There are a lot of ways of launching yourself into the real estate business. And if you are really close to the business, opportunities might be even more diverse. And that is because ‘diversification’ is a trend and it creates niches of investments one can miss as an outsider.
UK is about to become a world leader for ‘for speed, simplicity and an open approach to data’, when it comes to real estate transactions. This is the goal the Land Registry set for 2018 and it should be reached once digitalization is in place – 6th of April 2018.
The process will become simpler, faster and cheaper while at the same time the integrity and security of the register against threats from cyber-attacks and digital fraud will be strengthened…
But what are the implications for those acting on the real estate market: sellers and buyers?!
Details in the article on Property Wire:
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Before buying a home, it’s essential to know whether it’s freehold or leasehold. It’s the difference between owning your property outright and having a landlord.
Owning a property freehold means you own the whole building and the land it stands on. Most houses – not ones divided into flats – are sold on this basis. When buying a freehold property, you are listed on the land register. You’re responsible for any and all costs incurred to maintain the fabric of the building, common parts and land.
While this might sound like a big responsibility, the benefit is that you won’t need to pay ground rent, service charges or management fees, and you’re able to modify the property to your tastes – seeking planning or building permission where required.
Leasehold means you effectively lease a property for a number of years. This is common for flats or apartments, and less common with houses. You will have bought and signed a lease agreement for the property from the freeholder, often referred to as the landlord.
When buying a leasehold, the more number of years on the lease, the better. Leases can last as long as 999 years! After this time, the lease reverts back to the freeholder. Avoid buying properties with 80 years or less left on the lease. Securing mortgages on these properties is difficult and you may have to shell out for expensive renewal fees if you wish to remain in the property after the lease has expired.
Leasehold limitations
You don’t own the property outright when you buy a leasehold. As a result, you may face restrictions and additional charges.
For example, you’ll need the freeholder’s permission to do certain things. This is known as requesting a ‘licence for alterations’. From asking to keep a pet, to seeking permission to knock walls through, actions you may need to ask the freeholder about can vary from property to property.
Ground rent and service fees apply, too. These annual fees are charged to the leaseholders for the maintenance of the building. Primarily, these fees are put towards building insurance, but also cover the upkeep of common areas, entrance ways, building security or roofing and structural repairs.
The only time this is not the case is if the leaseholders have been awarded the Right to Manage.
What is Right to Manage?
Unhappy with how the freeholder’s managing agents look after the property, or are spending the service charge funds? You could apply to take over certain building management duties from the freeholder. This is known as ‘The Right to Manage’ and is awarded by the First Tier Tribunal.
To gain Right to Manage responsibilities, multiple leaseholders need to apply collectively. For more information on qualifying for Right to Manage, visit the Leasehold Advisory Service.
Should you choose to buy a leasehold property, in many cases you may be eligible to collectively purchase the freehold. ‘Collective enfranchisement’ is when a group of leasehold property owners act together to buy the freehold of the property. Owning the freehold is an attractive prospect, because you’ll have more freedom over your property. Sounds great, but the road to get there is complicated.
We strongly recommend researching the complexities of owning a share of the freehold, seeking legal advice before making your first move. Sites like gov.uk and lease-advice.org are great starting points.
If 2018 came with some extra courage for you, we have some ideas on how to materialize it! Start a business in real estate for some extra monthly income and good use of your spare time. And there might be months when the money are just going to come, without any effort.
As any other business idea, becoming an entrepreneur in the real estate domain is tricky. Might not seem easy at first, but things are not very complicated. Just ‘do your homework’ in advance, as this article on Property Division says and you should be prepared.
Feeling ready? We’re here if you have any questions and you can go to our website to search for types of properties that are worth investing in.
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Over the past few years, the digital landscape has changed dramatically. Social media for estate agents is no longer an option but more of an imperative. Here are 4 BIG reasons why an estate agent should be using social media although they can apply to any business.
Social media doesn’t cost much
Social media, with its massive reach and huge audience, is the most effective way to promote your business online without investing a ton of money. Creating a profile is free and there are tools out there to help you manage all your profiles from one single dashboard so that helps take some of the stress away.
