So -called landlord influences promote the big money profits to be made from renting home on a new sub -genre of Tiktok that is seen by millions worldwide.
Videos published with the hashtag #PropertyTok have landlords “who boast about pricing houses that they bought for cheap” and “charging often quadruple the monthly mortgage in the rent”, Sarah Manavis said I news place. But while Tiktok Stars shave in cash and “huge consequences” by “running landlord and real estate portfolios as ambitions”, many of their followers “are priced to own a home”.
‘Galling and perverse addictive’
Some of the landlord’s influencers “present themselves as gurus who preach virtues of riches creation and” passive income “in expensive educational courses”, said The custodianS Simon Usborne. In the world of #Propertytok, the rental value “is no longer seen as the preservation of money layers with half an eye on pension”, but rather as “a lifestyle and path to” economic freedom “for young people who otherwise feel starved by opportunities”.
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Among the models for property owners marketed by the landlord’s influencers are houses in several professional (HMOs) and a version of rental known as “rent for rent”, alias Rent2nda.
Critics claim that promoting these models can have a harmful impact on not only tenants but also the landlord’s reputation as a whole. “Landlords are not a universally well -perceived group in the first place,” said Chris Norris, Policy Manager at National housing rental associationtold the newspaper. “And I think what a lot of this content does is illustrate the surplus.”
Some of what makes #propertytok -videos “both so mad and perverse addictive”, said Vice Magazine’s Polly Smythe is that these videos “force you to witness the main joy of the landlord when they dance to songs like No money or To move on“
“It is also a consequence of the language in videos, which has the ability to disappear tenants and their uncomfortable humanity,” added Smythe, which pointed to phrases such as “already tenant” and “ownership plans to refinance, rent out and go again”. That “real people’s lives are at stake” is hardly recognized.
“Liberating for many people”
According to Dan Wilson Craw, Deputy Director at Campaign Group Generational“The big problem is generally that the economy sees property as an economic function and as something that inevitably rises in value”. This trend to treat property as a “fashionable investment option” pricing out people who need a place to live Input journal.
But for others who “try to find stable work in the middle of a recession,” Sarah Manavis wrote for The new statesmanThe
Landlord Influencer and coach Samuel Leeds-who take up to 12,000 pounds for 12 months of rented out to The Guardian that he provides a message that is “quite liberating for many people who earn minimum wage and struggle with the living cost crisis”.
“My gift, without being arrogant, is that I can make complicated things quite simple,” said Leeds, who has posted hundreds of videos, with titles like “23k a month at 23”, which has had almost 40 m views in total.
Despite promises of big profits, the essay said, many influencers are “keen to challenge perceptions of landlords as agents for Avarice who raise rents, skimp on maintenance and drive up house prices”.
“People believe that because there are landlords out there, they are pushed away from the housing market,” said Rick Gannon, a former police officer who now rents a reported property value at £ 7.5 million to a total of 150 tenants. But “if we look a little deeper into that is probably not the case,” he told Input Magazine. “It’s much more involved than that for why people can’t get into the housing step.”
At the same time, said Vice Magazine’s Smythe, “Looking at what it looks like as another related tictoc” just to find that it is yet another real estate investment promo is “like biting a donut to find it is filled with pus instead of vanilla sauce “.
