Increases in Let to Buy in London

The Telegraph report on the growing trend of let to buy in the capital, as the practice of renting, rather than selling, a home to finance the purchase of another property becomes more popular, particularly amongst those up-sizing to properties outside of London.

Read the article here 

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New BTL Equity Withdrawal Scheme

Expand your buy-to-let property portfolio with this innovative equity loan with Castle Trust, available via Property Hawk Mortgages.

The Buy-to-let Equity Withdrawal Scheme is an innovative equity loan that can help you expand your property portfolio. With a maximum LTV of 85% and no stress test, an existing landlord at 70% LTV would be able to double the size of their portfolio using this scheme.


Product overview

• It’s an equity loan, secured via a second charge, of up to 20% of the property value and up to 85% LTV including the primary mortgage.
•  There are no monthly repayments which means there is no debt service stress test. 
• Loan is repaid at redemption, along with a share in any growth in property value over the term of the loan.

Suitable clients

• The Buy-to-let Equity Withdrawal Scheme is perfect for landlords who want to grow their portfolio – quickly and efficiently
• It will particularly suit landlords who want to gear up to the maximum possible limit – to 85% LTV – to accelerate growth of their portfolios
• It will help those landlords who want to enhance the cashflow from their property portfolios
• The product is particularly suitable for low yielding properties where conventional borrowing is constrained by the debt service stress test 

Search the whole BTL mortgage market free

Email: info@propertyhawkbtlmortgages.co.uk 

Tel: 01494 894639

Your home may be repossessed if you do not keep up repayments on your mortgages.  

The Financial Services Authority does not regulate some forms of mortgage.

Landlords remain positive despite lower demand

The latest survey from BM Solutions reports national tenant demand to be at its lowest since the second quarter of 2012. Demand remains high in the London bubble and the East of England.

Despite a fall in yields the confidence of landlords surveyed remains high, buoyed by a perceived upturn in the economy and increases in property prices. These factors have seemingly outweighed the stalling rents and increases in void periods to keep a smile on the majority of landlords faces.

- swings and roundabouts.

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Yet another letting agency scam

Another letting agency scam has surfaced. A Maida Vale  landlord believed her letting agent had let out her property to a Swiss businessman and his family, at £560 a week. The landlord had been told by the letting agent that the tenant's rent would be paid by an employer, a company called Kingsman & Kingsman Ltd.

What the landlord discovered two years into the tenancy was that the tenant, was in fact claiming Housing Benefit, and had been right from the beginning. The employer Kingsman and Kin
gsman Limited didn't actually exist, and even more shockingly, Westminster Council was paying a monthly rent of £4,550 direct to the letting agent. A rent that was more than £2,000 a month more than the landlord had been told the property was being let out for.

After investigating the situation further the landlord, a Miss Lawal, went on to discover the offices of the fake company were unsurprisingly based at the home address of one of the letting agents.

Personally I'm not as shocked by the discovery of more dodgy letting agents, as by the ridiculous rate that Westminster council is prepared to pay out on housing benefit - nearly twice the market value.

Maybe the crisis in PRS is not down to greedy landlords, but more an issue with the financial ineptness of local authorities, who appear to be more than eager to spend taxpayers money.

The landlord commented that  “no one at Westminster seemed bothered” when she raised her concerns about the deception.

The letting agents were ordered to repay Miss Lawal £67,559.56 in lost rent, as well as £25,000 in legal costs, but unsurprisingly she has not seen a penny, after the letting agents sold up the business and moved on.

More detail on this story can be read here

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Free advice to Landlords with Heating Problems.

More expert advice on a landlord heating problems from Alan our resident heating expert:

I am a Landlord and a retired Heating and Electrical Engineer. I always noticed a sharp increase in customer calls at this time of year. People began to turn on their heating systems and sometimes they didn't work.The customers with the problems were always the same. They had turned their heating off in the spring and heated their hot water with their immersion heater during the summer.

There is a widely held misconception that heating hot water with an immersion heater is the most cost effective way of doing it. We are lucky now because our gas and electricity bills tell us how many Kilowatts of energy we have used. In the past, when gas use was measured in Therms, it was very difficult to compare different energy prices. Now on our bill we can see that gas and electricity are priced in Kilowatts and typically gas is around 5 pence and electricity is around 13 pence. This shows us that electricity is over two and a half times more expensive than gas for the same energy amount. Even if we had massive losses on the piping between the boiler and the hot water cylinder it would always be cheaper to heat the hot water with gas.

It is also not fully understood that the heating coil in the hot water cylinder can heat at a typical rate of 10 Kilowatts per hour whereas the immersion heater will only heat at 3 Kilowatts per hour. This means that the gas will only need to be heating the water for a third of the time required by the immersion heater.

Alan's recommendation
So my recommendation here is firstly to make sure that your heating systems have separate controls over the heating and hot water timings. Also a well insulated hot water cylinder is essential. Then set the hot water timer to come on early in the morning for just an hour. You can always increase the time if need. Then have the timer set for another period an hour before the hot water is needed in the evening.

So, to come back to my first point about heating systems failing around November. Because the heating has been off during the summer, often the heating pump hasn't been used since the spring and rust or heating residue may well have caused the pump to be seized. A typical call-out and repair of a pump would cost around £310 which is another important reason to heat the hot water with gas and use the pump all year.

You can take further advantage of my experience as a heating engineer and to find out how to free off a seized pump by going to my site www.fixtheheating.com. Here you will find a new service, Free Advice to Landlords with heating problems.

Free property management software, Free tenancy agreements

Letting agent conspiracy theory

We all love a good conspiracy theory.

Property Hawk was recently contacted by a blogger mascerading as Anja Liszt.  This blogger has a serious point.  Her view (wrongly or rightly) I suspect the former rather than the latter is that the likes of Foxtons and Countrywide letting agents are on the cusp of being forced out of business because of their non compliance of consumer protection regulation.

An incredibly well researched piece which I suspect ignores the fact that government are incredibly adept at moving the goal posts if they think they have over done the constraints on capital and the capitalistic process (a conspiracy theory in itself).

What we would love to know is the real identify of Anja Liszt and her/his motivation.  They clearly have quite a lot of time and brain power to devote to their own conspiracy theories.
 
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