How to make HMOs work for you

Many investors are drawn to HMOs by their seemingly high returns, but then deterred (us included) by the amount of work they seem to involve.

And there’s no getting away from it: HMOs are more effort than your standard single let. Nevertheless, there are steps you can take to boost your chances of making HMOs work for you – including some handy “HMO hacks” to automate or delegate a hefty portion of the management.

We talk about:

• How to identify a suitable HMO location
• Why you need to think very carefully about the spec and the services
• Options for outsourcing the management
• Some self-management systems you can put in place to drastically cut down your time input
• What might be ahead for the sector

Resource of the week

Thank you to Andy Norman of our Leeds meetup for pointing us towards streetcheck.co.uk.

We’ve featured a few similar tools before, but this seems like it could be the best – pulling together a whole range of different data sources into one handy place. All you need to do is enter a postcode, so head over and try it out…

News this week

Congratulations to a group of landlords who took on the West Brom building society in court, and won!

The case revolved around a tracker mortgage offered by West Brom, who promptly used the small print to renege on the deal when the base rate plummeted. The landlords affected had to take the matter to three separate courts, but they eventually prevailed – earning a refund for themselves, and a rare good news story for us!