Professional property investors are enjoying the current financial climate. What? You probably think I’m mad making that statement. On the contrary, what we are experiencing at the moment is a market that is panicking and amateur investors are panicking l. What this does for the professional property investor is gives us the opportunity to buy properties which will meet our strict criteria.
6. We are all too well aware that far too many people jumped on the bandwagon and purchased buy to let properties without applying simple basic criteria. Let’s face it, with a rising market anyone can make money no matter how bad a deal it was. Clearly this is a lesson to us all and reinforces that we need to have a strategy, clear-cut and stick to it when we buy investment property.
7. Number crunching: if you are to succeed in buying investment property in the current market, you need to do your calculations. As we have all discovered the lending criteria has changed and now lenders are looking for 25%-30% deposit. You need to be able to demonstrate to your prospective lender that you have built-in contingencies to cover void periods, general maintenance and insurance.
8. Letting agents: we are fortunate in the UK buy to let market that we have several options for letting agents. We have in our experience had the good, the bad and the ugly-this is a specialist area and you would do well to invest the time and effort to interview and test them thoroughly. Let’s be honest we are buying investment property for the long-term and need to ensure that we have the best team around us. Once you have agreed terms you are relying on the letting agent to ensure you have full occupancy of your buy to let properties. Therefore do not skimp on this important factor of your business.
9. Quite often you will be targeted with off -plan properties with fabulous (unqualified) ROI figures. The professional property investor will disregard these figures and carry out their own research to draw a realistic conclusion. Far too many companies advertise properties indiscriminately promising huge returns which unfortunately are totally unrealistic. One important question to ask yourself is why buy properties that developers are marketing in this fashion? If it looks too good to be true, more than likely it will be.
10. Location, where do you buy investment property? Some will say ‘it’s far too expensive where I live’ and go on to purchase in some remote area of which they know nothing about. This is all good and well as long as you carry out your thorough research and you can manage it one way or another. We would suggest in the first instance you concentrate in the UK buy to let market ie: your own backyard there are deals to be found if you look hard enough-let’s face it no one said it was easy.
