A bank chief has used a national newspaper interview to make a stand in favour of buy to let landlords and private renting in general.
Nigel Terrington, chief executive of the Paragon Bank, has told the Sunday Times that it’s time to bust some myths about buy to let, which he describes as “an incredibly misunderstood product.”
He says that in only one year of the past 25 have buy to let mortgage arrears been greater than in the owner occupation sector, while insisting that the vast majority of professional and portfolio landlords have no intention of quitting the rental sector.
However he is not blind to the challenges facing all landlords and in particular small scale amateur ones.
He tells the paper’s Business section: “Everywhere landlords turn they hear they’re bad people and profiteers and they wait for the next bit of government to whack them over the heads. It doesn’t create a conducive environment with which to encourage investment.”
Terrington says landlords already face 168 pieces of legislation with the Renters Reform Bill likely to add more.
There is also an intriguing paragraph which reads: “Terrington reveals he is working on ways of helping long standing professionals who want to retire from their investments to leave the market.”
You can read the whole article here although for some readers it may be behind a pay wall.
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Can't read it but nice to know someone is making the effort to balance the argument, just wish the NRLA would do a bit more.
All the Amateurs are in Government and City Hall.
I read the article, very supportive of landlords. However, they are heavily into BTL mortgages so need to keep us sweet.
I am really glad that one of the banks have come out in support of the landlords, I get Paragon are a major player in this field and he is protecting his companies position. Beadles About should take note and support the banks statement.
Nice to hear some support but I take offence at the idea that smaller scale landlords are amateur. I consider myself a small scale landlord with 7 properties but am by no means an amateur. I am considering leaving the sector though - partly because I am tired of the constant heaping of new costs and vilification on our heads and partly I would like to now spend some of my hard earned on a nice retirement.
With 7 properties I think you will be considered a medium to large Landlord. Small normally is 1 property.
My accountant has 150 Landlord's he looks after, I was his 2nd largest Landlord when I had 14 properties, the next nearest to me was 5 properties but vast majority just had one property.
I am now down to 7 properties and will be getting smaller for the very reasons you have mentioned.
More than 4 is considered portfolio.
More than 10 is large portfolio.
It always gets me that so many lenders will only lend to non portfolio landlords. They are far more likely to have no experience of so many things purely because they only have one or two properties. A major repair or non paying tenant is far more likely to cause a small landlord far more of a problem than it would a portfolio landlord. Even as a portfolio landlord with 16 properties and over 25 years experience I still occasionally face situations I have never encountered before.
Agreed Jo it's called spreading the risk, if one of my tenants stop paying hopefully the other 15 will be paying so this compensates for the lose of one rent
We have gone from 15 down to 5 ( and zero in next two years) as we are fed up with regulation, villification, and aggravation from the government, Shelter, Generation Rant et al. LLs are voting with their feet. Paragon best find another income stream.
Very good point, maybe its time for Paragon to look at other markets!
I've gone from 12 to 8.... And I'm not stopping there... Enough is enough....
This is very sad to see those LL’s selling up and still some people are in denial that its happening.
So if 10 would be a large portfolio what will we call the others with dozens of properties. I see one with 300 and there are bigger ones than him for sure so they had been getting loans on multiple properties, buy to let loans caused this before which it didn’t happen with Commercial loans. Some like to speculate about some landlords being Loan free and not affected so much, that being the case there’s only one reason for this they have paid it off, while others had been adding more & more properties to their portfolios, nothing paid for and now many in trouble.
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