Developing an audience / following takes time but using the 75% / 25% approach – i.e. 75% of posts are about news / advice / help & support and then 25% are about you and your services – you should find it begins to grow.
Any paid promotions you decide to invest in, like Facebook Ads etc, are a relatively a low cost compared to other marketing expenses. The cost effective nature of social media enables you to see a much greater return on investment when compared to other marketing efforts.
Your customers are already on there
There were 2.80 billion global social media users in 2017, so many of your customers, clients, and future customers are already actively engaging on social media. It’s crucial as an estate agent that you engage and connect with your audience.
This is where social media can have a huge impact on your agency, giving you the opportunity to be in front of people who are relevant to your business and local area. Given the competitive nature of the property industry, social media is more important than ever in marketing your home to potential buyers or tenants.
Get in front of your competition
Although many agents use social media these days, it’s still surprising that a lot of companies are yet to get to grips with it properly. This is where you can turn it into your advantage; a lot of agencies neglect the engagement side of social media and solely put their efforts on advertising their properties. There is so much more to social media than just advertising your properties, by adding a human touch and engaging with your audience, your brand awareness will go through the roof.
Improves brand loyalty
A staggering 71% of consumers who have had a good social media experience with a brand are likely to recommend it to others. Reviews by followers can go a long way in improving your brand’s credibility, with people more inclined to contact you when looking to buy, sell or let a property.
Your followers can see what you are up to on a daily basis, giving you the opportunity to interact with them in real life and provide quick answers to their needs; this can go a long way in keeping potential customers satisfied.
By using social media, estate agencies can create more substantial, personal relationships with their clients while enhancing the visibility of their brand.
The average price of a property coming onto the market in January 2018 is up by nearly £2,000 compared with December 2017, but sales are down by 5.5% from this time last year.
Rightmove, which tracks 90% of the UK property market, said there had been a “good start” to 2018, with more than 4 million visits a day to its site, up nea
rly a tenth on last year. The average price was up 0.7% to £297,587.
But sellers may be being hopeful in their pricing and may have to reduce the price to find buyers. Rightmove said the average time to sell a property has jumped to 67 days compared to 55 days last summer, which is an extra 12 days.
The period from now to late spring is traditionally the busiest time of the year for house hunters as they aim to complete transactions and then move during the summer school holidays and be settled in time for the Christmas holidays, but Rightmove said the pace of activity had slowed down.
Asking prices continue to fall in London. The average price for a home listed by the website in the capital is currently £600,926, down 1.4% on the month and 3.4% over the year.
With affordability stretched and incomes falling behind inflation, most property forecasters are predicting flat house prices in 2018 or relatively minor rises.
The two big lenders that operate well-known price indices, Nationwide said it is expected property values to be “broadly flat in 2018, with perhaps a marginal gain of around 1%”. Halifax has allowed itself some wiggle room, predicting UK growth from 0% to 3%.
Halifax said that in December house prices fell by 0.6%, the first decline it had registered in six months.
Photo source: Wikimedia http://bit.ly/2EBN0JJ
[…] the growing appetite for flexible offices is permeating across European markets, with London, Berlin and Paris witnessing the strongest growth. The sector will continue to expand, as new styles of workspaces are developed to service a growing variety of occupier needs […]
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Being energy efficient can make a big difference to the cost of your energy bill. It doesn’t always need a big investment in time or money to make sure you’re wasting less energy and saving more.
These are our top tips to help you save money on your energy bills:
Switch off or unplug any chargers or appliances you don’t need on.
If they have a stand-by light, a display or are hot to the touch they’ll be using energy just by being plugged in.
Washing at a lower temperature will use less electricity.
Washing at 30ºC rather than 40ºC can save you a third of the cost to run the cycle.
Insulating your home can save you money.
Loft insulation can save up to £140 a year off your energy bills and cavity wall insulation can save up to £160 a year.
Think ahead when setting your heating.
Set your heating to come on 15-30 minutes before you need it on, and off 30 minutes before you go to bed.
If you have storage heaters, make sure you’re using them efficiently.
Keep the input constant at the amount you need, but turn the output down to a minimum when you don’t need the heating on or turn it off at the wall.
Turn the pressure down on the power shower.
