Get out while you can – Increasing regulations make owning a property portfolio more costly than the profit

Over the last week, an influx of Property118 landlords rushed to contact the team at Landlord Sales Agency – a company known for being experts in property portfolio exit strategies. The question wasn’t so much whether now was the time to sell our portfolios, but more how.

With so many properties on our books, the vast majority of us are looking for a solution to sell the whole portfolio in bulk, regardless of whether or not there are tenants still in the properties. For Shauna, a landlord of 30 years, selling straight away in bulk was crucial. Like many of us reaching our golden years, Shauna knew that the property portfolio she’d built up over the years was starting to become a financial ball and chain. It was obvious she needed to get out while she still could, but traditional Estate Agents and many private buy-to-let selling services just weren’t working. They either took years to sell or required her portfolio to be split up into smaller chunks for sale. That just wasn’t an option, and so like many Property118 landlords, she chose to place her trust in Landlord Sales Agency.

It makes sense: our property portfolios have become these machines we’ve built up over the years, which used to be creating a profitable monthly income but, when they stop doing that, the last thing we want is to then deal with the painful stress of managing the sale of the portfolio in painstaking ‘three properties at a time’ pieces, chunk by chunk.

Selling the whole thing in one go might sound like a strategy reserved only for auctions that take a hefty percentage, but Landlord Sales Agency are specialists for a reason. We have a powerful database of over 30,000 buyers who want to buy whole portfolios and who are alerted every time we have a portfolio to sell.

We focus on a quality fast sale, rather than a cheap fast sale, we ensure that our buy-to-let portfolios are sold not just fast, in less than 28 days, but for an extremely attractive 80% – 90% of the value. It’s a no-brainer deal when all landlords have to do is call us. We take the whole thing off your hands and manage the entire sale in record speeds.

There’s no one like us out there, and we’ve built up an unbeatable record for helping landlords. Most landlords who contact us are like Shauna, and we’ve got the best team in the business to get the sale done in days rather than months or years. For Shauna, she decided to keep 10 properties and give us 23. All of them were sold in one go within 5 days of listing. We don’t have to upsell our service, the results speak for themselves.

But why are so many landlords desperate to sell now? And why are so many wanting to cash in and get out of the market? The answers are looking right at us, and it’s only getting worse:

1. The financials – interest rates are going up and inflation is about to go through the roof, which will have knock-on effects on landlords on tracker mortgages
2. Section 24 taxation costs – landlords don’t know whether they can incorporate or may not have the ability to incorporate. The results are that landlords may end up paying more tax than they’re making in profits
3. Trying to sell your properties to solve some of these financial issues when you’ve got tenants in situ, some of them long term, is a problem for many landlords. Where do you turn?
4. Regulations – current regulations are costing landlords: rewires and refurbs. But there’s, even more, to come with EPCs and EICR which can cost £10,000 per property from next year
5. Section 21 notices are coming in to make it more difficult to evict tenants, and without an eviction it’s harder to sell
6. House prices could drop as a result of inflation, it’s not worth the risk of waiting
7. As the cost of living increases, will tenants be able to afford the rents? Are we looking at a future with thousands of rent arrears?

It’s an overwhelming list, but it’s clear and present and becoming very real. It’s time to sell, and landlords like Shauna are making the right decision by getting out now.

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