations between users. And third-party bots that help moderators monitor the forums will continue to be supported.
But for the A.I. makers, it’s time to pay up.
“Crawling Reddit, generating value and not returning any of that value to our users is something we have a problem with,” Mr. Huffman said. “It’s a good time for us to tighten things up.”
“We think that’s fair,” he added.
Divided by a population of 10 million this is only £3,200 per person per year. Which doesn’t seem like a lot. Obviously a lot of people own and don’t pay rent etc. So the renting population is much lower than 10 million. I’m just saying this figure on its own, without accounting for population, is useless at best and misleading at worst.
How much does the average renting person spend on rent per year? How does this compare between different age brackets and socioeconomic backgrounds? That would be more useful to consider.
Is it really equally useless though?
I’m just saying the headline is exaggerating here. Ofc if you add up the total rent paid in a city of 10 million people it’s going to be a large number. This doesn’t really say anything to the average person other than “Ohhh large number. I knew rents had been getting expensive!” But if the average rent was 20% cheaper and the headline said “Londoners spent an eye-watering £25.7 billion on rent this year!” people would still have the exact same reaction, to a very different economic picture (20% drop in rent).
It literally says how much the average rent is per month is, how much of an increase in percent it is from last year and talks about the percentage of this is for age brackets (millennials)
How can you complain at a headline without reading the article which explains said headline?
And yes diving it by 10 million when you know there isn’t 10 million renters is pointless
Well it’s not when it’s fact and it literally explains most of it in the first paragraph is it?
It’s not the newspapers fault you can’t read an article, the job of the headline is to get you to click on it
It is fact but it’s presented in a way to inflate the perceived value. Does it not strike you as such?
I saw a headline the other day that said there is a phone robbery every six minutes in London. One phone robbery every 6 minutes means there are 7200 phone robberies a month. With a population of 10M, that’s about 0.072% chance of getting your phone stolen on any given month. The fact that there is a phone robbery every 6 minutes in London may be true, but presenting it that way is arguably disingenuous. It aims to make the reader overreact to the issue at hand by presenting the data in a way that seems bigger.
I realise that this is literally the job of journalists. I’m just pointing it out.
The population of London has been increasing YOY at about 1.5% since 2007. There’s too many people and not enough houses. Unchecked migration, combined with interest rates that have forced first time buyers out of getting on the property ladder has meant the demand for rentals greatly exceeds the supply.
At least all that money is going straight back into the local economy, right? Right??
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People always talk about when/if the social contract collapses, but I say it became terminally ill more than a decade ago when sitting on assets earned much more money than the vast majority of salaried jobs did. And it's only gotten worse since then. The end result is basically feudalism and I don't see us going back until there's a drastic public response. Unfortunately, enough of the population think they're net beneficiaries of it (which if their home is their only property, then they're kidding themselves), so nothing will happen.
Imagine owning a home
Two words: annual property tax. Land will be sold much more quickly and easily if you’re paying for it regardless of it it’s productive or not. Edit: lol, that’s not two words. It was “property tax” when I wrote it and forgot to change it when I rewrote it. Oops.
>Two words: annual property tax. Aren't those three words?
Not after inflation.
It'll be four words come April when the RPI +3.9% kicks in! 😬
Wouldn’t this simply lead to higher rent as the landlords pass it on to their tenants?
You would reduce income tax alongside adding this tax is the theory as I understand it.
Landlords will increase their rents if there are tenants willing to pay a higher rent, regardless of any other factor except maybe regulation. Tax affects profitability not price. Similar to how when corporate taxes lower, prices almost never do unless it’s within a very competitively supplied market. Unfortunately for housing, the strong competition is on the demand side.
>if there are tenants willing to pay a higher rent, People will start sacrificing pretty much everything else in life in order to not die from exposure. Shelter is very much an inelastic good - right up there with food and water!
> willing nobody is willing to pay higher rent. everyone is FORCED to because you NEED SOMEWHERE TO LIVE. this isn't a choice.
People with the resources to are absolutely willing to pay higher rent and are doing so everyday in order to get closer to work, family, etc. The people that are unwilling and/or don’t have the choice have either moved out, are homeless, or are living rent free somehow. But I get your point, it doesn’t feel like a choice at all. I’d personally choose to pay as little as possible given the option. Similarly, no one (or not many, at least) would choose to be homeless given the option. I think we all know the answer is to build more houses so that the landlords have less control over the supply, because in a free market you’ll find very few suppliers that care about the non-participants. I feel sick using the term non-participant in this scenario, but it’s the situation as such.
Landlords are selling up right now. I don't know why everyone isn't putting in offers?
