Lettings Annual Review for 2022

I am writing this  with a message of good wishes for the New Year ahead but before we tackle 2023, I want to reflect on 2022. I will be looking also at the lettings industry and results of our own internal survey of Landlords and tenants.

The rental market is still incredibly strong, fuelled by high demand and lower levels of supply. This disparity between supply and demand has naturally caused rents to rise, its basic economics. As things stand, I don’t see any sign of change in 2023 which means rents should continue to rise. It is quite clear that there is a huge difference between the prices of newly let properties over those with existing tenants in, which is why people are remaining in their rental properties longer as they would rather stay put than pay more rent elsewhere which isn’t helping the supply.

The results we carried out at our annual survey of landlord and tenant trends shows the average rent from properties we let at Barbers in Newport during 2022 was £867 per calendar month which is up from £815 p.c.m in 2021, this represents an increase of just over 6%, to put that into context the average national rents, excluding London had risen to £977 per calendar month in the twelve months to December. The number of applicants we registered for properties to let at Barbers during 2022 was up by 26% on the previous year.

We can also report the various reasons as to why tenants are renting. In previous years the biggest percentage of tenants were moving from one rented property to another either through work or to simply trade up to a larger house as their family grows, this has historically accounted for around 60% of the tenant market, in 2022 that figure was down to 45% showing that people are staying put. The second largest group were tenants moving from family homes and couples moving in together for the first time with 20% of our lets to this group. 15% of lets were sadly to people in family break up situations, 14% to people relocating to our area through work and 9% were to people who had just sold a property and were renting to potentially put themselves in a better to position to purchase again. A range of other reasons made up the rest to include company lets and students.

It is also interesting to note the age ranges of our tenants in 2022, with the largest age group being the 18- to 29-year-olds at 34% in our local area, the 30-to-39-year bracket accounted for 19% of all lets, 40 to 49 years was the second largest range at 29%, 50 to 59 was 10% and finally 60 plus was 8% of all lets. A whole different subject is the way these groups now find properties to let, social media is king for younger people and agent websites are more for the older applicants, personally I like nothing more than a website!!

Landlords’ confidence in the industry has been knocked by further tax and legislative changes, but buy to let, if managed by qualified and regulated professionals, will still provide a secure source of investment in the months and years ahead. Certainly, we have seen some “accidental” Landlords choosing to sell their properties but we have found that generally landlords are staying the distance and are in this for the long haul with new clients being greater than those exiting the market.

We do urgently need more properties to let in order to try and meet theses high levels of demand. If you would like to talk about how we can help and go through our services please call into any of our branches or email me on r.heath@barbers-online.co.uk