2 bedroom terraced offering great location and a good yield

This property is on for sale with Bush asking for offers in the region of £245,000.
Being perfectly situated on Newmarket Road this property allows easy and convenient access to the City Centre, Riverside walks, Marshall's Airport, A14, M11 and A11 meaning that it will capture a great tenant and is likely to rent for around £1200pcm so if you do your maths correctly this great little investment will earn you a minimum yield of 5.9%.

That's 5.9% if you pay the full asking price?

http://www.rightmove.co.uk/property-for-sale/property-52466447.html

Cambridge Buy To Let Yields only 4.29% – Should you look further afield?

I was at a recent business networking event in Cambridge, when a landlord (who it transpired had a couple of Buy to let properties) bent my ear on where the next hot spot town or city is to invest his money in and where the best rental yields are. Now it can be tempting to just look at Cambridge when growing a buy to let property portfolio, but there can be big differences in the amount of rental income you receive and how much your property will appreciate by considering other locations in the country.

Now regular readers of my articles of the Cambridge Property Blog know of my love of the ‘buy to let seesaw’. On one side of the seesaw is yield and the other capital growth. Landlords should be looking for a high rental yield so that they can comfortably cover any mortgage payments and make some profit from the income return, but you also want the property to rise in value over time so you can get some capital growth when you come to sell. However, high yielding property in say such areas as Arbury or Milton in Cambridge, (so the seesaw arm with yield on it goes up on one side), will suffer from low capital growth (so the other arm with capital growth on the seesaw goes down).  The relationship works in reverse as well, so in such upmarket areas as Trumpington, properties offer good capital growth, but at the expense of a decent yield.  

The North East and North West of the UK are landlord magnets for great yields. The average yield in Cambridge today is 4.29%, which when you compare with say Hartlepool in the North East, which achieves 7.73% or  9.43% in the Anfield area of Liverpool, doesn’t look too healthy. Now of course, these are only averages and some of my Cambridge landlords are achieving 6% to 7% on some of their Cambridge properties, but at the expense of capital growth. Anyway, after wasting a tank full of petrol up the A1 to Teesside or the M1 to the Home of the ‘The Reds’,  that Liverpool property, would have dropped in value by 2.2% in the last 12 months and the Hartlepool property would have dropped by 1.4%.

When you compare the long term house price growth, it gets even worse. Looking at the graph, Since 1995, property values in Cambridge have risen by 220.68%,compared with Hartlepool at 21.02% and Liverpool  at 90.11% – it just shows you shouldn’t always chase the yield because of the poor increases in property values in those two places. As I always like to explain to landlords when they either email me, pick up the phone or pop into my offices for a coffee (both my own and even landlords who use other agents (you are all welcome at ours), together with soon to be FTL’s (first time landlords)), a decent yield is important, but when you come to sell your buy to let property it would also be nice to make a decent profit.

At the end of the day, as a Cambridge landlord, you want to be making gains from both your rent and house price growth, particularly when you want to sell, because when combined, the rental yields and capital growth, that gives you the real return on your investment.
 

3 bedroom terraced house with a yield of 5.2%

 

Here we have a great little property investment offering a yield of around 5.2%.

On the market with Carter Jonas / Bradshaws with a guide price of £299,950 this property offers you great value for money, the location is great for capturing working professionals from near by Addembrookes hospital and is situated on the main bus route to Cambridge's city centre and would offer a monthly rental of around £1300pcm.

For full details please see the link below
http://www.rightmove.co.uk/property-for-sale/property-34274010.html?premiumA=true

2 bedroom terraced property investment with a great price tag.

Extensively refurbished to offer stylish accommodation, this modern free hold terraced house is ideal for first time buyers or investors. This property is located in a pleasant cul-de-sac on the south east side of the City and is on the market with Tucker Gardner with a guide price of £275,000.

Looking through the pictures this property is ready to let straight away and is likely to achieve a rental fee upwards of £1050pcm offering you a minimum yield of 4.6% with this in mind coupled with the great asking price for a pristine property you will be left asking yourself "What's there not to like about this property"?

http://www.rightmove.co.uk/property-for-sale/property-34703808.html

Where have all the Cambridge First Time Buyers gone?

