Further to the week’s earlier reports of a certain amount of stability returning to the property market, there is a knock-on effect from this which will please a lot of professional landlords. The Telegraph had an article last week on the fact that this improvement in the state of the property market is causing there to be fewer new properties being made available for rent.

The Telegraph quotes figures of 62, 765 in April, falling to 34 088 in May. A drop of nearly half! Not surprisingly they are attributing this drop to fewer accidental landlords being created. In other words fewer people are choosing to hold onto their homes and rent them out rather than sell them. A situation that was created by the diabolical drop in housing prices.

Jonathan Moore, UK and Ireland country manager of EasyRoommate.com, said: “What we’re hopefully seeing is a semblance of normality returning to the rental market as many home owners who saw rental as a last chance saloon are now more confident that they can find a buyer if they put their properties back on the market.

“In the second half of this year we would expect to see depressed average rental prices start to rise as the supply-demand balance begins to level out.”

Let’s hope he is right and we can start to get back to normal. Being a professional landlord is never an easy job but a return to a stabile environment will ease things a bit and take away the extra stress a lot of us have been under.

The BBC news channel reported this week on the fact that it looks like the house prices in the UK may be stabilising. They state that this is a result of of rising interest from buyers and a falling number of sellers.

According to figures that they quote, enquires by people looking to buy property have increased for the seventh month in a row. Also, they claim, it is at the fastest rate since 1999. Coupled with this, there have been fewer people putting their properties on the market over the past two years.

“On the face of it, the housing market does appear to be close to bottoming out with activity picking up in a material way and prices at last stabilising,” said Rics’ ( a company that runs surveys to test consumer confidence in the housing market) spokesman Ian Perry.

This does sound encouraging and there does seem to be more of this type of sentiment around recently than at any other time in the last year or so. Still the optimism does come with a warning. Mr Perry also stressed that the recovery of the housing market was bound to be contained by the difficult state of the economy.

All of the good news we are hearing seems to be tempered with a degree of realism but there is certainly more optimism around.

Things are definitely looking up!

Students have traditionally provided a steady supply of tenants for landlords, and in these hard times it appears that this strong bond is only set to strengthen further.

Landlord Assist has released figures this week that show that students are helping a lot of landlords to beat the recession.

They have shared with us the fact that the latest figures from the UK University & Colleges Admissions Service (UCAS) showed an 8 percent increase in the number of people applying for higher education.

This is excellent news for those landlords with properties near places of higher education. Graham Kinnear, MD at Landlord Assist, said: “Very few students are able to afford mortgages, so there remains plenty of scope in the student market, particularly in so-called university towns. The market tends to be predictable and reliable as students tend to stay in a property for at least a year at a time.

He also points out that at the end of their studies students are most likely to want to return to the places they are from and so, therefore, unlikely to cause any problems by refusing to vacate the property. In many ways they can be the perfect tenants.

A word of warning, though. Students do tend to cause a higher than average amount of wear and tear and that will need to be corrected by the start of the following academic year.

It struck me the other day that there is a lot of irony in the current financial situation. A year ago, virtually anybody could get credit and pretty much name their own sum. The difficulty was they were likely to be paying through the nose for the privilege.

Nowadays the price of credit has never been so low but your chances of getting your hands on it, especially if it is for a buy to let mortgage, is slim to none.

A recent report shows that one group of people who do seem to be benefitting form this current situation are key workers. We have all heard about the problems nurses and police officers have had finding affordable housing in the places their jobs take them; this has been particularly bad for those serving in the south of the country.

The Halifax has kept a close eye on this group of people over the years and has recently reported that things do actually seem to be improving for them. In 2007 only 3 percent of towns were affordable to this group in terms of purchasing the average family home. The Halifax indicate that at the moment the that figure stands at more like 21 percent, with police and teachers gaining the most from the affordability shift.

It is good to see that in difficult times at least these important people are gaining something.

Some people will be feeling pretty pleased with their low mortgage repayments at the moment. Those that are on mortgages that track the base rate will have seen their repayments fall steadily as the interest rates continue to go down.

Some others, though, could be in for a nasty shock, and quite soon. More…If your mortgage deal happens to be one of those that tracks below the bank’s base rate then you risk a massive jump in your mortgage repayments when your deal expires. 

For example if you have £200,000 mortgage, then the repayments could jump from less than £100 to over £600.  With Bank rates falling to a record low of 1% last week some people are paying 0% interest and some others as low as 0.19% soon to be zero if the predicted further fall in interest rates occurs. It is said that most of these loans were sold in Summer 2007 so the nasty shock is just around the corner for some people.

Richard Morea of broker L&C Mortgages said: “The shock is inescapable — those on super-low rates need to be ready. Even the cheapest remortgage deals are at 3%.” This is potentially quite grim news for some people and it is as well to do as the man says and check the fine print on your mortgage in order to prepare for any rate hike that may be in store. In particular check to see what standard variable rate you will fall on to, and see if there are better deals out there.