Stamford's Private Rental Market Set To Grow By 600 Households By 2025

I was having a most interesting chat the other day with a Stamford landlord when we were looking at a property.  As I am sure you are aware, I am always happy to cast my eye over any potential buy-to-let purchase, be that you emailing me a Rightmove link, a brochure in the post or even treading the carpet and seeing it together.  I don't charge for my advice, and you don't even need to be a client of mine.

We got talking about the Stamford property market and this landlord brought up the subject of a report he had read from the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) that stated almost 1.8m new rental homes are needed by 2025 to keep up with current demand from tenants.  He wanted to know what this meant for Stamford.

Last winter, some commentators said that buy-to-let was in decline, what with the new stamp duty changes and how mortgage tax relief will be calculated.  Others even said 500,000 rental properties would flood the market nationally in the 12 months after the new stamp duty rules came into force on the 1st April 2016, as landlords left the rental market.  Well, I wish the landlords of those 500,000 properties would hurry up and put them on the market – because I have plenty of other potential landlords desperate to buy them!

Back to the matter in hand.  If the RICS and PwC are indeed correct, what does this mean for Stamford?  The fact is, as a country, we are facing a precarious rental shortage and need to get Stamford building in a way that benefits a cross-section of Stamford society, not just the fortunate few.  I call on the Prime Minister to drop the higher stamp duty tax on buy-to-let purchases to ease the pressure on the rental market.

Of the 9,000 households in Stamford, currently 3,000 tenants live in 1,500 private rented properties.  If we apportion those 1.8m households equally around the country, that means in nine years’ time, the number of rental properties in Stamford needs to rise by 600 (i.e. 42.8%), taking the total number of rented properties in the town to 2,100.

Therefore, Stamford landlords need to buy around 70 properties annually between now and 2025 to meet that demand, because according to my calculations, an additional 1,300 people will want to live in all those 'additional' Stamford rental properties.  So, why is the government penalising landlords?

Thankfully the new housing minister Gavin Barwell detached Teresa May's new administration from the Cameron/Osborne ‘laser-like’ focus of just home ownership to solve our housing issues, saying "we need to build more homes for every single type of person needing a home and not focus on one single tenure".

The private rented sector became a stooge under David Cameron's watch and still, with increasingly unaffordable Stamford house prices, the majority of new Stamford households will be relying on the rental sector in the future to house them.  I can only say Westminster must put in place the measures that will allow the rental sector to flourish.  Any restrictions on the supply of rental property will push up rents (bad news for tenants), thus side-lining those members of Stamford society who are already struggling.

Let's hope this new government continues to see the contribution landlords give to the country as a whole.

 

I like to keep a close eye on the local property market on a daily basis because it enables me to give the best advice and opinion. If you want to learn more about the Rutland and Stamford property market, feel free to pop in for a coffee at our office for a chat with me.

For professional advice on buying, selling, renting and managing your homes and property investments.

David Crooke
Owner

 

UPP PROPERTY - SALES & LETTING AGENTS
Understanding People & Property

Email: david@upp-property.co.uk

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