Sourcing a property that works as a short let

What actually makes a location work

Short-let demand is not the same as rental demand, and a strong buy-to-let area is not automatically a strong short-let area. What short stays need is a reason for people to be there on a Tuesday.

That reason is usually one of a small number of things, and it is worth being able to name it before buying anything.

• An employer, hospital, university or major site that brings people in for weeks at a time. This produces the most valuable demand — long, mid-week, repeatable, and largely indifferent to season.
• Sustained construction or infrastructure work. Contractor demand is real and often underserved, but it has an end date. Know what it is.
• A transport connection that makes the property viable for people whose reason for travelling is somewhere else nearby.
• A genuine visitor draw — but be honest that leisure demand is seasonal, weekend-weighted and the most competitive segment to enter.

The checks that kill deals, done first

Every one of these can be checked before an offer, and each of them has ended deals that looked excellent on paper. Doing them in this order saves the most time.

Start with tenure. If it is leasehold, read the lease for restrictions on subletting, short-term occupation, business use and holiday letting. Then check whether the local authority has an Article 4 direction covering the address, which can remove the permitted development rights the plan depends on. Then check the nation: Scotland requires a short-term let licence, Northern Ireland requires certification from Tourism NI, Wales operates its own regime, and Greater London applies a 90-night annual limit on entire-home lets before planning permission is needed.

Then look at the building itself. A flat above a shop with a single staircase and no compartmentation is a fire safety problem, not a bargain. A property with a communal entrance shared with long-term residents is a complaints problem. Neither shows up in a yield calculation.

Reading a sourced deal

A sourcing pack is a sales document. That is not a criticism — it is what it is for — but it should be read as one.

The figures worth interrogating are the nightly rate and the occupancy, because everything downstream is derived from them. Ask which specific comparable properties the nightly rate came from, and whether the occupancy figure is a twelve-month average or a peak. Ask whether cleaning has been costed per changeover or per week. Ask whether the projection includes the setup cost at all, because a first-year figure that ignores furnishing is not a first-year figure.

Then ask the question that most reliably separates a real sourcer from a reseller: what did the last three properties you sourced actually earn in their first twelve months? Someone with a track record can answer. Someone passing on a listing cannot.

What we look for, and what we turn down

We take on properties in a lot of places, and we turn down properties in a lot of places too. The pattern in what we decline is fairly consistent.

We decline where the consents are not clean and the owner would rather not check. We decline where demand is purely seasonal leisure and the low months do not cover the running costs. We decline where the building makes safe short-let use awkward — a single means of escape, a lease that plainly forbids it, neighbours whose reasonable enjoyment cannot be protected.

None of that is caution for its own sake. A property that is wrong for short letting does not become right because it is managed well, and taking it on would mean spending an owner's money to prove a point we could have made for free.

Before you commit

Three things are worth doing between agreeing a deal and completing it, and all three are cheap relative to the cost of being wrong.

Get written confirmation of the position from the local authority for that specific address rather than relying on a general statement about the area. Get confirmation from the freeholder or managing agent that short-term letting is permitted, in writing, naming the use. And model the deal on the lowest month rather than the average, because that is the month that tells you whether the arrangement survives a bad year.

If the deal only works on the average, it is not a deal — it is a bet on the average holding.