One of the things I’ve noticed over the years is that refurbishment projects often tell you quite a lot about themselves on the first day. Some start well. People arrive, know what they are doing, have what they need, and get on with it. The place feels reasonably organised from […]
One of the most tempting ideas in property refurbishment is this: do some of the work yourself, save the labour cost, and keep more of the profit. On the face of it, that sounds perfectly sensible. And sometimes, in a narrow sense, it is sensible. But very often it is […]
Somewhere along the line, after a few projects where things had become muddled and jobs had been done in the wrong order, I started writing things down before the work began. Not an elaborate project plan. Nothing involving software, spreadsheets or anything fancy. Just a list. What needed doing first. […]
One of the easiest mistakes to make with a refurbishment project is to assume that if finance is available, it must automatically be the right finance. It doesn’t work like that. A deal can look perfectly workable on paper, the lender can say yes, the money can arrive, and yet […]
Before I became a full-time property investor, I spent years as a Chartered Surveyor. And one of the most useful things that background gave me was not some magical ability to know everything about a building the moment I walked through the front door. It gave me a way of […]
One of the more frustrating things about refurbishment projects is that when there is a loss of profit, it is not always because of something dramatic. Sometimes it is not one big disaster at all. Sometimes it is a series of smaller mistakes, each of which may not look too […]
One of the easiest mistakes to make on a refurbishment project is to assume that if you spend money on a property, you must automatically be adding value. It would be nice if that were true. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it isn’t. And sometimes people spend quite a lot of […]
If you ask most people why renovation projects go wrong financially, they will usually point to the obvious things. The costs overran. The market moved. The builder let them down. And of course those things do happen. Sometimes one of them is the problem. Sometimes two or three of them […]
A few years into my investing career, someone introduced me to what looked like a very exciting opportunity. It was a substantial property. A lot of work was needed. There were quite a few moving parts to it, including structural issues, planning considerations and multiple units. In other words, it […]
A surprising number of renovation mistakes do not happen on site. They happen before a single contractor is booked, before a single quote is requested, and before the keys have even changed hands. They happen at the planning stage, or more accurately, because there has not really been enough planning […]
