A recent report from buy to let lender, Kent Reliant, has revealed that many landlords are restructuring their property portfolios in a bid to beat government tax changes. Some landlords have converted their businesses into limited companies, whereas others are raising rents or transferring ownership of properties to relatives.
The Rent Smart Wales scheme is now law, but although 89k accounts were created and 64k licence registrations submitted by landlords, a further 13k licence applications were never completed, which suggests quite a few landlords are operating without the necessary licence.
A landlord who illegally converted a three-bedroom house into two self-contained flats has been ordered by the courts to pay back the £140k in rent she earned from letting the flats. If she fails to repay the money within three months, she will be sent to jail for up to a year.
The Autumn Statement revealed that the government is planning on banning letting agents from charging fees to tenants. If you use a letting agent to manage your rental properties, you might be concerned about this development.
The RLA recently won a very important court battle over whether a landlord has to pay council tax if the tenant moves out but the tenancy has not formally ended.
Taking out a mortgage is a common way to build a property portfolio, but landlords are coming under increasing pressure from the Bank of England, which is making buy to let mortgages more difficult to come by.
Yesterday’s Autumn Statement has caused a storm in the private rental sector after Phillip Hammond announced a ban on tenant fees. Landlords are now concerned that letting agents will charge them more to cover the loss in revenue from tenants.
The UK’s biggest buy to let mortgage lender has become the first to place lending restrictions on landlords in higher tax brackets. Currently, landlords borrowing money from Birmingham Midshires are expected to charge rents equal to 125% of their monthly mortgage repayments.
From last week, benefits will be capped at £20k a year. An estimated 100,000 households will be affected by a cut in their housing benefits, the majority of them in London. Experts fear that many tenants living in the private sector could face losing their homes because they can’t afford the rent.
Londoners are still struggling to get on the property ladder. New research from a crowdfunding platform claims it will take, on average, 121 years for someone earning around £34k a year to be able to save up enough deposit to buy an average flat in the capital.
HMRC figures reveal that 25% of all properties bought this summer were buy to let investments or second homes. This indicates that government tax changes, which were designed to curb the buy to let market, haven’t worked as well as the government had hoped they might.
Research carried out by the Association of Letting Agents (ARLA) shows that increasing numbers of landlords are abandoning rent increases. The proportion of landlords hiking rents on their properties fell to 24% last month, which was the lowest level this year.
Airbnb is a popular way for homeowners and landlords to let out properties on a short-term let basis. For the most part, the site is very good at matching properties with prospective tenants, but sometimes it can and does go wrong.
In a bid to cut the number of rogue landlords operating in the UK, the government has proposed a mandatory standard of 6.52 square meters for a bedroom in a shared house. The room size would apply to any bedroom, irrespective of whether a couple or an individual was living there, so bunk beds are […]
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