Oxford Private Rents Average £27.92 per sq. foot

Gone are the days of making money by buying any old Oxford property to rent out or sell on. Nowadays, property investment is part art and part science. The art is your gut reaction to a property, but science must also play its part on a property’s future viability for investment.

Many metrics most property professionals (including myself) use when deciding the viability of a rental property is what properties are selling for, the average rent, the yield and an average value per square foot.

However, another metric I like to use is the average rent per square foot. The reason being it is a great way to judge a property from the point of view of the tenant ... what space do they get for their money. Like people buying a property, tenants must balance between better vs. worse location, more vs. less money and larger vs. smaller accommodation.

I know there are a lot of you in Oxford who like to read statistics on the Oxford property market, so before I talk about the rental figures per square foot, I wanted to share the £ per square foot for sales values. In Oxford, the current AVERAGE figures being achieved by properties are:

·        Oxford Detached Property - £472 / sq ft

·        Oxford Semi Detached Property - £476 / sq ft

·        Oxford Terraced Property - £509 / sq ft

·        Oxford Apartments - £537 / sq ft

So, the rental figures:

The average size of a rental property in the Oxford area is 833.2 sq ft compared to the national average of 792.1 sq ft. This means the average rent per square foot currently being achieved on an Oxford rental property is £27.92 per sq ft per annum

So, what we can deduce from this?  Well the devil is in detail!

Something quite intriguing happens to the figures, in terms of what the property will sell for and what it will rent for, as the size of the property increases.

My research shows that doubling the size of any Oxford property doesn’t mean you will double the value of it … in either value or rent. This is because the marginal value diminishes as the size of the property increases. In Oxford what appears to happen is that a doubling of size gives an approximate 40% to 65% uplift in value, but here comes the even more fascinating part … when it came to the rental figures, doubling the size of the house generates only a 20% to 45% in increase in rent.