Category: Features

Our excellent and completely free buy-to-let profit calculator has had a facelift. It’s now even easier to see your ROI, yield, investment and monthly profit at a glance.

If you’ve seen it before (or even if you haven’t), give it a try now to see how your next property investment could work out.

Quick and simple to use

You only need to enter three numbers to get started:

• your expected purchase price
• your forecast repair cost
• the monthly rent you expect

After you’ve entered those numbers you can either scroll down and click “Calculate” or wait a moment to see your results automatically appear.

Set your cash

If you leave the “Cash Available” field empty the calculator will work out the minimum investment you could put in to make the deal satisfy the mortgage requirements.

You might want to put in a bit more to improve your cash flow or perhaps ask for a calculation with a bit less, to see how far away from your target that would leave things.

Tune the mortgage

The calculator comes with some “reasonable” mortgage criteria pre-set but the chances are they wont fit your exact situation. So you can scroll down a bit on the calculator to customise the interest rate, fees, LTV and rental cover details. See the results instantly update as you make changes.

Save, Download or Share

With your results on the screen you’ll also see buttons to:

• Save & Compare – create a free account and store this calculation, you can then add others to compare different properties you’re considering.
• Share – get a unique URL for your calculation and send it to anyone you like, they’ll be able to see the exact numbers you entered and full results.
• Download – we’ll email you a PDF with all your input figures and calculated results so you can keep them for easy reference in the future or to send on.

Displayed results

The results don’t just give headline numbers, there’s also a complete table with calculated figures for yield, ROI, profit, required investment, stamp duty, available mortgage and more. There’s even a table giving an outline of how the Section 24 (mortgage interest relief) tax changes will affect the resulting income.

Try out the buy-to-let profit calculator for your next property deal.

Property rental can be a complicated business. Similarly keeping track of rented property can be too. One example of that is when one property is actually let out on multiple tenancies.

This might be because the property is a house of multiple occupation (HMO) or perhaps you’ve just chosen to rent out the garage separately from the house or flat (for example).

From launch PaTMa has supported these scenarios by allowing multiple active tenancies to be recorded against a single property. Each tenancy keeps track of the tenants, rent and other details independently.

With our recently released updates, you can now be more specific about this – choosing to mark a property as “multi-unit” when you want to keep track of multiple units that are separately rented out.

Once you’ve marked a property as multi-unit, you can add each of the units, along with a label.

After that, each new tenancy can be allocated to a specific unit within the property.

Along with the ability to create the units within a multi-unit property and track tenancies against each of them, this feature also uses the extra information to improve your property dashboard statistics.

Your current occupancy and historic occupancy levels will now include each unit separately, making them much more accurate for HMOs.

Every week PaTMa is getting better at saving time and helping to organise property people, whether looking for your next investment or managing your existing ones. This post runs through a few of the recent improvements.

Browser Extension

We officially launched our Property Tools browser extension that saves you time while browsing Rightmove and Zoopla. It provides price history, a summary of local comparison properties for sale and rent, and a quick link for adding that property to your prospects list.

Prospector – Local Schools

Local schools are now listed for each of your prospects, including their last Ofsted rating and a link to the schools website (where it’s available).

Prospector – Local Train Stations

Train stations are often critical when choosing where to live and hence also where to invest. So  along with the straight line distance to each they’re also shown on your prospect detail pages. This doesn’t include tube stations yet but they’ll be coming soon.

Manager – Improved Rent Schedules

More flexible rent schedules are now much easier to manage. The system allows you to more easily insert past changes, edit, delete and move them around. All while correctly keeping track of the rent owed to you across these changes.

Manager – Better HMO Support

HMO and multi-unit support is now better, providing specific spaces to record each unit. These can then be matched up with a tenancy and will feature in your portfolio statistics; making your figures more accurate than ever before.

Manager – Property Documents

Upload and store documents per property to help with your organisation. This is in addition to the specific uploads for tenancy documents (eg contracts and inventories), EPCs, expenses and safety certificates. You could use this upload space for appliance manuals, land registry or perhaps planning application documents.

Manager – Encrypted Storage

All potentially sensitive document uploads are now stored encrypted on disk. This covers tenancy documents and property documents to help ensure that your (and your tenant’s) data always stays secure.

Manager – Visual Improvements

We’ve overhauled all of the data input and display pages within the application to ensure they’re consistent and easy to read. Along with this you’ll now find handy “Delete” buttons visible on many more pages to help you keep your records tidy and correct any mistakes.

The visual improvements also extend to the image gallery, available per property, with more mobile friendly navigation and clearer actions.

Other Minor Enhancements

Here’s a quick list of some of the more minor enhancements we’ve added:

• Cancel buttons for easier navigation away from edit pages
• Better filenames for rent record downloads
• Improved date entry, you can now type instead of using the picker
• Better hover information on your dashboard occupancy graph
• You can now upload spreadsheet files in most document storage points
• Rightmove new-homes pages are now supported in the browser extension
• Better detection of un-available properties

What’s next?

Here’s a sneak preview of some more improvements that we’re currently working on:

• Property tickets! Quick notes and tracking of tasks and communications.
• More data for prospects.
• Per tenant document storage.

Discount!

Well done for reading this far! As a reward you can get a lifetime 10% discount on any PaTMa subscription if you sign-up before the end of June 2018 and use the discount code SPRING2018 (if you’ve already got an account, just email support@patma.co.uk and mention this article).

Quick Access Pricing History

Would you like to have quick access to a property’s asking price history while you’re browsing Rightmove? (And Zoopla, but you could just scroll down on Zoopla!)

Then you’ve found the right browser plugin!

While you’re browsing any property on Rightmove or Zoopla, just click the PaTMa icon in your browser to open the extension. Then click “Price History” to see how the asking price for that property has changed over time.

This feature works in a very similar way to the previously popular Property Bee plugin – it relies on people using it to collect the property data and hence history may not be available for all properties.

Note that the PaTMa browser extension works in all modern versions of Firefox and Chrome (unlike the Property Bee plugin, which requires an old version of Firefox).

Local Asking Price Comparisons

Want to get a quick idea of comparable local asking prices?

Get an instance snapshot of other properties for sale within half a mile and one mile of the property you’re currently viewing. Just open the PaTMa browser extension icon and click “Local Comparables”. A moment later you’ll know how many local properties are for sale and the range of prices.

The PaTMa browser extension automatically extracts some basic details about the property you’re viewing to make the comparisons as useful as possible. Property type (house/flat), the number of bedrooms and of course the location are used.

Local Rental Market Comparisons

What about a quick comparison on going rental rates in the area?

Yep, having clicked “Local Comparables” from the previous section you’ll also be presented with a summary of the rental properties being marketed in the area. Again the system tries to pick up the property type and number of bedrooms to help show sensible comparison properties.

For each of the property comparisons shown in the browser extension, there’s also a handy link to view the corresponding full list on Zoopla. Use those links to open the list in a new tab and browse to get a better idea of the rental competition and other properties for sale in the area.

Install The Extension

Now you’re convinced the PaTMa Property Tools browser extension is a great idea, you’ll need to install it in your favourite browser. It’s available free for Chrome and Firefox (those links go directly to the browser stores), or view our dedicated browser extension page on the PaTMa site.

Future Features

We’ve already got more great features planned for our browser extension but if there’s something that would save you even more time and you’d really like to see available, please send me an email with your thoughts.