[RENAY] Hi, welcome to That’s When You Get a Dog, the podcast BOWFOW, by old women for old women.
This is our second debrief episode and before we go any further, if you haven’t listened to episode 2 Can I Live? Head back and listen now as this debrief is directly related to that episode.
I’ve got a few shout outs, first up I’d like to thank Castbox app, for giving the show a banner on the homepage of their US podcast app, that was a big win for us, visibility is everything. Also I wanna shout out RadioPublic, they named us one of their Indies of the week, which was really exciting, really unexpected so thank you RadioPublic and Castbox, if you’re looking for a new podcast app put those to the top of your list.
I’ve also got a new podcast series to shout out called The Backstory, hosts Suzy and Claire hear about life changing events from a person’s life. Their 6 episodes in so far a standout for me is Natasha’s story about how she woke up and thought she had HIV, next week’s december 5th episode is about a friendship that changed lives.
They’ve just launched their companion Backchat episodes that discuss themes from the main show, similar to the Debrief episodes. Find The Backstory on all good podcast apps and follow them on twitter @Backstorypod or Insta Thebackstorypodcast.
Right down to business, episode 2 was about owning a home and whether it is still possible, Sophie is back and here’s our chat.
Sophie’s here, go on.
[Sophie] Hi guys, back for the debrief episode of the episode that I was on, can I debrief myself?
[Renay] You’re debriefing yourself, ‘cause you’re here.
[Sophie] and what was the names of the other two women that were on it?
[Renay] There was Miriam and Gift
[Sophie] Okay
[Renay] Gift was the…
[Sophie] New York woman
[Renay] yep
[Sophie] okay
[Renay] Miriam was the Northerner
[Sophie] what I found quite funny about this episode was that, you just couldn’t find somebody who’d just done it the way that people seem to think you can get on the property ladder, which is “Oh yeah I just, just saved for a few years and just got a mortgage and just got a property like” in London I’m talking anyway, like no, that person just doesn’t exist.
[Renay] Well they do if they’re rich…
[Sophie] that’s what I mean, or their parents have given them money.
[Renay] yeah, there’s no, like my old housemate Fleur she had saved and bought somewhere in Nashville.
[Sophie] Nashville?
[Renay] You cannot do that and buy somewhere in London, yeah Nashville her sister lived in Nashville, so it kinda made sense, so she bought with her sister.
[Sophie] Nashville America?
[Renay] Nashville America, yeah, Tennessee, Nashville Tennessee
[Sophie] Can you just buy somewhere in another country without being a citizen there, are you allowed to just roll...
[Renay] her sister lived there, but yeah you can of course you can
[Sophie] Oh okay
[Renay] you can buy holiday homes, you can buy in any country, you can’t buy in National Parks, but yeah.
[Sophie] *sigh* maybe I need to think about buying externally
[Renay] Buy abroad
[Sophie] buy abroad
[Renay] Buy abroad, it’s kind of like a weird, then what? You still haven’t got your home?
[Sophie] yeah yeah, I get that point, yeah, and also like my fear is that I’ll buy my place in Nashville and then someone will be like “the boiler’s broken” and I’ll be like I live in London, there’s nothing I can do about that.
[Renay] She’s got someone managing it.
[Sophie] that’s what I mean yeah, yeah you’d have to.
[Renay] It’s more of a stress but if you want property, you can buy property, you just can’t live there.
[Sophie] Yeah
[Renay] you just can’t, and there’s no, yeah, so there’s plenty of rich people who buy in London, now but I didn’t want them on the show.
[Sophie] but not even rich, just people who have had help for their deposits…
[Renay] well then they’re rich,
[Sophie] No, I don’t know if you’re rich, you’re just lucky your parents can…
[Renay] If your parents give you twenty grand, 30 grand, I’m sorry, that’s a different life, I don’t know that life.
