Good News

The car radio, set on a favourite comedy show is interrupted by a ringing over the speaker.

I can see the caller display on my mobile phone. I know full well who it is. It is late in the day and I am tired and ready for a cup of tea back at the office. I have half a mind to ignore the call and let it go to voicemail.

It is the regular, at least once a month contact with David. He always calls at about the same time, perhaps a natural break in his own day, an empty moment in his routine or just to satisfy his own curiosity about what is happening in Hull.

I have met him a few times, face to face over the last 10 years and we have got on well. He has bought a few houses in the city to rent out although he lives a good distance away in the rural depths of the next county. The call to me always starts with a request for an update on the property market. I have had to disappoint him over the last 5 years because nothing has really happened in terms of improved demand, saleability and prices.

He did manage to assemble his collection of small terraced, mainly 2 bed renters, at reasonably affordable prices in the period before the boom of 2005 to 2007 and so experienced a general increase in values that made the mortgage debts easier to meet with the income from tenants. Although the market fell away sharply in 2008 the demand for private rented accommodation was sustainable and indeed rents crept up slowly as people were corralled into this sector after losing their own homes or having been evicted by other landlords.

I find myself starting each of my monthly updates with a re-run of this scenario. David always sounds downbeat and downtrodden in the first few minutes of our conversations. He would like to sell up and escape the responsibilities and liabilities of being a landlord, and a reluctant one at that in spite of his apparent earlier willingness to invest. There are however no takers.

The huge influx of investors and speculators who flocked to Hull to buy up the cheap housing, by average UK prices, had disappeared as rapidly as their 4 x 4's and away day rail tickets had brought them. A few chancers were left who would be happy to steal away your hard earned portfolio at a fraction of their actual value even in a recession. Some landlords were in a difficult position with an unsympathetic or wholly dismissive Lender and a few small property empires tumbled and fell through repossession and other circumstances of forced sale.

In fact, David has bought well and his modest houses are spread around the lower number postcode districts where local demand for rented is good.

I have learnt, from our conversations, to let him rip and vent his frustrations and anxieties. I am a bit of a counsellor and agony uncle combined with The Samaritans in this regard.

His properties are full and although there are inevitable periods of rental void and arrears he is meeting his financial obligations.

He has had one drug factory in the back rooms of what was a decent older terraced house. He first knew of it when the Police contacted him with the information that they had broken in and made an arrest of his tenant and associates after a tip off about a distinctive smell in the neighbourhood.

It was a mess after the very moist and humid growing conditions for cannabis plants had rotted the place from inside out. The Police had been quite accusatory to David as though they had him in the frame as the Mr Big. This was compounded a few weeks later when a Police helicopter hovered for an unnecessarily and suspiciously long period over his actual home address as though scanning with a heat seeking camera. He laughed with me now but the whole thing had made him a nervous wreck for some considerable time.

By now I have been parked up by the roadside for about 15 minutes but I am sitting comfortably with driver seat set back and my legs stretched out up to the pedals. I am likely to be about half way only through the conversation.

We discuss what options David might have to move into different areas of property. He quite likes the idea of developing run down premises or even buying a shop or some type of commercial property as a natural progression in his investment in bricks and mortar. In the background I can hear the sounds of echoing footsteps and large items being dragged across a floor. David is at his own place of work and he gets me up to speed with the state of the market in his area of expertise in cardboard boxes, cartons and packaging. It is an interesting trade of our own business knowledge.

I try to seek an opportunity to break off the phone call but cannot get a word in.

I find myself overtalking David which I know is a rude and inconsiderate trait but he rattles on now introducing a wide sweep of topics and subjects as though mopping up and seeking consensus or otherwise on his own views. We avoid politics, sport, families, wives and racial issues and so the main theme of the property market returns and we make closing statements.

It is now a 45 minute conversation before there is an embarrassing enough silence to prompt our goodbyes. I feel physically and mentally exhausted but I expect David is wholly refreshed and reinvigorated in his spirit and determination to persist with his love affair with the tenant population of Hull. I feel that I have played my part in the big machine albeit as a very small and insignificant cog.