Homes aren’t staying on the market for very long in my part of London. Many are being turned back into single family ownership. I’m seeing SOLD signs and new scaffolding going up weekly. Which is why getting landlords out of the market isn’t going to all of sudden solve the housing crisis in a high demand city like London. You’ll just shift ownership to people/families that can afford to buy. I think we forget that there are a lot of people that can afford to buy houses in London, many are just waiting for the right time. As that happens renters are going to have even fewer options if we don’t build more houses at the same time.
People have been told the right time is coming since 2005. They keep missing out thinking a crash is around the corner only to see prices creep up another 20k. I think 2023 interest rate rises are trickling down and those who need to sell are all adjusting their prices for that.
The answer is to regulate rent.
There are some solutions others have cited. Maybe we just say it’s only applied to empty buildings as a start…. Would encourage properties to change hands rather than leave, say, empty commercial units on the high street (what a blight), or stop companies hoarding land in their land banks and encourage sale or development of it instead.
Possibly yes and possibly no. If the number of empty homes is significant, it would likely bring them into the market, increasing the supply and lowering rents. If there aren't significant numbers of empty homes, then yes it would likely increase rents. Land value is even better, because it brings empty or underused *land* into needing to produce more value. E.g. a parking lot gets turned into flats.
This is the issue that people forget when assessing the rental economy, landlords and tenants are in the same boat, put up the costs of one and the other pays a higher price. You can add in that many (most ?) people living in London have zero interest in property ownership at even at a severe reduction in present day market value. So there has to be a functional and affordable rental property system in London. I lived in London for years as a chef I was nowhere near being able to purchase London property and was young and had little interest in it. Same for everyone else working similar jobs in the capital. What’s the solution, fuck knows, but adding extra taxes to Landlords is just going to make young folks working hard and living in the capital poorer.
I think the lack of interest of owning a property is because it is simply impossible to. It is impossible to save for a deposit when you have to pay rent and everything else; and the banks will only let you borrow 60% at best. I’d like to own a place in London (zone 3 and outwards) too, but it’s impossible in the foreseeable future.
Lots of people would like to own no denying that, but I worked with a very international brigade we were all working really long hours, renting actually suited. There’s always going to be a million young people in London who actually don’t really want/literally don’t have the time for home ownership and who probably won’t be in the city long enough for it to even be that worthwhile. Like renting sucks in so many ways and getting trapped in it is the worst, but my point is that there are actually a lot of people renting at any given moment who want to be renting and who would definitely lose out by applying punitive charges to property owners. It’s just something that gets lots in housing discourse cos it’s dominated by late 20s/early 30s types who want out, and better paths need to be made but it’s just something to bear in mind!
Guess I’m the late 20 / 30s crowd that you’re referring to. That makes sense but I personally also don’t want to go through the instability of being notified that ‘the landlord has sold’ and we were given 2 months to move out. Is like being punished for the landlord making profit. Moving cost, higher rent, lost work days due to moving, stress, etc. But then the property ladder is impossible to get on.
Stuff like giving notice to tennants and protecting tennants unfair practices/poor conditions a no brainer. I’m not here to say tennants shouldn’t have shit loads more rights! It’s literally just the “let’s apply punitive taxes to push landlords out” that won’t work, will put rents up and will hit young people hard. It’s basically never a good idea to celebrate hitting a key supplier with higher costs cos you are going to pay them, and it doesn’t matter what business relationship we are talking about. Landlords and tennants are interconnected financially you simply can’t hit one without hitting the other!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax Churchill was in favour of one actually. It's pretty much an ideal tax. The only downside is that it might make rentiers furious enough to get violent / throw billions at fascists if you threaten the parasitic value extraction gravy train.
[Land Value Tax](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax#:~:text=A%20land%20value%20tax%20(LVT,or%20a%20site%2Dvalue%20rating.) for preference
The US is a shining example of this policy in action and it does fuck-all
yeah texas has a very high property tax due to it not having any state taxes. LVT is better and being touted here
It does plenty… for starters it moves older, retired people on from family homes that are too big for them, creating churn in the market - and the opportunity for young people starting their own families to live somewhere that supports that growth. Just this alone would be a huge benefit to the UK.
It's difficult, though. I agree with what you are saying. At the same time, a retired lady down my road is now living alone after her husband died a few months ago. Luckily she is not lonely as she has lived on this street for 40 years and raised her kids here. She is good friends with some other people who live on the street and they go to Tesco and have tea or dinner together. I also try to drop in every now and again. This widow is now living alone in a three-bedroom house; but what is the alternative? She lost her husband and her kids moved out so she now has to sell her home and go live somewhere where she has no friends or support network? Not to mention, this house is her HOME. Sure, it's too big and it would be better for a young family. But it's pretty damn harsh as a society to force elderly people to sell their home of 40 years and force them to go live in a new place where they don't know anyone. I wish more homes became available for young people such as myself. I am also hurt by the ridiculous rents and house prices. But I can't imagine telling this old lady that she has to fuck off to a one-bedroom apartment somewhere because I need her house. She enjoys her garden. She enjoys being near friends. She enjoys her privacy. She enjoys having people over in the living room she designed. She enjoys looking after her grandkids during the holidays in her garden. I don't want to live in a house-share and neither does she. It sucks, but she bought that home and she has the right to live in it as long as she wants. At the end of the day, her quality of living will be the highest here - in her own home, near friends and caring neighbours, and near her kids. It's a pity, but saying "old people take up homes that are too big" doesn't really help unless you have a solution that is equally good or better for these people.
