£666/month=about 6% of the capital of £130K. There is nothing which could safely provide that given current interest rates. Can your flat/shop provide £666/month? safely? after all expenses?

What I would do? Definitely sell everything as is for £130K-£140K. The hassle of looking after property hundreds of miles away could be significant. Use the money to re-structure your finances - pay off debts, set up emergency pot, invest in some share funds, pay more into pension etc etc.

Yes shop earns 666 after expenses. Shop is fairly low maintenance, no costs.

Flat done up would be 400 a month to rent out but would need thousands invested to do it up and then I would loose % on manegmant fee.

Your two threads on this today - this one (https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showthread.php?t=5840420) and this one: https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showthread.php?t=5840422 seem similar to the thread you started last year here: https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showthread.php?t=5667966

If they're all about the same flat perhaps you would get better results and responses by using just one thread!

Zandeman already different people have commented on the two threads/ I need as much advise as I can get.

Who knows who will be looking into investments and not at pensions who may have that incredible break through idea. Im feeling extremely desperate right now! Does it matter to have two threads running, one is about investment yields, asking what I cAN get that yeild on whatever the shop is worth.

£666/month=about 6% of the capital of £130K.

The shop is worth less than the whole so 666 on....80 grand?

Are you ready to be a LL? Have you researched all your legal obligations? It's not as simple as getting a tenant in and taking home the money. There's lots of hoops to jump through.

You don't have the money to do the flat up, so I assume you won't have the money for any emergency repairs that need doing when you get a tenant in there? I'd sell up, and if you really want to be a LL then use the money to buy a property nearer you rather than hundreds of miles away.

The flat would be SOLD AS PART OF LEASHOLD IE 999 YEARS.

The LL part is for commercial property, no i dont want to become a landlord for the house.

You still have responsibilities as a commercial LL as well.

How are you going to raise the money to do the required work on the flat before you sell it? If you can't raise that money, then it seems your only option is really to sell the whole lot and invest the proceeds. Being hundreds of miles away, that's definitely the option I would choose.

The questions were already dealt with on your original thread almost a year ago which Zanderman linked above.

On that thread, one of the early answers was that if you did not have that property, and had inherited the fair market value sales proceeds instead, would you choose to buy that investment in a run down flat hundreds of miles away, out of all the investment choices in the world? No of course you wouldn't,. So sell it as it is, and take the cash.

You laughed at that and agreed that of course you wouldn't buy it if you didn't already have it. It doesn't make any kind of sense to choose a flat or a rental shop over having the cash, especially when it needs money and effort spending on it and you are not local, don't have DIY skills, or experience running a (commercial or residential) lettings business let alone one hundreds of miles remote from where you live with worries over quality of tenants etc.

The people on the thread who had pretty much all told you to sell up, said that it was a serious point, not a joke and you should take it seriously. You said you understood it but it was a funny way of putting it into perspective like that. It's not the thing you would buy of you got the sales proceeds from it.

And then you went back to talking about maybe selling the flat but keeping the shop, on the grounds that although the shop had had empty periods, bad tenants doing a runner etc when your father owned it, it made decent money when the tenants weren't running.

You should have sold it all a year ago like everyone suggested. You should still sell it all now, like people are suggesting now. You are waiting for someone on one of the several threads to come up with an amazing idea and help you have the breakthrough moment where it becomes clear what you should do. Are you going to come back another one year from now and try again to ask for new opinions? You should have had that breakthrough moment last June when someone told you that if you wouldn't choose to buy that place with the cash that it's worth, you should not choose to keep it..

You said it was amusing to get that clear perspective - but the logic is used in business and investing all the time. If you wouldn't want to buy something because the ownership proposition is not the best potential use of your money or time, don't keep hold of it. Dump it and take the cash.

It doesn't really require you to have a fresh investment idea for the money you raise just yet. It will take a while to sell anyway. All you need to know is that a commercial premises with flat above, hundreds of miles away, is *not* the best use of your wealth. Whether the alternate use of your wealth is adding to your pensions or filling your investment ISA with investment funds or some other long term property based investment local to you, the one thing we all seem to be quite certain of is that having a six figure sum tied up in this property, is a silly thing to have when you could just take the cash for the property in its current state.

Splitting the property is an idea if you can do that effectively and cheaply, and do refurbishment at cost price etc. Buy you are likely to be selling out to a professional investor who has a portfolio of this sort of stuff and industry contacts for getting cheap supplies and reliable labour to do a refurb job, and will do it at lower risk than you because he has a whole portfolio of other things going on.

Trying to change what you have to make a bit more money out of it when you sell it is a noble idea but not a very practical one. Just play the cards you are dealt, and get the money. Then later, once you have it in your hand, decide on the various compromises between spending that money on yourself or your mortgage or improvements on your own property,, or investing for income, or investing it for less income and some longer term gains, etc.

