Hertford Landlords and the Buy To Let Market..............

www.hunters.com

I was having an interesting chat the other day with a Hertford landlord when we were looking at another property he was thinking of buying. The property wasn't on the market with our agents but as I am always happy to take a look at any potential buy-to-let purchase's he was asking my opinion. We got talking about the Hertford Property Market and this landlord brought up the subject of a report he had read that stated almost 1.8m new rental homes are needed by 2025 to keep up with current demand from tenants. He wanted to know what this meant for Hertford.

Some commentators said last Winter that buy-to-let was about to die, what with the new stamp duty changes and how mortgage tax relief will be calculated. Others even said 500,000 rental properties would flood the market nationally in the 12 months after the new Stamp Duty rules came into force on the 1st April 2016 as landlords left the rental market. 

The fact is, as a country, we are facing a precarious rental shortage and need to get Hertford and the surrounding areas building in a way that benefits a cross-section of the local society. 

Of the 21,540 households in Hertford, currently a large proportion live in the private sector. Thankfully the new housing minister Gavin Barwell detached Teresa May’s new administration from the Cameron/Osborne laser-like focus of just home ownership to solve our housing issues, saying “We need to build more homes for every single type of person needing a home and not focus on one single tenure”.

The private rented sector became a stooge under David Cameron’s watch and still, with increasingly unaffordable Hertford house prices, the majority of new Hertford households will be relying on the rental sector in the future to house them. I can only say Westminster must put in place the measures that will allow the rental sector to flourish. Any restrictions on the supply of rental property will push up rents (bad news for tenants), thus side-lining those members of Hertford society who are already struggling.

"Your local property experts, our advice is free but our knowledge is priceless" 

  

           

I have been in and around the Hertfordshire property market for over 25 years, starting as an estate agent in the county town of Hertford and now running a successful lettings and property management company based in Stanstead Abbotts. I have let and managed property all over Hertfordshire from the area that I currently work to Wheathampstead where I owned and managed a lettings & estate agents to Watford and surrounding areas where my company acted as a marketing agent for one of the largest property management companies in the country”