Profit margins are shrinking for landlords in smaller towns across England. Mortgage rates up. Maintenance costs up. Energy efficiency requirements tightening. Rental growth in secondary markets has not kept pace with any of it. Cash flow is under pressure for buy-to-let investors who built their models on steadier returns. Portfolio […]
Professional property investors are largely undeterred by regulatory changes which some commentators predicted would accelerate a landlord exit – that’s according to Handelsbanken’s fifth annual Property Investor Report. The report, informed by a survey of 200 UK real estate investors, property management professionals and landlords, was carried out after the start […]
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 […]
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 […]
Here’s an uncomfortable truth about property renovation. Most people who try it don’t make the money they expected. A fair number make very little. Some make nothing at all. And a surprisingly large number actually lose money, not through bad luck, but through mistakes that were avoidable if they had […]