 

Since the 1960’s more people have owned their own home than rented but, for many young Cambridge people, the dream of buying their own home is dying...or is it? Since the turn of the Millennium, in Cambridge (as in the rest of the Country) there has been a significant change in the proportion of people who own their own home in Cambridge. In 2001, 52.62% of homes in Cambridge were owner occupied, today the figure is 47.46%, a significant decline in such a short time.  Buy to let landlords can find tenants because young people say they cannot afford a deposit to buy unless they inherit money or are given a loan from the Bank of Mum and Dad

In Cambridge, only 22.66% of 25 to 34 year olds have a mortgage. When you compare Cambridge against the national average of 35.93%, it just shows how different parts of the country have different housing markets. However, the really interesting fact is this  ...Roll the clock back to 1991 and nationally, 67% of 25 to 34 year olds had a mortgage. After WW2, the supply of properties being built kept up with demand as millions of council homes were built (the most being built in 1950s, surprisingly under Tory Governments!). Also private house building increased in the 1950’s, but especially in the 1960’s and 1970’s, and as the Country  got more prosperous it meant that by 1971, there were more home owners than renters.

However, since the 1970’s, the population has grown but the number of new properties being built hasn’t kept up at the same rate, the result is that there have been huge rises of property prices in the early ‘70s, the late 80s and more recently between 1999 and 2004. Interestingly, since the early 1970’s, out of the 34 richest countries in the world, the UK has seen highest property prices rises.

95% mortgages have been available to first time buyers since late 2009, but with property prices rising by 220.68% since the early Spring of 1995 in Cambridge, as property prices have been rising and first time buyers have been saving, the amount they have to save is continually rising at the same time. The stress on saving even for that kind of deposit, coupled with the new stricter mortgage rules introduced in 2014, means that most 20/30 something’s in Cambridge are renting instead of buying.

The issue quite simply comes back down to a lack of new homes being built. In Cambridge, only 405 properties a year are being built whilst the population is rising by 1,501 a year. The supply of new homes has been limited by planning laws, local councils not having the money to build council houses, hard hitting green belt limitations, and our old friend NIMBY’ism.  With a rising population and net migration, especially from the EU, the mismatch between demand and supply is why we have the problem. Until Politian’s have the backbone to realise the Country needs a lot more decent homes built, the problem will just get worse.

In the meantime, demand for rental property will continue to grow because people need a roof over their head at the end of the day ......fact.

Property Values rise by 0.2% in Cambridge

Property values in Cambridge rose by only 0.2% in March. This follows several months of sluggish activity in the Cambridge property market in the run up to the Election, putting the average price of a property in Cambridge at £379,100, 9.2% higher than in March 2014.

 

Interestingly, the Council of Mortgage Lenders and Estate Agent trade bodies over the last few months have reported seeing a fall in mortgage lending and enquiries from prospective homebuyers. This is important because it comes amid an overall fall in housing market activity in Cambridge. Data from the Land Registry said completed house sales in Cambridge in the three months to January 2015, (the most up-to-date figures available) fell by 10.86% compared to the same three month period up to January 2014.

However, I believe that the slowdown in property sales in Cambridge is supporting Cambridge property values, as there is a shortage of houses coming onto the market. Even though in the whole of the first Quarter of 2015, Cambridge property value increases may seem subdued when compared to 2014, let us remember, property values are still rising well above the level of inflation. 

As I have said many times before, the population in Cambridge is growing at a much higher rate than the number of properties being built. This increasing demand for a roof over people’s head, which is outpacing the supply of new houses being built in Cambridge, is creating a severe imbalance in the Cambridge (in fact the whole of UK’s) housing market, thus making homeownership an ever increasingly distant dream for many of Cambridge’s potential first time buyers.

In fact, I still maintain the view that house prices are likely to rise by around 3 to 5% in Cambridge in 2015, even after taking into account this blip at start of the year. The reason being is that the rise reflects both strong economic conditions and steady market conditions with (and this is the most important factor) very low numbers of properties on the market. 

