Long lets vs holiday lets in Porthaven - the honest maths

We are a lettings agency, so you might expect this article to conclude that long lets are better. Fair enough - but we are going to show our working, using a real two-bedroom Harbour Quarter cottage from our books, and you can check every line of it.

The holiday-let pitch starts with the headline week: £950 in August, and the brochure quietly multiplies something like it across the year. Reality in a town like Porthaven is seasonal. A well-run two-bed cottage here achieves roughly 60% occupancy across the year at an average of around £620 per week - about £19,300 of gross booking revenue. Now subtract the costs the brochure skips: platform commission and card fees at 15-18%, changeover cleaning and laundry at £85 a turn across forty-plus turns, linen replacement, higher insurance, utilities and broadband you now pay yourself, a TV licence, and the furniture refresh every few years because guests are not gentle. On our worked example, the owner banks around £11,200 before mortgage costs - and many lenders still price holiday-let mortgages higher than buy-to-let.

The same cottage on a 12-month assured shorthold tenancy lets at £1,050 pcm - £12,600 gross. Subtract our full management fee, a sensible maintenance allowance and an eleven-day average void, and the owner banks around £10,700. The tenant pays the utilities, the council tax and the broadband, the cleaning is the tenant's business, and the phone does not ring on changeover Saturdays.

So the honest gap on this cottage is roughly £500 a year in the holiday let's favour - before you price your own time at anything above zero, before a wet July knocks the occupancy assumption over, and before you check whether your title, lease or local policy even permits short-term letting. Several Porthaven streets now carry restrictions, and the direction of travel on registration schemes is one way. A long let, by contrast, is boring. Boring twelve times a year, by standing order.

If you are weighing this decision for a specific property, come in and we will run both columns with your actual numbers - mortgage, street, condition, the lot. Sometimes the answer genuinely is holiday letting, and when it is, we will say so. That is rather the point of us.