I still have quite a bit of money tied up in UK residential property and I am still interested in metrics which relate to this investment. I wrote the other day that information about yields is hard to come by. In fact I mis-spoke, as findaproperty.com has some excellent data available on its website here. Essentially yields are now (and have been) at around 4.5% throughout the UK, the only places where you can get a significant uplift being Scotland and the North East, where I would guess that the extra hassles and lower credit quality of the tenants entirely nullifies the yield advantage. In fact, given the overwhelming dependence on the public sector in those two regions, this premium seems very modest indeed.
I went to the London Property Network event in Piccadilly last night. It was my first time, and I think I'll go again. The drinks (for the West End) were reasonably priced, and there was a sense of energy (or perhaps just desperation) amongst the participants. I met a number of interesting providers, some of whom I could imagine doing business with, others of whom were simply too good to be true, including one who claimed that he could find me a property yielding 12%, locally in the UK.
The event was a mixed bag, with providers outnumbering investors by a big margin. This was nice for me as an investor, but most of the services did not entice me. The sorts of thing on offer were:
- overseas investment, especially in Brazil,
- property sourcing agents promising to find distressed sellers who would be happy to sell their property for 75% of the correct market value,
- people still pushing lease options
- people offering to magic away tax liabilities,
- some very well established professional services companies offering block management, ground rents investments, lease renewals etc.
New BTL investors now seem to be pushed all the way into HMOs, because only with those can the yields support the sort of penal rates charged by the lenders. My own experience of HMO ownership is almost entirely negative, so I won't be joining the crowd, as usual.
If anyone fancies coming along to the next event, drop me a line and we can meet up, there, or before. It's probably advisable to eat first as there is no food provided, or available to purchase, and eating isn't really compatible with networking.