[Sophie] true, true, but no, one of my friend’s parents gave her some money for a property and they are by no means rich, it’s just, I mean her mum’s a dinner lady and her dad’s a builder but just so…
[Renay] Builders can be rich
[Sophie] but, no but he’s like a, he’s almost retired now but what I’m saying is that they basically were, they’ve lived in the same house in Ealing that they bought for like five grand or something, so it’s just they paid off the mortgage. So any income that they make now is savings, so that’s how they’ve made it, they’ve because again, it’s a generational thing, they can give to their kids because they have paid off their mortgage and that sort of thing, so that’s why, I wouldn’t consider her parents rich by any means.
[Renay] They’re richer than the average parent
[Sophie] Yeah true
[Renay] they are, so a lot of rich people, or people with money, with savings, that does make you rich but they also often play it down because the average person doesn’t have savings because they’ve not had the benefit of being able to squirrell money away because they’re always poor and when you’re poor you constantly have, you know, live paycheck to paycheck, there’s no savings, so that is the difference, so they are. Even though she may not consider it they’re rich.
[Sophie] they’re rich in equity because they own their, they now live in a massive house that they fully own outright, they don’t have a mortgage.
[Renay] yeah, that’s rich.
[Sophie] so they’re rich yeah.
[Renay] People, that’s what makes you rich as well, property, if you can get it.
[Sophie] bricks and mortar, yeah.
[Renay] ‘Cause that’s where you, it’s an investment isn’t it, and it goes up in value like a stock, you know it’s your own thing
[Sophie] well hopefully it will bottom one day
[Renay] We’re never gonna know that life
[Sophie] no, it’s good. But yeah I liked the episode, when I listened to that New Yorker lady talking about her, you know, how you can get on the property ladder in Brooklyn, New York and she was saying you know “if you save 20% of your income for a few years, you can get somewhere for five-hundred thousand” , that’s Ronnie
[Renay] that’s Ronnie sneezing
[Sophie] that’s Ronnie sneezing…
[Renay] as usual
[Sophie] ‘cause you just couldn’t be quiet could you, for one episode, it’s all about you and your drama. Um so yeah the New York women I thought was really interesting because she obviously was all about saving and she said something along the lines of “as long as you save 20% of your income then you, for a few years then you can probably buy something for around five-hundred thousand dollars mark” which is about, what four-hundred thousand here or whatever, I still when I listened to that, I was like, four-hundred thousand is not reasonable, like in what world is four-hundred thousand pounds reasonable to buy a flat, like, you know…
[Renay] not for one person
[Sophie] one person, that’s what I mean, it’s…
[Renay] just kind of no one, from what I’ve seen and even, because this week the budget came out with the stamp duty thing…
[Sophie] yeah
[Renay] still nobody is thinking about what if you’re alone…
[Sophie] yeah
[Renay] In a positive way, you can be alone in a positive way but what if you’re doing something on your own or should you not. Are the government, is that what they’re telling us and society, you should not do anything alone because you have to just be rich.
[Sophie] maybe there just needs to be like a new Tinder but for people who wanna buy together
[Renay] there’s that um, I think Bumble Bizz, is the new, they’re trying to connect other people together, other people, other business people together with business but maybe there’s that, maybe for platonic um parenting, platonic home ownership.
[Sophie] Yeah but the irony with that is that platonic, let’s say I’m met, say you and me wanted to buy together,
[Renay] yeah
[Sophie] we’ve gotta bu a two bed place, not a one bed pace the way we would if we were a couple because that makes it even more expensive again, do you know what I mean?
[Renay] No because, if you could find someone who just wants to buy property but is happy renting where they rent…
[Sophie] oh they just invest for you essentially
[Renay] yeah, so they, they’ve got on the ladder, how they want but they have their separate home.
[Sophie] but that’s what schemes like StrideUp work like that where you basically…
[Renay] StrideUp?
