Landlords confident for 2007

The recent rise in interest rates has done nothing to quash the confidence of buy-to-let landlords whose faith in the market is riding high for 2007, according to a new survey.

Some 95 per cent of the 3,617 landlords questioned in the survey said that they planned to maintain or expand their current property portfolio over the next 12 months, while 55 per cent claimed that they were looking to plough more of their cash into the sector in 2007.

The survey, commissioned by buy-to-let mortgage lender Bradford and Bingley, also found that a wider demographic of the British population are now investing in buy-to-let.

Just eight per cent of homeowners questioned described themselves as "full-time professional landlords" and nearly half are "employed by somebody else", while almost a third are self-employed.

Gus Park, head of buy-to-let mortgages for Bradford & Bingley, put this down to the legal liberalisation of the sector in the mid nineties: "Before, this property investment was dominated by commercial investment companies as you had to take out a commercial loan."

He continued: "The survey shows that today people of all sorts of different professions and ages are investing in buy-to-let from teachers and plumbers to accountants and journalists."