A high-pressure power shower is a great luxury to have but you’d be surprised how much water they use – sometimes even more than a bath.
Hang up your laundry.
Air-dry your laundry rather than tumble drying it, particularly if there’s warm or windy weather. What’s more nothing smells better than air-dried clothes.
Photo source: Pixabay http://bit.ly/2qKmbRC
Kitchen design in 2018 is all about timber veneers, colour contrast, texture, metallic, and the ongoing industrial look,’ says bespoke furniture manufacturers Schmidt.
The tail end of 2017 has seen the emergence of more bold colours and textures in kitchen doors and this will follow into the New Year. The mix of striking solid colours and woodgrains will continue to prove popular, whilst more industrial finishes like concrete will sit alongside these to really create interest in the kitchen. Consumers are increasingly looking for more variety and being braver in their style and colour choices.’
1920s
At the end of the first world war, Britain was a nation in which almost 80% of people rented their homes, almost all from private landlords. Concern about the poor standards of the housing stock led the prime minister, David Lloyd George, to promise a “land fit for heroes” for the homecoming Tommies. The 1919 Housing Act provided subsidies for local authorities to build council houses.
1930s
House building peaked at 350,000 a year in the mid-1930s as a prolonged period of cheap money prompted a private-sector building boom. With land and labour plentiful, and official interest rates pegged at 2%, this was the era of the three-bedroom semi and the expansion of cities out into the suburbs. New industries – car plants, aerospace companies, engineering firms – accompanied the ribbon development along the major arterial roads.
1940s
The second world war caused a double whammy: German bombing inflicted widespread damage to urban areas while house building came to a halt. The Beveridge report identified “squalor” as one of the five “giants” blocking the road to progress, but with money tight and construction materials in short supply, the pick-up in activity was slow. Aneurin Bevan, jointly health and housing minister, insisted council homes be built to high standards.
1950s
Council-house building peaked under the Conservative government of the 1950s, when the end of rationing and a growing economy meant that 250,000 new local authority homes a year were being put up. Much of the expansion was in the new towns designated by the Attlee government in land beyond the newly created green belt surrounding London – towns such as Hemel Hempstead, Harlow and Crawley.
1960s
House price boom-busts were still a thing of the future in the 1960s, the decade that saw combined private and council house building hit a postwar peak of just over 400,000 a year. This was the era of the tower block, with quantity coming at the expense of quality. One block, Ronan Point in east London, collapsed in 1968 following a gas explosion. By the end of the 1960s, Britain had as many owner-occupiers as renters.
1970s
Britain had its first experience of a housing bubble during the so-called Barber boom of 1973. An easing of credit conditions by the Bank of England coupled with the go-for-growth strategy of the Conservative chancellor, Tony Barber, resulted in house-price inflation peaking at 36%. The average price of a home, which had risen from £2,000 to £5,000 between 1950 and 1970, doubled in the next three years. The boom ended when the Yom Kippur war and the Opec oil embargo ushered in the stagflation of the mid-1970s.
1980s
Offering council tenants the right to buy their own homes was suggested to Jim Callaghan at the end of the 1970s. He rejected the idea but it was pounced upon by Margaret Thatcher, who made it the centrepiece of her political pitch to the aspirational working classes. Those who took advantage of the offer quickly saw the value of their assets surge in Britain’s second big housing bubble – the Lawson boom. House prices rose by 16% in 1987 and a further 25% in 1988.
1990s
The bust that followed the Lawson boom was long and painful. Interest rates were raised to 15% and left there for a year to control inflation. Unemployment doubled to hit 3 million for the second time in a decade and many of those who had taken out big mortgages could no longer afford the repayments. Record numbers of people had their homes repossessed as house prices fell for four successive years. It was not until the end of the 1990s that the market started to recover.
2000s
A rising population. More than a decade and a half of steady economic growth. Ample supplies of cheap credit. A sharp fall in the number of homes being built. These were the ingredients that contributed to Britain’s third big housing bubble of the post-war period. The average house price more than doubled from £100,000 in 2000 to just under £225,000 in 2007, before the financial crash brought the boom to an end. House building fell during the recession to its lowest peacetime level since the early 1930s.
