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It all sounds a bit morbid for landlords.

However, landlords being high net worth individuals need to consider what happens to their property investment assets when the day finally comes and they no longer are around.

What happens if a landlord gets hit by a bus?
God forbid what would happen if one day a landlord stepped out in front of a number 72 bus catapulting him or her straight into the next life.

Firstly, if a landlord has not written a will they would not be alone.  Approximately seven out of ten landlords haven’t.  For this group of landlords they die intestate.  At this stage the laws of intestacy apply to a landlord’s estate which means that a landlord’s estate including all their buy-to-let properties are divided between a landlords… Read Full Post

In many ways it’s the landlord’s worst nightmare.

You as the landlord turn up one morning unexpectedly and there it is; your buy-to-let property, empty and abandoned like the ‘Mary Celeste’.  With any luck the tenant has just removed themselves and their possessions and not any of your residential investment property.  Unfortunately, I was not so lucky as one New Year when I arrived at my residential investment property to discover that half of my new kitchen had also been removed, along with a new washing machine and fridge freezer.  To make it worse just as I was digesting this information I heard a knock on the door.  It was a prospective tenant coming to have a look around my buy-to-let property.  I was it would be fair to say, pretty speechless.
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The buy-to-let mortgage industry has gone from nothing in 1997 to an industry that in the first 6 months of this year saw loans being taken out of £21.2 billion.  The stock of buy-to-let loans taken out is now £108 billion equating to 10% of all mortgage balances.

The good news for landlords is that the UK buy-to-let mortgage market is probably the most competitive and innovative in the world resulting in around about a thousand different buy-to-let mortgage products on the market at any one time.

The numbers have however been cut back recently as buy-to-let lenders have responded to the credit crunch by reigning in the more risky buy-to-let mortgage products.  The other bad news for buy-to-let borrowers is that buy-to-let lenders have also repriced… Read Full Post

The fact is that the future prospects for buy-to-let lie largely in the hands of the politicians.  Not because they might implement penal tax charges on landlords as had been feared by removing the ability for landlords to offset the interest on their buy-to-let loans against rental income when calculating their rental businesses profits; or even by continuing with the introduction of more onerous bureaucracy such as the Tenancy Deposit Scheme or Houses in Multiple Occupation (HMO) licensing.

No, the main impact that politicians will have in the coming months and years is their approach to immigration.

Immigration key to buy-to-let prospects
There is no doubt that immigration has made a massive contribution to the UK economy, not least has this been… Read Full Post

Any professional investor knows that part of a successful investment strategy is to balance the competing aspects of risk and reward.  One of the big risks to any residential buy-to-let investor is that in essence their investment is very ‘lumpy’.  That is to say it is a large investment in a single asset class, in a single location.  This is great when times are good, but if times are bad for residential investment in that area then there is no way of avoiding poor returns

Is there a way around this for landlords?

The secret of good investment practice is a strategy that aims to spread an investor’s risks.  This means holding a range of investments in different sectors.  The theory being that when one investment is doing poorly others will be… Read Full Post

The rise in the buy-to-let residential investment market in recent years has been accompanied by the appearance of the so called ‘property investment guru’.  These ‘gurus’ spend all their time instructing property investors how they too can make millions out of investing in residential property.

As an experienced residential property investor I am instantly suspicious of anybody that appears to want to tell you how they made a million and how you can do it too.  The question is always why if you have found such a brilliant way of making money would you want to share the secret with a whole load of potential investment competitors?

What’s in it for me?

The answer is normally that these property investment gurus are trying to sell landlords… Read Full Post

A tax giveaway for landlords?

Landlords are set to be one of the main beneficiaries from the proposed tax changes signalled by the Chancellors Pre-budget Statement last week.  This Statement which outlines what changes are to be made for the tax year 08-09 or effectively the tax regime that is to come into force on the 6th April 08.  How much is it a give away and are landlords better to sell now under the current capital gains tax regime or should they wait?  In this article I set out to investigate what it means to landlords



The current taxation regime

The current system of Capital Gains Tax (CGT) was actually put in place by Gordon Brown in April 1998 when he introduced a system of taper relief to replace the previous system of indexation. … Read Full Post

You may be reading this at work on Monday morning thinking there must be any easier way of making a living.

I can tell you there is.  I secured my financial freedom at the ripe old age of 37.  It didn’t happen over night though.  A decade of hard work aided by a housing boom eventually secured me the financial FREEDOM that I so desperately wanted. How did I achieve this?

Landlords make their money when they buy, not necessarily when they sell.  That is to say that a landlord’s secret to making a fast and substantial profit is by buying their residential investment property at below what would generally be considered Market Value.

A landlord should therefore always be an opportunist by instinct.  When looking for a new investment property they… Read Full Post