By Christopher Browne

Imagine your delight if you won the property equivalent of a Bafta award - we'll call it a Rafter - for the best kept buy-to-let in the UK. You'd not only be sharing a bottle of bubbly with your tenants but dancing round your prize-winning pad like a landlord possessed.

Actually it's not as far-fetched as it sounds. The list of candidates for letting excellence grows every year as Britain's merry band of landlords flit from amateur to professional status. There could even be an award for the smartest-looking b-t-l as well as prizes for the tidiest and most profitable UK investments.

The Rafter for the UK's largest portfolio would probably go to two former school-teachers from Ashford in Kent who have just bought their 700th property. And jolly good luck to them I say.

If everything went to plan each time we bought and we managed to clinch a fixed low interest-rate mortgage, a property next to a railway station, motorway and superstore and in an area with an unlimited supply of tenants quite a few of us would achieve such moments of personal glory.