My review of a free landlords ebook

Great little book, thanks – covers the basics well and is easily digestible.

Thanks for your comments, Martin. Good point about carbon monoxide alarms. Tip no 24 does in fact mention getting a guarantor if the tenants earn less than three times the annual rent, but it’s split over two pages, so maybe easy to miss. 🙂 Kind regards, David.

A very useful book. More tips/ideas on Taxation issues would be good.

Thank you PC.  We’ll keep your suggestion in mind for our next book!

Very impressed with the book, a section for first time
landlords including an overview of capital gains tax when renting out a former
main residence would be useful, along with a warning about problems with
capital gains tax if you change the ownership to get a BTL mortgage.    (A lot
of mortgage advisors don’t know the risks of putting a partner on the registration
to get a mortgage, very few people would deem of asking an accountant for capital
gains tax advice until it is too late.)

Setting up post redirection, and letting the land register
have contact address to serve notices should also be covered.

Maybe a checklist of what do to when renting out a former
home, as it is different than a BTL.

Sorry I don’t think many of the downloads will become
customers due to location and people already having agents in place, but any
agent that gave me a book like the when asked to value for rent would have put themselves
in very good standing.

Thank you Ian for your
kind and helpful comments.

We completely agree
that there isn’t enough in our booklet covering tax, and your point
about Capital Gains Tax would be a useful inclusion. As would some
of your other suggestions, particularly contacting the Land Registry,
and we especially like the idea of a checklist, that’s a great idea.

Originally the
information that we wanted to put into it covered far more and went
into a great deal more depth. However, we had a 5,000 word limit as
we needed to see how this went first before launching into a larger
publication.

We accept the fact that
most people who download it won’t become our clients, especially as
we’ve been surprised by the number of agents that have downloaded the
pdf. copy and ordered the paperback version! But to gain clients
from it wasn’t our main reason for producing it (although it would be
very nice). Our aim was to try and show that we’re not like the
average agent, and to try and provide something useful for
prospective and new landlords that we felt wasn’t easily available on
the internet etc.

Of course, all this
information is out there, but the problem for an inexperienced
landlord is knowing what information is reliable and trustworthy. We
(like yourself, I’m sure) have seen many articles that have been
written by so called knowledgeable people and some of it has been
misleading to say the least.

So, we wanted to bring
as much correct and useful information together into one little
booklet as we could manage and give it to whoever would find it
helpful, even if they then realise that self-managing isn’t a good
idea for them, and they go to another agent to manage their property
instead of us (which has happened).

We will however, keep
in mind your suggestions and those that other contributors have made
for a future, larger edition.