There have been some really interesting comments on the EU Trying To Kill Buy To Let – sign the petition to STOP it now. blog and it is great to see some new people contributing to this important discussion but I am feeling a bit frivolous at the moment and I thought that I would […]

It was a bit breezy this weekend wasn’t it !!! Have you had calls from tenants to say their fence has blown down or that they’ve lost tiles off their roof? You know these things need to be fixed quickly to keep tenants happy and to prevent further damage so here’s what to do …..

Dozens of letting agents have gone bust in recent months leaving landlords struggling financial with unpaid rents and unprotected deposits. In some cases the letting agents are just poor business administrators, but several have ended in court for deliberate and calculating frauds involving the theft of hundreds of thousands of pounds of money belonging to […]

One of the most important aspects of running a business is keeping one step ahead of the competition and providing a service over and above your competitors. There’s no better time to start this than now since with Smartphones in increasingly more pockets, the possibilities are endless. Every Letting or Estate Agent should look at […]

Sharers pay an average £360 per month for a room – which is 5% more expensive than anywhere else in Europe. The figures were revealed from a study comparing rents in Britain, France, Italy and Spain by letting firm Easyroommate.

Landlord Pavlos Chatzinopoulos was fined £2,515 for making tenants share with cramped rooms with tenants they did not know. Swindon Council swooped on the property after a female renter tipped them off about the state of the house in multiple occupation when a man moved in to her room with her.

A student landlord who charged a tenant £290 for cleaning two flies from a windowsill is under investigation by a landlord consumer body after a number of complaints. Campbell Property, based in Pewsey, Wiltshire, has removed accreditation from the UK Association of Letting Agents from its website pending an inquiry.

Buy to let lender Paragon Mortgages profits rose 12% to almost £81 million thanks to landlords building on their portfolios. Paragon returned to lending in September 2010, and the pre-tax profit represents the first full year’s trading as a lender since the onset of the credit crunch.

By Guest Columnist Ben Reeve-Lewis I work for a council in London. I’m the landlord’s nemesis, the bogey man, a Tenancy Relations Officer; the guy who prosecutes landlords for harassment and illegal eviction, the one who gets injunctions out against them, has them arrested, helps tenants claim damages against them, kicks doors in and pushes […]

There is a lot of focus and discussion on the Governments Housing Strategy released on Monday but there are plenty of other landlord stories to educate and entertain in our second issue of the week, including guest articles from the Property Maverick, Nick Stott, Vanessa Warwick and Martin Cunningham.

The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) have issued a warning to landlords, saying they will prosecute those “who fail in their duty of care to tenants” after a Walsall landlord was sentenced. Khalid Hussain was fined £2,000 and ordered to pay £3,000 in costs after he failed to replace a boiler that had broken down […]

Landlord’s Log, the Personal Blog Of Mark Alexander, the Founder of Property118 Earlier this week a comment was left on one of our articles by a property developer who explained in very simple terms why developers can’t afford to build. Right across the UK, building sites are being mothballed but why is this happening if […]

Build-to-let funded by private investors and pension funds is the solution to the UK’s housing crisis, housing lobbyists have told MPs. Unlocking billions of private sector cash to invest in a house building programme together with the government’s new housing deal would meet the country’s growing need for homes, says the British Property Federation.

Another important factor I like to consider is the “Equity Return on Cash”. Ideally the smaller the deposit, the greater the Equity Return on Cash. Today 15% deposit is almost a thing of the past, 25% deposit is now the norm. Unless its apartment new build and then it’s a whopping 35% deposit. Let’s now […]

Desperate sellers are ready to accept knock-down prices on homes for sale as financial problems and a lack of mortgages keep buyers away. Both Britain’s biggest online property portals, Rightmove and Zoopla, report homeowners are discounting their asking prices.

Leaky pipes and sinks cost the UK’s landlords £2million a day and over 9 billion litres of water a year, and accounts for a quarter of all insurance claims on flats, according to property insurance specialist Cadogan Keelan Westall.

How and Where to Find Property Bargains Welcome to the next four part episode of the “Property Maverick”. I will again try to make this episode fact filled, funny and light hearted. But the real funny stuff will come in “The Pros and Cons of being a Franchisee”, “The Bulgarian Fool’s Gold Rush”, and laughs […]

As I sit here in a Civil Court’s waiting room waiting to be called (here pursuing a tenant on behalf of a landlord), it makes me think that all this is a bit laborious and pointless. Why is the legal system being used for run-of-the-mill cases like these? Yes, I know that it’s hugely important […]

I’m an unashamed fan of U.K. coastal holiday lets. My husband Nick and I first started investing in them in 2008 as we saw the economic climate deteriorating and reckoned that people would start holidaying at home again. We’re now the proud owners of two high-occupancy holiday lets – one on the island of Portland […]

Isn’t it ludicrous that we can invest our private pension funds into ‘off plan’ Caribbean Hotel Developments but we can’t invest them into solving the housing shortage in the UK? We have wealthy Greeks taking their money out of their failing economy and inflating London house prices by investing there and yet we can’t use our pension […]

Landlords might think that rent is the only income generated by their property business – but they may need to tell the taxman about other money coming in as well. Deposits from tenants are probably the main other income from tenants – and the rule is that these deposits always belong to the tenant.