A major regional agent has claimed that lettings demand is at a record high, with ten prospective tenants for every available rental home.
Yorkshire’s Linley & Simpson says that in the past month, the gap between available stock and people wanting to rent has widened, leaving many tenants unable to find a home.
The agency said that landlords were able to take their pick of professionals in employment, with an exemplary rental history and the ability to move quickly.
Linley & Simpson said the sharp upturn in tenant applications is being expressed across all of its nine Yorkshire offices, but particularly in Leeds, York, Harrogate and Wakefield.
Its Roundhay office – one of three it has in Leeds – reported a near 70% increase in tenants actively looking for property compared to this time last year.
Director Will Linley said: “The dearth of properties reinforces what we predicted last year and, unless the Government introduces incentives or banks free up money for investors to breathe life back into the buy-to-let market, supply will continue to lag behind growing demand.
“Unless stock levels start to increase, more and more tenants will find it difficult to find a property and monthly rents will rise.”
He added: “At any one time we have more than 400 available properties on our database that links all our offices – but more than ten times that number of people registered.
“It is a situation that is not common just to us – it is one that is reflected across the sector as a whole.”
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Comments
Would these be the same tenants who Shelter say should not have to pay to be referenced - I wonder how many will be successful in obtaining accommodation if they refuse to pay the fees!
"A shock statistic emerged from the software at lettings agency Linley and Simpson this week. Number crunching revealed that there are 10 tenants chasing every one of its rental properties"
In the same way as Alan Ward twisted the Shelter press release to say that a quarter of the UK population had been ripped off by lettings agants, Linley and Simpson's software produced the report and the original article says "its" (their) rental properties.
Can you chaps really blame Linley and Simpson for their story getting twisted in the telling?
As a landlord and - bizarrely - a tenant at the same time, I first read this piece last week as part of a Yorkshire Post in-depth investigation into the county's 'missing landlords' - and endorsed by even more worrying figures from the esteemed Joseph Rowntree Foundation.
See link:
http://www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/news/at-a-glance/main-section/web-question-do-missing-landlords-hold-the-key-as-yorkshire-families-hunt-for-homes-1-4914448
The salient paragraph is this:
The Joseph Rowntree Foundation research shows that by 2020 the number of home owners under the age of 30 will fall from 2.4 million to 1.3 million – a drop of 46 per cent. It also predicts that by then 400,000 vulnerable young people could be excluded completely, unable to afford either to rent or buy and turning “a housing crisis into a homelessness disaster”.
To be honest, I also think it the figures in the LAT story form a fair enough barometer - albeit one of several - that helps give a real-time insight into the market. What else does?
(It is no different to that chap who had predicted the health of the economy by studying how many Eddie Stobart lorries pass under a particular bridge on the M6 each day much more successfully time and again than highly-paid boffins.)
More importantly, if similar stats were collated nationwide with every agent contributing - perhaps through ARLA/NALS - then the sector would have more ammo to pressurise and lobby both Government (we have a new housing minister) and the financial institutions to do something to create the much-needed stock that everyone on here is united in saying is needed.
Rather than dismiss such figures out of hand, I believe there is food for thought here - and developing a monthly 'barometer' of supply and demand (to agreed criteria) has a role to play.
Come on agents - or LAT - post your stock levels and 'tenants listed' figures so the sector has a true insight into the market.
Lazy reportage. As Stoneyhenge points out, you can be guaranteed of one thing, housing demand up/down mortgage demand up/down, this is on the news level of the Sunday Sport, just without the nipple count. Hello people, you need to be reading Property Week.
The worrying thing is, that this claim is obviously outside other letting agents' experience, and can easily be checked.
Publishing this sort of article calls into question the accuracy of the other articles which you publish, and which are harder for agents to check.
The expectation is for verified facts - not press releases posing as articles!
I want to know how Linley & Simpson manage to get such an article onto LAT? Trouble is it simply cannot be true.
Two members of my wife's family run a Leeds Lettings Agency and although demand is high there is definitely not a queue for every available property to let.
This is crappy reporting.
P.S. Next week's headline. Nationwide and Halifax about to announce huge monthly rise/fall in house prices. FTBs thin on the ground. Extra pressure put on rental market. Agents demand high up front fees (sorry that was last week!)
Well said Steve!
Seems possible that Linley & Simpson may have hit on a good ploy to get prospective landlords to list with them?
What a load of rubbish.
If you've got twenty properties in stock and two hundred people ring your office that doesn't mean there are ten tenants queuing for every property (unless you happen to be the only agent in town).
The number of tenant enquiries I get is far in excess of my available stock. However, much as I'd like them to patiently line up and wait for me to source a suitable property for them all that happens is they go to one of my many competitors.
This story's headline should be "Agent runs low on stock and seeks free publicity that they can use to impress prospective landlord clients"
The market is busy, but this is just a lie. Just had a quick look at their website of the 10 houses i looked at the average listing time was more than a month.
Come on Journalists we can't print propoganda like this without checking it, it shows a false picture in the marketplace
I also have more people registered than we have properties, but the problem is we seem to have more people registered looking for properties we don't have or stock at the minute.