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Landlords like most potential house buyers are currently bombarded with a huge raft of often contradictory information about house prices. There's info on asking prices provided by websites such as Rightmove, the Government produces their own information using actual house prices from the land registry. For more details about house prices and who's measuring what have a look at this previous article.
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However, despite all this information on house prices the UK seems bereft of reliable and comparable rental data. Currently their is no index of UK rents for landlords.
The Centre for Housing Policy at York University briefly produced a record of average rents in the 90's but the shear scale of the effort involved resulted in this being very short lived.
IPD a global provider of rental data and property information will provide figures on average rents to some of their affluent private clients but only for a large fee. The data itself is also less than 100% reliable as it is gathered mainly from large corporate residential investors letting property on masse and predominantly in the major cities thereby giving only a snapshot of what is going on across the country.
Is it time that landlords have access to comprehensive rental data to find out what is going on in their local rental market? Would this be useful or can landlords gain enough information already about what's going on in their local rental market by keeping an eye on the local paper and rental sites like gumtree to find out what rents are being charged.
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3 comments:
I think Nestoria already do quite a good job with this. If you search for an area, you can view a chart showing the rental prices for that area in the last 12 months broken down by the number of bedrooms.
e.g. http://www.nestoria.co.uk/birmingham/property/rent
it's a bit hidden away and most landlords probably don't even know about this site let alone this feature.
Were you thinking of something more advanced than this?
Useful to know - but data seems to be very up and down with no consistent curve to statistics.
Hi thanks for the link to the site. I've just had a quick look. It certainly is better than nothing.
I suppose if I was being critical its short comings are that its asking prices which aren't always that accurate. In a rising market they are behind the curve and in a market over supplied with rental property the actual rent agreed between the landlord and tenant will often be considerably less.
The other thing is that it appears a bit general. If i'm a landlord renting in Birmingham for instance I'm only going to be interested in figures for probably the postcode my property is located in. A general Birmingham figure is probably not going to be that useful for me setting my rent.
The team at Property Hawk are working on a system that might be able to help landlords out with rental data and provide a much more accurate measure. Watch this space as they say!
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