Philosophy

"Our House - Your Home"

Our business philosophy is to earn our profit from rental income, not unsustainably increasing house prices.  This is important for our tenants.  Imagine you owned your own home.  How would things be done:

It's Your Castle: We are not reliant upon Buy-To-Let mortgages to finance our houses.  Our mortgage funding is less than 10% of the value of our portfolio.  Financial ill winds will not force us to sell homes with tenants in situ, a horrible experience for a tenant.  Nor will we evict you and sell up simply to earn a few thousand pounds because a property's sale price has increased.

Problems Get Sorted: Our rental income covers our mortgage payments many times over.  So when the occasional problem arises, we have the money to promptly put things right.  Many Buy-To-Let Landlords use all your rent to cover mortgage payments so getting repairs done from this kind of landlord can be difficult.  Also, we do not rent out Leasehold Flats where maintenance is controlled by the Freeholder. So we are always in control of any situation requiring maintenance and remedial work.

Home maintenance: Many Buy-To-Let Landlords buy brand new properties and run them with no maintenance schedule for many years.  Tenants endure a slowly deteriorating home.  We will look after your house to the same standard as if you owned it.  We have a maintenance and improvement schedule for all our houses, funded by rental income.

You make the place your own: We do not refuse reasonable requests to change decor.

So tenants living in our houses feel very much at home.  "Our House - Your Home"

Energy Performance

Government legislation will change the residential lettings sector in 2025 and 2028, by requiring landlords to make all properties Energy Performance Certificate (EPC) rating C, as a minimum.  All bar one of our houses already meet, or exceed, this target: The one under-C house will be upgraded during 2023.

Buy-To-Let Financial crash of 2022-23

There have been numerous press articles in recent months highlighting the perils landlords and tenants face as interest rates of BTL mortgages cause repayment spikes.  Most worrying for tenants is the situation where the Landlord can not re-finance the BTL mortgage and the house is sold by the landlord, or their bank: Obliging the tenant to leave home, or causing the tenant distress wondering if an eviction will be made.  To settle any concerns of any of our tenants or prospective tenants: We do not operate a Buy-To-Let financial model.  The recent interest rate changes have made only a small impact upon our budgets and we will not be selling any houses due to mortgage affordability issues.