I believe they grab the reader’s attention. My previous entries have included Shakespeare, Bradley Wiggins and the Muppet Show. But I was struggling for a headline for this blog until a visit to Waterstones opposite Kent Reliance’s new branch in Canterbury.
When you walk in, you are assaulted by display after display of Fifty Shades of Grey (and other “mummy porn”). I haven’t read FSOG (not even on my Kindle so no-one could see), but I know enough about it to have been mortified when my 73-year-old mother picked it up and considered buying it because she “had heard so much about it” (so it’s not mummy porn then? – Ed).
So, how do I bridge the gap between FSOG and the BTL market? Tenuously, of course. I’m not going to talk about yield, rates and LTV, because I won’t be telling you anything you don’t already know.
No, my tenuous link to Fifty Shades of Grey is that I think that, if there really were fifty shades of grey and they spanned the range of economic performance from boom to bust, the buy-to-let market would still have a place and be strong at every point in that monochromatic spectrum. Even in a post-apocalyptic world, there would probably still be a buy-to-let market.
A strong economy drives house prices, people save up to buy and they rent in the meantime. A weak economy tightens mortgage supply, and people rent instead. Landlords win both ways. We don’t even need to get into the whole fragmentation of society debate, general growth in the population and lack of housing supply.
Conclusions? I’ll keep Kent Reliance open for BTL business. I can’t comment however on if there’s any Fifty Shades of Grey action going on in our Chatham Head Office…
John Eastgate is sales and marketing director at Kent Reliance
