In between being bested by sandwiches and slipping off stages live on television, a progressively desperate Ed Milliband ignored advice from his own party and insisted on including housing policies in his election manifesto that seemed to alienate landlords, letting agents and practically anyone that lived in a house or who had even ever seen one.
Mansion Tax, rent capping, three year tenancies, ramped up SDLT rates for foreign investors and the scrapping of non-dom status has lead up to the fact that Cameron was able to let himself through the back door and that there are now more pandas in Scotland than Labour MPs.
As a Labour win seemed less and less likely on the night, you could literally hear landlords, homeowners and even the buildings themselves heaving a sigh of relief.
However, recent research has found that under their tenure, a Tory government is twice as successful in creating nasty surprises with a house prices rises crisis, which is actually harder to find a real positive benefit for than it is to say, unless you are fortunate enough to own your own home outright, plan on dying before prices drop again and leaving all the money to your greedy kids. Bloody greedy kids.
So now election madness is behind us, house buyers, landlords, tenants and investors will be encouraged to go ahead with their plans and attempt to kick start the property market back into life.
Yet as both sides sought to find solutions to the housing crisis, no party actually addressed the main issues facing the PRS. Now that the Tories have a majority of sorts, it would be good to see them focus on these issues to improve standards across the industry.
Incentives for landlords that will encourage them to put their money back into their properties and raise standards for their tenants. A less confusing Housing Health and Safety Rating System (HHSRS) and the sensible regulation of letting agents (which the industry has been desperate for for a long time) are all high on the agenda.
The Conservatives have shown little interest in regulating the PRS and this should make life a little easier for landlords and cut down on red tape.
There are already two Conservative policies in the pipeline that could affect landlords in the near future. The first, which involves changes to Section 21 (A & B) of the Housing Act, is likely to come into force later this year.
Brian Murphy, head of lending at Mortgage Advice Bureau said: "The changes proposed to Section 21 of the Housing Act will make it more straightforward to evict a tenant, albeit placing some restrictions on how and when a Section 21 can be given. However, landlords must ensure that they don’t carry out their own eviction in a way that is actually illegal.”
And then there was that sub letting clause ban that seemed to slip under the radar even more stealthily than Camerons surprise win on Friday morning.
At the time Paul Shamplina, founder of Landlord Action, had this to say: "If it goes ahead, it will throw up a magnitude of problems in the buy-to-let industry. We have never seen so many sub-letting cases going to court because of unscrupulous tenants trying to cream a profit from a property they have rented.
The detail is yet to be revealed but, in my opinion, there should have been a period of consultation with the industry before this was announced. This is not the way to fix the housing shortage, and in fact will have quite the opposite effect if more and more landlords are exposed to the risk of nightmare sub-tenants. Giving landlords even less control over their own property by preventing them from instilling clauses which prevent sub-letting could drive more good landlords out of the marketplace.”
The biggest issue however, stubbornly remains the same. Staying firmly lodged like a piece of bacon in a politicians mouth.
Many polls and surveys questioning MPs and the general public alike have found that the vast majority believe Britain is currently experiencing a housing crisis. There is a rather strong argument that the current government's policies on the property construction, or lack of it, has contributed to this current crisis.
In fact, the one thing almost all parties agreed upon is that more homes need to be built.
And as the population of the UK is expected to swell over the next 10 years, if sufficient homes are not built to meet this demand, an entire generation will be unable to afford a home of their own.
Maybe we should put the champagne on hold for a bit eh?
