Local knowledge and time-proven contacts are why many long-term landlords and property developers mainly focus their efforts on creating property projects relatively near to where they live.

For those who only focus on a build or convert-to-sell strategy it can be easier to manage development projects from afar as the delegation of daily site management, particularly on larger sites, can be left to professional project managers, but there will always be some who want to micro manage it all.

Technology advances in the last 20+ years and through the use of letting agents, has allowed many buy-to-let investors to build rental property portfolios, often doing more straightforward single lets to family tenants, which can be hundreds of miles away from their home and many have done this successfully.

Shared accommodation units (HMOs) are of course more management intensive, particularly for larger units and where the focus is on active ‘community management; a.k.a. ‘co-living’. My personal view having observed and talked with many HMO landlords over the years, and who only want to self-manage, would be to only focus on having units within an hour’s drive from your home.

In recent years we have also seen the rise in popularity of the short-let / serviced accommodation sector and more than a few have chosen this approach due to the negative effects on their tax burden of the section 24 tax changes brought in by government from 2017. In the short lets sector as with student let HMOs there are many management agencies to choose from for those who want to acquire property far away from their home and delegate the day-to-day management to others.

On page 15 you can read our latest report on long-term historic ratios where we compare average property values in all the UK regions including London and also Scotland. It should come as no surprise to our long-term subscribers to this publication that property values in the capital are very high compared to some less prosperous parts of the UK.