Running a business in Britain, page 5
246 articles on what it actually takes to run a business in Britain: VAT, staff, rent, rates, tenants, stock and sites. From the studio that simulates it.
- The month the overdraft is called in. An overdraft is repayable on demand, and the demand arrives on the worst possible morning. What you do in the first forty-eight hours decides most of it.
- Employing family, and the paperwork nobody does. Putting your daughter on the payroll is legal and often sensible. Doing it with no contract, no timesheet and a wage that suits the tax is the expensive version.
- What every British recession does to small firms. Three recessions, three different causes, one repeated pattern. Which trades go first, which come back fastest, and who quietly got bigger while it happened.
- Why a British business simulation is different. Most business simulations are American, and the rules that make British business hard are missing from them. Rates, VAT, employment law and the bank manager.
- Stamp duty, and the three different taxes it actually is. Three countries, three different taxes, three different sets of bands. And the surcharge on a second property is the part that changes the arithmetic most.
- Gross yield is a sales figure. Net yield is the truth. Gross yield is the number in the advert. Net yield is what arrives in your account after the agent, the insurer, the boiler and the six weeks with nobody in it.
- HMO licensing, room sizes and the fines. Five tenants, two households, one unlicensed house. The civil penalty runs to five figures and the tenants can reclaim up to a year of rent on top.
- EPC ratings, and the wall your portfolio is heading for. An E-rated terrace is lettable today and probably will not be for long. The work takes months to plan and weeks to do, and everyone will try to do it in the same year.
- Why every refurbishment overruns. You budgeted £40,000. Twelve weeks in you have spent £52,000 and the kitchen is still in boxes. Here is where the money actually goes, and why the contingency never survives.
- Possession, notice and what replaced Section 21. No-fault eviction is going. What replaces it is a set of named grounds, a notice period and a county court list, and the court list is the part that will decide your business plan.
- An agreement in principle is not a mortgage. An agreement in principle takes ten minutes and commits nobody. The offer comes after a valuation, and the valuation is where the deal you agreed becomes the deal you can afford.
- How a chain breaks. Four transactions, one completion date, and any one of them can end it. Where the exposure sits in a property chain, and why chain-free is worth real money at the negotiating table.
- Planning permission, permitted development and the appeal. Permitted development covers more than people think and less than they hope. What needs permission, how the eight weeks really works, and why an appeal is a year of your life.
- The student let calendar, and why it is unforgiving. You get one chance a year to fill a student house. Miss the letting season and the loss is not a few weeks of rent, it is twelve months of it.
- Serviced accommodation versus a standard tenancy. Three times the gross rent, and a cost base that can eat all of it. What serviced accommodation actually costs to run, and what changed when the holiday letting tax regime ended.
- Section 24, and why landlords went limited. Section 24 taxes you on rent you never keep, because the interest you pay is no longer a cost for tax purposes. Here is the arithmetic, and what incorporation really costs.
- Britain is not one property market. The same £200,000 buys a one-bedroom flat in one town and a tenanted three-bedroom house in another. Yield and capital growth pull in opposite directions, and you have to pick.
- The residual valuation, and the land price it implies. You do not decide what land is worth. The finished value does, minus everything it takes to get there, minus the profit you need. Work backwards and the land price tells you itself.