More UK landlords are now making use of letting agents

More owners of UK buy-to-let property are now making use of letting agents to handle their property management, according to a new report published this week. It suggests that landlords increasingly trust letting agents to deal with important parts of the process.

Typically, letting agents will deal with things like the finding and bringing on board of tenants, collecting rental payments and dealing directly with tenants over issues like maintenance and repairs, and according to the National Landlords Association (NLA) report, the first few months of this year has seen this number increase.

It said that as of the end of March this year, as many as 61 per cent of landlords operating across the UK make use of a letting agent for these reasons. This is a rise of some seven per cent in just three months since the end of 2016.

The report said that this represents a surprising rise in the early part of 2016, following a number of years between 2014 and 2016 where the proportion of landlords who were making use of a letting agent sat between 53 and 54 per cent, which represents a rise of just one per cent in the previous three years.

In the same period, there has been a fall in the number of landlords who choose to self manage their properties, which could suggest that there are many new landlords who are coming to market who may not understand how to operate on their own. In just the last year, the volume of self-managing landlords has fallen from 46 per cent to just 39 per cent.

“As landlords plan ahead to compensate for the tax changes over the next few years we would expect to see the number who use an agent to slowly fall away, and for more to start considering whether they are able to manage their properties themselves,” said Richard Lambert, NLA chief executive officer.

“However, this sudden spike, which is completely out of step with recent trends, completely turns this theory on its head. The big question is whether or not it’s a blip or if it will continue to rise,” he added.

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