Many Buy to Let landlords know that investing in the Cambridge property market is a long-term strategy of 10, 20 even 30 years. Governments come and go, but unless Cambridge City Council start to build hundreds and hundreds of new properties a year to make up for the shocking lack of supply, Cambridge people will always want a roof over their head, and irrespective of which party is in power, if there aren’t any council houses and they can’t (or are unable to buy), a demand for rental properties will always remain.

 

As my existing Cambridge landlord clients will testify, whether you manage your property yourself, or another Cambridge agent manages your properties, everyone is always made to feel welcome when they pop in for a coffee at our offices in Cambridge to discuss anything to do with the Cambridge property market, how Cambridge compares with its closest rival towns. I don’t bite, I don’t do hard sell, I will just give you my honest and straight talking opinion. However, if you are too busy to pop into town, you could always visit the Cambridge Property Blog http://cambridgeproperty.blogspot.co.uk/ for advice, intelligent commentary and analysis of the Cambridge Property market.

2 bedroom duplex for sale in north Cambridge.

 

Here's an opportunity to purchase a spacious duplex maisonette which is located towards the North of the City Centre. This property is on the market with Morris Armitage for £200,000 with NO onward chain and boasts easy access to the A14 and Cambridge's Science Park.
This type of property would rent for around £895pcm and is currently let to tenants so you could possibly discuss keeping the tenants meaning an instant yield of 5.4%.
What are you waiting for this investment opportunity is all ready and waiting to go?

please see the link below for further pictures and information:
http://www.rightmove.co.uk/property-for-sale/property-52135409.html

Great opportunity to invest in the north of the city with a 5.4% Yield

This property is on the market with Haart with a guide price of £355,000 which for 4 bedrooms in Cambridge is great value for money.
Close to Cambridge's Science Park this property would attract working professional sharers and reach an estimated rental value of £1600pcm offering you a yield of 5.4% - All four bedrooms are doubles so there would be a potential for higher rent meaning a higher yield.

The property could do with a minor cosmetic overhaul so bear this in mind when you are making an offer on this and you could see your yield rise higher still - All in all another great property investment in Cambridge.

http://www.rightmove.co.uk/property-for-sale/property-52020614.html

Cambridge Property Market – Life after the General Election?

After the shock of the Conservatives returning to power with a majority at Westminster, all the potential issues and possible uncertainties of a hung parliament has lifted the cloud from the Cambridge property market.  Talking to other Cambridge agents, surveyors and solicitors in the area over the last few days, there are signs this has started a new impetus the Cambridge property market after a subdued six months, when an amalgamation of tougher lending conditions, a natural correction after the strong recovery in Cambridge property prices in 2014, and political uncertainty ahead of the General Election slowed demand.

Against the back drop of Labour’s election promises of rent controls and three year tenancies, some Cambridge buy to let landlords were waiting to see how these new policies would be implemented before they committed themselves to buying more property for their  buy to let portfolio. Now that uncertainty has been removed, the long term picture is very positive.

So, with all that uncertainty now removed, where next for the Cambridge property market?  Well with inflation at zero and with the Money markets happy David Cameron is still at No.10, the Bank of England have no reason to raise interest rates until 2016 at the earliest. As mortgage rates are at their lowest levels since 2010, landlords with large deposits will now be wooed by the mortgage companies in the coming months with low rates.

You see over the past couple of years, Cambridge landlords have benefitted from a booming Cambridge job market. Unemployment in the city has dropped to 1.3%, as a year ago, 1,149 people were claiming unemployment benefit compared to today’s 760. With more jobs and better pay, as the level of rents is directly linked to tenant’s wages, there has been an increase in the rental prices tenants are willing to pay for good quality Cambridge properties.

