An increasingly popular method of buying investment property over recent years has been to invest in buy-to-let properties. These are properties in towns or cities and rented by locals who can’t afford to or don’t want to buy their own property to live in. As a buy-to-let landlord you hope to maximise your rental income by renting out the property for large chunks of time at once – a minimum of six months, and you hope for much longer. Your rental income should cover your mortgage outgoings and other expenses to bring you a net income, and, of course, the property should go up in value over a reasonable number of years.

Popularised by a number of television programmes, buying investment property that is need of renovation or redevelopment has also become a well-known way to make money in recent years. The theory here is that you buy a property in need of repair or modernisation, do it up, dress it up and sell it on for a nice profit. The dangers are that your renovation budget will be stretched so much that it will eat into your profits, and the time taken will also be “dead” time when you still have to make mortgage repayments on the property with no income from a tenant.

This entry was posted on April 22, 2008 at 7:23 am and is filed under Property Investment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.