The most worrying time for any landlord is the time between tenancies – the void period.

When your resident decides to move on, you will be given anything between one month to three months’ notice. It really is at this point that you need to decide if there is anything you will need to do to the property before your next resident moves in.

For any tenancy over five years, you need to consider, as a minimum, should you need to redecorate those areas of heavy usage? Heavy usage areas includes the hallway, living room and kitchen. For any tenancy over seven years you may want to consider looking at new flooring. To answer any of these questions, you will need to refer back to the last visit carried out to the property or talk to your agent to obtain their opinion.

Part of your decision has got to consider what the value of the changes you make will be. For that you need hard data.

February rental data

So this means the average rental for a standard two bed cluster now stands at £850pcm.

Sometimes there can be quite a few clusters on the market which means that you have quite a bit of competition. This is where looking at your void period comes into play. Are you going to attract a resident faster if you have given that home a spruce up? The answer is definitely yes.

How do the number of bedrooms affect rental growth?

For the PE27 area you can see that the highest year on year increase is with four bedroom properties.  Believe me – area does matter, as growth in PE29 for a four bed home has only seen an increase of 7.5%:

Why is this? To be honest I can only put it down to the fact that more people are looking at PE27 – at the moment both areas have similar breakdowns on the type of stock available:

How do you achieve above-average increases?

There is a huge supply and demand issue in the private rental sector (PRS) – there are not enough homes for the number of people looking.

This will explain the average rental increases above. However, we have categoric proof that people will pay more for a good product.

This means at the viewing stage your property needs to be in tip top condition – which will include a recent or new kitchen / bathroom. The property must be clean and, when it is cold outside, you need to make sure that you have put the heating on.

Over the last few months, we have been able to achieve up to £250 more than the last rental for the same property. Purely by having everything I have mentioned above.

We call the upgrade of any home ‘future-proofing’ because by spending money on upgrades now you are going to stay well ahead of the competition and attract the best resident who will be happy to stay for a longer period.  Tenancy lengths have also increased from this time last year and are now three months longer at 48 months.

If you want any advice on what rental you should be looking for you or where you should look to buy an investment property just call us on 01480 494939.