Some landlords might be nervous about Tory’s plans for the housing market in the next five years in terms of tenant demand for their rental properties. One plan is for Housing Association tenants to have the right to buy their property. These kind of tenants were never in the private rented sector and will actually increase the supply of properties in the housing stock in decades to come. The Government ‘Help to Buy Scheme’ has only helped to buy 110 Cambridge properties since April 2013. Considering 1,539 properties have changed hands in the last year alone in Cambridge, I don’t think it has made a huge difference to our local property market.

The biggest matter, when it comes to tenant demand of rental property going forward, comes from the shift in the mindset and attitudes towards renting itself. Twenty years ago you were seen as a second class citizen if you rented a property. In Cambridge, as in the rest of the UK (apart from Central London), renting continues to offer good value for money for tenants.  If you are an existing landlord in Cambridge or thinking of becoming one (or as we like to call you .. a FTL .. a ‘first time landlord’), then I must suggest you out seek specialist advice and opinion. Like many agents in Cambridge, we will happily give you our opinion on the current state of the  market and the advantages/disadvantages to investing in the Cambridge property market if you pop into our offices. However,  if time is at a premium, another source of information on the Cambridge Property Market is the Cambridge Property Blog: http://cambridgeproperty.blogspot.co.uk/

Stunning apartment with a 4.3% yield within a highly sought after block in Cambridge.

It's not often I get excited with investment properties with a yield of 4.3% but this one is a must see.
On the market with Bush this 1 bedroom apartment is for sale for offers in the region of £365,000. I hear you say "Well that's a lot of money for a 1 bedroom apartment" and my reply would simply be have you seen the potential that these apartments have to offer?

I have a few of these on my books and I can tell you that these apartments simply do not stay empty, boasting a concierge service, tenant only swimming pool, sauna and gym and extremely well kept and secure garden areas these apartments are highly sought after within the rental market reaching a monthly rental of £1300pcm

Not to mention the possibility of letting these as holiday lets, increasing your yield and making these truly hot properties.

For more information on this please see: http://www.rightmove.co.uk/property-for-sale/property-47191045.html

5 bedroom terraced investors dream in Cambridge

 

Looking through Rightmove today I have stumbled upon this little gem. Ok it's not so little but it certainly is a gem of a property.
Up for sale with Bush for offers in the region of £395,000 this appears too good to be true and looking through the pictures I can see that you may have to have a few of the rooms dulled down a little but generally all the aspects of a great rental property are already there.
This property boasts a great kitchen, good sized bedrooms and a large garden so once painted neutral it would certainly gain the attention of potential tenants with ease earning you around £2300pcm.
So if you was to offer the full asking price then you could be potentially making a yield of 7% - And that's if you offer the full price?

Please see the following link for all pictures: http://www.rightmove.co.uk/property-for-sale/property-51995420.html

Cambridge Property Investment with an instant 6% Yeild.

This 4 bedroom terraced house is for sale with Tucker Gardner for £400,000 and is situated in the fantastic rental location of Milton road in central Cambridge. This property is situated perfectly to capture all genres of tenants and has just been fully refurbished in neutral colours making it the perfect rental property for the Cambridge market.
This property would rent for around £2000pcm with the location being key, This property is directly between the city centre and the Cambridge Science Park making it perfect for the working professional or students alike.
With a property like this you will never be without a tenant as long as you get your prices right.
For internal pictures please see: http://www.rightmove.co.uk/property-for-sale/property-34308267.html

Cambridge Buy To Let Landlords Get A 1166% Return Since 1999

 

Buy to let is essentially different from investing in stocks and shares or putting money in the Building Society. Whilst these other investments (Building Society Passbooks, Stocks and Shares etc) are passive  ie once the  money has been invested it you leave it alone, with buy to let, things are more hands on, in fact it’s almost a business. One thing the landlords I speak to say is the fact that they like buy to let because it is both an investment as well as a business. It is this factor that attracts many of my Cambridge landlords – they are making their own decisions rather than entrusting them to others (such as City Whiz Kidz in London playing roulette with their Pension Pot).