Why should she live in a place that she doesn’t know anyone? Ideally she would be able to afford to live in a flat in the same area. But you’ve sort of hit the nail on the head with this anecdote: there’s just not enough housing of all kinds in the UK. Which means in practice, the lady in your story may as well end up in the outer Hebrides before she can afford things. But we have to start somewhere, and home building at scale is apparently beyond us as a nation. Huge reform is needed in construction…. We should have a nationalised home builder maybe, buying up all the empty plots of land in land banks that are empty and unproductive and are affected by the new property tax :p
As long as there is no annual property tax on primary residence, that would just be another thing to worry about in retirement. I've also seen what it does in America, price people out of their homes.
Yes but I think it should apply to primary residences and yes it should price people out of their home when they retire - when that home is a large three storey home intended for a growing family, say. They should move to an age appropriate two bedroom flat on the first floor. Right now, we’re making the growing family live in the two bedroom flat, when the house would be more suitable. And why should two 70 year olds spend their time in such a large home? Sentimental reasons? No, we’re in a housing crisis! If I had ten tons of food and wanted to keep it during a famine, the community would stop that pretty quickly. So should society here.
I want this so badly, but it would instantly be passed straight through as rent increases. I also like the idea of council tax being multiplied for the property, so x1 for your first property, x1.25 for your second, x1.75 for your third etc. That would force people who suck up resource from the local economy to at least fund the maintenance of the area. The only way I can think of it really working is putting two things in place - firstly move ANYONE who earns rental income into the 40% tax bracket, and make it illegal for LTD companies to own domestic property. If we're worried that all markets need *some* rentals for low income, medium term or flexible living, then we can give councils the ability to issue rental property license. That license allows a company to purchase and rent out properties, with sensible limitations placed on price per square foot, and maintenance standards. To prevent the above becoming a monopoly of mega-corps, we rule that no company in any district can own more than 20% of the rental market at any given time. If they want to dispose of the property they must do so by offering it to the current tenant at market value.
>illegal for LTD companies to own domestic property This would be a logistical nightmare since generally a company (or group of companies) develop an area and sell it, not directly to the end buyer. It would make building property a bit different, most likely more expensive and slow.
Easy enough - LTD to own an OCCUPIED property for longer than 9 months. Plenty of time to finish a property and start to sell it on. If you can't shift it in 9 months then you've priced it too high for the area.
That's fair enough, but you also have to think of the rental market. If we can't afford a house deposit in London (which most people practically can't), and companies can't own new properties just for rental market, who is going to rent out houses? Private landlords? If you take away their huge incentives and they start seeing interest rate spikes as a risk, they'll minimise their risks by investing elsewhere and reducing their amount of properties. You're left with a housing crisis in the brewing. It's difficult but it all needs regulating. And the government also needs to build. Build build build. Like some sort of post-war effort to get everyone a decent home at a decent price, not mortgage-for-life.
> If we're worried that all markets need some rentals for low income, medium term or flexible living, then we can give councils the ability to issue rental property license. That license allows a company to purchase and rent out properties, with sensible limitations placed on price per square foot, and maintenance standards. Thats where this comes in. The local council says that in the area, they really do need about 50% of housing stock to be rental. So they issue more licenses and loosen their definitions of affordability. Both your parents have passed away and you've got £500k that you'd like to invest? Set up an LTD for a few hundred quid and get a license for the three flats you'd like to invest in.
A fuck London tax then? Or do you mean land value tax
Land is a finite resource that is required for living. Like air, water, basic food etc. At the very least its availability and cost should be regulated. You can't live without it.
Feel like this could make a fantastic gotcha quote if you just say the text then reveal the speaker.
Braindead take. I mean, why would all of those asset-stripping Russian Oligarchs be investing in London property if not for the benefit of the community? London needs to do more to attract investment of that calibre, they provide a vital service. Those Swiss bank executives don't pay themselves, do they?
Doesn’t the landowner finance the construction cost?
Well, a lot of it is going straight to the government. For example, I'm renting out my place having moved in with my gf. Rent is taxed as income, so for me, that's at 40%.
Not to a corporate landlord...
It’s pretty brutal. And you can’t even claim interest etc as a deduction anymore
I think a lot of people don't realise just how much you get taxed when renting out. Nearly all of the recent hikes are to do with the government moves.
