It was the private rental figures that caught my eye. With eight or nine years of recovery since the Credit Crunch, economic recovery and continuing low interest rates have done little to setback the mounting need for rented housing. In fact, with house price inflation pushing upwards much quicker than wage growth, this has meant to make owning one's home even more out of reach for many Millennials, all at a time when the number of council/social housing has shrunk by just over 2.5% since 2003, making more households move into private renting.
There are 47,381 people living in 18,944 privately rented properties in Reading.
In the next nine years, looking at the future population growth statistics for the Reading area and making careful and moderate calculations of what proportion of those extra people due to live in Reading will rent as opposed to buy, in the next ten years, 20,306 people (adults and children combined) will require a private rented property to live in.
Therefore, the number of Private Rented homes in Reading will need to rise by 8,119 households over the next nine years,
That's 902 additional Reading properties per year that will need to be bought by Reading landlords, for the next nine years to meet that demand.
...and remember, I am being conservative (with a small 'c') with those calculations, as demand for privately rented homes in Reading could still rise more abruptly than I have predicted as I would ask if Theresa May's policies of building 400,000 affordable homes (which would syphon in this 5-year Parliamentary term is rather optimistic, if not fanciful?
So, one has to ask wonder if it was wise to introduce a buy to let stamp duty surcharge of 3% and the constraint on mortgage tax relief could curtail and hold back the ability of private landlords to expand their portfolios?

I have a steady stream of Reading landlords every week asking me my opinion on the future of the Reading property market and their individual future strategy and, whether you are a landlord of mine or not, if you ever want to send me an email or pop into my office to chat on how you could navigate these new Buy to Let waters... it will be good to speak to you (because you wouldn't want other landlords to have an advantage over you - would you?)