The simple answer is that the best time of year to rent out your property as a landlord in London is the summer.
The rental market in London is driven by students and young professionals.
In general, students will run on one-year contracts from July, August and September and in London we also see tens of thousands of new jobs open up in the Greater London area around the same time each year, so there’s a huge uplift in demand for rental properties.
When you combine this with the fact that a number of landlord’s are selling due to their properties no longer being profitable because of high interest rates and government restrictions, it results in the number of enquiries we receive in July, August and September roughly tripling.
This demand from potential tenants at this time of year naturally causes rental prices to shoot up and so it is a great time of year for landlords to try and renew their tenancies to maximise the return on their investment, and that’s exactly what we do for our landlords at Rocket by timing their contracts to begin and end over the summer.
We’ve already had rental increases of around 20-30% over the last few years, so I don’t think we’ll see those levels again, but it’s likely we’ll see perhaps a 10% uplift this summer.
This year in particular, it would be an especially good idea to aim to rent out your property with a contract beginning over the summer due to the imminent introduction of the Renters Reform Bill.
With its current trajectory, the Renters Reform Bill should be law by the summer and it will likely come into effect in the autumn.
As such, at Rocket we’re advising our clients that over the summer is an ideal time to find good tenants, who are paying a market rent, and to sign them on for a minimum of a twelve-month tenancy but ideally for longer.
This does not mean you have to take the aggressive approach of serving a section 21 eviction notice, but if you have good tenants and they’re paying under market rate, it’s worth having a conversation to see if they want to stay and if they would be willing to sign a new contract starting from July, August or September at a competitive market rate.
This will allow our landlords to see out the initial chaos that will inevitably come with the introduction of the Renters Reform Bill and by the time these tenancies are up, they will have a much clearer view of the future of the property market in London, allowing them to make an informed decision moving forward.
