Posts with tag: rental property

The Office is the Least Used Room in British Homes

Published On: December 13, 2016 at 10:14 am

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The office has been named the least used room in British homes, knocking the dining room off the top spot, according to new research conducted by Ocean Finance.

The Office is the Least Used Room in British Homes

The Office is the Least Used Room in British Homes

The study found that the office sees less action than any other room in British homes, with more than a third (37%) of respondents admitting that their family spends the least time in there.

Previously consistent at the bottom of the tally, the dining room now ranks as the second least used room in the home. Once a place where families would enjoy quality time together each evening over dinner, use of the dining room is still dwindling. However, with Christmas now less than two weeks away, more families may be making use of the room yet again.

When it comes to spending time together, households are more likely to do so in front of the television. Almost seven in ten (68%) said their family spends the most time in the living room.

Landlords should take the research into account when renting out a property – it may be worth converting an office into another bedroom, knocking the kitchen through into the dining room to create a more open space, and focusing on making the living room as comfortable as possible.

The spokesperson for Ocean Finance, Ian Williams, says: “An office in a house is a favoured attribute when buyers are looking for a new home, however, the reality is that it is more than likely to be used as a large storage cupboard, barely entered into, than its original purpose.

“The same could be said for the dining room. Not that long ago, the dining room was the main place the family would assemble, to enjoy a meal as a family at the end of the day or to eat a hearty family breakfast at the weekend. However, today, this space has fallen into disuse in many homes across the UK.”

He adds: “Christmas could be the one exception to the rule, as families usually decide to celebrate the festive occasion by eating together in a more formal space than the kitchen-diner or living room – will there be a revival in your home?”

Remember that many British homes are being rented from private landlords, so focus on what families are looking for to secure happy and reliable tenants.

Letting Your Property in Winter – 4 Useful Tips

Published On: December 13, 2016 at 9:28 am

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Finding new tenants for your rental property during the winter months can prove to be a lot harder as compared to all other times of the year. Generally, people tend to avoid moving house in winter, as it poses its own set of problems. However, there are still people moving home during the cold months, for one reason or another, and if you channel your efforts in the right direction, you will be able to find new tenants for your rental. Here are a few tips on how to go about letting your property in winter.

  1. Diversify your marketing

There are different routes tenants take for finding a rental property. About 80% of people search predominantly online. However, if you want to reach as many potential house movers as possible, you should use all other marketing channels you have available too. Don’t neglect the remaining 20% of people – one of them might be your next tenant.

Apart from placing ads online, use the local to let boards to reach people searching for a rental in your particular locality.

Using local classifieds are another marketing strategy you should make the most of. These are preferred by people who want to avoid using letting agents and paying their often high fees.

Letting Your Property in Winter - 4 Useful Tips

Letting Your Property in Winter – 4 Useful Tips

Diversifying your marketing strategy will let you capture a wider audience and, especially in winter, the more people know you are letting your property, the better your chances for closing the deal.

  1. Offer incentives to potential tenants

It’s a great idea, especially in the slow winter months, to offer your potential tenants some kind of an incentive for applying for your rental property. Here’s what you can offer them:

No application fees

Letting agents can sometimes charge as much as £300 for applying for a rental. Many house movers try to avoid that fee by searching for properties to let from private landlords. Advertising that you are not charging any application fees can bring a surprising amount of applicants your way.

Half a rent, or no rent at all, for the first month

This is a really lucrative offer, especially around the holiday season, when tenants usually have limited funds. Sacrificing half or one month’s rent can help you find a tenant a lot faster, and offering this incentive will certainly pay off.

Flexible terms on furniture

If your tenant needs a certain furniture piece, like a wardrobe or bed, it pays off to arrange that piece of furniture for them rather than losing a tenant and a month’s rent. Similarly, if you are letting a furnished property and the tenant wants to bring in their own piece of furniture, like a bed for instance, you should remove the bed from your rental home to make room for it. Being flexible on furniture can help you find a tenant a lot faster, and it is a thought worth considering in the winter, when there are far fewer people who are willing to go through house removals.

  1. Come up with fresh advertising

Usually, a property newly put up on the market is let within the first two weeks. However, winter months can be slower and if your rental has been on the letting market for more than two weeks, you should consider freshening up your advertising. Re-write the property’s description, take fresh photos, point out the good sides of your rental, etc. Re-launch your ad and the audience will view it as a new rental property on the market.

  1. Adjust the price

Last but not least, if you are finding it hard to find tenants for your property in winter, you should reconsider the rental price. Check out what your competitors are offering, re-evaluate your property, decide on a realistic letting price and bring that down by 5%. This discount will draw in more potential tenants, as they will know they are saving in the long-term. It can turn out a lot costlier to lose one month’s rent rather than offer a 5% discount monthly – it adds up to just 60% of a month’s rent over 12 months.

