Constantinou Anthony C, Fenton Norman
Risk and Information Management (RIM) Research Group, School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science, Queen Mary University of London, London, United Kingdom.
PLoS One. 2017 Jun 27;12(6):e0179297. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0179297. eCollection 2017.
In 2015 the British government announced a number of major tax reforms for individual landlords. To give landlords time to adjust, some of these tax measures are being introduced gradually from April 2017, with full effect in tax year 2020/21. The changes in taxation have received much media attention since there has been widespread belief that the new measures were sufficiently skewed against landlords that they could signal the end of the Buy-To-Let (BTL) investment era in the UK. This paper assesses the prospective performance of BTL investments in London from the investor's perspective, and examines the impact of incoming tax reforms using a novel Temporal Bayesian Network model. The model captures uncertainties of interest by simulating the impact of changing circumstances and the interventions available to an investor at various time-steps of a BTL investment portfolio. The simulation results suggest that the new tax reforms are likely to have a detrimental effect on net profits from rental income, and this hits risk-seeking investors who favour leverage much harder than risk-averse investors who do not seek to expand their property portfolio. The impact on net profits also poses substantial risks for lossmaking returns excluding capital gains, especially in the case of rising interest rates. While this makes it less desirable or even non-viable for some to continue being a landlord, based on the current status of all factors taken into consideration for simulation, investment prospects are still likely to remain good within a reasonable range of interest rate and capital growth rate variations. The results also suggest that the recent trend of property prices in London increasing faster than rents will not continue for much longer; either capital growth rates will have to decrease, rental growth rates will have to increase, or we shall observe a combination of the two events.
2015年，英国政府宣布了多项针对个体房东的重大税收改革措施。为了给房东留出调整时间，其中一些税收措施从2017年4月起逐步实施，在2020/21纳税年度全面生效。税收政策的变化引起了媒体的广泛关注，因为人们普遍认为新措施对房东极为不利，可能预示着英国购房出租（BTL）投资时代的终结。本文从投资者的角度评估了伦敦BTL投资的预期表现，并使用一种新颖的时间贝叶斯网络模型研究了即将到来的税收改革的影响。该模型通过模拟不断变化的环境以及投资者在BTL投资组合的各个时间节点可采取的干预措施的影响，捕捉了相关的不确定性。模拟结果表明，新的税收改革可能会对租金收入的净利润产生不利影响，相比那些不寻求扩大房产投资组合的风险规避型投资者，这对偏好杠杆操作的风险寻求型投资者的打击要大得多。对净利润的影响也给不包括资本收益的亏损回报带来了巨大风险，尤其是在利率上升的情况下。虽然这使得一些人继续当房东变得不那么可取，甚至不可行，但基于模拟时考虑的所有因素的现状，在合理的利率和资本增长率变化范围内，投资前景可能仍将良好。结果还表明，伦敦近期房价上涨快于租金的趋势不会持续太久；要么资本增长率必须下降，租金增长率必须上升，要么我们将看到这两种情况的结合。
