The letting agents who cried wolf?
If your own data undermines your warnings about rent increases it might be best to keep quiet.
Another month, another Association of Residential Letting Agents (ARLA) warning that the buy-to-let tax changes and a crackdown on letting agents’ fees will inevitably result in higher rents.
But if ARLA actually bothered to look at the data they gather from their letting agent members, they might pause for thought.
Every month they ask members whether they’re seeing rents increase; here’s a graph I’ve made from the results since January 2015.
Clearly the situation has not become worse but better for tenants.
And here’s a funny thing. The tax changes were announced in July 2015, which prompted many professional landlords to pause adding to their portfolios but also produced a rush in the first quarter of 2016 from many people motivated by getting into buy-to-let ‘before it is too late’.
Rent increases became less common from July 2015 to December 2015, then more common during the rush to beat stamp duty, then dropped off again.
It’s almost as if the transfer of a property into the private rented sector (or from one landlord to another) actually increases rents.