So if you are investing in the Cambridge property market, you can earn from your investment in two ways. When a property increases in value over time, it is known as 'capital growth'. Capital growth, also known as capital appreciation, this has been strong in recent times in Cambridge, but the value of property does go up as well as down just like shares do but the initial purchase price rarely decreases.  Rental income is what the tenant pays you - hopefully this will grow over time. If you divide the annual rent into the value (or purchase price) of the property, this is your yield, or annual return.

I was talking to a landlord who bought a maisonette in the Verulam Way area of Cambridge. He bought a very pleasant 2 bed maisonette in 1999 for £59,000. It sold again in February just gone for £231,000, a rise of 291.52% in just over 15 years – a compound annual return of 9.53%

However, the real returns are for those Cambridge landlords who borrowed money to purchase their buy to let property. They have made significantly higher returns than those who paid 100% cash. If the landlord had borrowed 75% of the £59,000 purchase price of the Verulam Way maisonette on an interest only 75% mortgage, he would have only needed to invest £14,750 (as his 25% deposit... borrowing the remaining £44,250), but his £59,000 would be worth today, £186,750  (£231,000 less £44,250 interest only mortgage)... a rise of 1166.10% - a compound annual return of 18.44%... and I haven’t even mentioned the rent he would have received in those 15 years!

This demonstrates how the Cambridge buy to let market has not only provided very strong returns for average investors since 1999 but how it has permitted a group of motivated buy to let Cambridge landlords to become particularly wealthy. In fact, if this landlord had continued to remortgage the property as it went up in value, he could by our reckoning have had an additional two or three properties (albeit with larger mortgages but greater future potential).

As my article mentioned a few weeks ago, more and more Cambridge people may be giving up on owning their own home and are instead accepting long term renting whilst buy to let lending continues to grow from strength to strength. If you want to know what (and would not) make a decent property to buy in Cambridge for buy to let, then one place for such information would be the Cambridge Property Blog.

Great investment property situated in Fulbourn Old Drift with a 5.4% yield.

This semi-detached property is on the market with our friends Sharman Quinney for offers in the region of £400,000. Now a property of this quality would generally rent for around £1800pcm however boasting 4 bedrooms and a good location you could also go down the route of letting to sharers and potentially increasing you rental amount to as much as £2200pcm giving you a yield of between 5.4% and 5.8% and that's if you pay the full asking amount?

This property is of a great standard and would be ready to let instantly, Check out the rest of the pictures I think you'll be pleasantly impressed.

http://www.rightmove.co.uk/property-for-sale/property-34262529.html?premiumA=true

Are Attitudes to Home Ownership changing in Cambridge?

Speaking to a Bank Manager the other day in Cambridge, we got talking about the state of the Cambridge property market and whether we, as a Country, are turning more and more to the European style of property ownership, where it is the norm to rent as a opposed to automatically buying once you have a good job etc.

Even though a recent report by the Halifax stated homeownership remains a goal for 85% of twenty to forty five year olds, there is information emerging that attitudes in the UK towards renting your own home as opposed to owning it have softened, showing more and more, that renting is being seen as a life style choice.  In fact it is recognised in learned circles that the cycle of renting is also repeated by the fact that people who grow up primarily in rented accommodation are themselves more likely to rent than buy.

The biggest barrier often mentioned to buying a house is the claim that they are not buying property at the moment because of a lack of sufficient wages and by the high level of deposits in Cambridge, if a couple, both on the average Cambridge salary of £31,036 pa, assuming they had a reasonable credit history they would be showered with lenders offering them a 95% mortgage (a reasonable credit history means they haven’t defaulted on loans, paid all their bills on time nor got any County Court Judgements. Just because you missed just one credit card payment won’t mean you have messed up your credit score and your ability to get a mortgage) and they would need to find a sizeable, but nothing stratospheric, £12,800 as a deposit to buy a decent two bed town house or a very nice modern two bed apartment...  it comes down to the perceived capability of the youngsters in Cambridge to buy nowadays.

Interestingly, when I looked at the Cambridge figures, the average Cambridge tenant has a much younger profile than the English and Welsh average (the sub 24 year old can be partly explained by University, but it is the 25 to 34 year olds that are the surprise), as can be seen from the graph below.

