buy to let investment

This cautious advice from Thrugelmir is wise.
Any landlord of a single property is very exposed to encountering a bad tenant, who just might trash the building, pay no rent and cost you thousands to evict over a 4 - 6 month period of court proceedings.

Also the London property market does not look buoyant at the moment, so there's little compensation there in terms of return.

I used to have very good tenants, but I pulled out for that reason. There were too many risks.
Nowadays I feel my money is more secure in financial investments that I can completely control.
Dales

It happens too much, believe me.
Even more so in urban areas (as I understand).
Just google it and you will get a screenful of cases like this -
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6817389/Tenant-hell-leaves-house-filthy-state-evicted-landlord-faces-25-000-bill.html
House trashed, no rent paid, eviction legal fees incurred by landlord.
You or your letting agent might well be really stringent on checking out prospective tenants' credentials, but there's no real defence against tenants who turn out like this.
If you have 100 houses, it averages out.
If you have just one house let out, it is a disaster...and it's too much of a risk for me nowadays, thank you.
Dales

sixpence. wrote: »

Re tenant from hell - if I use a letting agent then can they just deal with that stuff?

No, they cant (and indeed, no they dont). The agent deals with some of the work but you still carry all the responsibility and the risk. If the agent doesn't do soemthing, doesn't fulfill a legal duty, its down to you.

If it's only one property is it honestly as much work as running a business? I don't know loads about it but that does seem a tad hyperbolic.
Its not as much work as running a business until it all goes pear shaped and then its far worse. Normal business clients dont trash the business's sole asset.

Why a rental property? - so it's either going to be a property OR stocks and shares but I already have a retirement stocks and shares ISA on the go (I'm turning 30 this year and started investing two years ago).so London property doesn't seem like a bad plan.

So you arent worried about the new tax treatment making letting especially unfavourable for high rate taxpayers), the proposed new laws on eviction and getting rid of bad tenants, declining London prices (historically much of a BTL's return has come from increasing property prices, both directly and indirectly) and threatened more stringent controls on letting from future governments?



You say a "retirement ISA". Do you mean a LISA? Have you considered increasing your pension contributions? What are you currently doing for that? Are you a high rate taxpayer or likely to be soon?



As for "This is probably going to sound really naive, but does this actually bloody happen?"

yep you certainly are naive and yep it happens all the time. Have you never watched an episode of "Cant Pay we'll take it away" ?

There are also numerous posts in here from naive LL's like you complaining about how their tenants are not paying rent, wont leave, needs legal action to remove, doesnt work on technical grounds, cant get their money back, etc etc etc.

p.s. show the numbers here from your actual proposed rental because you simply seem to have assumed that a profit is slam dunk.
There's been a couple of recent posts, one from a would be landlord one from an actual one, both of whom were actually making a LOSS on their rental,and there have been others from people talking about how much they make and when you look at the actual return they might as well have their money in a 2% savings account.