Hand picked selection of the best apartments in Birmingham for investment and end use

Birmingham Overview:

Birmingham is a cosmopolitan city with a historic, industrial past. It is a pioneering, forward thinking and global place to live.

Birmingham is a truly varied city with a rich cultural mix in both its permanent residents and student population. This diverse character is reflected in its restaurants, shops, cultural activities and places of worship. You will be able to find the food that suits your tastes in Birmingham’s many cafés and restaurants. If you feel like cooking, you can visit the large fruit, vegetable, fish and meat markets and Asian or European supermarkets, where you will find Halal and other specialist foods.

7 reasons to Invest in Birmingham

1. Birmingham means business

Birmingham may just be the UK’s current business hotspot. It is attracting enormous inward investment, from the UK and abroad. In 2017, the city received more than £1 billion of inward business investment – almost half the total investment in the West Midlands region. And, of the inward investment into Birmingham, around a third is from overseas.

Increasing numbers of major organisations are choosing Birmingham as the location for their headquarters in the UK. These include major banks such as Lloyds, Deutsche Bank and HSBC.

It is not only big business that is blossoming in Birmingham. The number of businesses here has increased by more than 13% in the last year – that’s three times the average rate of business growth in the UK.

Birmingham is the star performer in the UK economy right now, and business growth and investment here is helping to grow the local population and create new jobs – and this is great news for property investors.

2. Birmingham’s diverse economy is future-proofed

Birmingham’s economic growth is not based on a single industry or economic sector. It is home to a huge financial and professional services sector, but is also home to a large innovation hub, green and renewable energies industry, food manufacturing sector digital and creative companies, and one of the largest advanced manufacturing bases in the UK. A quarter of the UK’s aerospace industry is located in the West Midlands, and it is well known for its automotive presence.

This huge diversity of industrial and economic sectors makes Birmingham one of the most sustainable local economies in the UK – and this should future-proof economic growth and potential for property investment in Birmingham.

3. Birmingham is a gold medal winner in the education race

Businesses need well-educated, highly qualified workers to grow. In Birmingham, new and growing businesses have a huge pool of talent to choose from, thanks to the five universities here: Aston University, Birmingham City University, University of Birmingham, Newman University, and University College Birmingham. Five Universities in the City with over 100,000 students, including 10,000 middle-class Far East and Middle Eastern students.

This is a major factor in Birmingham’s status as the youngest city in Europe. Four in 10 of the city’s population are under 25 years old – the demographic that is most likely to rent, making the city a hotbed for buy-to-let investment potential.

4. Birmingham property is in demand and in short supply

Like most towns and cities in the UK, Birmingham’s supply of property is not enough to meet demand. Birmingham’s population is forecast to grow by more than 170,000 in the next 20 years. With this level of growth, it has been estimated that almost 4,500 new homes will need to be delivered every year to keep pace with demand in Birmingham. There are only around 4,000 new homes in the pipeline this year, and this gap between supply and demand looks set to remain for some time.

5. Birmingham is the UK’s top-performing city for property investment

According to the UK Home track Cities House Price Index, Birmingham’s average property price has increased by 7.5% year-on-year. Rental yields are strong, too, with an average of above 6%. Therefore, an investment in Birmingham property a year ago would likely have yielded a gross total return of around 13.5%.

6. Birmingham’s future is bright for property investors

A fast-growing, diverse economy with a young population is certainly attractive for property investors. The gap between supply and demand is helping to drive property prices up, and buy-to-let investors are benefitting from good rental yields.

Knight Frank and JLL believe that these fundamentals will help Birmingham property prices to rise further and rents to stay strong:

• Knight Frank forecasts that the average property price in Birmingham will increase by 18.4% between 2018 and 2022
• JLL believes property price growth will be 20.5% between 2018 and 2022
• They both believe that rental prices will grow by 15.4% and 16.5% respectively during the same period

7. The arrival of HS2

The arrival of HS2 will be an absolute game changer, connecting Birmingham city centre, the airport and NEC campus with London and the North West in a way never seen before.

So now really is the moment for investors to seize the initiative and focus their attention on Birmingham and the West Midlands.