A two bedroom town house on Wolfsbane Drive, Tamebridge, Walsall, WS5. The asking price is £125k with Purple Bricks (0121 721 9601). The Full property details can be found here.
Located in the highly popular and very desirable Tamebridge estate, speaks volumes as to the location and therefore the potential for long term letting.
A 3 bed terraced house on Birchfield Way, Yew Tree, Walsall, WS5. On the market with Bairstoweves (01922 312791) and priced at £130k. Full details can be found here.
I think I’ve created a new word! Yes, I said ‘rentirement’, not retirement. Let me define it: rentirement , Renters who are currently in their 50’s and 60’s who don’t own their own home but rent their home, privately, from a buy to let landlord.
In Walsall, there are just under 1416 rentirees and this number is growing steadily! How…?! Read on to find out…
The truth is that these Walsall people are prospectively soon to retire with little more than their state pension of £155.95 per week, probably with a small private pension of a couple of hundred pounds a month, meaning the average Walsall rentiree can expect to bring in about £200 per week once they retire at 67.
The ‘Rentirement’ Time Bomb…
This 2 bed semi is situated on Segundo Road, Delves, Walsall, WS5. On the market with Paul Dubberley (0121 659 6109) and priced at £130k. Full details can be found here.
Properties in this area are turning up for sale at reasonable prices and coupled with its popularity and long term rental propensity, it just makes sense.
A two bedroom terraced house, Sorell Drive, Tamebridge, Walsall, WS5. Ideal for a buy to let (BTL) investment opportunity. Marketed Bairstow eves (01926 312791) and at a very reasonable £110k asking price. You can find the full property details here.
Situated in the highly popular Tamebridge estate, which is very conducive for long term letting.
I was recently reading a report by the Home website which suggested that landlords are selling en-masse their buy-to-let investments due to increasing burdens on them in the buy-to-let market. Their findings suggest the number of new properties that came onto the market nationally (for sale) jumped by 11% across the UK as a result.
Those increasing burdens include new tax rules coming in over the next 3 to 4 years and the announcement that all self-managing landlords (i.e. landlords that don’t use a letting agent to look after their buy-to-let property) will soon need to register with a compulsory redress scheme to resolve tenant arguments and disputes; as Westminster wants to heighten standards in the Private Rented Sector.
Interestingly, a few weeks ago I was chatting with a self-managed landlord from Bloxwich, when I was out who didn’t realise the other recent legislations that have hit the Private Rented sector, including the ‘Right to Rent’ regulations which came in to operation last year. Landlords have to certify their tenants have the legal right to live in the UK. This includes checking and taking copies of their tenant’s passport or visa before the tenancy is signed. Of course, if you use a letting agent to manage your property, they will usually sort this for you (as they will with the redress scheme when that is implemented).
Over the weekend I had an email from one of my Blog reading friends. I thought I would post this below and discuss in this week’s Blog post as it may benefit the rest of my friends who follow the Walsall Property Blog…
Landlord’s Question:
”Dear Salek,
Over the past two years I have had three different tenants in my rental property in the Delves area of Walsall. At first each of them came across like ideal tenants. However, not long into each of their tenancies, problems started to arise. To cut a long story short, between the three tenancies there have been months of non-payment, plenty of damage to the property and harassment (in the sense that I was called over 40 times in the space of 4 weeks with requests to change light bulbs, locking themselves out of the property etc).
Why am I attracting these tenants? Is this a common thing with being a Walsall landlord?’’
My Response:
One of the best things I love about my job as an agent is helping Walsall landlords with their strategic portfolio management. Gone are the days of making money by buying any old Walsall property to rent out or sell on. These days, property investment is both an art and science. The art is your gut reaction to a property, but with the power of the internet and the way the Walsall property market has gone in the last 10-15 years, science must also play its part on a property’s future viability for investment.
As a property professional I use many metrics (as do others), when deciding the viability of a rental property i.e. the price, the average rent, the yield and one you may not be too familiar with is – an average value per square foot.
However, another metric I like to use is the average rent per square foot. The reason being is that it’s a great way to judge a property from the point of view of the tenant … what space they get for their money. Now of course, location plays a huge influencing factor when it comes to rents (and hence rent per square foot). Like people buying a property, tenants also have that balancing act between better/worse location, more vs. less money and size of accommodation (bigger and more rooms equalling more money) and where they live (location) verses making ends meet.
During my rounds in Walsall town centre this weekend I bumped into one of our Let Only landlords who I hadn’t seen for a while. I’m going to call her Ally Monie just for the fun of it! We decided to have a catch-up over a coffee inside the new Co-Op on Bridge Street (lovely it was too!!). She told me about the shock and dismay when she recently visited one of her properties after 3 years!
It’s ok, it’s not one of those horror stories that you hear where there was a cannabis factory in the loft, or there were four other people living in the property that shouldn’t have been or worst still the property was deliberately trashed, or is it…
Ally owns a number of properties and used our services to provide our Walsall Tenant Find Only service. She didn’t need an Agent for management, agency fees are money for old rope, and she had plenty of time to manage.
A good 18 months has passed since annual rental price inflation in Walsall peaked at 10.7% (June 2016). Since then we have seen increasingly more humble rent increases to 7.3% in November 2017. In fact, in certain parts of the Walsall rental market over the autumn, the rental market saw some slight falls in rents. So, could this be the earliest indication that the trend of high rent increases seen over the last few years, may now be starting to buck that trend?
Well, possibly in the short term, but in the coming few years, it is my opinion Walsall rents will regain their upward trend and continue to increase as demand for Walsall rental property will outstrip supply, and this is why…
The way I see it is this…the counterbalance to that improved rental growth would be to meaningfully increase rental stock (i.e. the number of rental properties in Walsall). However, because of the Government’s new taxes on landlords being introduced between 2017 and 2021, that means buy-to-let has (and will) be less attractive in the short term for certain types of landlords resulting in fewer new properties being purchased to rent out.
Walsall Property Blog 
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