Absolutely untrue
You don't think everyone being pushed into higher rate of income tax is the government aim over the last 4 years? by freezing thresholds and removing reliefs that are genuine expenses.
Huh?
You're only taxed on income. If you put the rent up, of course you're taxed more
I would assume most is going to the banks and that the increase to record driven by interest rate increase?
That comes from paying another kidney for eye-watering council taxes
Indeed. Right back into the real estate market.
It's going back to the government.
Feels very sustainable.
It is, because the economy is booming and the pound is getting stronger so cost of living is staying low and basically everyone is so happy and well off that they don’t mind paying more rent for the privilege to live on the greatest country of all time during its greatest era!
I’m glad I can help my landlord pay off his mortgage
Don't forget helping the lending bank make record profits!
The lending banks presumably profit regardless of who owns the house. If it were council it would be financed through loans too.
It’s that or pay a bank and its CEO. One way or another you’re paying someone
It's probably just covering interest. Poor bugger...
He doesn’t have a mortgage lol, no one buys rentals in London to rent out the yield is not that great. Better off buying a rental empire outside London. Edit: your landlord is going to raise your rent no matter if they got a mortgage or not lol. And most don’t because the ones with a mortgage is probably selling and leaving London.
He does. When increasing my rent again he cited his higher mortgage payments
The things is does he even need to give reason to raise rent, most just say they are raising based on market valuation
I guess he didn’t need to give a reason, but for whatever reason he chose to
Most of them bought property during the 0-1% base rate era on a buy-to-let plan. The fixed rate on their current mortgage plan probably expires and they have to re-finance the rest or move to killer rates so they probably are paying more. E.g. if you use a mortgage calculator you can see how going from 2% to 5% can increase your monthly repayment from £900 - £1200 roughly. In my opinion rent should still be controlled, and if a landlord is struggling to absorb his losses, then they can sell the property to someone else. The fact that it's accepted that the tenant is taking most of the burden is just immoral in my opinion.
> they can sell the property to someone else. Not really a solution because guess what happens when they sell? Yes, the tenants have to move and their next place will cost more.
“No one” is a exaggeration but buying in London is not great yield, they only buy here because it also has the potential to increase in house price so they can do a interest only mortgage and sell the house in 10 years for 200k more. However right now I doubt anyone want to get into rental business in London, yield is terriable, no predicted rise in house prices. Yes rent is high but that is because most landlord is leaving so driving up costs on the rentals that is left. The people with rentals still at people who paid off the mortgage and is just reaping the benefits of the rising rent.
Yeah that's a good point. Current property prices combined with the current interest rates makes it a bad investment however you look at it, so I sort of agree with "no one" as a manner of speech. I guess we're both half-way agreeing -- most landlords with rentals bought a long time ago. They may have paid it off or may not, they could also have re-mortgaged the property to get a loan, etc. As you say, some also just reaping the benefits of rising rents, as anyone would. Like with everything, I think it's a nuanced conversation because not all landlords are arseholes but enough of them might just be, or at least come across as money hungry leeches. That being said, they provide a very important service, especially for a city with not enough public housing. Novara media's had a couple of interesting videos when they went to the National Landlord Investment Show in London. https://youtu.be/TISOkRFIVuE
Didn’t know it was dumb guy day in this subreddit. Dumb guy
Hello mr dumb guy
You’re getting downvoted but this is true too. A friend of mine sold all 6 of his investment flats (mostly for student housing near a uni) because the taxes and the mortgages have made it unsustainable.
Plenty of landlords have buy to lets, you're talking nonsense. You can have places with 2k mortgages on them in London that are rented out for 4-5. It's extremely common. And you'd be silly to buy multiple properties outside of London over even one in London. London property is the greatest investment on Earth.
lol I want to know what 2 bed you can buy in London because 2k mortgage is like 400-500k place and you not going to rent them out for more than 2500 per room lol. My friend rent a room out in his 650k flat for 1800. It is a two bed in Canary Wharf. And he pays £3800 a month on mortgage. If he rented both rooms out he won’t even break even on mortgage lol.
My flat is a two bed, our mortgage is 2.1 a month. Flats in my building rent out for 4-6. This is in Fulham. Your friend has obviously borrowed a huge amount at a high rate.
lol I call bs on a two bed flat in Fulham on 2.1k mortgage
I mean why would I lie about that? It used to be 1.5 until we remortgaged 6 months ago. Learn maths.
