Two of Britain’s best property timers may finally be pulling out of the market
06-11-2015
Brad & Angelina, Posh & Becks … Fergus and Judith Wilson
If it’s movies, it’s Brad and Angelina.
Music and sport? Posh and Becks.
But the pin-up couple of buy-to-let property? That would be Fergus and Judith.
And they were in the news again this week, offloading some of their property.
Should you be doing the same?
The maths teachers who got aggressive and got lucky
Like so many who stumbled into buy-to-let property in the 1990s, former maths teachers Fergus and Judith Wilson are accidental landlords. Or at least, they were at first.
“We had a house to sell and another to buy”, Mr Wilson told the FT. ‘”I thought with a fair wind, I could keep both at the time and rent one out.”
Many people made that same decision back then. And the winds really did turn out to be fair. A generation of buy-to-let landlords was born.
Plenty of them grew their portfolios beyond that first flat, helped by a mid-to-late-90s financial innovation known as the buy-to-let mortgage.
Easy lending and a rising market made it all so easy. You borrowed against a house. You watched it rise in value. You re-mortgaged at a higher price, took out some of the equity and used it as the deposit on another place – or in the Wilsons’ case, many other places.
“Be aggressive in a bull market”, runs the saying, and that’s just what the Wilsons were – more so than anyone. “In early 2000, the main requirement for gaining a mortgage was the ability to sign your name”, says Mr Wilson. They took full advantage, so that by 2007, they’re believed to have owned as many as 1,000 properties, mostly two- and three-bedders in Kent.
They survived the financial crisis – just – and were bailed out, like all landlords and debtors, by the subsequent suppression of interest rates. Their debt-servicing costs were minimised and their portfolio has since benefited from the asset-price inflation brought on by zero interest rate policies (Zirp), quantitative easing (QE) and all the rest of the manipulation of money that has gone on since 2008.
“We’ve never made money like we’ve made in the last five years”, says Mr Wilson. “God knows how much we’ve made daily on capital value.”
The gains they’ve made at a time when ever fewer people can afford their own home – and no doubt, comments like the above – have made the Wilsons the poster-children for the loathing many feel towards buy-to-let landlords.
My own view is a little more benign. I don’t blame the Wilsons for trying to make money, so much as I blame government policy for creating this distorted market in the first place (stupid planning laws, debt-based money, a failure to include housing in official inflation measures, and all the rest of it – read this if you want to know how to fix housing).
The messy business of tidying up a property portfolio
That said, Mr Wilson has hardly shied away from controversy. The Wilsons benefited perhaps as much as anyone from government largesse in the form of Zirp, yet they have been very critical of people on benefits.
They evicted 200 such people last year, with Mr Wilson saying he preferred Eastern European migrants “who don’t default on the rent”. The fact that housing benefit no longer matched the rents achievable in the private sector was another factor in his decision.
There was further provocation this year, when he began to evict Eastern European families who had moved more people – particularly children and grandparents – into the homes than originally agreed.
Wilson declared he had no choice due to council overcrowding rules. “Contrary to what may be depicted by the leftwing media”, he told The Guardian, “I do not eat little babies alive… I do not make the rules, but I do play by them… welcome to ethnic engineering at the coal face.”
I suspect, however, that the main reason behind these decisions was in fact to make the buy-to-let portfolio as attractive as possible to a potential buyer. As long ago as 2008, the Wilsons have made noises about the portfolio being up for sale.
And this week, they are reported to have sold 100 of their properties – most already tenanted. Fifty were bought by one Chinese investor, while the others also seem to have been bought by overseas investors in multiples of five or ten. If we are to believe The Telegraph, the average price is Ł250,000.
The portfolio is so location-specific – in and around Kent, but particularly Ashford and Maidstone – that it makes sense to offload in this way, if one buyer for the whole portfolio can’t be found. Selling the properties on the open market would simply drive down prices.
But the idea of one landlord – whether it’s the Wilsons or, worse, an institution – owning so much property in one town, as the Wilsons seem to in Ashford, is scarily reminiscent of Pottersville in Oh, What A Wonderful Life!
But what does all this say about the UK property market?
But what does all this suggest about the UK property market?
The Wilsons are, no doubt, shrewd. And the fact that they are finally starting to pull out of the market may be a sign that the great era of buy-to-let is drawing to a close.
Mr Wilson says current prices may have got ahead of themselves: “Prices always used to go up so that a property would double about every seven years, so about 13% a year. I used to say 10% was quite healthy, but when you see them going up at 25% you think – it can’t continue."
And there’s no doubt that buy-to-let is not the game it once was. The yields are not there, especially in London. In London in the 1990s you could find yields well over 10%, plus you had the capital appreciation of the property.
Now average yields are closer to 3%. In many cases they are lower. I was also amused to read this in the comments section of the Guardian from ‘elwoodjblues’: “I am BTL landlord and my net yield after costs is… 0.5%. Not exactly the scandalous profiteering guardianomics would have you believe”.
Those kinds of returns don’t matter as long as the market is rising. But if it reverses – particularly in such a heavily leveraged market – then the whole market can look very shaky, very quickly. No yield, falling capital values, and a whole lot of debt that is suddenly that much harder to pay back. Leverage works in reverse too.
The Wilsons got in at the bottom. Now they may well be getting out near the top. But top or not, they are right to offload.
You can argue the toss as to what a sensible asset allocation would be for today’s world – a lot of it depends on your own time horizon and needs, but I’d suggest that property, equities, bonds, cash and precious metals all have a role to play in varying amounts.
But what I can say with certainty is that, for where they are in their lives (I’m guessing late-60s), the Wilsons are way too geared to Kent real estate.
They’ve made the decision to diversify. And I don’t blame them.
• Dominic Frisby is the author of Life After The State and Bitcoin: the Future of Money.