I was in a taxi the other evening making a big effort to increase my carbon footprint (difficult when you don’t have a car, but I try to make up for it by not recycling).

Anyway, the driver was Polish – a sort of thoughtful, well educated and very polite Travis Bickle with a Masters in electronic engineering.

Polish Deli

He’s spent the past three years on the mean streets of Brighton, and as we drove along he cast a rueful eye over the more risqué cavortings of our friskier local residents (”Is crazy,” he muttered.)

Britain has been great, he said, but he was planning to go home, as were many of his friends. The Polish economy is on the rise, jobs are more plentiful and better paid, and you get fewer zloty to the pound now than you did a few years ago.

This, I’m extremely sorry to say (I’m seeking professional help), brought to mind the latest ARLA missive on buy-to-let.

The people at ARLA seem to be fairly upbeat, and a good deal of their optimism is based on the following:

“Increased demand is being driven in part by immigration. Across the country, the average proportion of properties taken by immigrants through ARLA members is 20 per cent. More than 16 per cent of these are from the European Union.”

You see where I’m going with this? There are, by some estimates, 1,000,000 Poles in this country. What will happen to ARLA’s happy landlords if they, and the other Eastern Europeans, go home?

One would imagine it can only have a negative impact on the investment market, albeit in quite a localised way. Or am I missing something here? Let me know.

Related Tags: Buy-To-Let, Rent, Landlord, Tenant, Renting & Letting

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