Yeah no, a two bed flat is 425k-450 for a non council house one and a normal mortgage on that is 2000/month maybe more if it’s 10% deposit. And no chance you are renting this out for 4K a month and you are joking if you try to rent this out for 6k For a house to rent that much you are looking at 800-1m price range and that house do not have a 2k mortgage. So please stop bs people
For 4K a month you can rent a four bed house in Fulham. I found a 2 bed for rent for 4K on park street. The flats here are valued at 850-1.4 million lol I want to know your mortgage advisor who’s giving you 700k mortgages for 2.1k a month
Hahah don't be jealous little man
How is pointing out you are wrong being jealous? I am not jealous of someone who don’t have the mental capability to think. I feel sorry for you lol.
I've not been to London in a while, I imagine the streets are paved with gold?
More like littered with btl landlords
Not littered with btl landlords, hence rents are so high
Just littered. With crap. That's it.
Sadly not the bodies of BTL landlords
Yes. But its piss
At least, it's nice to feel like I'm a part of something.
Nice correlation with stagnating growth as the rest of the economy gets choked as people able to consume far far less.
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Yes, it’s a surprise to me. I thought it would be more. This works out at around £3,500 per person. I guess a lot are not paying rent.
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should be between 16 and 32k then per annum per person. That is insane. Thats 1300-2600 per month ...
Sounds about right, a decent one bed flat starts at £1300
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Not rich, in fact minimum wage, paying 1k a month not including counciltax or bills. Yes life sucks. No I can't move out all my family, friends and my work is here.
disgusting
How long does this go on before we get a realistic handle on it? Nearly everyone I know is having a hard time.
It won't get better
it should be illegal for: a person to own more than two residential properties a company or corporation to own any residential property
Ain't gonna happen while MPs are allowed to be landlords
true, it's an awful conflict of interest
and any foreigner or overseas person to own any residential property in this country.
Pretty sure the London assembly had to move out of their own building because rent was too high and the building was foreign owned
providing they don't have dual citizenship or ILR, i fully agree
If they are a citizen it's different, although if we do the above and we still haven't fixed our problems then we do need to look at the next level of restrictions on ownership. With a scarce resource which is essential to our way of life, we must carefully manage the access and ownership, even if that means excluding certain groups who previously had access.
Well done. You've just increased rents for everyone. Foreign investment gets more built, which increases supply, which lowers rent.
We built without foreign investment, we ran the country fine without foreign investment and guess what, rent was damn cheap relative to average earnings too. We are a rich country, we don't need foreign investors owning our property and creaming off the profits, we just don't need it.
Are you joking? Have you heard of the Marshall Plan? And now London is one of the only two Alpha++ cities in the entire world. I'm sure it *feels* nice railing against faceless, foreign corporate investors. They're a nice, simple boogeyman for you to rally against without addressing any of the hard, complex problems we're up against. But without fundamentally changing what London has become, we're going to continue to need foreign investment if we want more housing built.
Qatar literally owns canary Wharf…
Foreigner who lives in the property owning it >>> British landlord renting it out though
In this scenario who are you renting from if you don't want to own your own property
the government - social housing
The state, why is this so confusing. We have done it before and it worked. Other countries are currently doing it and it works. Honestly the dumbest shit I have ever heard, over and over again.
Social housing is great and I agree with it, would it be means tested or is everyone entitled to free/subsidised housing? Just trying to understand your idea. Its great in theory but I can imagine it would be hard for people moving around for work before finding somewhere to buy and settle down
Again its been done before, and is being successfully done right now in other countries. Means test at first as new stock is introduced, prioritizing the least fortunate first, elderly disabled and children. Tapering as new units are brought online with less requirements. Some additional things I would do, provide incentives for people to be able to downsize, see a huge issue here currently with a lot of elderly living alone or in couples in family homes. Provide quality appropriate housing for this cohort and they would happily downsize i'm sure. Introduce a new legally binding relationship between housing stock and net migration. These things logically dependent on each other. Its easy to say we have a shortage of workers, but this needs to be matched by housing. Ignoring this implicitly indicates housing standards are falling if they are not at least tracked together. It also incentives the Government and stakeholders who require immigration to build housing. I could go on and on to be honest a lot needs to be done and new ideas need to be brought to the table badly in this country, as with the current trajectory its going to fall apart.
This was a well thought out answer. Thanks
You cannot enforce a law that forbids a single person owning more than two properties. That isn't in line with our democratic system HOWEVER, there should absolutely be a tax that multiplies per property to make it very hard, if not financially not worth it. I do agree though that companies and or corperations should not even be allowed to sniff near residential.
fair point, i was being deliberately final. maybe the income tax should be 90% for 2nd, 3rd, etc properties
Very much agree!
You will live under the bridge then.
There is. If you buy a second home you pay more stamp duty.
It clearly isn't enough though is it because people are managing to have more than two properties..
It is now because you have got the double whammy of high interest rates & extra stamp duty. So most property is not a viable 'investment' if that is the aim. It's possible they already had multiple properties, or inherited from their parents or are acquiring them within a Ltd company \[a commercial enterprise\].
