All Mod. Cons.

Today

Everything's coming together for the purchase of the flat to let in Bristol. In these financially uncertain times, buy-to-let seems the way forward. The purchase money landed in my account this morning and the letting agents have a possible tenant who can move in within 3 weeks!

When the transaction on the Bexhill flat completes I shall be very happy with 2 nice little nest-eggs. I have met the tenant at the Bexhill flat but it's highly probable that I shall never meet tenants at the Bristol flat - the agents will deal with it all. So, in a way, it's quite as impersonal as any other investment.

In My Day

Just like me, when times were hard back in the '30s, Daddy took the opportunity of buying some properties that were going cheap. In the early years I think these were just 4 Beulah and the house next door in Upper Beulah. The whole of Upper Beulah was let into flatlets. We occupied half the basement and the whole of the ground floor of 4 Beulah. Dawson Large, Daddy's father-in-law occupied 2 rooms on the top floor and the rest was divided into a mixture of self-contained flats and flatlets.

Later, Daddy also bought 2 more properties in Upper Beulah and 6 Beulah, all with sitting tenants.

What made his enterprise so different from mine was our close involvement with all these tenants. At 4 Beulah we shared our bathroom with at least 2 families. Often all tenants would be on the lawn in the summer enjoying tea and gossip together. It's not that Daddy ever interfered with their lives; we were just all living much closer together.

We became good friends with the Lawrences on the 1st floor. They somehow managed to bring up 4 children in 2 rooms with kitchenette and share bathing and toilet facilities, before eventually buying a house in Eastbourne. They owned 2 cats who roamed freely and we girls often played with and took care of the children.

Daddy carried out much of the maintenance and repair work himself, creating kitchenettes and doing plumbing and decorating. He collected the rents himself and found himself becoming involved in all sorts of ways with the tenants' sad and sorry stories. Many of them were very old or struggling families and he was much too soft and probably didn't make much money out of some of them. And I can't remember him ever evicting anyone.

The properties were all on 99-year leases with a short time left, the freeholds being owned by the Church Commissioners. While he received some compensation on having to leave 4 Beulah, the others simply ceased to be his on the due date. He took some dramatic pictures of the houses in Upper Beulah being demolished with massive steel balls. So they weren't exactly investment opportunities, although I guess the rents did supplement his earnings a bit.

With modern purpose-designed flats I don't see myself doing plumbing or wielding a paintbrush, let alone becoming an agony auntie for my tenants. But who's to say that my life will be the richer for that?