Looking at Angel Lettings website I see 1 bed flats in my block are now going for 350/pw up from 300 last year. Rents seem to have rocketed in the last 12 months in N1, N5, N7 - 2 beds in Holloway now pushing 400pw!! All the agencies seem to have whacked up rents by at least 15% . A friend in a block on City Road is paying 340, a flat in same block going for 395.

So its not all doom and gloom for BTL I suspect, particularly in central London. Having said that, flats in N1 are still going for a whopping £500,000 for roughly 50sq m thats £10,000 per sq meter!! . So even a rental income of max 25k/'year is 5% gross return. You can get more in Northern crock.

I've had it, moving to Edinburgh. Except there's a real shortage of unfurnished flats there, plenty of flats to let but all have someone else's furniture in them! You can rent a spacious 2 bed Georgian flat (with a proper kitchen) for 800 / month in the centre of the city.

* compared with prime Berlin, say in Prenzlauer Berg, prices are about 1500/2000 sq.

Dept. of Ancient History: Twenty/thirty years ago all available Edin. flats were partly furnished with the most godawful trash that had somehow avoided Guy Fawkes Night, patches of Utility Pattern carpet vulcanised with antique filth and a crusty iron gas stove. This was a "furnished" flat gave the LL various nebulous* rights over evicting the peasantry at the drop of hat, which an empty one didn't. Squatters were a force in the land in those days.



*Nebulous to us, that is. Presumably backed with the full rigour of the Law. More concerned with getting tickets to that Gong gig, and whether the grimy "furniture" would cack up our velvet loons.