Morning Investors,

I wanted to make this post to understand the demand and hear your honest opinion as to whether a detailed investment search engine would be useful?

I am currently developing an investment property search engine that analyses property marketing websites such as Rightmove, Zoopla and OnTheMarket. It can digest and analyse property investments, with regards to YOUR investment criteria, to provide the fundamental investment characteristics all on one spreadsheet such as the return on investment, yield, rent (based off similar comparables), refurbishment potential and costs. This would allow YOU to efficiently identify and compare secure, high yielding investment opportunities, with regards to your location, budget and debt terms, while saving you 90% of the time taken during your typical investment process.

The purpose is to allow you to save time in your initial analysis and quickly identify the most glowing opportunities on the market, while ignoring the bad ones.

Would this be useful and would you pay a monthly subscription for this service?

Look forward to hearing all your feedback.

Thank you.

Tom

The boat has probably sailed on BTL for this generation - those with a portfolio will be 'weeding" out the less profitable lets because of recent changes in taxation and the increasing use of very expensive licences by local authorities.
In addition to the search if it offered the opportunity for legal work in buying selling, mortgages and property management then a "one stop' shop would be more attractive.
I have one property in Central London and i live 300 miles away so local contacts for building work or refurbishment would be beneficial . At home we have 2 properties but I live locally so can source any needed work quite easily.

Observations:

Even my feeble google-fu easily finds (free) information like this: http://www.totallymoney.com/buy-to-let-yield-map/

The few "hardcore" BTL-ers I know (ones with >2 properties) all just own quite local properties and consider their "edge" to be local knowledge of what's hot and what's not and what's "upcoming" and what's sought-after locally and being able to be "hands on". AFAIK none of them would consider buying property in another city (or even on the other side of town) just because the the yields are better there.

Suspect you're about 10 years too late with your offering... but good luck!

Agree that people like to buy locally AJW however would you not consider purchasing in an area with a higher yield if all the data and analysis was provided (including how the management costs would effect the Net Yield)?

As others have said, BTL is not the lucrative pastime it once was.

With prices starting to stagnate in London, and the inevitable ripple effect hitting the cheaper parts of the UK, personally, I can see no use for any search tool that would only confirm what I already know.

House prices are a reflection of the UK economy and with Brexit uncertainty, I cannot think of a worse asset class to get involved in. I would much rather park my cash in REITs such as BBOX or TRY, both offering yield and the prospect of capital growth in a tax-free environment.

As for paying for a search tool, I don't know any sane landlord that would. It's not that hard to find out where the best yields are in the UK ie usually the regions that have the lowest prices. If I was to invest in a BTL it wouldn't be in the UK, I don't want the hassle of managing a property in what is probably quite a grimy area.

I would go for sunny Spain where you can get double-digit yields and a nice holiday home!