Does anyone own a holiday cottage that they rent out as investment? Need advice.

[wilbur]

We are toying with a medium-term idea of buying a holiday cottage in the UK which we could use a few times a year and then rent out for the rest of the year to cover costs and hopefully make a small income.

Does anyone have any answers or thought about the following questions?

1. Do you use an agent to rent it out and if so, what percentage do they take? Is it worth it to reduce hassle?

1. Or, are there just listings websites where you put your property and do all the arranging yourself?

1. How do you manage the issue of people leaving deposits and how much do you ask for?

1. How do you declare the income to the tax man, is it straightforward?

1. Do you use a housekeeper-type person to do changeovers and cleaning? Does this work well?

Any other tips, or horror stories, need to hear it all in order to make a decision about whether this is worth working towards. Thanks for any help!

And we don't accept pets as we have some carpet downstairs so I wouldn't be able to keep it clean enough. Many people have allergies too. If we are renting we always avoid homes that accept pets as we have had bad experiences with smelly homes in the past.

Thank you so much, guys, for all these interesting replies. Quattrocentro, I am going to make an appt to see our accountant to talk to him about offsetting any tax loss, and soapbox, thanks for the info about needing to be available for a number of weeks to be viable for tax breaks. TBH, for the first few years, we would prob only use it 4 or 5 times a year so hopefully it would be available for the rest of the time and we would qualify. I am trying not to get too excited about the idea in case it doesn't work out, but hopefully in the next year or so, I will be putting an ad (paid for, natch) on MN advertising our elegantly appointed, sparkling clean and fruitshoot-free country home .

We have a holiday home on the Northumberland coast which we bought two years ago. At the time we were looking for a 2/3-bed cottage, to use periodically and rent out with an agent until such times as we moved closer and could do it ourselves.

We investigated small cottages, but the figures didn't stack up very well, so in the end we bought a 5-bed barn conversion, did it up to a 5-star standard, furnished it with loads of baby and child-friendly kit and marketed it via a small, local agency. We get lots of small groups, house parties, and two-family/extended family holidaymakers, and are probably full around 75% of the time (more from March-October). I think having a larger property works really well if you are in a good, popular location.

You really need to look at the figures - done out beautifully you can get maybe 4 times more weekly rental for a 5-bedroom house than you would for a 2-bedroom cottage, but the price to buy it would probably not be 4 times more.

As someone said earlier though, it can cost a lot to furnish it, decorate it, and keep up the level of decor and style, although we've been lucky and had no real damage so far. Fingers crossed! One other thought, bigger properties are harder to fill at short notice, though on the plus side they do tend to book up further in advance.

I would also recommend a local specialist agent. We pay ours 25% to manage bookings and the cleaners (who we pay additionally).

A final idea would be to call a small agency you'd like to be associated with, in the area you are keen on, and ask them what size of property they are desperate for (it could that they have loads of 3 bed cottages and are keen to sign up a house-party house, or a 2-bed bijou cottage).

A bit long winded I know, but hope this helps!

We completed on a buy to let in Suffolk yesterday (sold I mean). What a weight off my mind. It wasn't paying for itself, very stressful as nearly 2 hours away so I couldn't just pop there. I now have to go and pick up all the furniture next week with a man and a van.
I am more than happy to now rent other people's holiday homes by the seaside!