Thinking of buying some property for letting...advice please.

Only do so if you have the financial AND emotional reserves to cope with the tenant-from-hell (or agent-from..) who forgets to pay rent for 7onths whilst you pay mortgage, legal costs to evict, repairs.

And calls you 10:38 Saturday evening to say toilets leaking:. For three days: onto sofas and carpet downstairs.

Repairs? Oh yes, pay them or judge will decide you are a wicked Landlord and give tenant more time.

Cheers! Artful:. Landlord since 2000 - most years I make money, but not always

We’ve owned several rental properties for about 15 years now. Mainly our experience has been positive but we have learned a bit which might be helpful. Firstly, choose carefully. A very cheap place might be a mistake. We bought an inner city terraced house first. It was sound but dated internally. We did it up ourselves and put it with an agent. We never had especially good tenants, the area declined, the house was used to deal class A drugs and was locked up by the police for 3 months. Finally we decided to sell up as we got fed up with it, sold it after 10 years for the same we bought it for. We made some profit on the rental but looking back, it wasn’t worth the aggravation.
Meanwhile we bought an ex council house next to a school, with a garden, in good nick, just had to decorate. A success, let to the same family for 10 years, virtually trouble free. A bit dearer, but a much more sensible buy,
We also have a flat we inherited, in a good location, popular block, again trouble free, let to same tenant for 10 years.
We also inherited a McCathy and Stone flat for over 50s, a disaster really, can’t sell it, huge overheads in management costs, luckily it’s let at the moment but given a choice we wouldn’t touch one of these with a barge pole!
So from our experience, yes it’s definitely worth it, but choose carefully, take advice from letting agents as to what’s successful in the area, if you get a good tenant don’t rock the boat by being greedy with rent, unless you’re very local to the property and don’t mind hassle use an agent, central heating boilers can be a nightmare, better to have an agent dealing with that, if you have to replace a boiler don’t be cheap, we learned that the hard way, and again choose carefully. Good luck!

I also agree with what's said above. Our first rental property was a 1 bed flat that my husband owned, and we just couldn't sell at the time. Not in a great area either. We did manage to make a little money renting, and eventually sold it, but the tenants were difficult and often left without paying. It was definitely more hassle than it was worth. Our current rental property was our home for 6 years. We knew this would be a good rental prospect as we extended, making it the only 4 bed in the area (apart from the very expensive 'luxury new builds, with a rental price tag to match). It's in a decent area. We pitched the rent slightly below market value, to give us a good choice of tenants. The current ones have been there 18 months, and it's working well. The only problem is the agency we use is not great, as unfortunately the highly recommended agency we signed up with were taken over by one that has a much worse reputation. Still, we are close by so if the agency isn't helping, we just deal with the tenants directly.