St Albans rental market update November 2015

The St Albans rental market is a fascinating one to examine from time to time, and as with all markets things do change - there has been a notable dip in prices of property on the market for Sale in central London, as well as a drop in instructions nationwide due to various factors.

Some of our contemporaries both large and small have had to cull staff or urge existing team members to take second jobs pulling pints due to the lull in availability. But where does this leave the rental market?

Well, I don't like to work on hearsay and speculation and I always say you can't beat hard figures. With that in mind I had a look at the three major portals for some insights on what is happening out there to draw down some figures.

We used data from Zoopla this time as it seems to have a good selection of live figures to work from. Bearing in mind the data was clearly sampled at the time of writing and may be subject to change, Zoopla is showing the current snapshot of available property along with the prices and the current asking rents. Based on that data I have put together a little graph showing you the likely average yield on each type of property;

You must remember that this data is just a snapshot based on what is currently on the market and it's also based on asking prices, not the actual Sale Prices and the actual rent achieved so these numbers could go up or down.

Interestingly we had an anomaly in the data which was that Zoopla are only showing one "1 bed house" For Sale which was a 1 bed park home and the Sale price is very low when pitched up next to the average rent for a 1 bed house, hence the huge data spike - we pulled that out of the data and found two other properties for Sale on Rightmove which were 1 bed houses. The yield on 1 bed houses in this area should be topping out at around 4-5% max on a sunny day with the wind behind you so don't take the 7% shown in the chart as a sign that 1 bed houses in St Albans are the new hot ticket, although you may wish to investigate them as a potential purchase.

Removing one bed houses from the equation (the data is volatile as there are fewer of them) shows that 1 and 2 bed flats (represented in black on the chart) are the best investments, but once you move beyond two bedrooms, houses take the baton from the flats as a better bet for a greater yield in the 3 and 4 bed market.

This of course may differ depending on the location of the property and the type of tenant you want as a Landlord - a central flat with three bedrooms rented to young professionals or sharers may be a good bet as opposed to a three bed house out of town - we must judge each case on it's merit.

The average price you can expect to pay in St Albans based on data from the last 3 months is £494,088 and the current average value is settling in at around £523,979 which means the local agents are probably overcooking asking prices by about 6%. This is based on 225 sales which equates to 75 properties per month changing hands in the City. Values have increased by just 0.01% in that time but are rising steadily.

For more market updates, information and to find out what your home or investment might be worth, please call me on 01582 346 111 - we do have a Lettings team as well who are currently beating tenants back with a stick. Current record stands at letting a property in less that 14 hours - we're aiming to beat it.