Picture this. In the boom you decide that buy-to-let could be a profitable sideline and arrange mortgages to finance your portfolio. You snap up several inner-city flats, assuming that there will be demand from well-paid young professional tenants, although the area is already oversupplied with such accommodation, and salaries in the locality are modest. The gloss of prosperity you have observed in surrounding streets is financed more by credit cards than chunky salary cheques.

The downturn hits and you lose your own day job. You use the dwindling sums you are receiving in rents (tenants are few and void periods grow longer) to finance your lifestyle rather than pay your mortgages. You also disregard the all-important maintenance of your rental properties. The welfare of your tenants (your paying customers) is your lowest priority.

At this point, buy-to-let investor readers whose borrowings are small and whose tenants are long-staying will be shaking their heads in disbelief at such folly. But this scenario is far from fanciful. It is the typical tale, for example, behind many of the repossessed buy-to-let portfolios now being marketed for sale by UHY Hacker Young, the accountants. Most of these portfolios are on the fringes of Manchester where crass buy-to-let investment decision-making was evidently rampant.

A team headed by Nick Hancock, UHY Hacker Young's corporate recovery partner, collects rents and carries out repairs. As Hancock told me this week, he also tries to find buyers - with some success in the nice bits of central Manchester, in the popular suburbs to the south towards Macclesfield and to the north towards Bolton and Bury.

But Hancock must also disabuse prospective purchasers of portfolios in other more challenging locations of the notion that they will earn yields as high as 12 per cent, thanks to the large price falls in these gritty neighbourhoods.

This search for the best return indicates that the spooked mood of the stock market, and low rates on deposit accounts, are encouraging a new breed of buy-to-let investor to enter the sector. In the interest of tenants and the long-term stability of the housing market, let us hope that they quickly learn from the experiences of their repossessed predecessors.

Text and sub-text

The difference between the statement in the subject line of an e-mail and the substance of the message is one of the constants of the digital age. The subject line holds out the promise of a fab deal, a super-discount mortgage, say. The text below brings you down to earth by spelling out that only those needing to borrow 60 per cent of a property's value qualify.

Anyone hoping that the second bank bailout will curtail lenders' use of this electronic communication practice must be patient. The banks' fates are intertwined with that of the property market, which means that they have a compelling reason to bring about its recovery. They must reconcile themselves to this reality, but there are few signs of such self-knowledge. The e-mails sent out by banks in the 48 hours that followed the latest bailout demonstrated that the best deals would continue to be restricted to homebuyers with plenty of savings or equity in their existing properties, as we report on page 7.

The first bank bailout in October may have saved the banks from meltdown. But their near escape seems to have so spooked them that they can concentrate only on building up their balance sheet against risk. Thus, for the moment, they will continue to favour customers who represent the lowest risk.

For the excluded categories (first-time buyers, and owners with little equity aspiring to trade up) this is particularly frustrating. Their sense of injustice is being further exacerbated by the still self-satisfied expression on the face of Sir Fred Goodwin, the former chief executive of RBS, the man whose strategies mean that this bank is currently not playing its part in mending the property market.

Other images, although more agreeable, also serve to remind those shut out from discounted and any other mortgages, of what they are missing: bargains. The asking price of Pear Tree Cottage, a Grade II-listed house in the hamlet of Wyck Rissington, Gloucestershire, is now £650,000, down from £785,000. The property, pictured above, on sale via Strutt & Parker , went on sale at £800,000 in April 2008. The garden has “productive pear trees”. But we will stop there as more of the detail of Cotswolds comfort could be painful to some.

Timely relocation

The example of the last recession showed that sycophancy (and punctuality) made you less vulnerable to redundancy, or “de-emphasis” as it was called at the time. The current emphasis on being at your desk bright and early means that many will be studying with special interest the graphic on pages 8-9 on the new transport links about to arrive in London, Edinburgh and other locations. While the emphasis in the work-life balance grows ever more on the work bit and how to keep it, even the scruffier among these new easy-commute locations could acquire a new charm.

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