Furnishing a Rented Property Advice from LettingFocus.com

FURNISHING A RENTED PROPERTY - ADVICE FROM LETTINGFOCUS.COM.

LettingFocus.com expert Lawrenson explains about furnishing packs. Ask us for advice with your buy to let and property investment needs

Property expert David Lawrenson of www.lettingfocus.com says, "You shop, we drop. It’s a great tag line isn’t it? But much as I like the convenience of someone trawling the supermarket aisles for me, queuing at the checkout, packing my shopping and delivering it to my door, I have to admit that I’ve been sorely disappointed at times with the quality of some food items delivered. There’s nothing quite like seeing what you are buying before you delve into your wallet."

It’s pretty much the same when it comes to furnishing your buy to let property, although the consequences of purchasing a poor quality item of furniture can have far greater reaching implications in terms of both cost and time.

Let’s face it you’ve already invested a sizeable chunk of money on purchasing the property. You’ve reached completion and you want to secure a tenant as soon as possible to avoid rental voids. But as always there are more costs to consider before your property is ready for viewing tenants, and particularly so if you are renting in an area where the demand is for furnished properties.

But first make sure there really is demand for furnished places. After all, if you don’t furnish, the costs of insuring will be less - there is no need to insure something you don’t have!

You can get the inventory done much faster and with less stuff to break or damage there will be less to haggle over at the end of the tenancy.

But if you are letting more up-market type of lets, there will be some demand for furnished accommodation, especially true in the short term serviced apartment category where you will be competing with hotel rooms.

When it comes to furnishing your property you basically have two choices; you can furnish it yourself or you can get someone else to do it for you. There are of course advantages and disadvantages to both.

The beauty of the DIY approach is that you can express your own creativity, choosing colour schemes, items of furniture and decorative adornments to reveal the interior designer within.

You can decide exactly how much money you spend and can furnish to a budget. If you’ve taken the time to choose your furniture in stores you will know for certain the quality of the items you have selected.

Hopefully you will have touched, sat on and even jumped on the furniture to make sure that it will withstand the rigours of tenant occupation. Cheap furniture may satisfy your budget in the short term but could result in a hefty price tag in the long term.

If you purchase on-line or from high street catalogue shop delivery may come in the form of flat packs and you’ll be unable to determine the exact quality until everything has been assembled.

Furnishing a property yourself can save money without a doubt, but can result in a compromise on the quality of the furniture items and will most certainly require a huge investment of your own time. Here’s a basic check list that you need to adhere to:

Firstly, take great care to measure the property yourself making sure that you take note of the locations of radiators, plugs, telephone sockets and aerial leads. These locations can determine the layout of your furniture within a room and are often not indicated on the brochure plans that you have access to.

A further consideration is access to the property; make sure you measure all entrances, hallways and stairways or lifts to ensure that you can actually get the furniture at least as far as your front door!

Moving on you need to translate this information you’re now armed with to make sense of the measurements of your furniture items and packages. If you’re ordering items ready built then make sure you know the exact size of the packaged furniture item – this can be considerably larger than the stated measurements making it difficult to gain access to your property without unpacking the furniture outside and risking damage on delivery.

If your furniture is being delivered by suppliers then co-ordinating delivery times can be a nightmarish juggling act, particularly if you live some distance from your investment property. Problems with out of stock items, late deliveries, missing or damaged items can then further disrupt your carefully co-ordinated delivery schedule, delaying handover to letting agents.

So what about the alternative? Buy to let furnishing specialists predominantly sell their wares as furniture packages, with ranges from basic to premium and prices from £900 to £9000. A furniture package includes all the items deemed essential for buy to let furnished rental markets and includes sofa combinations, coffee tables, dining tables and chairs, beds and mattresses, wardrobes and chests. As the old adage goes, you get what you pay for.

There are without doubt a number of cowboys in the market and one sure way to sort the wheat from the chaff is to make sure you get the opportunity to see the furniture you are paying for. If a supplier is proud of the quality of their range they will make it accessible to you.

Admittedly, you can often see pictures in a brochure and on a web site but more often than not these depict furniture carefully arranged by the manufacturer to look visually appealing, veiling the quality of the product on display.

“We recognise how important it is for property investors to have access to the furniture they are purchasing, and so have two showrooms available where our full range is displayed, installed and dressed as it would be in a property we were furnishing” comments Jane Pickup, MD of Style Counsel Interiors Ltd. “It never ceases to amaze me that astute property investors are prepared to almost recklessly invest thousands of pounds on essential items of furniture without even investigating the quality.”

So other than quality what exactly is the difference between a £900 furniture package and a £9000 package? Well more often than not it is the service and experience of a professional that you are paying for. A good furnishing specialist will be able to supply the product quickly, install it professionally and make the whole process as hassle free as possible for the property investor, saving that precious and expensive commodity of time. Co-ordinating the whole process at speed is invaluable in this quick moving market and measuring and design elements should come as part of the service offering.

Leaving it in the hands of the experts may limit your choice, but a good supplier will have chosen their ranges carefully to appeal to modern properties and ought to work with a complete range of colour combinations to make your furnished property unique in both style and design.

Find out if the supplier will store your furniture for you free of charge if your completion is delayed and most importantly find out exactly how quickly your property can be furnished as this will reduce rental voids. Most importantly recognise the importance of quality which may not come cheap in the short term but could cost you far less in the long term.

The Buy to let furnishing specialists Style Counsel Interiors say they always meticulously select their ranges to ensure that all items of furniture are well designed, robust, doing the job they have been created for and still looking good in years to come. “Our furniture is high quality, low maintenance, affordable and readily available” claims Jane Pickup, “and the ability to install within ten days of order reduces the hassle for our customers, which they tell us is priceless.”

About David Lawrenson and Lettingfocus.com

If you need more advice on furnishing rental property please contact me. I’m David Lawrenson from property investment mentor lettingfocus.com.

I’m the author of the buy to let book “Successful Property Letting - How to Make Money in Buy to Let” which is the UK’s top selling property title. Click here to buy the book: property book.

The new edition is fully up to date with all the recent changes to tenancy deposit schemes, HMOs, licensing, capital gains taxes and it has new sections on buying below market value.

What’s unique about lettingfocus.com is that we offer independent property and landlord coaching because unlike most people in the buy to let and property “advice” business we are not linked to a property company, developer, estate agent or bridging loan financier and do not receive commissions from any of these sources either.

We offer advice both at our property seminars and also on a one to one basis.

Lawrenson and Lettingfocus.com – Freelance Property Writer, Speaker and Consultant

I am an independent expert on the UK and overseas property market and a well known property investment blogger. I contribute to newspapers and a host of property websites as a freelance property writer.

My work as a property consultant and property speaker also stretches to helping companies such as banks, building societies, housing associations and web portals with their buy to let and property products and services.

You can read more about my buy to let networking programme at my website lettingfocus.com. My next London property investors seminar meeting is coming soon. If you need more information please contact me.