If your property is vacant at the end of autumn or your current tenants are about to move out before winter starts, you should plan well in advance and start advertising your rental at least a month before it becomes vacant. As people are more reluctant to go through house relocation in the winter months, you should do your best to make your property more appealing to potential movers. These four tips would be a great way to start.

Rogue landlord fined for dangerous property

Published On: November 3, 2016 at 12:30 pm

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A rogue landlord has been ordered to pay over £1,000 after being found guilty of possessing an extremely dangerous rental property.

Landlord Joe Burgess, of Newark Road, Lincoln , failed to adhere to housing regulations and left his property in an appalling state of repair. Some issues with the property included unsafe electrics, no central heating, damp and a leaking roof

Fines

West Lindsey District Council served plenty of notices on Mr Burgess. After he failed to comply with these notices, the council were left to fit a considerable bill in order to make the property safe.

At Lincoln Magistrates’ Court, Burgess was found guilty and fined £440. In addition, he was told to pay £400 in legal costs, £376 in investigation costs and a victim surcharge of £44.

Rogue landlord fined for dangerous property

Rogue landlord fined for dangerous property

Councillor Sheila Bibb, chairman of the council’s Prosperous Communities Committee, said: ‘This is the second successful prosecution we have undertaken this year and demonstrates the council’s commitment to tackling criminal and rogue landlords. We hope this case sends a clear message to landlords that we will use all of the powers available to us if they do not comply with our requests when we serve formal notices. Nobody should have to live in unsafe accommodation in the district.’[1]

‘In this day and age there is no excuse for landlords who choose to ignore the law and we intend to continue to pursue them wherever their properties may be in our district. I would like to thank officers for their excellent work on this case,’ she added.[1]

 

 

[1] https://www.landlordtoday.co.uk/breaking-news/2016/11/landlord-fined-for-extremely-dangerous-rental-property

Gumtree – Friend or Foe?

Published On: November 3, 2016 at 12:01 pm

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James Davis – Portfolio landlord & property expert

After being a landlord for 22 years and becoming increasingly frustrated with the lack of quality tenant find services for landlords, James started Upad. Upad has mastered the intricacies of online to provide landlords a service they can rely on. In this article, James outlines the pros and cons of using Gumtree to find tenants.

Is it time to stop advertising on Gumtree?

Gumtree - Friend or Foe?

Gumtree – Friend or Foe?

Gumtree, with its village noticeboard approach to classified adverts, has long been the alternative choice for rental property seekers.

The benefits are simple: Landlords reduce costs, as they can advertise their properties without paying for magazine space or property agents. Tenants save time and money, with the ability to flick from home to home, striking deals and dodging agency fees.

Right now, Gumtree is still highly popular. But is it about to be left behind as spam, adverts and unreliable tenant leads flood its user base? In today’s digitally-focused market, should landlords forget about Gumtree?

Around the houses

Where rivals Rightmove and Zoopla have refined their user experience and functionality, Gumtree remains an unspecialised, classifieds website with a rental section, alongside used cars and musical equipment listings. This gives the specialist sites the upper hand, since their search functionality is specifically geared towards happy house hunting. Let’s look at the location criterion as an example of how specialist sites are better for users:

On Zoopla, you can draw lines on a map to define your search area, save the map and come back to it later. On Gumtree, the most refined you can get is village level, such as Hertford. There is no advanced search function to combine areas either. This is clunky and time-consuming for users who are increasingly trying to cram flat hunting into dead time, like during commutes.

Weak stock, fewer options

Gumtree’s problems mean the site only attracts a small fraction of the housing stock on the market at any one time. This might seem attractive to a landlord; a good property on Gumtree will have less competition than some of the bigger property portals.

Having fewer properties, however, means fewer tenants will bother visiting the site – supply could eventually outstrip demand. Furthermore, due to a laxer approach to posts and how they are moderated, Gumtree has become inundated with spammy and out-of-date ads.

The low quality of Gumtree’s site in turn attracts low quality users. Research by Upad found that the quality of enquiries from Gumtree users was lower than enquiries made via the leading online property portals. It took four Gumtree enquires to every Rightmove lead to successfully let a property.

To discover the most effective way to find tenants in a digital age, check out Upad, the UK’s largest online letting agent.

Best Way to Prepare Your Property as a Landlord to Rent to Students

Published On: November 1, 2016 at 11:38 am

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Renting property to students is a path trodden by many landlords for several reasons. Firstly, students tend to rent for the entire duration of their programme. This translates to constantly occupied property and consistent income for landlords. Secondly, there is a lower risk of rent default amongst students, as the norm is to include rent in calculated academic expenses for the year.