[Sophie] don’t have um, you don’t get a mortgage, you just, again, it’s a little bit funny because you need a deposit so basically they just say you give them the deposit that you’ve got. You find a property that you wanna buy, you give them the deposit that you’ve saved and they find somebody else to buy the rest of the property for you, but then you technically pay back rent to that person, the same way you would in shared ownership I suppose but it’s yours, you can do what you want with it, you know, you can’t be chucked out because you technically own a portion of it or this sort of thing.
[Renay] I’ve just gone to the StrideUp website, which is strideup.co and their motto is ‘Life doesn’t wait for a mortgage’...
[Sophie] yeah essentially
[Renay] which is true.
[Sophie] the same thing is, I was looking at those sort of schemes and still am a little bit because, but then again the thing about these schemes is that as far as I’m aware they’re not regulated by the financial services authority, they’re sort of these private equity schemes and I don’t know if they’re, how safe they are, how well they work, how if something goes wrong, how protected I am, all those sort of things, so there’s a little bit of about it obviously but um, yeah, so I’m a little. I need to look more into those sort of schemes really, but yeah I really…
[Renay] Have you got any friends you could buy with?
[Sophie] No, they’ve all bought already
[Renay] oh
[Sophie] but then, they would buy because they wanna live the same as me.
[Renay] But I think, so I was having this conversation with my other housemate the other day because she wants to buy and she was thinking about, “no but I wanna, if I buy I wanna have a home” and blah blah blah I think we’ve got to change that mentality and think, yeah you could buy something where you wanna live but if you’re happy where you live renting…
[Sophie] yeah
[Renay] Why not buy somewhere that can help you buy your home, like in five years, so if you get on the property ladder…
[Sophie] so if I, so the logic is then maybe, if I can only get a small mortgage because I’m self employed, why don’t I take that mortgage that I can get and give it to somebody and go, look I’ll put this towards the property, you live in it, we draw up a legal agreement which says if you sell I get whatever the percentage of the property is back, that I’ve given you, obviously if the property’s gone up in value I get a percentage of that higher value...
[Renay] yeah
[Sophie] and something like that, but then, the issue is I suppose is, wouldn’t you have to have an agreement in place where you say well you have to agree to sell in five years because if I suddenly wanna buy and I’m locked in with you because this is your property for life and you never wanna sell it, how do I ever get any money off it? Or get equity from it?
[Renay] Well you could, yeah remortgage, they wouldn’t have to buy, they could remortgage, they could buy you out, those kinds of things but I think you’ve got to look at property ownership in a different way, not, stop thinking about, oh it needs to be my home forever. It’s not going to be your forever home, I mean who buys somewhere forever, like a one bedroom flat forever?
[Sophie] I think it’s just security, I think it’s just knowing that, something you come back and it’s yours and I mean, our landlord’s let us renew for another year in this December and that’s great but I think after that year’s up I think he will wand us out and he will want to redo everything, I think that’s his plan from where I can gather. So, I’m a little bit like what am I gonna do at the end of next year, I mean next year, it sounds ages away but it’s not, it comes around quicker than you think, and I’m like crap where am I gonna live, what am I gonna do, and I’m just like... about it all so.
[Renay] I think, I would look into buying with someone, or wherever you can afford to buy just buy somewhere and get some passive income coming in, then you don’t feel so bad renting, ‘cause I rent but I don’t feel bad about it because I’ve got my property bringing in income.
[Sophie] but then the thing is buying somewhere is that I’m worried about not being able to rent it and then I’m literally like, oh god, stuck.
[Renay] Well where would you buy?
[Sophie] I don’t know…
[Renay] if you’re buying out in some kind of no man’s land then, then yeah obviously it might be a problem to rent out. If there are people there, you will rent it out.
[Sophie] Yeah, I suppose, even if you bought somewhere like far afield as flipping Durham or somewhere, I mean there’s a massive university there, like students are always gonna want places to live.
