According to the attendees to our recent buy-to-let community meetup, the biggest concerns for landlords this year is that lower consumer confidence impacts the market, and that there is huge uncertainty around changes in BTL regulation.
At the event, hosted in our London offices, we heard from property expert Kate Faulkner on what she thinks are the biggest issues set to impact those with buy-to-let property investments over the year ahead - including regulations such as SO21 and Letting Agent regulations.
It’s clear that landlords have deep concerns about the future of their industry, due to the sweeping tax changes started several years ago. The landlord population in the UK in 2019 was at its lowest level since 2012, despite the number of properties owned by the average landlord being the highest since 2009. We believe this shows continuing confusion around the changes in BTL regulation which is being felt most by the smaller, part-time or accidental landlords. We’re now seeing many of these accidental landlords leaving the industry — a trend also seen in the increase of ‘company’ rather than ‘individual’ buy-to-let structures.
As a measure of more cautious economic outlook from landlords, our data team found that for Habito’s BTL customers, the 5-year fixed-rate product remains the most popular — doubling in popularity from 21% in October 2016 to 46% in October 2019. That said, it still isn’t as popular as it was a year ago — having seen a dip from its peak of 48% in April 2019.
Kate Faulkner, Industry Expert commented,“Making sure landlords know the rules and regulations that could impact them, will better set them up to provide the best housing required for the 4.5 million people who rent in this country. It’s an uncertain time for landlords — we’ve seen a raft of changes impacting their property investments. Keeping up-to-date with any and all the implications has really never been more important.”
You can watch more of our findings, and listen to Kate’s fascinating presentation on our YouTube channel below.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKp4wq6E0dE&t=502s
To find out more about Habito’s BTL mortgages visit habito.com/borrow-with-us. To register your interest for the next Habito BTL meetup, visit our eventbrite page here or our Facebook community group here.