However, as much as renting your property to students might be profitable, only properties adequately prepared to cater to the student audience will be inhabited.

It doesn’t matter whether you are planning to rent your property to students for the first time, or you’ve had student tenants for decades and your property needs to be renovated, here are the best ways to prepare your property:

  1. Provide white goods

You student tenants will prefer properties with items such as washing and drying machines, refrigerators, vacuum cleaners and others. Providing them with such items increases comfort and makes cleaning easy. In addition, this helps the students save the money they would have spent on cleaning and maintenance bill at the end of the year. Most students will ignore your property if they have to use a laundrette or go through the inconvenience of doing laundry at a friend’s house.

  1. Embrace quality furnishings
Best Way to Prepare Your Property as a Landlord to Rent to Students

Best Way to Prepare Your Property as a Landlord to Rent to Students

For the modern day student, shabby and chic no longer work. Your property will command more attention if it has higher quality finish. You should focus on providing simple, easy to clean and modern furnishing.

Look beyond installing the typical furniture (think bed, wardrobe and desks) and consider adding utensils and gadgets. Extras like flatscreen TVs are not out of place. They are now common in modern student accommodation, especially where rent is marketed as all-inclusive. These little extras will not eat deep into your income and can impact positively on the attractiveness of your property on property advert sites like The House Shop. You can also comfortably charge a little bit more on a monthly basis.

  1. Consider providing free wifi

You can stay on top of your competitors by offering free wifi for your student tenants. Fast and cheap broadband is a big draw for tenants. The internet is more important than ever for modern day students. Saving them the hassle of finding their own internet service will surely impress most of them.

  1. Stick to dark colours

It’s a good idea to choose darker paint colours for students, even though it is common knowledge that using neutral colours may appeal to the average tenant. You can avoid wear and tear while keeping your property looking clean and smart by using dark colours such as dark brown and grey.

  1. Keep privacy in mind with layouts

In many student properties, the physical layout is very important. Even when students live in large groups, they do not want any compromise on privacy. This is why properties with separate suites and multiple bathrooms are more appealing. However, this shouldn’t rule out a well-furnished communal room for housemates to converge in. The room can be a recreation room or a standard large sized living room.

  1. Incorporate electric instead of gas

As mentioned above, student life is a new experience for most of your target audience. Incorporating electric instead of gas into your property will reduce accidents that may occur with people cooking for the first time for example. Regardless of what the insurance policy looks like, you don’t want to hear about a fire incident at your property at any point.

  1. Make the flooring easy to maintain

Wooden floors are regarded as the best option for the average tenants, but for students, it is not a practical option. Cheap and easy-maintain options such as linoleum will help you avoid expensive maintenance while reducing your initial spending. Do you have wooden flooring in the living areas already? Consider using lino in the bathroom and kitchen. These are two points that see the highest degrees of wear and tear, as they require regular cleaning.

Follow the above guidelines to help you prepare for your student tenants, keep you property fully rented at all times and keep maintenance costs at affordable levels.

17m Adults Have Paranormal Experiences in Their Homes

Published On: October 31, 2016 at 9:46 am

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Somewhat worrying, but timely, research from Ocean Finance has found that around 17m adults in the UK have had paranormal experiences in their homes.

17m Adults Have Paranormal Experiences in Their Homes

17m Adults Have Paranormal Experiences in Their Homes

These experiences include seeing ghost-like figures (9%), seeing orbs (6%), unexplained movement of objects (7%), and inexplicable noises (13%).

The study found that women are more likely than men to say that they have had a paranormal experience, with 30% of women having a strange encounter to 25% of men.

Ocean Finance also revealed that these unusual experiences do not just occur in our own homes, but many people have had a strange feeling when viewing a property to rent or buy.

The most common strange experiences that have occurred when viewing a property include feeling cold, eerie and dark. Almost one in five adults say that they decided not to buy or rent a property due to a negative feeling.

More positively, tenants and buyers also report that some properties have an unexplained positive vibe, making the home seem cosy, warm and inviting. For landlords looking to let a property, you’ll be pleased to know that a quarter of all adults decide to rent or buy a home because of a positive feeling.

Ian Williams, of Ocean Finance, comments on the findings: “During this spooky season, it’s interesting to find out that many people take into account their emotional response to a property when deciding whether it’s going to be their new home.

“Perhaps it is reassuring that the vast majority of us don’t think that our homes are haunted. But it’s still surprising that quite so many people do believe they share their home with something else. Those with a rational approach might point towards noisy plumbing or creaky floorboards as more likely explanations. Either way, luckily mortgage lenders don’t yet require people to disclose non-living residents!”

Have you or your tenants ever experienced something strange in your rental property? Don’t put off future renters with your ghost stories… even if it is Halloween!