I'm a landlord with 26 properties - one change increased my income by £2,000 a month

Andrea Cooper, 47, has a portfolio of 26 properties in Barnsley that she’s been building up since 2003 – and made a change a few years ago that saw her income quadruple nearly overnight.

“I already had my own property and had some equity in it. I was a single parent, bought a rental and remortgaged the house I lived in with the equity I had,” she says.

After she got together with her husband, the couple continued buying properties in the same pattern, purchasing a mixture of terrace houses and flats in Barnsley, all let on single-tenant lets.

“Every time we had enough for a deposit, we’d buy another home. We were real grafters and didn’t spend much money on anything else,” says Andrea.

In 2018, the 47-year-old decided to dip her toe into the serviced accommodation sector, renting out properties fully furnished for short-term lets and including bedding and cleaning in the price.

Andrea does all the cleaning, ironing and washing of the linen, and property management herself, and found the financial advantages were immediate.

With the first property, she was getting £400 a month for letting it as a traditional rental; when she switched to doing serviced accommodation, the price quadrupled to £1,600.

“Back then it was just an idea and there was nothing like it in Barnsley but now everyone is doing it,” she says.

Andrea has now moved five of her properties, or 20 per cent of her portfolio, over to a serviced accommodation model, where guests can stay for a minimum of three nights.

“I get four times the amount from them doing this than when I rented them out the traditional way. But they are a lot more work and much more involved, and if you’re not doing it yourself, if you have someone to manage the linen and the cleaning, the returns are less,” she adds.

The next time one of her properties becomes empty, she’s planning to move it over to become serviced accommodation.

“I’ve not tested the market yet, but I might move to a minimum of 28 days – longer-term, short-term lets. I currently charge £120 a night but will change that to £75 a night for the 28-day minimum.”

That said, she doesn’t think she will move her entire portfolio because the work involved across more than 20 properties would be too much.

Andrea disagrees with many landlords who are selling up and blaming the introduction of the Renters’ Rights Act [RRA] in May. “For good landlords [the RRA] is what we’ve always been doing anyway, and, with arrears, it just works out as an extra two months you need to wait,” she says.

“It doesn’t put me off. You always make money on properties. If I sold up, I would spend the money in 10 years and be skint.”

After hearing an inspirational speaker last year, Andrea decided that she had become too complacent with her own portfolio and decided to start buying again, which can be unusual for landlords in the current rental market.

She is in the process of purchasing four two and three-bedroom terrace houses in Barnsley for £105,000, £120,000, £75,000 and £75,000. All the properties were purchased off-market, with Andrea preferring to advertise for properties herself rather than going through agents.

“They are all on buy-to-let mortgages and the advantage of buying off-market is these sellers will wait for me to get a mortgage approved. When you’re buying on the open market, people are often buying in cash and [sellers] won’t wait for me,” she adds.

The deposits are funded by four remortgages of other properties which have gone up in value.

Unsurprisingly, Andrea’s savvy business brain was spotted by The Apprentice producers, and she appeared in the most recent series of the show, making it to Week 6.

“When people say: ‘Did you enjoy it?’ I say ‘No, but it was an experience and I would do it again as the experience of doing it was good,'” she says.

“It wasn’t busy enough for me; I’m always on the go, and there was a lot of waiting around. You aren’t allowed to talk about the tasks while you are waiting around, and we’d been living together in a house so the common thing that we had was what was happening on The Apprentice. It was also difficult for me because of the age difference.”

She’s still in touch with her fellow contestants though, and there’s a group WhatsApp, which sometimes springs into life.

“We all just got invited to the National Reality TV Awards in London so there were a lot of messages on it last night.”