[Renay] Far doesn’t matter, people live far, people live far away, people live all over this country surprisingly not just in London.
[Sophie] we’re getting into a proper property question time debate now aren’t we, we’re not debriefing the episode we’re just talking about our thoughts out loud.
[Renay] it’s not about buying in, like close to London, it’s about buying somewhere you think could bring in income through rent, that’s most places in the country. So I think if you want to buy that would be an option, just buy somewhere.
[Sophie] Yeah, but my thing was never that I wanted to bring in an income through rent, like I wanted to be able to live somewhere that I know I’m not gonna get chucked out unless I can’t afford to pay my mortgage, so…
[Renay] You could move to Durham.
[Sophie] I heard the music industry is flourishing in Durham
[Renay] but like that was my other thing about being able to work from home. That is the future, I think that is the future, I think.
[Sophie] yeah but actually I I counteract that argument with the fact that if I could, I technically do have a job where I can work from home through most of it if I wanted to, so in theory I could live anywhere in my country, in the UK and get a train down to London from wherever I live, maybe twice a week and do the office but the rest of the time. But the reason I don’t do that is because my friends and my social life and my circle is in London. I don’t wanna move and live in a sixty grand property in Durham and just work from there, like, it’s really difficult to.
[Renay] But you can make new friends.
[Sophie] It’s difficult though.
[Renay] It is difficult but I think living where our friends are, I mean that would mean, you’re never gonna live abroad, you’re never gonna move away from your friends, that’s not true , you would, you would consider living abroad, so therefore, you’d go and make new friends. So it’s like people let these things hold them back, like oh no I can’t do that because oh my friends, oh my family, oh this...there’s always a reason not to do something but how about swapping it and looking at the benefits of why.
[Sophie] But I don’t think somewhere like Durham is probably the…
[Renay] Let’s not do Durham…
[Sophie] no offence to anybody who lives in Durham, I’ve been there a few times and it’s actually a beautiful place.
[Renay] I’ve never been…
[Sophie] I’ve fallen over twice there as well on the ice in the Winter.
[Renay] I fell over in Edinburgh, it’s very hilly, there’s just too many hills. But yeah live somewhere else. My dream is to live by a lake somewhere, I mean my friends won’t be there, I’ll make new friends.
[Sophie] Or you’ll just be that lazy woman, that crazy woman by the lake.
[Renay] Yeah, it’ll be me, Ronnie a bottle of red wine and I’ll be like the kooky, oh that kooky lady down the street yeah.
[Sophie] oh no…
[Renay] that’ll be me, by my lake. But that’s my dream, that’s what I wanna do. So I don’t know if your dream is to live in some kind of commune with your friends, ‘cause if that’s your dream, sure.
[Sophie] I don’t want to live with my friends, I’m sure once I’ve learnt about two of their bad habits I’d hate them and not wanna speak to them again anyway.
[Renay] But like, look at the benefits of what can you do, how can you make this property, I own a home I’m not gonna get evicted unless I stop paying the mortgage, obviously, but I’m not gonna get evicted, how can I make that possible and if that is moving away and coming down to London twice a week, that could be a possibility and then you see your friends for two days a week.
[Sophie] I don’t know.
[Renay] There’s facetime now, there’s you know technology, you can see your friends.
[Sophie] I don’t know, it’s funny because it’s almost this thing of like being in our thirties, which is obviously what the podcast is about anyway, it’s about being over that age, it’s the expectation of what has come before us, what we sort of should do versus the fact that we don’t have to do that now because we’re a different generation and sort of can carve our own plans but I have a thing of like...I do have moments where I get a bit down and I’m quite like, god I’m thirty-four, should I not own my own property by now at least have my own place and live on my own and all this stuff. But then, there’s a little part of me that, it’s a little voice but it’s a loud voice and it says to me like, hold on a minute, like, but you don’t really wanna live on your own, I quite like living with my housemate and I quite like the flat that I’m in now I think it’s lovely and I’m quite happy and I’m quite content. So it’s all these other social norms, expectations that I’m putting on myself because I see all my friends buying their places now and doing all these things but…
[Renay] If you could rent somewhere with like a fixed term for like 5 years, would you?
