Why buy just one house when you could snap up a whole street?
It's not for the faint hearted – instead of buying one home, which is stressful enough, you can actually own a whole row of houses in Norwich.
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It's unusual but you can currently buy seven purpose built student terraced houses in a cul-de-sac off Nelson Street for £1.99 million, a line of nine out of 10 1930s houses on Starling Road for £2.75 million or four Victorian terraces, each with a newly painted red front door, on Cathedral Street for £1.2 million.
But with the armchair investor market drying up over Brexit concerns as well as the high cost of stamp duty involved, estate agents are finding a distinct lack of buyers for many of the homes.
The seven, six bedroom properties off Nelson Street, giving a total of 42 bedrooms, have been for sale since November 2017. This is despite each room being let for £380 a month – equating to a rental yield of 8.2%.
One of the tenants, Ty Kelly, 18, an art student at NUA, Norwich University of the Arts, said: 'It's a really quiet cul-de-sac, you feel you are away from everyone, you can walk to college and into the city.'
Nick Taylor, of Hadley Taylor estate agents, said: 'Generally speaking, you aren't looking at private individuals buying these sorts of properties to line their pensions with as they just don't have £1 million-£2 million.
'The bottom line is that investors want a 10% rental yield or more. Brexit is a bit of a factor, but it's also the tax you have to pay on a
£2 million purchase.'
James Bradley, senior sales negotiator at Jackson-Stops, selling four terraces on Cathedral Street, said in fact there had been some good interest. The properties let for approximately £57,840 annually in total – which equates to a yield of 4.82%.
'We've had three or four offers, someone who wanted to buy ahead of seeing. Bearing in mind three out of the four homes have four bedrooms, for the total price of £1.2 million, most people would snap one up for the price of £300,000.
'But the investor is looking for an annual yield of 9.5% which you can achieve if you turn the dining room into an extra bedroom in each property – that would give you 19 bedrooms.'
On Starling Road, nine properties newly converted with four bedrooms each generate a monthly rental return of £16,650. Steve Pymm, of Pymm & Co, marketing the homes, said: 'Everyone is waiting to see what happens with Brexit, people with large portfolios aren't selling at the bottom of the market and investors only want to buy at the bottom so it's a stalemate.'
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