It all started yesterday with Paragon mortgages' suspiciously upbeat assessment of the buy-to-let market. Everything was, apparently, up. Capital gains - up. Yields - up. Rents - up. Our friends at FirstRung (okay, I say friends, but...) were the first to point out some possible inconsistencies at the heart of the Paragon release. Like... were Paragon really saying that buy-to-let house prices had risen a whole 3.65% in the last quarter - a wildly optimistic view of the housing market? And if prices had risen 3.65%, and rental income had grown a mere 3.33%, how could this mean that yields were also up, or that buy-to-let was a more attractive prospect now than three months ago? All good points, although we suspect that Paragon would counter by saying this merely proves rents are due to rise. All this came in the wake of CML figures reporting a record number of buy-to-let loans in the second half of 2005... a 39% increase on the previous six months. Today, ThisIsMoney weighed in with a piece counting the pitfalls (lots) of getting involved in buy-to-let right now... you might choose the wrong location, you might over-stretch, you might get a bad tenant. Yeah - and you might catch bird flu. In most of these instances you're factoring in either bad luck or avoidable human error. Finally, FindAProperty joined in with a piece about letting to students. Apparently, the halcyon days of squeezing a few cardboard partition walls into a studio flat and advertising it as a six-bedroom shared house are long gone. Students demand penthouses - and the new investment is in purpose-built blocks. FindAProperty lists some ways of getting into the modern student letting racket. Over the coming months we'll be keeping a close eye on the buy-to-let market, so stay tuned.