Are you a professional landlord, who lets out property for a living and has a large portfolio of rental homes?
Or maybe an accidental landlord, who lets their property due to work relocation, property inheritance or because they couldn’t sell their property and needed to move on?
The chances are you fall between the two traditional definitions of a landlord.
A study investigating who are the individual landlords providing private rented accommodation reveals that just under 40% of landlords appear to have ended up letting property without the initial purpose being a buy-to-let investor to rent at a profit.
The results of the research, funded by the TDS Charitable Foundation, show that 61.4% of landlords had bought a property with the specific intention of renting it out. However, 22.9% of landlords originally bought the property to live in themselves and 5.4% bought it to let to family or friends.
A further 10.2% invested for other reasons, including intending to make profit from property through, for example, buying to renovate and sell at a profit, but then letting the property instead.
Many landlords, particularly the 64.5% of those surveyed who owned three or more rental properties, rely on the income they receive from tenants to cover the cost of their buy-to-let mortgage.
However, this study shows 15% of landlords remortgaged their own home to fund a further property purchase, and just under 30% own a rental property without a mortgage.
More worryingly, 19.5% of rental property owners did not carry out any research before becoming a landlord. A further 39.6% got their information from the internet, 20.8% read landlord magazines on how to let a property, 26% sought advice from friends or relatives, while just 24% relied on the knowledge of rental specialists such as Denhan Guaranteed Rent.
Only 27.7% use property specialists such as Denhan Guaranteed Rent to let and fully manage their properties, with 38.1% of landlords preferring to find tenants and manage the properties themselves.
The remaining 34.2% of landlords surveyed use an agent to find tenants but then take responsibility for the management of the property themselves. This includes complying with legislation affecting tenant deposits, gas and electrical safety and evictions – plus collecting the rent owed to them and maintaining the property.
This is despite 3% of landlords admitting to not knowing their legal obligations to their tenants compared with the 24.7% who claimed to be “perfectly aware” of their legal obligations.
Perhaps the most surprising statistics this survey came out with are that 49% of landlords are aged between 55 and 70 and that 34.6% of all landlords rely on the rental income they receive as their primary source of income.
It should be remembered that this research is based on the results of 205 individual landlord responses. Denhan Guaranteed Rent’s own research reveals the majority of all landlords who get in touch with us are looking for security when it comes to ensuring they get their rent paid.
The Denhan Guaranteed Rent Scheme provides landlords with an assurance that we will pay your rental income for up to five years. We work how you work, from let-only to full management. If you have just one buy-to-let property or are an experienced landlord with a large portfolio or rental homes, our business is to help you maximise the return on your investment, with the added bonus of guaranteed rent.
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