🔎 2025 Commercial Property Investing: Strategies You Must Know with Suzi Carter

This is your weekly property talk show brought to you by propsfilter, hosted by myself, Guillaume Blaque, your favorite Frenchman, maybe not so favorite today on your notice link list. So CEO and co founder of propsfilter. And as you know, the UK is highest rated platform to find deals. We're on a mission to empower our property investor and dealfinder members to find another thousand deal this year thanks to the blueprint. And the purpose really with these calls is to give you more the best of the available resources, tactics and secrets about what actually works right now in terms of finding and making deals and the reality of running and systemizing a high performance business in property. It really is my pleasure today to introduce my good friend Susie Carter on today's deal finder corner. So if you don't know Susie, she's a Chartered surveyor with 30 years of experience in the commercial real estate and property sector. She used to work for some of the UK's largest property and development companies, agents and people including CBREs like the guys behind me over here, which I find quite interesting. And bnq, you bought lots of shopping centers, you were one of the directors in the sector and you used to run one of the largest REITs and you were responsible indeed for I think almost 3 billion worth of shopping centers of acquisition. So that's quite a bit more than my current portfolio.

So you're mine by the way.

Yeah, not yours either. Yeah, yeah, it would be nice. So you left this corporate career some 10 years ago and started your property investment company. I think you studied with Simon, did Mastermind and things like that, but brought a lot of your commercial experience into all of this. So now you run the property, the Commercial Property academy, which helps people invest in niche areas of the commercial property sectors and also you've got your own little group of monitoring. So anything to do with commercial property and sometimes with commercial property, we, we always try to convert into resi. But hopefully Susie today will show you lots of sexy and interesting ways or you can, we can make money with pure commercial. Right? So, so today, Susie going to walk us through the why there still is an incredible window of opportunity in the commercial sector. And thanks to Trump in the last few weeks, he could be even better. Right? So very much looking forward to hearing from Suzy today. So we're going to talk about how to be laser focus into what actually makes a great commercial property deal, not get distracted by all sorts of noise and things like that, how you can find these deals and how you can play the commercial finance games in your advantage. To get all your money out. So very much looking forward to hearing today's talk from Suzy. So please give a massive props filter. Welcome to Ms. Suzy Carter. Thank you so much.

Hey everyone. Thanks Guillaume. Lovely to see you all. So yeah, I'm going to talk to you about what makes a great commercial property deal in 2025. And you know, I think one thing is true of this market we're in is that you can make a lot of money, but you can also make a lot of mistakes as well in commercial investing. And so hopefully I'm going to kind of lead you in the right direction in terms of what you should be looking for and just some things to think about in the, in the kind of market going forwards as well. And as Guillaume said, I'll give you a few strategies, give you some case studies and hopefully kind of enhance your knowledge of kind of what to look for. So yeah, so I'm going to be Talking about why 2025 is a great opportunity to buy commercial what makes a great deal in 25, how to find the best deals, who can help you do that and how to play the commercial finance game to get your money out. And by the is really is a game you can play. So I'm going to kind of talk to you about kind of why that is and some steps you can get, you can, you can take today to get going. I won't do my intro because Guillaume has very nicely introduced myself so I will move swiftly on. But just to say that if you don't follow the Commercial Property podcast, I do a weekly episode of my podcast. You can find me on socials and I as Guillem said, I also run various programs to help investors and I also have my own portfolio as well. So rather depressingly, I started out in 1995 in commercial. That's when I started at CBRE as a, as a wet behind the ears graduate surveyor. And it was the first year how old I am. It's the first year that Amazon sold their first book. Can you believe that? Like, and if, you know at that point the commercial property world was very different. You know, there was no really no online retail and you can see kind of the impact that that has had honors kind of now. And commercial property is basically, and this is really relevant for what I'm going to talk about today. Commercial property is anything that's occupied by a business. And so obviously anything that affects businesses will affect commercial real estate. And, and just kind of remember that point because I mean it's stating the bleeding Obvious, obviously. But, but, but obviously anything that happens in the economy that affects businesses will, will affect commercial property. And obviously there's different businesses and different types of property that is therefore they're all, they're all affected slightly differently. And so you know, that's the skill in this market. It's an art to find the right investments, the future proof investments, the investments that