Cheltenham Buy To Let – Should you look further afield?

The other day a  landlord asked me where the next hot spot town or city is to invest his money in and where the best rental yields are. Now it can be tempting to just look at Cheltenham when growing a buy to let property portfolio, but there can be big differences in the amount of rental income you receive and how much your property will appreciate by considering other locations in the country.

Now regular readers of my articles of the Cheltenham and Gloucester Property Blog know of my love of the ‘buy to let see-saw’. On one side of the see-saw is yield and the other capital growth. Landlords should be looking for a high rental yield so that they can comfortably cover any mortgage payments and make some profit from the income return, but you also want the property to rise in value over time so you can get some capital growth when you come to sell. However, high yielding property in say such areas as Hesters Way, Springbank, Whaddon and Wymans Brook in Cheltenham, (so the see-saw arm with yield on it goes up on one side), will suffer from low capital growth (so the other arm with capital growth on the seesaw goes down). The relationship works in reverse as well, so in such upmarket areas as Leckhampton and Charlton Kings, properties offer good capital growth, but at the expense of a decent yield.

The North East and North West of the UK are landlord magnets for great yields. The average yield in Cheltenham today is 4.68%, which when you compare with say Hartlepool in the North East, which achieves 7.73% or 9.43% in the Anfield area of Liverpool, doesn't look too healthy. Now of course, these are only averages and some of my Cheltenham landlords are achieving 6% to 7% on some of their Cheltenham properties, but at the expense of capital growth. Anyway, after wasting a tank full of petrol up the A1 to Teeside or the M1 to Home of the ‘The Reds’, that Liverpool property, would have dropped in value by 2.2% in the last 12 months and the Hartlepool property would have dropped by 1.4%.

When you compare the long term house price growth, it gets even worse. Looking at the graph below you can see that since 1995, property values in Cheltenham have risen by 199.36%,compared with Hartlepool at 21.02% and Liverpool at 90.11% – it just shows you shouldn't always chase the yield because of the poor increases in property values in those two places. As I always like to explain to landlords , a decent yield is important, but when you come to sell your buy to let property it would also be nice to make a decent profit.

 At the end of the day, as a Cheltenham landlord, you want to be making gains from both your rent and house price growth, particularly when you want to sell, because when combined, the rental yield and capital growth, that gives you the real return on your investment.