50% of Property will be Buy To Let?

Good Buy To Let News or Just dreams

Buy To Let News Release:- David Lawrenson, a letting expert, predicts that by 2026 let out or used as second or holiday home could hit 50 per cent of the UK housing stock....Lee Grandin from Award Winning Landlord Mortgages gives his prediction below.

“Do you agree that by 2026 over half of UK houses will be buy-to-let or second homes?"(send us your blog comments to leeg@lml.co.uk)

Lee Grandin, Managing Director of Landlord Mortgages responds:
“While David Lawrenson’s statement may seem far fetched, some of his reasoning behind this forecast is completely reasonable.

“Most first-time buyers struggle to get on the property ladder due to high house prices and if the current trend continues, we will increasingly see people who are resigned to renting until they are in their late forties or simply never buying at all.

David is also correct when he states that investors are increasingly choosing to put their cash into ‘bricks and mortar’ – you only have to look at the performance of the buy-to-let market in recent years to agree.

“However, I don’t believe that the ‘hire and fire’ culture is going to be one of the driving forces behind this movement. While admittedly we don’t tend to have the ‘job for life’ that many of our grandparents had, most people still want to own a home. Purchasing a property is a rite of passage and an essential part of life for most people who grow tired of pouring money into someone else’s pockets.

“So while I agree that the buy-to-let market will continue to grow over the coming years, I am sceptical as to whether all these market forces will lead to the situation David predicts.

“Indeed, while I may be the managing director of a company which would stand to benefit from such a move, I don’t think it would be particularly healthy for the market or UK society as a whole.

Buy-to-let is not for amateurs and if we go down this path, I think that we could face a situation where the market is flooded with dangerously ill informed landlords who could cause serious damage to both the housing market and the buy-to-let industry.”