banks want to fund as well. And I'll kind of be taking you through some of that today just, just to kind of, for those of you I know, I can see lots of lovely friendly faces in this group. So I know that some of you will know this stuff. But if you don't invest in commercial, obviously some of the benefits are that there's longer leases for repairing insuring terms which means that the tenant has to repair everything and hand it back in the same condition that you granted, granted them. There's great tenants which is mainly means it's really good for kind of pensions and steady income. It's a great diversification play the net and the growth because the tenant does a lot of the repairs, there's very little maintenance. So net and gross yields can be very similar. And there's tax benefit, you can claim capital allowances. The stamp duty regime is much more preferable than resi. Some types of property are undervalued. A lot of property values were hit in Covid and since Liz Truss did her mini budget and that's just getting worse. So I'm going to talk to you about that today. There's, there's permitted development potential but you don't have to do conversions. It's definitely less crowded markets and it's not emotional, it's not a vote winner for, for governments. It's just, you know, unlike residential, everyone doesn't hate commercial landlords. There's like, it's just not got that, that emotion around it. There's lots of profitable niches and you can do these amazing paper exercises to add value. Rather than going in and doing a big refurbishment or extension. You can actually do paper based asset management to increase the value. And I'll talk to you about how you do that later. Now what made a massive impression on me in 2008 was when I was managing a portfolio shopping centers at Land Securities. And literally when this is somebody leaving Lehman Brothers in 2008, I don't know whether you remember what it was like at that time. I mean everyone thought that the world was about to end. I remember the finance director at Landsec, literally I thought he was going to hurl himself off the nearest bridge into the Thames was horrific. Our property values at Lamsec, they halved overnight. We fell into, we had a rolling facility with Deutsche bank, we fell into special measures. So every rent review you did across a 15 billion pound portfolio had to be approved by Deutsche bank bankers. I mean it was really horrific. And I wasn't investing myself. I had a few resi investments but I wasn't investing myself in commercial at that point. And the one thing that really, really struck me was how much money some people made at that point in the market. And you know, we had a retail park in Aintree. The value halved overnight and investors bought that. I mean Landset was doing fire sales because they had to get their loan to value better. You know, you had to get it down. And so they had to do capital raises and they had to do fire sales of assets. They basically were selling their crown jewels and the investors who bought it, they were cash rich, well backed investors and they made about, they made about 20 million in about two years on the, on the asset they bought. And that's always kind of stayed with me in terms of the opportunity in down markets to make money. And so that's, that's a lot of what I'm going to be talking to you about, about today. So obviously we've had quite a lot going on the last few years. A bit of Brexit action, bit of COVID Ukraine war obviously then we've had, you know, inflation going up now hopefully going down. Although we'll believe that when I see it kind of as a permanent trend. Interest rates obviously have increased substantially again hopefully we're now on the downward spiral but that will be very much dependent on inflation. And then Liz Truss came into power and we all know what happened then all hell let you let loose and lots of faith was lost in UK plc Bond yields moved out. That's basically the risk free, you know, risk free investments of bond yields. The government borrowing which meant the commercial yields had to rise because you don't invest in an industrial park at a lower yield than your government bond because government bonds are risk free income. So that basically meant that all the values moved out in the commercial property market. And you know, that's happened that, that's been consistent now for the last over two years we've been bumbling along with lower values. And then Rachel Reeves has come along and you know, and it's not really affected commercial property so much but it's affecting business. Her budget from last year is affecting business. So business Rates have doubled, national insurance has increased for employers, minimum wages increase. And you know, sectors like retail, hospitality, leisure are particularly affected. Nurseries because they have lots of low income workers. And so this is where we start thinking about, you know, commercial property is business. But then we start thinking about the differentiation within the sector and you can already see that those sectors now are, they're being hit worse than others. So we start, just start thinking about kind of where this differentiation is starting to happen in the market and obviously problems, equal opportunities. So I'm not saying avoid everything like the plague in there but you know, you just need to be careful about what, what you're, what you're buying. And you know, markets are governed by sentiment. And you know, we've seen what's happened the last two or three weeks. You know the great orange one from over the pond, he's, he's made his, you