According to new research by Business Development Research Consultants (BDRC), there is significant polarisation in fortunes between ‘amateur’ private landlords (those who own four properties or less) and ‘professional’ private landlords (those with more than 20 properties).
In total, 7 per cent of private landlords questioned had been involved in some repossession activity by a lender in Q4 2008. A further 4 per cent had missed at least one mortgage payment in 2008.

Picture this. In the boom you decide that buy-to-let could be a profitable sideline and arrange mortgages to finance your portfolio. You snap up several inner-city flats, assuming that there will be demand from well-paid young professional tenants, although the area is already oversupplied with such accommodation, and salaries in the locality are modest. The gloss of prosperity you have observed in surrounding streets is financed more by credit cards than chunky salary cheques.
The downturn hits and you lose your own day job. You use the dwindling sums you are receiving in rents (tenants are few and void periods grow longer) to finance your lifestyle rather than pay your mortgages. You also disregard the all-important maintenance of your rental properties. The welfare of your tenants (your paying customers) is your lowest priority.

Buy-to-let is dead, or so the conventional wisdom goes, killed by a combination of falling prices and the drying up of the credit markets. Try telling that to Simon Gray.
After selling his portfolio of properties in Chelsea, west London, in spring last year (“more by luck than judgment”), Gray, 50, who runs a seafood-import business, has just bought not one but five new-build Barratt houses on the outskirts of Billingshurst, West Sussex. Although unwilling to reveal how much he has spent on the properties (two with three bedrooms and three two-bedders), Gray says he received a “substantial discount” on the properties, which were on sale for £299,955 and £226,995 per unit.

Buy-to-let lending volumes held up better those for the housing market in general, the City regulator reported today, although it said that this changed in the third quarter of last year.
The Financial Services Authority (FSA), which pulls together figures from all regulated lenders, said that new lending in general showed continuous weakening, having declined by 59% since its peak in the third quarter of 2007.

It may sound like the easy option, but home owners who think they can ride out the housing downturn by offering their properties to let rather than for sale face a nasty shock. This is a difficult rental market in which only the best properties are letting easily, and those “accidental” landlords who take a less than professional approach to renting out their homes are facing long and expensive void periods.
“Contrary to what people might think, the lettings market is not busy across the board,” says Tim Hyatt, head of residential lettings at Knight Frank. “As a landlord you have to be totally flexible and you need to treat the property as you would an investment property: it must be well-priced, neutrally decorated, and ready for someone to move into straight away.”

A group of buy-to-let directors defrauded innocent customers of millions of pounds and spent their money on luxury cars and racehorses.
John Potts, 60, Peter Gosling, 57, Natalie Laverick, 28, Peter Graham, 62, and Eric Armstrong, 55, admitted fraud offences relating to an estimated £80 million of their customers’ money.

“Pay for 12 - get one free”: this is not an offer for tins of beans at the supermarket but the latest in creative marketing from lettings agents. A glut of rental property on the market has forced agents to adopt supermarket-style selling tactics to win over potential renters.
“Free” months are one of many incentives that tenants can now choose from. As house prices fall, the increasing number of homeowners who are opting to let rather than sell has given bargaining power back to people who are choosing to sit out the downturn by renting rather than buying.

Mega-rich footballers have huge sums in property, but while old school buy-to-let investor Robbie Fowler profited, new build buyers such as Steven Gerrard and Wayne Rooney have lost out.
With wages of more than £120,000 a week and a fortune estimated at £35m, you might think the recession would have little effect on Wayne Rooney, but the Manchester United striker is already counting the cost of expensive forays into the property market.