Paul Rockett, director of sales and marketing at The Business Mortgage Company (TBMC), said: “The aim of buy-to-let is to make money not put a roof over your head.”
Roger Hillier, product development manager at Mortgage Express, applauded the FSA for its decision on home reversion loans but reiterated the fact that buy-to let was an investment decision and therefore difficult to fit into the template created by the FSA for consumer-focused regulation.
“If regulation ever were to be introduced there would be some fairly fundamental questions to address first,” he said.
“How do you define the buy-to-let market? Is it individual consumers buying one or two properties as an investment or buy-to-let investments placed under the name of a limited company? Are buy-to-lets also loans for property development where the buyer immediately rents out the property? Semi-commercial loans are another issue.”
Hillier said there had been ‘no signals’ that the FSA has this sector in its regulatory sights.
Guy Batchelor, sales and marketing director at Platform, said it has seen little evidence of vulnerable or inexperienced landlords entering the buy-to-let market.
“The majority, if not all, of our landlord borrowers tend to be professionals with sizeable portfolios and we are not seeing any evidence of first-time buy-to-let landlords at the moment,” he said.