know, his, his tariff announcements, rode back on a few, they're going a bit hard on China. Nobody really, really knows where they are. We might do a trade deal, might we do a trade deal, might we not? Markets hate that. Markets hate unsettled markets. They had, you know, sentiment's affected, everyone starts feeling nervous. Recessions are created generally by lack of sentiment rather than anything else. Sometimes you get these kind of black swan events but, but recessions tend to be created by sentiment. And you know, we're definitely in a low sentiment environment but it's very, very early days in it. But one thing is for sure is we are, we are entering a period of turbulence. The world order is starting to change and again there's some great opportunities in that. So you know that, that's, that's the spin I'm going to do on onto in today's talk. And you know, just as a final note, you know the UK bond yield, I think we're, our bond yield is now higher than Greece which isn't a great, which isn't, isn't a great kind of endorsement for UK plc. So that means that, you know, faith in the government, people, you know, have the government's having to raise their, their lending rates to get people to lend to the government basically. And that again that all that, that's a reflection of sentiment as well. So sentiment's not great in the market and of course because there's so many different types of commercial property then every sector responds differently. So like I said, you know, a lot of retail, leisure, hospitality is being hit by Rachel Reeves's budget. Then you've got industrial, you know, will it, will industrial Prices be affected by the tariffs. You know, if the tariffs continue, there's going to be certain key exporters to America, etc. Who are going to be affected and potentially that could affect sentiment in the industrial market. Offices. We've seen a massive change in offices since COVID a race to prime. So grade A offices doing really, really well. But secondary offices starting to lie vacant. Leases are coming to an end. But there's some fantastic repurposing opportunities in the office market. And you know, then you compare all that say to a doctor's surgery or a vet or whatever and you know they're not really that affected by anything that's going on. You know, people still like service based property occupiers. Service based businesses aren't being that affected. You know, when, when we're in lockdown. I was just desperate for my chiropractor to open. I would literally have spent anything for my chiropractor to be open. And you know, the first thing I did was go to the chiropractor as soon as they opened. You know, like it's, it's not affected as much as some of these, the, these, these other industries. So, and then just, just as a final note on the market before we go on into kind of what to look for, this is a graph to show that this is back in time 2008. Just to kind of reinforce what I was saying earlier, that the squiggly lines are all different sectors. So retail, industrial, London, regional offices. The, the, really the only, the only thing I want you to look at in this graph is that yields rose rapidly when Lehman's went under. So when it, when a commercial yield rises, that means prices fall. So prices fell, I mean literally overnight that they fell. But what's interesting about this graph is you can see by mid to end of 2009 prices had almost normalized and that's how short that window of opportunity was in the market. To get in, to buy at lower prices and to obviously then capitalize on that lower market. Now the graph you'd see today, the market's changed since then. The graph you'd see today probably every, is everything recovering at slightly different times. Prime property will recover first and then secondary will follow. But, but the same is still true that once in the commercial market there's a real weight of money that wants to invest it in it and when it recovers, it recovers. And so you know, we have this window of opportunity at the moment where prices are lower, where that, where there is an opportunity to, to buy and you know, there's, there's the back end of last year, commercial agents were really talking the market up. You know, there was green shoots at the top of the market. If I heard about green shoots one more time, I was like flipping it. Like, I just didn't, I just didn't buy it. I just didn't buy. I. This is my third downturn that I've experienced in commercial and I'm very clear that we didn't fit enough pain over the last couple of years. Yes, prices had fallen, but lending was still pretty good. And you know, it just, it just didn't feel to me. There's been enough pain and I think there is going to be a lot of pain this year. So the window of opportunity I think has just got better. I think there's going to be many more motivated sellers. And then for those of you who are buying actively buying commercial now and you've got relationships with commercial agents, you'll know I'm, I'm being inundated with off market opportunities at the moment. And that tells me there's a lot more motivation in the market. It is not a seller's market at the moment. It is a buyer's market. And obviously that means that you can put out lower offers, maybe creative deals, and potentially even buy stuff that maybe even two or three months ago you might not have been able to, to buy that. There's also a lot of stock coming on the market because I think a lot of vendors are thinking, gosh, if we have a real global downturn, I want to offload now. I want to, I might be on the downward cycle, but I want to be at the top of the