As originally published in
Bridging and Commercial
Here’s something that people don’t talk about any more: GDPR.
There was a time – just a couple of months ago – when you couldn’t open a newspaper or read a website without being bombarded with scare stories about the impact and fallout of the new data regulation. But now that implementation has been and gone, little seems to have changed, except I receive fewer emails than I used to and we have a slightly smaller marketing database at Castle Trust.
It’s a smaller database, but it’s also a stronger database. We may have lost a number of contacts, but they were the brokers who never really engaged with our marketing messages and were even less likely to engage with our business. Now, following consolidation, we can be sure that even though we are communicating with a smaller group, they are more engaged and we can concentrate more of our energy on working with these more productive brokers.
There seems to be a lot of similarities here with the buy-to-let market. The dual impact of tax changes and regulation have triggered many scare stories about an exodus of landlords from the market and research from the National Landlords Association (NLA) states that up to 380,000 landlords – nearly a fifth of the market – expect to offload properties in the next year.
But, at the moment, this anticipated exodus of landlords isn’t being translated into business volumes. According to UK Finance, there were more buy-to-let mortgages completed – and for greater value – in May this year than the same month a year ago. Conversations with some of our distributors that focus on specialist buy-to-let also indicate that they have never been busier and it seems that more landlords are taking a holistic view of their portfolios and diversifying into properties such as HMOs, multi-unit blocks and holiday lets for the first time.
So, while changes to buy-to-let may lead to some consolidation in the overall number of landlords, those that remain have the appetite to become more engaged with the market and drive more value from their investment. Like GDPR, the focus is on quality over quantity and this is good news for brokers who can add real value by advising committed landlords on a whole set of new strategies to help them to grow and diversify their portfolios.
It can be easy to take comfort in a large portfolio of buy-to-let clients and any reduction to these numbers can be daunting, but consolidation provides you with an opportunity to get closer to those clients that really matter and make sure that you are an integral part of their future plans.