The appeal of the Scottish property market is no new thing. Home to 15% of all UK buy-to-let properties, the buoyant Scottish market records yields that consistently outperform the rest of the UK by as much as 10 basis points.
The country’s house price growth figures have hit some eye-watering records, and at the tail-end of 2021, Scotland was named the most affordable of the UK nations to build new housing.
We at GetGround want to make Scottish buy-to-let more accessible to a greater number of investors than ever.
Yet, anecdotally, we hear regularly from our customers who for years have invested in England and Wales but haven’t yet expanded their property portfolios ‘north of the border’. Ask them why and the reasons are typically uniform: hassle and cost – the property investor’s biggest bugbears.
Probe a little further and there are rarely further reasons not to invest in Scotland. Landlords read the same market data as you or I. They recognise the Scottish opportunity and would like to go after it.
But tackling the complexity of managing a portfolio of investments that crosses tax and regulatory borders is too great a deterrent.
Investors remark that the process becomes more manual than they’d like, can be harder to manage and more demanding to stay organised. Relying on different accountants to process separate envelopes of receipts, for instance, is laborious and brings with it additional cost they’d prefer to avoid.
The launch of GetGround in Scotland earlier this month aims to tackle these administrative challenges head on. For the first time, we’re enabling investors to manage all their properties in one place, regardless of those assets’ locations.
But relieving landlords of administrative burdens is only half the solution.
Every investor sets out with the ambition to maximise the best possible return opportunities from their portfolio of investments. But a lack of comprehensive oversight and visibility of the individual parts of that portfolio is what holds back many investors from turning a good portfolio into a great, outperforming one.
Add in a cross-border element to their portfolio and for too long, the process of managing investments and extracting the best value has been too cumbersome, too costly and ultimately too much hassle.
When you manage a portfolio of property investments that crosses borders and is subject to different legal or tax treatment depending on the location of each asset, the need to achieve total visibility over the portfolio’s performance from multiple angles becomes crucial.
We in the buy-to-let market talk a lot about rental yield and capital gain. Of course we would, they’re our bread and butter.
But when presented with the opportunity to cleanly, efficiently and easily survey the performance of individual assets in a portfolio on one single dashboard, landlords want to see more performance metrics on display.
Performance, in their view, should also be measured by the time, cost and effort of maintaining legal documentation of each individual property, preparing for the impact on that asset of regulatory change or managing the tax deductibility for that asset as an individual item.
It’s time we eliminate the assumption that we’re comparing English apples and Scottish pears. When investors have visibility over any number of performance metrics all in one place, the perceived differences between investment assessments north or south of the border melt away.
At that point investors can start to extract more value from more diverse and expansive portfolios than ever before. The UK, from St Ives to Inverness, becomes their workspace and the options are limitless.
Joe Carbonaro, global head of consulting, GetGround