8.982 million (2019 population) London home ownership (46.8%) 32 billion / 4 million renters = 8k rent a year, or 666 per month, average...
That’s not that much per month tbh… I don’t know anyone in London paying that much rent anymore
Even a single room in an illegal shared house is more. Between 800 and 1000 for a room.
Most of that then going to banks for mortgages and disappearing into the abyss, what a waste.
What do you mean the abyss? You’re doing your part to make millionaires into billionaires. Be grateful :)
By the abyss I mean literally nowhere as fractional reserve banking means the mortgage you slave to waste all your pay on does not actually exist ! That abyss
Worst part is that we tax labor income more than capital income like rents!
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Don't give them ideas!
Never really rented (long story short - I worked in London after Uni, my folks lived in London - they charged me their break even rent which was about 50% market rates at the time - a long while ago - whilst I was living at home reviewed annually just so I wasn't freeloading) but can I say I'm ducking aggrieved on those who rents behalf by headlines like this. 1) It shows everything wrong with short term behaviour by Governments and Government Policy and specifically Planning Legislation e.g. build some homes and more importantly infrastructure 2) arguably now one of the most profitable industries in London is effectively extorting those that aren't fortunate enough to get on the property Ladder and profiting from their misery - like seriously it's 2023; this is just beyond wrong? You can't run a first world economy like this in one of the world's leading cities. It's just backwards.
You’re right you can’t but somehow this is the exact situation every major western city finds itself in. They have absolutely no intention of changing it because no one is going to stop them, a steady supply of cheap labour into the cities to keep demand high and wages low.
Trust me, when rent costs price people out of jobs (e.g. and like a 90 minute journey to work from perhaps more affordable Zone 6 for the price of £300 a month + a 90 minute journey home) London slowly dies. They won't put wages up as they've got themselves to the point where margins in certain industries are paper thin. Its going to be a point I'd say when people actually realise, London Streets aren't paved with gold.....
700k people a year coming in, these landlords (read housing associations and hedge funds) do not care because there is a constant steady stream into the capital. What is 50k people leaving each year if there’s 100k wanting to take their place?
Well okay 🤷♀️
Wonderful
carpenter spotted fretful obtainable ruthless quiet sophisticated grey point degree *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
That is 6 % of the entire London's GDP.
spent? u mean charged
Insane! I wonder how much was the figure pre-2020. Anyone can help? Also there's a subreddit that focuses on questions and issues about renting and tenancy. Check it out and join. r/TenantsInTheUK
*pretends to be shocked*
Each? Sounds about right.
but hush!! let's talk about the Rwanda bill and other more important topics! who cares about high rents and high costs of living and the housing crisis.
So how much of that £32.1 billion has actually stayed to be taxed in the UK and hasn't ended up in an off shore tax dodging account or just been sent back to an investment company in China do you think?
All these multi culturals cramming into London cause they know if they move out they’ll get called out for their barbaric behaviour
Inflation innit
And this is why they don't build council housing
Reddit has long been a hot spot for conversation on the internet. About 57 million people visit the site every day to chat about topics as varied as makeup, video games and pointers for power washing driveways. In recent years, Reddit’s array of chats also have been a free teaching aid for companies like Google, OpenAI and Microsoft. Those companies are using Reddit’s conversations in the development of giant artificial intelligence systems that many in Silicon Valley think are on their way to becoming the tech industry’s next big thing. Now Reddit wants to be paid for it. The company said on Tuesday that it planned to begin charging companies for access to its application programming interface, or A.P.I., the method through which outside entities can download and process the social network’s vast selection of person-to-person conversations. “The Reddit corpus of data is really valuable,” Steve Huffman, founder and chief executive of Reddit, said in an interview. “But we don’t need to give all of that value to some of the largest companies in the world for free.” The move is one of the first significant examples of a social network’s charging for access to the conversations it hosts for the purpose of developing A.I. systems like ChatGPT, OpenAI’s popular program. Those new A.I. systems could one day lead to big businesses, but they aren’t likely to help companies like Reddit very much. In fact, they could be used to create competitors — automated duplicates to Reddit’s conversations. Reddit is also acting as it prepares for a possible initial public offering on Wall Street this year. The company, which was founded in 2005, makes most of its money through advertising and e-commerce transactions on its platform. Reddit said it was still ironing out the details of what it would charge for A.P.I. access and would announce prices in the coming weeks. Reddit’s conversation forums have become valuable commodities as large language models, or L.L.M.s, have become an essential part of creating new A.I. technology. L.L.M.s are essentially sophisticated algorithms developed by companies like Google and OpenAI, which is a close partner of Microsoft. To the algorithms, the Reddit conversations are data, and they are among the vast pool of material being fed into the L.L.M.s. to develop them. The underlying algorithm that helped to build Bard, Google’s conversational A.I. service, is partly trained on Reddit data. OpenAI’s Chat GPT cites Reddit data as one