Member Article

Diamonds of the North Shine Bright for Property Investors

The latest list of Diamond Property hotspots from AI powered property investment portal One & Only Pro has revealed that the North of England is the best place to bag a buy-to-let bargain in 2020. Bootle, North of Liverpool, tops this year’s table with the greatest concentration of Diamond properties, up two places from this time last year when it ranked joint third with Birkenhead.

The analysis ranked the top buy-to-let locations using One & Only Pro’s unique algorithm. Investment properties across England and Wales were given a score from one to ten, with properties rated ‘ten’ being the most likely to increase in value. Dubbed the ‘Diamond Property Hotspots’ by the property experts, the five locations with the highest concentration of top scoring properties can all be found in the North of England.

Last year’s top spot was held by Salford, which has seen a significant drop to 47th place in this year’s report. Grimsby and Hartlepool both make the top five for the first time in third and fourth place respectively, whilst Burnley holds on to second place.

Place December 2018 December 2019 1st Salford Bootle 2nd Burnley Burnley 3rd Birkenhead/Bootle Grimsby 4th Hartlepool 5th Blackpool Liverpool

With 26% of ‘Diamond’ properties, Bootle’s average property price of £57,559 also makes it an affordable option for first time investors.

Henri Sant Cassia, from One & Only Pro comments, “It is great to see the predictions we made last year have been borne out – the North has remained strong and the Central London market had, as we predicted, bottomed out price wise and is now seeing an upturn. The top five Diamond Property Hotpots this year all offer great value, even for first time investors, in terms of average house prices. Investors could easily overlook towns like Grimbsy or Burnley which offer fantastic value in comparison to the big cities.

“It is important to note that our data isn’t simply an analysis of last year’s trend – our system algorithm analyses and studies future trends and also factors in changes in bank lending and fiscal policy for example which could influence the property market during the following year.

“Despite the general doom and gloom, especially around Brexit, in 2019 the market actually remained quite robust, as we had predicted. The trend for the government to continue to legislate against the rental sector and increase taxes for smaller landlords is likely to continue in 2020. As interest rates are likely to stay low, rental profit will be high for landlords so we predict a positive year ahead for property investors on that front. We should also continue to see banks relaxing their criteria so landlords and property investors will be able to borrow more money and with easier stress testing”.

One and Only Pro only lists properties considered to be viable for investment, so shared ownership, retirement and other unsuitable property types are stripped out. Everything listed has been pre-vetted for investment, unlike a typical property portal where the whole market is on show.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Jess Stanojevic .