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Ball backs Buy-to-Let

from "UK Landlord" magazine, May 2007

Professor Michael Ball of the University of Reading's Business School has dismissed claims that buy-to-let landlords are pricing first-time buyers out of the market. He sees the solution to rising house prices as being to build more houses in which people want to live, and in locations where people want to live.

Professor Ball told the annual conference of the Association of Residential Letting Agents (ARLA) that buy-to-let has substantially improved housing market stability and given young people the choice to delay entering owner-occupation at a financially precarious time of their lives.

He added that buy-to-let has sheltered households from rising prices and given individuals the option of cheaper monthly outgoings by renting. "It [buy-to-let] enables households to build up their own equity and, although tenants do not share in capital gains directly, they do so through lower rents and lower risk," Ball told the ARLA conference. "They can do this while living in good standard accommodation, as competition in the rental market is now greater." Other positive effects of buy-to-let on communities were highlighted at the conference. Professor Ball said that it had"spread renting to towns and suburbs that had little or no private renting before [and] had assisted in the regeneration of inner city neighbourhoods and in some areas helped to revive the housing market."

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