When is a crack not a crack? When it’s a concern. Ok, not a great piece of humour, ironically a little like cracker humour, if you’ll forgive the pun. Joking aside, cracks in our world (of property) are worth understanding – many a deal has turned out to be a poor one because the buyer…
In the old days one of the things we loved about property was the received wisdom that property values double on average every ten years. By the old days, I mean before the credit crunch (before 2007). Although many of us talked about buying for cash flow, in our hearts of hearts, out of the…
I’ve mentioned it before on this blog but the Hometrack City index is worth another look. Not least because it’s monthly and coincidentally the latest results popped into my inbox this morning. If you really want to know what’s happening with house process in the UK, and at a micro level, this is the index.…
How active or passive do I want to be in my (buy to let) property investing business? Many of us want to be passive. After all we didn’t go into property to create another job. But whether we are going to be active or passive will often depend upon practical considerations like whether we buy…
The RICS (Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors) have speculated in their latest report that rents for investment properties and buy to lets will increase over the next few years as more and more landlords pull out of the PRS (private rented sector). In fact they think that over the next five years rent increases will outpace…
What are the tax implications of owning (buy to let) investment property? There have been two big changes in the last few years First, section 24 of the 2015 Finance Bill restricts the amount of mortgage interest a property investor or second home owner can off-set against rent, phasing off-setting out so that after…
What will my exit strategy be if I ever want to get out of investing in property and want to sell my buy to let property investments? It might seem a bit premature to ask this question before we start, but it’ll almost certainly be far to late if we leave it until we need…
There we go. Proves there’s some truth in the saying “There’s lies, damn lies and statistics”. When it comes to house prices you can hold any opinion and be right! Of course, to be fair, there are a number of different house price indices, and the methodology for each is different. but, as just one…
In the old days (which was up until about 2 years ago) we had the choice of buying our buy to let investment properties into either a limited company, or our own names, (or something fancy like a trust). That is unless we were doing something like flipping (buying and selling-on) in which it worked…
Ok, there’s a bit of artistic licence there but the Hometrack UK Cities House Price Index for July 2017 has just come out. As I’ve said before, if you want to know what’s really happening in the UK market, and not rely on general stats and indices, this is the one to watch. Hometrack are…