Eventually, this had serious implications on his health.
“One day I was trying to help an electrician, to keep costs down, but I was coughing up blood and struggling to move,” Williams recalls.
He was diagnosed with sarcoidosis in 2013, which causes swollen tissue to develop in the organs. It can affect the lungs and lymph nodes, and also the skin.
Two years later, Williams was rocked by another health scare – a heart attack.
“I took ill on Monday and was getting progressively worse until I was taken to hospital on Saturday with suspected meningitis. The following day I had a heart attack in front of a consultant.”
He puts these health troubles down, in part, to being a landlord, and says the stress led to his heart attack. It took a long time for him to recover, so a local agency started managing his portfolio instead. Now he was “solely relying on the rent for income, which was really difficult”.
He adds: “If it weren’t for the large critical illness payout from my insurance policy when I had the heart attack, I would have gone bankrupt.”
In one particularly difficult year, the boiler in his home broke, after he had already paid to replace four for his various tenants. He couldn’t afford to fix his straight away, so he and his partner had to go nearly two months over the Christmas period without heating.
“We were going to bed freezing and waking up freezing. It put a serious strain on our relationship,” Williams admits.
In one property, which housed refugees, the agency responsible for the property’s upkeep left it in a state of total disrepair. Repairs to the kitchen and bathroom needed refurbishment costing £19,000 – this was made worse by the loss of rent while waiting for repairs to be carried out.
Williams tries to keep rents low, as he knows his tenants are already “stretched”. He says he “just wants to provide homes for people,” and so hasn’t raised prices for more than five years, yet feels landlords are constantly vilified as being greedy.
But it was rising mortgage rates which really hit him hard. He and his partner struggle to make ends meet, which has led to him feeling forced into raising rents by £25 a month.
