» The Landlady
Letting isn’t easy
Back in the days when I used to invest in property – when I had enough money to indulge in such pastimes – I was an avid reader of supplements and articles relating to investment in bricks and mortar.
Increasingly – and, as more and more people became investors – a surfeit of investment, design and décor magazines and supplements appeared. I have managed to steer away from such literature for the past year or so, preferring to re-read favourite books like The Magus, which is much more fun than reading about someone in Norwich’s vast portfolio, or how an elderly couple from Humberside converted a barn in Tuscany using their own surplus facial hair, on a budget of £5.
The only newspaper I buy nowadays is The Guardian on Saturday, if only to get rather annoyed by the smugness of it all, and also to be petrified by the thought that I could be turning into a typical Guardian reader. In spite of its wholesome parts, the Saturday tome regularly recommends expensive restaurants, clothing and furniture in a rather The Daily Mail in The Guardian’s clothing type of way. So I was therefore quite alarmed to read the recent backlash against buy-to-let landlords in the Money section. Talk about biting the hand that feeds it.
"A great deal of time was spent taking calls from tenants at 5am because the loo seat wobbled"
I was an early buy-to-let investor and a great deal of my time over the past ten years has been spent plumbing, painting, financing, re-financing and taking calls from distraught tenants at 5am because the loo seat was wobbling.
I have now sold all bar three of my flats. Of these, two are let on a long lease at a much reduced rate to a housing charity which supports vulnerable people. Since I have been a landlady, I have always purchased Christmas gifts for all my tenants and attended meetings with freeholders and cared for the buildings where my flats are situated.
BTL has certainly created competition between landlords. Frankly, who would want to go back to the cruddy lets and dodgy landlords of ten years ago? But, I agree that a proportion of new BTL investors are only interested in the money.
On the subject of money, it annoys me when people who should know better bleat on about ‘tax breaks’ for BTL landlords. Yes, landlords get tax relief on running costs, but they also pay tax on profits on an annual basis. And that’s without including the dreaded capital gains tax. When I sold five flats to pay off my ex-husband, roughly 30 per cent of the money went to the Inland Revenue as CGT. The other 70 per cent went to my ex-husband, who then bought another house with it. So the amount of money that I earned after eight years of hard work was precisely zero.
But there’s always a bright side. Because of BTL, I almost own an exceptional house, which, because of selling another BTL property recently, I can afford to a) renovate for the first time in ten years and b) live in without lodgers for the first time in six years.
Because of BTL, after I’ve paid the tax man, I shall have enough left over to buy a few nice things for the kids and I. Which is just as well going by the style recommendations in the Saturday Guardian magazine, because you need to be a property tycoon to afford them.
