Investor Quick Start | PVP S1E12

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The Property Voice Podcast - Series 1: Episode 12 Investor Quick Start

Last in this first series, but by no means least. We recap the main aspects from the series before sharing the ‘one-page property business plan’, otherwise known as the ‘30-minute business plan’, it really is that super-fast! We have some pointers of how to stay educated and on track too. For those that have shown their loyalty to the show, we have a podcast listener bonus offer of a free ‘mini-strategy review’; this is worth £200, so a nice thank you for listening we hope you agree. Finally, we reveal what is coming up in the second series, so tune in and find out.

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Resources mentioned

• Property Investor Toolkit – here is the book link on amazon.co.uk & amazon.com in case you would like to get yourself a copy to accompany this series
• Your Voice – with a twist...grab your Mini-Strategy Review worth £200 for free by sending an email to podcast@thepropertyvoice.net along with your full name, perhaps a little bit about you and your property background and we will walk you through the simple 3-step process
• Shout Out – a web resource that allows us to benchmark estate agent performance based on real data: https://www.estateagent4me.co.uk/why-compare-agents/

Today’s must do’s

1. Complete your one-page business plan now and don't forget to request your FREE Mini Strategy Review worth £200 (see (Resources section above)
2. Subscribe to & rate the show in iTunes…and while you are at it please help us to spread the word by telling all your friends too!
3. Send in your property stories, questions or moans to podcast@thepropertyvoice.net and we will try and feature YOU on the show too!
4. If you would like to, grab yourself a copy of the book: Property Investor Toolkit (link in Resources above)

Get talking!

• Join in the discussion, either here in the comments section below, or anywhere else on the Blog
• Start a conversation on Twitter with us @PropertyVoiceUK or on our Facebook page

Transcription of the show

Hello and welcome to another edition of The Property Voice Podcast, my name is Richard Brown and as always it is a pleasure to have you join us in what will be the final episode of series one. I am joined today by Casa; hi Casa, how are you doing today and what have we got coming up?

Casa: Hi Richard, I am splendid thanks. A little excited but also a little sad to be drawing a curtain on the first series today…but it’s been a lot of fun!

So, in today’s show, we have Property Chatter, where Richard will give a quick recap of the main aspects of this first series…Building on Solid Foundations.

Then, we have Your Voice and this week, we have a short but very sweet five star listener review.

Next, in the Shout Out, we share yet another tool to help us, particularly when we are looking at selling a property, however there is a twist to that, to help potentially find some ripe bargains too perhaps.

Finally, I believe you will be sharing with us what we can look forward to in the second series, which I really cannot wait to hear…it’s about recycling I think, isn’t it?

So, back to you Richard…

Property Chatter

Thanks Casa…recycling…err, well not quite to be fair but a nice try…have you been trying to read my notes upside down again?

OK, so this final episode is intended to provide an overview of what we have covered in this first series and then a few suggestions of what you can do next as an Investor Quick Start.

Let’s start with a brief recap:

We have covered a fair amount of ground, with well over 30,000 words spoken over this first series…here is a summary:

Strategy

We started off by looking at Property Strategy and used the RIGHT strategy mnemonic to illustrate the main categories:

• R is for Rental Income
• I is for Investor Services
• G is for Growing the Capital
• H is for Handling Property by using other people’s money or assets
• T is for Trading Property

We will return to the Strategy section in a future series but choosing one or two strategies from around 20 or more possibilities can be tricky; we can help with that

Property as an Investment

• Risk & reward:
  • Reduce risk via diversification
  • Investment returns – income or capital growth
• Taxation
• Leverage cash on cash returns
• Compound growth & inflation
• Wealth creation: An accumulation of assets generating a passive income sufficient to fund our lifestyle expenses forever

Define your ‘Why, what & how’…or purpose, goals & strategy

Criteria & checklists

Key Performance Indicators

• ROI
• Cashflow
• Net equity gain / profit
• Payback period

Criteria – ‘STAR’

• Schools (or Unis)
• Transport
• Amenities
• Revenue (jobs & inward investment)