[Sophie] Yeah I think so
[Renay] So what ideally would be beneficial is if the government came in with some regulations about long term renters.
[Sophie] yeah
[Renay] yeah, which is not what they’re doing.
[Sophie] yeah. Which is funny because it’s almost in their interest to do that because, well I don’t know, because it depends how the scheme works but the majority of our current government, conservatives, they’re all fricken landlords, they all own property all over the shop. So I know many landlords who would be very happy to have a guaranteed tenant in their property for five years. I know some people are a bit like oh no that means we can’t put the rent up or whatever if it’s a fixed tenancy but at the same time it’s, it’s a funny one.
[Renay] If you’ve not bought an ex council property, you can rent your property back to the council and they’re five-ten year agreements. So if I, my flat is ex council, so I can’t, the council won’t take it back but if I had a house or a you know, purpose built flat that was never social housing I could rent that to the council and I would happily do that. If I didn’t have to think about filling my flat with tenants and I was guaranteed five years of rent, that would be a dream, it just takes the pressure off.
[Sophie] Because it’s someone paying your mortgage, for you and you’re just sat there doing nothing.
[Renay] So I think, I think property owners and landlords would be into that. I don’t know whether, you know the bigger management companies would be, because they like to increase rents and things like that but I think the independent landlords would be into long-term renters, because it’s stressful, it’s stressful. If you have one, if you have a property that you rent out and you’re not like a mogul, it’s super stressful.
[Sophie] It doesn’t need to be, the agreement doesn’t even need to be for five years of what you’re paying rent-wise, it can have something in that says something like you know every year the agreement that the rent will go up 2% or something which means a) you’re prepped for it a) you know exactly what your rent rise is going to be every year. So I’m not even against being fixed into something that every year is gonna have rent increase if I know what it’s gonna be, so it’s sort of like yeah it’s, it’s a funny one. It’s a very British thing, it’s a very, we have the need to buy. Anywhere else, like, I was, just come back from Japan a couple of days ago actually and I was in Tokyo and I was talking to a couple of people who live out there and I said to them like, “Oh you know, do you ever dream that you could buy here”, and they looked at me like I was mad, and I was like, what? And they were like, “that’s like saying do you ever dream to build a castle out of candyfloss, it’s like we don’t dream about something that really just isn’t possible”. Like it just never was on their agenda at all, literally like, and one of them said “if we had kids, then we move really far out of Tokyo, a little bit further out and we can try and buy out there, again it’s equally as expensive”. They just said that’s just not what you do, the city it’s got the most expensive per square foot of real estate of anywhere in the world, although I think they said at one point, I think it’s San Francisco now or somewhere, it’s ridiculous. But, and they just said no, that’s not what you do, she said that you know, you are protected, you are covered by a lot of rental protection by the Japanese government like these, almost like these long ten, fifteen year tenancies. So you know if you have a child and you need to move somewhere bigger, you know that if you can get a fifteen year tenancy, your kid’s gonna be good til he’s fifteen and you’re not going to have to worry about your landlord throwing you out and having to find somewhere new to live for whatever and things, so they’re quite heavily protected in Japan.
[Renay] That’s what I think is missing from this, the government seem to, so in this new budget that came out on Tuesday, 21st, basically the chancellor of the exchequer said that stamp duty is gone from properties under £300,000 so that was gonna save people around £1700 so that was it, it’s not a big saving and then from between 300 and 500 thousand there’s a much smaller stamp duty. Stamp duty is a tax that you pay to the government when you buy a house. None of that helps when property prices rise and you can’t afford and then when you are buying somewhere between 300 and 500 it still doesn’t help the person who’s on their own trying to buy. The government aren’t thinking about people who genuinely can’t afford housing on their own. It’s all fine and dandy if you have a couple or you find a friend but what if you don’t or what if you’re friends are at different stages, if there’s no one why aren’t, the government just aren’t thinking about, yeah, a person on their own, I don’t understand why because they were all single at some point, like every single one of them was. But I guess it’s the reality that they’ve never been, they’ve never needed to think about money I guess.