Thanks bowlhead99,

I decided to sell the flat a year ago - I had a buyer - a friend lined her - her flat was seemingly sold very quickly but unfortunatly during the sale a nasty issue cropped up which - has TAKEN A YEAR to resolve and during that time the goal posts on the sale have changed somewhat.

I took everyones advice on board and I am extremely grateful for anyone taking the time to respond.

You said "Splitting the property is an idea if you can do that effectively and cheaply, and do refurbishment at cost price etc. Buy you are likely to be selling out to a professional investor who has a portfolio of this sort of stuff and industry contacts for getting cheap supplies and reliable labour to do a refurb job, and will do it at lower risk than you because he has a whole portfolio of other things going on"

I am not touching the flat to sell my friend has said she would take that on, but her money is now lower than it was a year ago.

Its been an excrutiating long year waiting and waiting BUT ....IN THAT YEAR I have been getting 600 a month from the shop.

My husband and I are on a low income even this small increase has been a good thing...which is why I would be loathe to just give that up.

I have no one to talk this through, I struggle to understand some concepts I have been let down by agents and solicitor first time round, I dont think my tennant was in then I have come through all that - learning the hard way...so I am sorry if you feel I am doing something wrong by posting again, but I I wouldnt mind myself - because there is a reason for that and the goal posts have changed since the last time I posted.

You dont sound equipped to maintain this asset.

Sell up.

What you say makes sense I guess, but you said you *had* a buyer, not quite sure if it was your a friend or another person that your friend lined up (" a friend lined her")..and now they have less money and you still need to pay for creating the leasehold, separate water works etc. You mentioned in your first post the flat needs ten grand of other work, but you say you're not going to touch it to sell. So we assume the buyer's going to buy it cheap from you at £40k and do that work themselves, even though "her money is now lower than it was a year ago"? Presumably her money being lower than a year ago doesn't change the open market value of your flat.

If your own money is tight, you can't really afford to do your friends favours by splitting a flat off from the test of the property and selling it to them on the cheap. It may still be better to just sell the whole thing to a developer or professional landlord.

I'm struggling to follow some of the wording, eg "I dont think my tennant was in then I have come through all that". Your tenant was in what? In the property paying you rent? Making an offer to buy the property?.

If you create a new lease for the flat as a separate address, but are the landlord of that lease (ie owning the freehold to it) then you still have the maintenance obligation for when it needs a new roof and you have to front the money before trying to recover a fair share off the leaseholder who's "under your roof and above your foundations" along with your shop. It's not as much hassle as being a residential landlord but still involves responsibility.

I can see why having rent from a shop rolling in each month is attractive. But if you've had 100% occupancy and no issues, that's probably beginner's luck. You should be putting a chunk of it aside for issues and the times it's vacant etc. What happens when the flat's new owner occupier has a bust up with the commercial tenant below them? Huge water leak damages both of the properties and you're stuck in the middle of both of them. The tenants of the shop stop paying for a while, trash it and do a runner like previous ones did to your dad, etc.

When you own commercial premises and it's too far away for you to monitor and control, it will worry you because there are lots of things that can and do go wrong, even if it has been painless so far. It's only painless because the less than average amount of pain is being offset by a better than average run of luck.

My dad made a few mistakes and tried to chase people for money when it was obvious they had none. i am very much of the mind that if someone stops paying thats it - move onto the next one.

The shop wasn't ever trashed.

When I posted before I am not sure I had a tenant in the shop below.

The price of the flat stays the same.

"and you have to front the money before trying to recover a fair share off the leaseholder who's "under your roof and above your foundations" along with your shop"

I would put money aside from the flat sale for this sort of thing however it concerns me that the person in the flat be it my friend or whosoever may not have enough to pay for things like that. I would have to assume not.

But a roof is a once in a life time thing. One good thing about it being inherited is that i know the issues that have cropped up with the shop and how intensive its been to manage it. It hasn't been painless - however it was still providing income for relative until very late in life...until he was too disabled and infirm to manage it.

The other thing that puts me off keeping it is having to deal with other humans for my living...

The thought of the money in other types of investment is very attractive.

All I can say is that I have friends who bought a house just round the corner as an investment- they were forever being called out by the tenants, then clearing up the mess between tenants, redecorating etc- and this house was only 5 minutes walk away!
It was pure hassle....... after a few years they sold it.... and peace returned.

Another friend bought a flat as investment and had problems with tenants, then unoccupied for months so no income. Don't know what the situation is now.....

Personally I would sell the whole thing, shop & flat, get the money in your hand and then decide how to proceed