So what does all this mean for Cambridge landlords and future Cambridge landlords? I honestly believe there is a difference between the hope and perceived capability of the younger generation to buy a home. Although homeownership is seen as advantageous by a majority, many tenants admitted in the Halifax report they are not taking the steps they need to purchase their own home

As the local authority aren’t building any properties in Cambridge, people still need a roof over the head, and that is why, as I mentioned a few weeks ago in the Cambridge Property Blog, the demand for rental properties will only continue to steadily rise in the coming decade. If want to know where the Cambridge Property market is heading and where you should (and shouldn’t buy), maybe the one place you should visit is the Cambridge Property Blog http://cambridgeproperty.blogspot.co.uk/or send me an email to cambridge@northwooduk.com

  

4 bedroom detached house for sale with a yield of over 5%

This perfect investment property is up for sale with Haart for £450,000 and boasts 4 large bedrooms which are perfect for letting to working professionals, sharers or a family making this property great for capturing tenants.

This property also boasts location being situated close to Cambridge's main and extremely popular Addenbrookes Hospital and has a low maintenance garden making this the perfect let. Being decorated to a great standard and having large rooms all round this property would let for around the £2,000pcm mark with a potential to reach higher giving you a minimum yield of 5.3%

To see more images of this great property investment please see:
http://www.rightmove.co.uk/property-for-sale/property-45250654.html

Your Pension could now buy you a Buy to Let property in Cambridge

In a recent article, I mentioned that pension rules are changing this April. It certainly created a few emails, with people asking questions about it. Therefore, this week, I want to look a little deeper into the subject of your pension and the Cambridge property market. George Osbourne, in last years’ Budget, announced pension reforms that come into effect this April, which will give people with pensions unprecedented access to their pension pot and the freedom to look for alternatives.
In a nutshell, after the 6^th of April, anyone aged over 55 will be allowed to withdraw all or part of their pension pot and spend it as they wish. Until now, you were allowed to take out a quarter of it and were forced to buy an annuity policy with the rest.

However, my readers always know that I like to tell it ‘as it is’. There are always two sides to a story, good and bad. Let me tell you the bad news first. There are some hefty tax implications by taking money from your pension pot. As before, as per the old rules, the first 25% can still be withdrawn from the pension pot tax free but, here is the sting in the tail, if you take more than a quarter of your pot (25%), anything above that initial 25% level will be taxed as income. So if you took the whole lot out, the first 25% will be tax free but the remaining 75% will be taxed at your income tax rate of 20%, 40% (or even 45% if you earn over £150,000 a year) .
.. and now the good news!

Under the old scheme, if you bought an annuity, when you died your annuity normally died as well. You would have no asset to pass on to your family. Also, the returns from pensions are awful at the moment. The best rates according to Hargreaves and Lansdown (big wigs in the City) state if you were 55 years old, the best rate you would get on your annuity pension would be 4.4% fixed for life (so it would never go up) or 2.2% but the payment would go up with inflation.  The sort of rates (also known as yields in the property investing game) being achieved in Cambridge are in the order of 3% to 5.5%.
The other aspect of property investment is how the fact property values have risen consistently over the last 50 years.  According to the Office of National Statistics, the life expectancy of a 65 year old male in Cambridge is 18 years and 9 months (its only 18 years 1 months in Peterborough). If we roll the clock back 18 years 9 months to June 1996, property values in Cambridge have risen by 209.5% to today .. you wouldn’t have had that with your pension!   But this is the biggest win, even by taking a hit in income tax now,  by buying a property, you buy an asset that you can pass on to your family when you die.... (or the cats home if they aren’t nice to you!).

So where next? It totally depends which strategy you are going to look at, one strategy is to look to achieve relatively small rental returns (ie low yields) in an up market area which has decent capital growth or, alternatively, another strategy is to buy properties in not so good areas known to produce a high returns (ie high yields) but low capital growth (ie how much the value of the property goes up). Now, I am not financial advisor, so cannot offer financial advice on what the best thing for you with your pension is. However, I can share my knowledge and experience of the Cambridge property market, what to buy, what not to buy and where to buy etc etc.  My thoughts on the Cambridge Property market can always be found on the Cambridge Property Blog  http://cambridgeproperty.blogspot.co.uk/

They Dont Make Them Like They Used To...Fen Ditton Investment.