Define your own criteria & KPIs

Research & Due Diligence

Layers of the onion

• Layer 1 – pre-screen against my criteria & KPIs
• Layer 2 – deeper desk-based research
• Layer 3 – wider research including other people & site visit

Areas to research

• Commercials
• Property
• Location
• People

Get good at research & due diligence and / or get a ‘trusted advisor’ to help you out

Knowledge – who, what & where

People

• Online communities
• Property meetings

Knowledge

• Online forums
• Industry associations
• Press & other print media
• Books

Lots of resource links in the show notes to this one, including a short and long reading list. Get and stay current, meet fellow investors and feed the brain

Lettings & management

Two episodes to cover a subject more in depth, with a couple of ‘subject matter expert’ contributions

Part 1:

• My top 10 Lettings and Management Best Practice Tips
• The top 5 areas of contention between landlords and tenants
• The top 5 costliest mistakes of poor lettings and management practice
• Interview with Damien Fogg presenting the case for self-management
• My personal take on being an outsourced ‘hands off’ investor

Part 2:

• My ‘two good & two bad’ landlord and tenant stories
• Interview with Tim Leffler on what to look for in a good letting agent

Financial & accounting systems

• My one thing, two pebbles & three buckets accounting analogy
• Capex & opex
• Good systems & record keeping principles

Funding your property investment

• Brief history of BTL finance
• Major sources of property finance
  • Cash
  • Friends & family
  • BTL mortgage
  • Commercial finance
  • Bridging & auction finance
  • New or disruptive lenders
  • Private finance Incl. Joint-ventures (JVs)
  • Creative financing strategies
• Deeper dive into BTL finance, commercial lending & bridging

The Investor Mindset

• Part 1 – The Investor Mindset Puzzle
  • Skills & competencies
  • Principles
  • Personal qualities & characteristics
  • Habits & routine
• Part 2 – Deeper dive into habits & routine

Some thoughts on our personal philosophy, motivation, change and personal growth sprinkled into the two episodes

Investor Quick Start

“It’s never too late to be the person we might have been” George Eliot

Ok, so it’s not too late, it wasn’t for me and it isn’t for you either. Let’s take a leaf out of Steven Covey’s book, the 7-habits of highly effective people…

First things, first: Stop – don’t rush to invest right now! We need to prepare ourselves…this is one way of going about things:

’Begin with the end in mind’

Let’s start with a 1-page business plan to ‘plug the gap to goal’

The purpose (or the reason ‘why’) - why do you want to invest I property…replace an income, plug a hole in your pension, help others, have a better lifestyle and so on.

Top line goal (the ‘what’) – what do you want to achieve in the next 12 months

Strategies (the ‘how) Determine you primary strategy & secondary strategies…no more

Set your KPIs – these are the milestones you will work towards to reach your goal, imagine the action steps you need to take to get the end result…it’s the how do you eat an elephant principle we are talking about here

Plan, do, review cycle - diarise progress reviews: weekly, monthly & quarterly, course correct & up the goal or activity level as appropriate

Celebrate success – reward yourself for small and big wins to reinforce progress

Give back – the principle of reciprocity, be generous with your time, knowledge and / or money – the more you give, the more you receive and the better for everyone

At the same time we need to ‘Sharpen the saw’…

• Knowledge acquisition
• Community & networking

We don’t have to do this alone…

Accountability & support:

• Get a buddy
• Join or form a mastermind group
• Get a mentor

Most importantly…take action…it’s no good having a great plan, all the learning under the sun and a bunch of great property pals to meet up and talk property with…we actually need to DO something. So get out, make mistakes and fail fast, don’t worry about it and have some fun along the way too J

My story

A quick look at my own property investment journey…

• First investment property in the mid-nineties
• The second one came in the mid-noughties, after what I call my Eureka moment in that pub beer garden. Having stumbled on the power of leverage and compound growth as far as property investing is concerned, I set myself a goal of plugging my pension before my next milestone Birthday.

However, I had something of a challenge to overcome…

I didn’t know it that summer’s evening but soon I was to be divorced, in rented accommodation, with a heap of debt, expenses above my income…considerably, a giant hole in my pension and with no savings. Oh dear.

