The Clapham Property Blog

Those of you that know me know that I'm a keen lover of BTL. A steady, passive income stream. Whether you are into single let ASTs or slightly more work/reward and you invest in HMOs, truth remains is that many people I meet are struggling with the FEAST/FAMINE that comes with building, development, buy to sell, you name it. Nothing beats a steady income stream. Steady, yes you read that right. It's steady. After all, if rents aren't paid you've protected yourself with a rental warranty, right?? So why am I so keen, especially now when the government has it out for us poor landlords? Simple. Today is January 31st. The day of the self-assessment tax return. The day when a lot of landlords will be hit with the hard reality that their taxes have gone up, because they've not been paying attention. They've let their investments ride on the capital appreciation of years gone by, being able to refinance their way out of trouble. Not any more. These la

It’s now commonly agreed amongst economists and the general public that the dramatic rise in Clapham property prices of the last six years has come to an end. Read the National newspapers, and they talk of doom and gloom in the British housing market with such things as strained buyer affordability ( as property prices have increased over the past six years at a far faster pace than average salaries ), a lack of new properties being built and the Brexit uncertainties over the last two and half years being blamed for the slow down - yet in the last 12 months, people have still been moving, buying and selling in Clapham at levels similar to the last six years - something tells me we have a case of ‘bad news selling newspapers’. So instead, let me share with you what, exactly, is happening in the Clapham property market, and more specifically, who is moving and why in Clapham. Most of the sales in Clapham over the past year were flats, which on average sold for £571,150. Te

Following on from my last article, if you recall I said that Kings Avenue had the most properties sold in the SW4 Clapham postcode, yet I felt that this information wasn’t telling the whole story, as some roads in Clapham have more properties on them than others. Therefore, I promised that I would compare the average number of properties sold by the actual number of properties on that street, to find out the streets whose owners proportionally moved (or sold) more often than the rest of the locality. To give some foundation to the article, in 2017 Clapham homeowners had, on average, lived at their existing address for 17 years and 6 months. However, when I looked at the difference between homeowners with and without a mortgage; Clapham homeowners without a mortgage had lived in their Clapham home for an average of 23 years and 9 months compared with 10 years and 1 month for homeowners with a mortgage. Interestingly, Clapham’s Lambeth Council house tenants have on average resi

Many folks say moving home is the most stressful thing. Moving home is like someone (and that someone is usually you and you are the cause of this devastation) has collected all your worldly goods, put them into brown boxes and into a lorry making your whole life look like a Amazon delivery van, only to spend the next six months unpacking it all, whilst unable to find important things like your bank cards, ‘those’ shoes or special jewellery! We wish we could be instantly transported like in Star Trek “Beam me up Scotty to a blissful moved in state”. Yet the week you move, it’s like an episode from the original 1960’s series Star Trek, when the crew had a transporter accident with an ion-storm sends Kirk and Spock into an alternate reality, where the caring Federation is the merciless Terran Empire, and the USS Enterprise is a warship and chaos eschews!!! Star Trek aside, when you decide to move and before the stress of living out of cardboard boxes for months descends; fi