The title is absolutely true and this Three Bed in Ditton Fields is such a good example of that. It offers bigger reception space and bigger bedrooms well as a fantastic sized garden compared to anything built after its era. On the market with Tucker Gardner it would not need anything doing to it and would rent at £1200, the asking price is £285,000 so expect a yield of 4.8%. Not bad considering it would rarely be empty due to location.

http://www.zoopla.co.uk/for-sale/details/35686154

No. Of Cambridge Rental Properties Set To Rise To 14,800 By 2021

I was having an interesting chat the other day with a couple of solicitors at a Cambridge business networking event, when the subject of a lack of property for first time buyers came into the conversation.  I followed the chat up with an email with my findings, findings that I would like to share with you today.

At the time of the last census in 2011, 3,401,675 properties in England were privately rented, of which it is estimated,  over 1.25 million were owned by private landlords. The rapid growth of buy-to-let is hugely controversial, especially as only ten years before that, there were only 1,798,864 properties under private renting in England. Buy to let landlords have been held responsible for forcing up property prices and preventing our younger generations from being able to buy. There is also growing resentment toward the billions of pounds in tax relief (estimated to be nearly £10 billion) landlords claim on their mortgage interest -tax relief which is not available to homeowners.

They may be asset rich thanks to recently rising property values, but let us not make the landlords the bogiemen they could easily be. Despite all these benefits enjoyed by private landlords, let us not forget the good they have done, especially in Cambridge.

Property values today in Cambridge are still 4.5% below the 2007 property boom levels (2007 being the peak of last property boom before everything dropped in 2008/9), yet inflation has risen by 26% in the same time frame, so in real terms, properties today are 21.5% CHEAPER than they were in 2007. Just think how low they would be without landlords buying all those rental properties in the city. Interest rates are at an all time low and first time buyers only need to save a £8,000 deposit to secure a lovely 1 bed apartment in the Southeast Cambridge area  with a 95% mortgage. Forget what the papers say, first time buyers can borrow money relatively easily on a 95% mortgage and nine times out of ten, it’s cheaper to buy than rent. So why aren’t people buying?

The number of people choosing to rent, either for lifestyle or economic reasons, has grown over the last 15 years. I also believe they will continue to grow for some time to come (as does every report on the subject). In fact I would go as far to predict the number of rental properties in Cambridge will have risen from the 11,170 properties recorded in 2011 to 14,800 by 2021. Sounds fanciful? Well in 2001, there were only 7,295 privately rented properties in Cambridge.

It is a fact that we as a Country are more and more turning into a European model when it comes to homeownership, where the norm is renting for the first ten years, as opposed to the norm from the 1960’s to 1990’s, where first time buyers were encouraged to buy as soon as they got a job.

Tenants, in particular, will also feel the benefit from potential changes in the market. The likelihood of interest rate increases in late 2015, existing economic conditions, combined with the uncertainty of new Government manifestos following the General Election in May will result in low demand for people to buy yet also put a dampening effect on increases in rent. As long as landlords buy the right sort of property, that allows for a reasonable yield, decent capital growth, everyone will be a winner. If want a  chat about what would make the best sort  a property that would offer that in Cambridge, then please email me on cambridge@northwooduk.com 

  

 

Fully Refurbished 1 Bedroom Apartment

 

Offered for sale by our friends "my online estate agent" is this one bedroom apartment that is absolutely stunning inside. It is newly built and has been advertised for students as the location is absolutely on point ! so why not buy it and rent it to those students who want quality but don't have the deposit to buy? Achieving £1100 pcm if you move quickly and get it for the asking price that's a 7.3% yield, before you say it YES you do have lease charges but even after this you still have a great investment.

http://www.zoopla.co.uk/for-sale/details/36303309