A landlord has been fined £17,000 after admitting endangering the lives of a family in one of her properties. Sima Yaqub, of Crescent Road, Sheffield, pleaded guilty at Sheffield Magistrates Court to five offences under the Gas Safety Regulations 1998. When the family moved into the property in City Road last July, Yaqub did not…

I have recently stumbled upon a great blog which features lots of great tips and advice for landlords and general musings on the buy to let industry. It’s fun, friendly, and written by a columnist in the Evening Standard, who is, herself, an accidental landlord, so why not take a look next time you have…

Tenants in private rented housing want to go green – but are LEAST likely to be benefitting from energy efficient, money saving upgrades, new research from the Energy Saving Trust has found. The exclusive survey of more than 2,000 UK adults found of those living in privately rented housing: 39 per cent were interested in…

Britain’s biggest property listings website today said investors were piling into buy-to-let for “blindingly good returns” after the government’s efforts to bolster lending had created an “arbitrage of immediate return”. Rightmove said its research showed that rents are delivering average gross yields of “5.9 per cent”. Its monthly house price report stated: “With some remortgage…

According to figures released by the Department of Energy and Climate Change, more than 1,800 property assessments have been carried out in the first month of the government’s Green Deal scheme. The Green Deal, which was launched in England and Wales on January 28th, is a government scheme that allows homeowners to make improvements that will increase…

A social landlord has issued a stark warning to tenants who sub-let their properties or obtain their home through deception, telling them that they could be made homeless and given a criminal record. Whitefriars Housing, Coventry’s largest affordable housing provider with 18,000 homes, has teamed up with the city council to catch fraudsters. Pauline White…

Shortly after announcing that many of it’s BTL mortgage products would not allow housing benefit tenants, BM Solutions has now removed these restrictions. The company made the move after The Mortgage Works,  Nationwide’s buy-to-let arm, made a u-turn on a similar decision last week.  The Mortgage Works said it had decided to exclude buy-to-let tenants in…

The mortgage provider Castle Trust has released figures which suggest that there has been a drastic increase in the number of people renting as opposed to taking out a mortgage. In 2012, the number of renters in the private sector reached 3.8 million, which is an increase of 23% on the 3.1 million figure for 2008….

In February 2013, the consumer group Which? carried out a number of mystery shopping tests on some of the major letting agents in London. Mystery shoppers who posed as potential tenants visited four different London branches of Foxtons, Barnard Marcus, Martin & Co and Your Move.  Their findings were that the fees that tenants would…

Recent announcements for the government suggest that they would like to get tougher on landlords who own properties that are rented out which fall into the lowest brackets for energy efficiency. As part of the Green Deal repayments on the government loan for the work are made via the electricity bill. So in effect tenants are…