However, by applying many of the principles that I have outlined throughout this first series of the podcast, I managed to turn things around to such an extent that I could live off my investment income forever if I wanted to. Here are the quick headlines of how I managed that:

• Applied some financial and budgeting principles to plug my income deficit
• Squirreled away a bonus from my efforts at work
• Secured some additional funding for my first property project together from a joint-venture partner
• Recycled the starting fund from that project…and so the journey began

Fast-forward just a few years and:

• No more hole in the pension
• A double-digit property portfolio in three countries with a six-figure annual rent roll
• Experience in a range of different investment strategies
• And most importantly - able to do what I enjoy the most with my time, which is mostly support others to do something similar

I do not say all of this to boast…merely to provide an insight into what is possible and achievable through this wonderful medium of property investing.

If I can do it from where I was only a few years ago, then I am sure that you can too!

What would you like to achieve in your property investment journey?

So, how can we help?

• The Property Voice website is packed full of resources ranging from news stories with insights, topical blog posts, sample projects with real numbers
• My book
• This podcast resource
• Mentoring, training & joint ventures
• Join the mailing list to keep in touch

Podcast listener bonus – as a thank you for making it this far in the series and also in this episode, we would like to offer you something of genuine value. Normally, we would charge close to £200 for this but as a thank you for your loyalty, we would like to offer you a mini strategy review…to help with your Investor Quick Start.

Drop us a note podcast@thepropertyvoice.net with the subject line ‘Mini Strategy Review’, along with your full name and we will walk you through a 3-step process to get you going with a desktop strategy review that considers your goals, current position, strengths and lifestyle factors to provide some ideal strategy matches and a personalised assessment from us.

We can’t say fairer than that can we? So get in touch; we look forward to hearing from you. Next up, Your Voice…

Your Voice

OK, to Your Voice, today we would like to share a 5 star review of the podcast…it comes from J H J 1122, who says:

I just thought I would take this opportunity to say thanks for a great first series Richard. I have enjoyed our time working together very much. I am looking forward to our next series with eager anticipation…something to do with the ‘circle of life’ isn’t it?

Back to you Richard for the Shout Out

Shout Out

Ah, that’s nice of you to say Casa…and I have enjoyed working with you as well…even if you have a dodgy sense of humour 😉

I am not sure that we will be looking at the Lion King and the ‘circle of life’ in the next series, perhaps you got a bit of garbage in, garbage out there in the data input? Hold fire for a quick minute and as soon as I have shared this week’s Shout Out, I shall reveal what we will be covering in series 2.

OK, so today’s Shout Out is a web resource that allows us to benchmark estate agent performance based on real data: https://www.estateagent4me.co.uk/why-compare-agents/

Plug in your postcode and it will return the local agent’s performance data as follows:

• ‘Success rate’ i.e. the percentage of properties where a sale is agreed, compared to the total number of houses listed with that agent
• Average time taken to sell a property
• How close they get to the original asking price
• Number of properties each agent has listed in the location of the sellers’ property
• The fees charged by each estate agent

Great if you are looking to trade a property on…or maybe even to use it in reverse to target bargains from poor agents…now there’s an idea!

All we need now is a similar tool to benchmark letting agents in the same way. I know that Zoopla have some comparison tools for both estate & letting agents, but not to this level of detail.

So, that’s it for another week on the podcast – and in fact that wraps up the first series from The Property Voice Podcast.

I have a couple more series lined up, so I am not disappearing anytime soon. We will start by looking at property lifecycles in the next series. Lifecycles in terms of the ‘soup-to-nuts’, or cradle to grave if you prefer, stages of a single property investment, longer-term market cycles and how to manage them and finally investment portfolio cycles in terms of start-up, consolidation & exit. So lots for us to get our teeth into there.

As usual, the show notes will be on our website with all the links and references mentioned earlier included, and please don’t forget our podcast listener loyalty offer of that mini-strategy review. Just drop us a note to podcast@thepropertyvoice.net with the subject title ‘Mini-strategy review’ and we can take it from there with your Investor Quick Start.

Thank you very much for listening to our maiden podcast series, we have enjoyed having you with us; but for now and until next time on The Property Voice Podcast…ciao-ciao