[Sophie] Maybe
[Renay] I don’t know ‘cause Sadiq Khan was normal…
[Sophie] was normal
[Renay] was normal, now he’s rich now, he’s gone now but like, but why aren’t they genuinely thinking, why wasn’t he thinking when his dad was a bus driver, he was at home seeing his parents struggle, why wasn’t he thinking, how can I help these people, how?
[Sophie] I don’t know, go figure…
[Renay] Maybe they can rent for longer…
[Sophie] Sadiq, any answers?
[Renay] Yeah, Sadiq, like sort out the rental market, give people stability because then I think people will be into long-term renting, ‘cause I honestly think unless something dramatic happens and I become a millionaire, which obviously is the dream, obviously, but like, my family home, if I chose to stay in London is gonna have to be somewhere rented. So ideally, I’d rent somewhere that I didn’t have to keep renewing the contract every year because if I’m raising children in a rented property I don’t wanna have to think, my god next year kids we might have to move or like you can’t go to this school because we’re moving now and I couldn’t find anywhere in the area.
[Sophie] yeah, it’s protection
[Renay] yeah, there aren’t, there’s completely no protection if you’re renting and you’re not in social housing.
[Sophie] but there is some weird protection that exists already, but you have to have been in a property for like twenty-five years or something ridiculous but the woman that lives next door to us and our flat, she’s been in that property for like thirty years renting…
[Renay] from a private landlord?
[Sophie] yeah, private landlord. But then he sold the property and basically she went to the council and said I’ve lived here for like thirty years, he’s selling now and the council basically said there’s a protection which is right, sort of like a right to remain is not the right term but if you’ve lived in a property for a really long period of time and that’s your home and you’ve contributed and you’ve maintained it then you aren’t allowed, your landlord isn’t allowed to just kick you out, so if he sells you have to go with, the tenant has to go with the new landlord.
[Renay] they go with the new landlord?
[Sophie] Yeah yeah yeah
[Renay] oh yeah that makes sense, yeah.
[Sophie] So, she’s basically protected now, she can stay there until she dies basically, he can’t chuck her out, which is great.
[Renay] but that’s twenty-five years.
[Sophie] yeah, so that’s not realistic obviously.
[Renay] that rarely happens, nowadays.
[Sophie] Yeah so it’s…
[Renay] it’s just tough, like the government need to, really just get a reality check. Like I don’t know who these people are, where they, it’s like they don’t live in our world.
[Sophie] it’s like you know we’re just, everything is is realistically they say to see change, you need a five year cycle so we’re gonna be pushing forty.
[Renay] So it won’t benefit us.
[Sophie] Yeah like there’s just extended the young person’s railcard to thirty, hello, I’m thirty-four, hello, like yoohoo, thanks.
[Renay] Tell us about your little experiment you did…
[Sophie] ahhh yes, so, I decided, just to make myself a little more depressed than I already was, I thought I’d find out what the possibility was of me getting a mortgage. So I rang up a mortgage broker and basically I found out that I can basically not really get much at all because I’m self employed, and because I’m self employed, they go on your, your net not your gross. So when you, and what that means is if you are employed and someone else pays you, your employer pays your tax and all this sort of stuff, when they look at your mortgage and how much you can make for a mortgage they ask how much you earn a year. So say that’s, for arguments sake forty grand, take that forty grand and they times that by four or five or six, whatever the mortgage lenders are willing to, that’s how much you can borrow right.
