As a Buy-to-Let (BTL) investor and landlord, one of the well-known roles of your investment is to provide residential housing for tenants across the UK. However, another important element of your investment in rental property is to generate a financial return for yourself.
To help protect the financial side of your investment and even help improve your returns, there are some great property tech that’s designed to help you:
- Manage your portfolio more easily while keeping within rules regulations.
- Save money.
- Protect your income.
Let’s take a look at three ways you can use technology to manage your BTL portfolio effectively and profitably.
Mortgage matcher
While we know that many BTL landlords are on the ball when it comes to their mortgages, it’s not always easy to be aware of everything that’s going on. Therefore, you might also not be fully informed as to what mortgage products and rates are available when the time comes for you to remortgage. Enter Mojo Mortgages.
The broker has developed new tech that goes beyond the comparisons available from other sites. Their new mortgage matcher takes the details from your existing mortgage and compares it to everything else on the market to show you how much money you can save and where to get the product from.
Where you’re due to remortgage but have let things go a little too long and are now on your lenders’ SVR rate, this tool can quickly and efficiently compare your existing mortgage to other similar ones on the market and help you find the best option. If you’re short on time, or want to remortgage a number of different properties at the same time, this is a great piece of property tech.
Identity checks that satisfy new regulations
Another problem some BTL landlords come up against is being confident that the identity checks they use are thorough enough and can be relied upon. With new, 5th fifth generation Anti Money Laundering (AML) directives set to come into force in 2020, ensuring that you and your tenants are exactly who you say you are will become even more important.
To help you achieve that level of AML compliance, property tech, identity check company Credas has a tool that uses multi-factor authentication and a large database to provide simple, but secure identity verification checks.
“We have always developed technology out of customer need, and it has become clear in recent months that the AML audit is an aspect of compliance that often goes under the radar,” said Credas chief executive, Rhys David.
By using tech like that available from Credas, BTL landlords and letting agents will not only fulfil up-to-date AML rules, but also gain complete peace-of-mind that their tenants are who they say they are.
Digital rent guarantors
Sometimes, a prospective new tenant is completely upfront about themselves and you’re confident of their identity. However, with that knowledge you sometimes find the tenant, who you’re inclined to rent your property to, might not always have paid their rent or other bills on time. Even if that behaviour is a distant memory for them, a sign of it on their credit check can be a concern to you.
To help alleviate those possible worries, without getting family involved, you can turn to a digital rent guarantor system. It works by finding a company, like RentGuarantor.com, who will run the details of your tenant – with their agreement – through their systems and in most cases, permit the company to provide a digital, company-backed rent guarantor for that tenant.
This means that as a landlord, you know you’re rent will always be paid and as a tenant, they don’t have to bother friends and family and ask them to sign up as their guarantor, possibly while also sharing some details of their finances they might prefer to keep private.
As you can see, there are a number of proptech options available to landlords to help protect their investment and help keep your BTL portfolio profitable.
