For example, if you are already a basic-rate tax payer, a Limited Liability Partnership might be a better solution for you if you are depending on the income from your property portfolio to maintain your lifestyle.

If you put properties into a company, although you can offset all the mortgages against the rental income, the extraction of that rental income may be at a higher rate by the time you have paid corporation tax and dividends tax.

Another way of mitigating the tax liability, apart from a company or an LLP, is putting £60,000 into pension schemes, which is now the new limit you can put in there.

If you happen to have done it or you decide to put your properties into a company because you are not entirely dependent on the income stream, then this becomes really tax-efficient. Now the rental income from your rental property portfolio has no corporation tax on the income money – it goes straight into a pension as a deduction from the company.

Over time and as the money builds up, the pension scheme can be used to buy commercial property. In your company or your personal LLP, you have more than one buy-to-let and then you start to build a commercial property portfolio inside of a pension scheme.

That is very tax-efficient strategy because all of the rental income is not contributions to your pension scheme – it is just the asset producing the income stream. Therefore, the income from the commercial property is almost completely free of tax in your pension.

If after 15 years your commercial property has doubled in value, then all of that growth is also completely free of tax.

Once you have the value up it is possible a SIPP or SASS to borrow money against a rental property portfolio.

Pensions are a very strong possibility for holding property portfolios if you are inclined to diversify from normal buy-to-lets into commercial properties. Not only is that diversification potentially sensible, because of the amazing tax benefit you get in a pension scheme it might be very efficient to do it that way.

Putting money into pensions, especially if you are a higher rat tax payer, is also a sensible thing to do anyway whether you are doing it through a company or personally.