Hello and welcome to Property Investments UK. In today's video we're going to be looking
at specifically what type of property investment strategies that we're seeing that are really
making an impact in 2017 and beyond. And what we're going to be focusing on in our long-term
property plan. So that's talking five, 10, 20 years plus.
Now there's been lots of changes in property during the last sort of 12 months from a tax
perspective, and then also from a legislation perspective. Now this impacts everybody in
the chain from developers, through to landlords, through to tenants. And it changes the dynamics
and the fundamentals of what type of property investments are going to be working. So buy-to-let
is still very much the corner stone of our property strategy going forward. We have some
good quality locations that we still have some buy-to-let properties on, but we just
try and compare and match that with higher yielding opportunities and other types of opportunities
that are going to kind of weather any potential storm from a tax or legislation perspective.
Now when it comes to the government's kind of understanding of it, everything we've looked
into, the people that we've spoken to, they are certainly making strides to set it up
more for a corporate type owner, or investor to be investing in wide stream property development
sites, rather than what's currently the case where there's lots of individual properties
owned by individual landlords. Maybe one landlord has a couple or a handful or properties, rather
than one large portfolio that as hundreds or thousands of them. And there's a couple
of reasons as to why that might be, but without getting too distracted on those particular
elements, what I want to consider is, based on the changes, based on where we see tech
and all other types of housing requirements going in the next five to 10 years timeframe;
what sort of strategies are we looking at today and also in the future to try and match
that and to make sure our properties are performing very well over the long term.
So the first thing is developments. Development sites where you're able to acquire one property
on a particular site, or a whole site and develop out depending on your type of strategy
that you want to be involved in, I think, are very valuable today. There's lots of growth
happening in different areas of the market. There's lots of tenant demand that's very
strong in lots of areas, and there's an increase in rental yields very often as well in those
locations. Developments focus gives you the value and the potential to add value on those
particular sites. So rather than buying an existing property, buying something that you
can gain some initial value on. So maybe it's an off plan site that you can purchase today
at discount that inherently locks in some value on that project, rather than a additional
type of property. Those types of development sites are very valuable then going forward
because of how property prices and demand are potentially shifting.
The second things to consider is how the sharing economy is working. Now this is massive in
a whole range of different industries and it's becoming destructive as well for a lot
of industries. If you think about maybe Air BnB for accommodation, how it affects the
hotel marketing also Uber for taxis. There's lots of different industries that are coming
in to a shared economy basis where people are wanting something that's low cost, affordable,
easy to access, and housing is certainly one of those. So there's lots of different strategies
now that have become more and more prominent in recent years. They have been available
to invest in previously as well, but maybe not quite as mainstream. Things like HMOs,
so houses of multiple occupation. Things like serviced accommodation, providing
short-term lets. Those types of strategies can give very high yielding returns, while
still investing in very good quality geographical locations. But the principal, ultimately,
behind those, the sharing economy I think is what's driving it. So anything that's potentially
geared around the sharing economy, we are looking into for ourselves, for our own portfolios,
and also working with clients on for their portfolios as well. But as of right now, 2017,
HMOs are very strong, serviced accommodation are very strong. Anything that's potentially
shared where you can increase some form of return on a particular property investment
is performing very well. The third strategy today that we're considering
as well is trying to match the traditional approach to property investing with a more
modern approach. So if you consider quite mainstream vanilla buy-to-let type properties,
they will always, I believe, be in demand from a tenant perspective. However, there
are much easier ways to invest in those types of opportunities now then there were certainly
in five years ago but definitely 10, 20 years ago. So if your focus was on straight-forward
buy-to-let, and you wanted to look at quite mainstream, quite vanilla type properties
in good locations, but you maybe didn't have large deposits on day one to invest or you
didn't have the funds available right now, there are lots of other opportunities. Things
like crowd funding, for example, allows you to get access to a range of different developments,
a range of different buy-to-let opportunities, where you can invest with the crowd a short
amount of funds over a shorter time frame. So some buy-to-let projects might be a 3,
5, ten year time frame for some investors. Whereas crowd funding can often be from 6
months up to usually maybe 3 to 5 years on average. So the time frame is shorter, the
access to investing in those opportunities is easier, it's quicker and also the amount
of money you have to invest is a lot smaller than what you might invest in a traditional
type of bricks and mortar type investment. So hopefully that helps give some context
in terms of how some, I suppose, modern improvements are coming into the housing market. What we're
looking at for our own portfolio going forward, and some different strategies to maybe consider.
And any questions, don't hesitate to ask. I look forward to catching up with you in
the future. All the best. Take care. Thank you for watching this video. If you
like this content and you'd like to join our free online property training course, we've
got a link for it on this page and in there we cover a range of different property strategies
to help you get started, either building a long-term property portfolio, or creating
cash flowing property business. We also look at ways to increase your return on investment
with any of the properties you're maybe considering, and we also have a couple of cheat sheets
and downloadable documents in there as well. Simply click on the link to join the free
training course today.