One flat, four years in — has being a small landlord actually been worth it for you? Small Landlord

Twelve percent to an agent on a single unit is at the high end and it is worth understanding exactly what you are buying. Full management including out-of-hours calls and compliance certificates is a genuine service; tenant-find-plus-rent-collection dressed up as management is not. Ask for the itemised list of what they do, then price a let-only service and doing the rest yourself. That change alone moved me from marginal to comfortable.

Two units here and I would say one is the worst number. One is all of the admin, all of the compliance, all of the learning curve, and none of the smoothing. Two was noticeably easier per unit than one, which sounds absurd but the fixed costs of knowing what you are doing are already paid. That said, scaling up to fix a problem is how people end up much more exposed than they intended.

One flat for nine years and the honest answer is that a single unit has no averaging. A portfolio absorbs a void month across twelve properties; you absorb it entirely. My rule after year three was to hold six months of the mortgage payment plus £3,000 in a separate account and treat anything above that as the actual return. On that basis my real return has been positive but far lower than the headline £180 a month suggested, and there were two years where it was negative.

The thing nobody tells you is the compliance load creeps up. Gas safety, electrical checks, energy certificates, deposit protection deadlines, the paperwork around any notice — the requirements differ by jurisdiction and they change, and getting one deadline wrong can be expensive in a way that is disproportionate to the rent. If you keep it, put every recurring certificate in a calendar with a two-month warning, and get proper advice on the rules where the flat is rather than reading a thread.

Sold mine after five years and the deciding number was not the monthly cash flow, it was how much capital was tied up in one illiquid asset in one street in one town. Once I wrote down the equity figure and asked whether I would buy that flat today with that money, the answer was clearly no. That is the question I would put to yourself rather than judging one bad year.

Terse: your year sounds normal, not unlucky. Boiler, void, deposit dispute is the standard triple and it will happen again. Budget for it or sell.