The headline takeaway the lender wants everyone to notice is 40% of landlords feel more optimistic about their prospects for their property business.
However, looking at the same statistics from the opposite perspective, 56% of landlords feel the buy to let market has stayed the same for the past three months, while 4% feel their property businesses have deteriorated.
So, Paragon would have everyone believe all is rosy – but the reality is the minority believe that even though the lender points out that the sentiment has improved since the first half of the year when only 30% of landlords felt optimism about the buy to let industry.
Then comes the definition of optimism.
Are landlords optimistic they may let a property, charge more rent or benefit from rising prices?
The survey does not define what all this feeling good is about.
Then Paragon goes on to explain that professional landlords are more optimistic about their businesses than private investors – with 41% expressing the opinion against 32%.
Apparently the difference between a professional landlord and a private investor is the professional has more than five properties.
What this looks like is not so much helpful data but market segmentation to resonate with target customers
The offering is signed off with some words from the lender’s director of mortgages, John Heron.
“This is the highest level of optimism we have seen in the last three years, which is in line with the improvements that we have seen elsewhere in the housing market,” he said.
“The Council of Mortgage Lenders published data last month which showed that there was £5.1 billion of buy-to-let advances in the second quarter. Recently, there has been speculation about a possible boom in the buy-to-let market, but we are a long way off reaching lending levels of anywhere near those of 2007.
“So I think concerns about a booming market are overdone. What we are seeing is more progress in a recovering housing market in general.”
The market research industry call these ‘sentiment surveys’ – they offer no measurable data and serve to talk up or talk down a market, according to the point of view of the organisation paying for the research.