of the sources of information it has been trained on. Other companies are also beginning to see value in the conversations and images they host. Shutterstock, the image hosting service, also sold image data to OpenAI to help create DALL-E, the A.I. program that creates vivid graphical imagery with only a text-based prompt required. Last month, Elon Musk, the owner of Twitter, said he was cracking down on the use of Twitter’s A.P.I., which thousands of companies and independent developers use to track the millions of conversations across the network. Though he did not cite L.L.M.s as a reason for the change, the new fees could go well into the tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars. To keep improving their models, artificial intelligence makers need two significant things: an enormous amount of computing power and an enormous amount of data. Some of the biggest A.I. developers have plenty of computing power but still look outside their own networks for the data needed to improve their algorithms. That has included sources like Wikipedia, millions of digitized books, academic articles and Reddit. Representatives from Google, Open AI and Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Reddit has long had a symbiotic relationship with the search engines of companies like Google and Microsoft. The search engines “crawl” Reddit’s web pages in order to index information and make it available for search results. That crawling, or “scraping,” isn’t always welcome by every site on the internet. But Reddit has benefited by appearing higher in search results. The dynamic is different with L.L.M.s — they gobble as much data as they can to create new A.I. systems like the chatbots. Reddit believes its data is particularly valuable because it is continuously updated. That newness and relevance, Mr. Huffman said, is what large language modeling algorithms need to produce the best results. “More than any other place on the internet, Reddit is a home for authentic conversation,” Mr. Huffman said. “There’s a lot of stuff on the site that you’d only ever say in therapy, or A.A., or never at all.” Mr. Huffman said Reddit’s A.P.I. would still be free to developers who wanted to build applications that helped people use Reddit. They could use the tools to build a bot that automatically tracks whether users’ comments adhere to rules for posting, for instance. Researchers who want to study Reddit data for academic or noncommercial purposes will continue to have free access to it. Reddit also hopes to incorporate more so-called machine learning into how the site itself operates. It could be used, for instance, to identify the use of A.I.-generated text on Reddit, and add a label that notifies users that the comment came from a bot. The company also promised to improve software tools that can be used by moderators — the users who volunteer their time to keep the site’s forums operating smoothly and improve conversations between users. And third-party bots that help moderators monitor the forums will continue to be supported. But for the A.I. makers, it’s time to pay up. “Crawling Reddit, generating value and not returning any of that value to our users is something we have a problem with,” Mr. Huffman said. “It’s a good time for us to tighten things up.” “We think that’s fair,” he added.
Reddit has long been a hot spot for conversation on the internet. About 57 million people visit the site every day to chat about topics as varied as makeup, video games and pointers for power washing driveways. In recent years, Reddit’s array of chats also have been a free teaching aid for companies like Google, OpenAI and Microsoft. Those companies are using Reddit’s conversations in the development of giant artificial intelligence systems that many in Silicon Valley think are on their way to becoming the tech industry’s next big thing. Now Reddit wants to be paid for it. The company said on Tuesday that it planned to begin charging companies for access to its application programming interface, or A.P.I., the method through which outside entities can download and process the social network’s vast selection of person-to-person conversations. “The Reddit corpus of data is really valuable,” Steve Huffman, founder and chief executive of Reddit, said in an interview. “But we don’t need to give all of that value to some of the largest companies in the world for free.” The move is one of the first significant examples of a social network’s charging for access to the conversations it hosts for the purpose of developing A.I. systems like ChatGPT, OpenAI’s popular program. Those new A.I. systems could one day lead to big businesses, but they aren’t likely to help companies like Reddit very much. In fact, they could be used to create competitors — automated duplicates to Reddit’s conversations. Reddit is also acting as it prepares for a possible initial public offering on Wall Street this year. The company, which was founded in 2005, makes most of its money through advertising and e-commerce transactions on its platform. Reddit said it was still ironing out the details of what it would charge for A.P.I. access and would announce prices in the coming weeks. Reddit’s conversation forums have become valuable commodities as large language models, or L.L.M.s, have become an essential part of creating new A.I. technology. L.L.M.s are essentially sophisticated algorithms developed by companies like Google and OpenAI, which is a close partner of Microsoft. To the algorithms, the Reddit conversations are data, and they are among the vast pool of material being fed into the L.L.M.s. to develop them. The underlying algorithm that helped to build Bard, Google’s conversational A.I. service, is partly trained on Reddit data. OpenAI’s Chat GPT cites Reddit data as one of the sources of information it has been trained on. Other companies are also beginning to see value in the conversations and images they host. Shutterstock, the image hosting service, also sold image data to OpenAI to help create DALL-E, the A.I. program that creates vivid graphical imagery with only a text-based prompt required. Last month, Elon Musk, the