There’s still strong demand from tenants, but softening prices puts greater emphasis on landlords taking a more active role in managing their portfolio to achieve greater returns.
So, what details do you need to stay on top of in your portfolio to make sure it’s generating the best results? And how is it best to do this?
Here are the key metrics to measure in your portfolio.
Property details
Make sure you have your property details tracked in one place: the purchase price and all the other purchase costs, the purchase date, and the current property value, to track your property appreciation over the years.
Mortgage details
The mortgage details are an important part as this will determine the level of equity you have on each property and on the entire portfolio. Another important thing is to track and be aware of your fixed-rate expiry dates and the early redemption fees as it will help you understand your remortgage options at any given time and to avoid having to pay your lender’s standard variable rate, which is usually more expensive than new deals.
The important data attributes are Original and outstanding mortgage balance, current interest rate, current early redemption fees. If it’s a fixed product, your rate expiry date and reversion rate.
Occupancy level
It is important to track the occupancy level over the years as this will impact dramatically on your net cash flow and actual return on investment.
Compliance details
EPC level and next due date, gas safety certificate and renewal date, EICR due date and all relevant documents. This section is very important if you want to keep your property compliant.
Cash flow
Rent payments, management fees, mortgage costs, insurance costs, service charge, ground rent and all other expenses per property. This is very important as without tracking it on the property level you will not know what your real property and portfolio performance has achieved
Depending on how closely you manage your portfolio, you may track some, or all of these already and many landlords use a spreadsheet to monitor their investment. However, maintaining your portfolio details on a spreadsheet might posing some challenges, that can be resolve by using software instead. The benefits you can get by using software are:
Knowledge base
When you maintain your own spreadsheet, you need to design and configure it with your own knowledge, while when you use software you can benefit from a larger knowledge base and ongoing enhancements based on the changes in the market.
History tracking and audit
It is hard to keep historical records and audits when you use a spreadsheet while it’s usually a built-in feature when using software.
Accessibility
Spreadsheets make it difficult to manage your portfolio on the move, which means that important things could be missed, while software and apps can be accessed from anywhere at any time.
Ongoing insights
It’s hard to generate ongoing insights using the data from a spreadsheet. It’s time-consuming and it’s not so simple to integrate external data sources.
An alternative way to manage your property portfolio is with a specialist software platform, like Lendlord. With software, you can benefit from a wider knowledge base of other users that allows for ongoing feedback and development within the software, it will include tracking and audit features and ongoing insight. With Lendlord, for example, you can also easily work on your portfolio data on the go, using a tablet or a smartphone.
So, if you want to improve the performance of your property portfolio, you need to manage the metrics and make changes when the data tells you to. You could do this on a spreadsheet, or you could make your life easier and give your portfolio the strongest chance of success, with a specialist software platform like Lendlord.