[Renay] it’s not more than five
[Sophie] You can get six apparently now, they can times it by six, yeah but you have to have a giant deposit for them to do that to buy a massive property. So yeah they do that, but if you’re self employed they basically take what is the equivalent of gross income and then net off all your expenses because you’re self employed and then take what’s left after that, which means technically you’re applying for a mortgage on twenty grand rather than forty grand because you have the equivalent of twenty grand’s worth of expenses a year or whatever so obviously you can see the problem, I’m now twenty grand times four as opposed to forty grand times four. It’s halving what I can get for a mortgage so that’s the issue but also what was interesting was that she told me as I was mainly looking at shared ownership which is the thing we have in London, for people living outside of the UK, where you can buy a share of a property, so twenty-five percent, thirty percent, forty percent whatever and then…
[Renay] Up to seventy-five percent
[Sophie] yeah and then you can pay a rent back on the portion that you don’t own and that usually goes to your local authority or council or whatever, they usually own it and you pay a rent proportion back to them. So that was more likely possible for me because if I could get a hundred grand mortgage on my earnings I could probably buy twenty-five percent of a property somewhere in London right. So, but the issue was as I found out was that apparently in order for them to give you access to the shared ownership property and if you do have a deposit and can raise the mortgage is they need to know that when your mortgage repayment, your council tax repayment, your maintenance payments on the property, don’t even get me started on the maintenance payments and the bit of rent that you’re paying back all that when it comes together, doesn’t equal more than 45% of your income a month. So they want to know basically after you’ve paid all your rent and your mortgage and your bills, all this stuff to do with the property that 55% of your income you’ll have left to do what you want to do, that’s madness.
[Renay] So that is kind of ridiculous because in 2015 The Guardian had an article and the headline is ‘Tenants in England spend half their pay on rent’ so they pay 50% on rent and actually in London the majority of tenants paid 72% of their income on rent. So for the government to be having this fake help to buy and all that business…
[Sophie] yeah yeah, shared ownership…
[Renay] yeah, shared ownership that you can’t, you can’t spend more than 45% of your income on rent that’s kind of ridiculous. Ronnie’s chasing his tail. So there making you pay more rent and or own a property than being able to own your property.
[Sophie] It’s difficult, I mean I just don’t know what the solution is for it. I think we’re in a very sticky place, in London in particularly when it comes to property ownership, I don’t know what the solution is, I think they can open up help to buy to old properties so if I find somewhere I like that’s a flat that’s already been, you know, or if somebody has already lived in it, I should be able to get a 40% equity loan from the government for that property, maintenance charges will be lower, it allows turnover of properties and allows that sort of chain-free thing to start developing. So there’s lot’s of weird things to go on about.
[Renay] I just think government, wake up, maybe talk to some real people, make the rental market, the private rental market stable so that people can feel safe in the home that they live in. Companies, open up your offices so that people can work remotely a couple days a week or the majority of the week and people, get creative, move to Durham.
[Sophie] move to Durham, the tech hub of Durham, I don’t know where Durham’s come from all of a sudden.
[Renay] I don’t know Durham, I’ve never been to Durham, it’s got a cathedral.
[Sophie] it has, I’ve been to Durham a few times.
[Renay] That’s Ronnie. Okay Bye
[Sophie] Bye guys
[Renay] Thanks to Sophie for joining me again on The Debrief.
That’s When You Get a Dog is produced by me Renay Richardson, our original music is by Aaron Williams and cover art by Adam Cohen.
We’re available on Castbox, Overcast, Acast, PocketCasts, Apple Podcasts, RadioPublic and many other apps, if you don’t wanna leave a review, although please do, why not tweet a screenshot of you listening to the show and share it on twitter using our hashtag #GetADogPod, you can also follow the show on twitter @GetADogPod, follow me @RenayRich and follow Sophie @Pouchatron P-O-U-C-H-A-T-R-O-N
Next week is the body image episode, see you on the flipside, bye.