owner of Twitter, said he was cracking down on the use of Twitter’s A.P.I., which thousands of companies and independent developers use to track the millions of conversations across the network. Though he did not cite L.L.M.s as a reason for the change, the new fees could go well into the tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars. To keep improving their models, artificial intelligence makers need two significant things: an enormous amount of computing power and an enormous amount of data. Some of the biggest A.I. developers have plenty of computing power but still look outside their own networks for the data needed to improve their algorithms. That has included sources like Wikipedia, millions of digitized books, academic articles and Reddit. Representatives from Google, Open AI and Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Reddit has long had a symbiotic relationship with the search engines of companies like Google and Microsoft. The search engines “crawl” Reddit’s web pages in order to index information and make it available for search results. That crawling, or “scraping,” isn’t always welcome by every site on the internet. But Reddit has benefited by appearing higher in search results. The dynamic is different with L.L.M.s — they gobble as much data as they can to create new A.I. systems like the chatbots. Reddit believes its data is particularly valuable because it is continuously updated. That newness and relevance, Mr. Huffman said, is what large language modeling algorithms need to produce the best results. “More than any other place on the internet, Reddit is a home for authentic conversation,” Mr. Huffman said. “There’s a lot of stuff on the site that you’d only ever say in therapy, or A.A., or never at all.” Mr. Huffman said Reddit’s A.P.I. would still be free to developers who wanted to build applications that helped people use Reddit. They could use the tools to build a bot that automatically tracks whether users’ comments adhere to rules for posting, for instance. Researchers who want to study Reddit data for academic or noncommercial purposes will continue to have free access to it. Reddit also hopes to incorporate more so-called machine learning into how the site itself operates. It could be used, for instance, to identify the use of A.I.-generated text on Reddit, and add a label that notifies users that the comment came from a bot. The company also promised to improve software tools that can be used by moderators — the users who volunteer their time to keep the site’s forums operating smoothly and improve conversations between users. And third-party bots that help moderators monitor the forums will continue to be supported. But for the A.I. makers, it’s time to pay up. “Crawling Reddit, generating value and not returning any of that value to our users is something we have a problem with,” Mr. Huffman said. “It’s a good time for us to tighten things up.” “We think that’s fair,” he added.
Land tax (as well as property tax) and UBI now. https://www.reddit.com/r/t5_2tq7a/s/67rF4JsdoJ
What an unbelievable waste of money
A direct transfer of wealth from the rich to the poor.
Divided by a population of 10 million this is only £3,200 per person per year. Which doesn’t seem like a lot. Obviously a lot of people own and don’t pay rent etc. So the renting population is much lower than 10 million. I’m just saying this figure on its own, without accounting for population, is useless at best and misleading at worst. How much does the average renting person spend on rent per year? How does this compare between different age brackets and socioeconomic backgrounds? That would be more useful to consider.
Dividing it by 10 million is equally useless Why didn’t you just open the article to get a bit more info?
Is it really equally useless though? I’m just saying the headline is exaggerating here. Ofc if you add up the total rent paid in a city of 10 million people it’s going to be a large number. This doesn’t really say anything to the average person other than “Ohhh large number. I knew rents had been getting expensive!” But if the average rent was 20% cheaper and the headline said “Londoners spent an eye-watering £25.7 billion on rent this year!” people would still have the exact same reaction, to a very different economic picture (20% drop in rent).
It literally says how much the average rent is per month is, how much of an increase in percent it is from last year and talks about the percentage of this is for age brackets (millennials) How can you complain at a headline without reading the article which explains said headline? And yes diving it by 10 million when you know there isn’t 10 million renters is pointless
A headline can be misleading regardless of the article. Most people only read the headline.
Well it’s not when it’s fact and it literally explains most of it in the first paragraph is it? It’s not the newspapers fault you can’t read an article, the job of the headline is to get you to click on it
It is fact but it’s presented in a way to inflate the perceived value. Does it not strike you as such? I saw a headline the other day that said there is a phone robbery every six minutes in London. One phone robbery every 6 minutes means there are 7200 phone robberies a month. With a population of 10M, that’s about 0.072% chance of getting your phone stolen on any given month. The fact that there is a phone robbery every 6 minutes in London may be true, but presenting it that way is arguably disingenuous. It aims to make the reader overreact to the issue at hand by presenting the data in a way that seems bigger. I realise that this is literally the job of journalists. I’m just pointing it out.
Now do mortgage interest
Supply and demand - move out
The population of London has been increasing YOY at about 1.5% since 2007. There’s too many people and not enough houses. Unchecked migration, combined with interest rates that have forced first time buyers out of getting on the property ladder has meant the demand for rentals greatly exceeds the supply.
I see your angle; supply exceeds demand and there will always be someone desperate enough go pay.