What is Serviced Accommodation?
If you are interested in investing in serviced accommodation you can contact Paul Winder and his team by filling out the form on this page.
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with Paul Winder
Paul Winder is an investment consultant with Residential Estates, who provides investment advice and property investment sales throughout the UK. You can see his company's website here.
In the second in our series on serviced accommodation, Rob and Paul ask, what exactly is serviced accommodation? This series will be running for the next few weeks where we are going to release two video articles a week. We will be looking at exactly what serviced accommodation is and, more importantly, how investors can profit from it.
Serviced accommodation refers to fully furnished properties which are available for both short or long term let. This type of accommodation may also offer facilities similar to those offered by hotels.
Video Transcript
Rob: Hi it's Rob from Property Investments UK, and in today's video, we're going to be looking at exactly what serviced accommodation is.
Serviced accommodation is quite a new thing when it comes to investment properties in the UK.
Paul here, from Residential Estates, is the best person to answer some of these questions because they've been doing it on a number of different properties and developments.
I guess the question is - what is serviced accommodation? And how do you envision it fits in with the portfolio side of things that you guys do?
Paul: By definition serviced accommodation is a fully furnished apartment.
It's also known as a corporate let and shouldn't be confused with more standard short-term stays.
Rob: Yeah.
Paul: That can incorporate weekends, short, long term lets, variable lets. But offers also, the facilities that a hotel may do as well-
Rob: Yeah.
Paul: But provides a home from home essentially. What we've found, we forwarded it from the investment side, is that we had clients who wanted to reach out to this market because companies were looking for this.
Rob: Yeah.
Paul: At the end of the day, they wanted their clients who were over on contracts et cetera to stop in apartments. So we formed an alliance with a few developers, where we could then incorporate that into an investment.
Rob: Yeah.
Paul: So the investment that they had purchased, we can then run a service model on it for them.
Rob: Yeah.
Paul: As a different option towards any normal AST or buy to let. Which, has worked very well so we will basically sell the apartment as a normal buy to let.
Rob: Yeah, so it's exactly like where we're in today isn't it?
Paul: Like we are today yeah. Yeah.
Rob: Perfect city centre location.
Paul: And then with the relationships we've formed over the last eight or nine years, what we will do then is, we will effectively market their apartment for them.
Rob: Yeah.
Paul: Apartments for them, to our corporate clients who will then book through us, and will maintain and service that apartment for them.
Rob: Yep. So, it's existing residential type housing stock, city centre apartments like we've got here.
Paul: Yep.
Rob: So from an investor's viewpoint it's the same as what they'd consider, maybe, if they were looking at other types of properties, a straightforward buy to let.
Paul: Yeah absolutely.
Rob: It's just a different type of tenant profile, a different type of rental.
Paul: Yeah. Different options, yeah. Absolutely.
Rob: Yeah. Perfect. So, in some of the mini-series, mini videos that we're going to be doing in this series, we're looking at some of the benefits of serviced accommodation. That's effectively what serviced accommodation is, just a tenant profile, another roundup, another way of marketing and renting those particular type of properties.