Kingston .. Good Time to Buy a Property?

Following last week’s article, I had an interesting chat with a chap who lives in Raynes Park who popped into offices whilst his better half was visiting at Kingston Hospital. He is thinking of buying his first buy to let property and he wanted my opinion on the state of the market and if it was a good time to invest.
He was particularly worried that with all the newspaper headlines of a booming housing market, there wouldn’t be any demand by tenants. One of the best pieces of advice I can give to those looking to invest in property is a simple trick of the trade. You can judge the affordability of an area’s property market (and thus how much demand there could be) by simply finding the ratio of the average property price to the average salary. The lower the ratio, the more affordable property is.

When we put this to the test, we found that Kingston currently has an average property value of around £561,400 with the average salary being £35,100. This is a ratio of 1 to 15.9. Meanwhile in Barnes, the ratio of property values to salary is 1 to 27.4 and South Ken is an eye watering 1 to 36.3! Considering the UK average is nearer 9.5 to 1, everything is expensive. However, the issue isn’t affordability, it’s the raising of the 5% deposit, which when you take into account fees, will be in the order of £28,000.

Tenants’ inability to raise that sort of money for the deposit is driving demand for rental property. If you would like some advice about buying to let, be you a landlord with a portfolio or someone thinking of investing in rental market, please come and see me at our office on Kingston Hill, opposite the Hospital.

For other stories and the Kingston Rental Yield table you can download the May rental report here (no log on or personal details taken 

http://downloads2.belvoirlettings.com/Offices/Kingstonuponthames/Kingston%20Property%20Newsletter%20-%20May%202014%20edition.pdf )


April 2014