There are still opportunities in buy-to-let for those willing to put the effort in, argues Bob Young, managing director of Capital Home Loans (CHL)

As I hope you will have seen, we recently launched the first iteration of CHL’s Landlord Survey which asked our buy-to-let borrowers a series of questions about their thoughts on how the sector might perform in the future to issues such as their property purchasing intentions and how their investments were coping in this current economic environment.

Over 350 CHL customers responded to the survey providing one of the most meaningful snapshots of the current BTL sector by those actively involved in it. Given the nature of the wider economic environment and the impact this has had on the buy-to-let sector over the last couple of years one might have expected many landlords to paint a rather dreary picture of what it means to invest in property at this time. However, the results from the survey showed this was not the case at all. In fact what we received back was an overall picture of professional landlords managing their properties effectively and predicting that 2010 would see a much more positive buy-to-let sector with many sensing that this is a market in which they can buy more properties.

Of course there were many who stressed they were happy with the current situation and would be happy to sit tight with their current portfolio just in case the assumed economic recovery did not materialise as quickly as some might hope. This is understandable given the rollercoaster nature of all things mortgage in the last few years, and yet our Survey also delivered a welcome overall view on the nature of our buy-to-let customer. CHL was never a lender that fought for business at the margins of sanity when a number of new entrants and other competitors took leave of their senses and began pushing products that required little if any deposit and no signs of any rental income to cover the mortgage. This wasn’t our style and therefore the type of ‘landlord’, and I use the term loosely, that went for this type of product is very rare on our books.

The survey confirmed that the majority of our customers are what we would define as ‘professional landlords’ who take a long-term view of their buy-to-let properties and, rather importantly, did not enter the sector based on their ability to make short-term gains through rising property prices rather than rental income.

Within the survey we offered respondents a chance to provide greater detail, for example, one landlord when detailing how he was positive about the future of buy-to-let said: “Landlords like myself