Alternative ways to invest in property

This week our friend Pete Matthew is back, guiding us through alternative ways to get exposure to property – without owning it directly.

We discuss different types of “collective investment” vehicles (such as REITs, OIECs and a whole bunch of other acronyms) as well as investments that track property rather than holding it, such as ETFs. During our chat we get to the bottom of:

• Why it’s useful to look at alternatives to holding property directly
• All the different options, and how to tell them apart
• The pros and cons of these types of investment
• How to research the prospects of different opportunities

If you enjoyed this episode, please check out more of Pete’s fine work at Meaningful Money

Resource of the week

If there’s anything you have to type out over and over again – like a property address, or even the template for a document – this resource will save you a lot of time!

It’s called a text expander, and it sets custom shortcuts for longer pieces of text. For example, you could set it up so typing “8ks” inserts “8 King Street, London W1 8QQ”.

Rob D uses Atext for Mac, and a popular Windows alternative is Phrase Expander.

News this week

Just as the UK prepares to bring in the restriction on mortgage interest relief, Ireland is scrapping something similar!

The Telegraph reports that a law introduced in 2009 to restrict finance relief to 75% is going to be gradually reversed by 5% per year, due to its negative effects on the housing market.

This doesn’t necessarily prove anything when it comes to the UK of course, but does lend strength to landlords’ arguments that this is unlikely to end well…