Tenants and taxes

At the Property Investor Show, we grabbed interviews with experts on two of landlords’ least favourite topics: tenants and taxes.

First we spoke to Paul Shamplina from Landlord Action about the messes landlords get themselves into with troublesome tenants. Then, to keep the party mood going, we turned our attention to tax – grabbing Janice Parker from Rita4Rent to learn what investors should be thinking about in the constant tug-of-war with HMRC.

It was great to have their expert opinions on the show, and there was plenty of great advice shared – so have a listen, and we’ll be back with another interview from the Property Investor Show next week.

Resource of the week

This week it’s not a tool, a book or a piece of tech, but a tactic: try listening to audio material at 1.25x speed!

Most podcast and audiobook applications will let you vary the speed, and you can do it with YouTube videos too. After a couple of minutes adjusting, you’ll find you don’t miss anything at all – and with a bit of practice, you can push on to 1.5x and beyond.

The result? More education in the same amount of time. The only downside is if you meet us in real life you’ll think we talk reeeeally slooooowwlyyyy…

News this week

As expected, lenders have started to increase their rental cover requirements – effectively reducing the loan-to-value that can be obtained for properties that don’t yield particularly well.

Nationwide (including The Mortgage Works) was the first to move – as The Telegraph reports – increasing their stress test from 125% to 145%. That means with a mortgage payment of £400 (at the interest rate they test at), your rent would now need to be £580 rather than £500.

Is it really a “crisis”, or “brutal” as described in the article? Well, not really…but it is another indicator that the South East in particular could be heading for a cooling off.