Buying An Investment Property - An Update on Where We Are At With Buying Our Buy-To-Let

It's been over six months since I first shared a blog post about our financial plans and of our plans to buy a buy-to-let for the first time. At the time, we'd had an offer accepted on a house and we thought that we'd be close to getting the keys as the house sale had no chain. However, things didn't quite work out as planned and the house survey we had done came back highlighting too many issues for us. 

So we moved on to a second property which had been very well looked after and would have been very easy to rent out, but that too didn't quite work out as we had hoped. Two separate bank valuations came bak valuing it £10,000 lower than we'd agreed and with the owners unwilling to negotiate, sadly we walked away. 

But sometimes some things just aren't meant to be and fast forward six months later to now and *touch wood* I think we've found the one. We completely changed the area that we were looking in and Adam went up and viewed a few places during lockdown whilst I stayed at home with the boys. There were a couple of village houses with lovely decor that would have been very easily rentable, homes even that we would have loved ourselves if we'd been looking for a 2-3 bed. But in the end we went with our heads and not our hearts and we decided on a property that was closer to the town, easily rentable and worked most 'well on paper' when looking at things like the likely bank valuation and not just what it was being marketed for and how much rent other houses in the same area were achieving. 

It has now been a few months since we had our offer accepted on the property and this time everything has gone though very smoothly. The bank valuation came back at exactly what we'd offered. The survey didn't highlight anything worrying. The mortgage offer came through super quickly. The solicitors searches and contracts are mostly done. We've also been advised that everyone else in the chain is nearly ready to go too, so this means, if everything carries on going well, we could complete on the property in April and own our very first buy to let! 

It's all very exciting, but obviously they'll be more work to be done once we do get the keys. In terms of the actual property, we're hoping it'll just be a case of a new washing machine, a fridge freezer, some upstairs carpets and an extractor fan for the bathroom, as well as some paint touch-ups. But in terms of being actual landlords, we are currently needing to compare landlord insurance and find out what sort of cover will be best for us. There's all different types of cover and things to consider such as loss of rent, accidental damage, malicious damage, unoccupied property cover and more! And we're also looking at our options in regards to how we're going to rent it out.. 'Will we do it ourselves or will we go through an estate agency?' Right now, we're looking at doing it ourselves to save on the estate agency fees and finding tenants and getting references checked via OpenRent. 

With the jobs that Adam and I both do and with working for ourselves, it can be a bit up and down financially from month to month and so for us this just seems like the most sensible option to put our savings into to bring in some more money on a monthly-basis. I also feel like it's never silly to invest in property if you can get it at a good price as houses prices (usually) increases overtime anyway. It's of course going to be a big learning curve I'm sure, but hopefully it'll work out as we hope and it'll help to secure our monthly income a bit more. 

If everything goes to plan in the next few months I will be sure to share some more posts and videos about our journey going into owning a buy-to-let, including a house tour and some more information about the numbers and the costs involved. 

Thank you for reading. 

  Alex xo