downward cycle rather than right at, right at the bottom. So this is why there's a great opportunity. But obviously, as hopefully I've demonstrated, you know, there's great opportunity, but you could get your fingers burned. So there's certain key characteristics of deals at the moment that I think will be really. Ben, you know, you need to be looking out for. So that's what I'm going to talk about predominantly today. So the number one, the number one attribute of a good commercial property is that there's good tenant demand. And if you haven't, if, if that property hasn't got great tenant demand, then you can create it. So this is because, you know, residential property, we value on a bricks and mortar value. So you make it night look pretty and you do an extension and it's worth more. With commercial property, you don't need to do that. What you're looking at doing is increasing the rent. So every time the annual rent goes up, the, the value of the property goes up. That's just how the equation works. And then you divide by the yield, that's the commercial yield that basically reflects all the risks associated with the property and it's something that a valuer will put in. And there's certain yields that you can pretty much rely on in certain locations. But the yield will be affected by tenant type, lease length because it's all about risk. So you know, because you're relying so much on the income from the property, you know, if that income is short income, that is the lease is going to expire in a few months, then obviously that's more risky than maybe if you've got a 10 or a 15 year lease. So that's kind of what the yield, the yield reflects. So every, every commercial property will have, will have slightly different attributes and different yield, etc. And you know, tenant demand is, if you've got a property where there's lots of tenant demand and supply and demand is in your fav, then even if your current tenant leaves, you know that your void period will be quite low that you'll be able to let again potentially on similar terms. And, and that's the kind of due diligence you need to do. And really the whoops. The, really the, the, the, the thing that governs that is location. It's location and size and configuration of unit. So you know, it's very location specific. So you know, the headlines over the last few years have been that all retail is dead. And yet that I know that I've got a couple of retail investing locations where literally they're short high streets, they're wealthy areas. I know that if a retail shop comes up, up to rent, it will literally rent within two or three months and it will let, let on a 10 year lease, full repair and insuring terms. And you just can't get that in a lot of locations. So this is where the trick is in terms of finding those locations where there's great tenant demand and you know that, you know, you'll be able to prove to valuers that you could let the property really quickly. I'll talk about that later actually in terms of, in terms of that. So supply and demand is what you're really looking for. And you can find out that information from commercial agents and if you niche your strategies, which is something I'm going to talk to you about in a minute. If you really specialize in a handful Maybe two or three locations. Then you know it anyway because you become the expert in those, in those investing locations. And you know, so for example, you can create tenant demand as well. So not a great picture of industrial unit. It doesn't look very sexy. But you know what, the returns are sexy because this is my strategy. I've got various clients doing this as well, buying a larger industrial unit for which actually there's not much demand and therefore rents are lower. But if you can subdivide that space and create smaller units, there's actually a lot of demand for smaller units. Not everywhere. You've got to pick your location carefully. But that means, I mean I've got one client doing this up north and she's actually doubling rents. She's spending about £30,000 subdividing a unit and then she's doubling the rent just because she's creating a smaller unit, which means there's more tenant demand. So this is what I mean about creating or changing a unit to kind of cater for that tenant demand. And obviously that requires some knowledge and market specialism. So tenant demand is really important. But also tenant type and covenant. Tenant covenant. So hopefully I've kind of demonstrated this already. But as we, you know, if we do have a global downturn, which by the way, I don't think is totally guaranteed, but I suspect we might be heading that way then as I said, like a doctor's surgery is going to be a lot more future proofed than potentially a closed shop. Because the first thing that goes, the first thing that's that you know the customer. Because at the end day we're talking about customers quite often what, what they do is they'll go, oh gosh, I haven't got as much money now I'm feeling jittery about the economy. I'm not going to go and buy it's discretionary spend. You know, I don't need a new top, I don't need a new outfit, but I do still need to go to the doctors, I still need to go to the chiropractors. So it's, it, you know, discretionary spend is going to, is the first thing that goes. So again if your tenant type is that kind of closed shop, you know, high end gift shop or whatever it might be, you might be more exposed and you might be with a more of a service based tenant. And then tenant covenant. Tenant covenant is basically the quality of the tenant and the ability of the tenant to keep paying the rent. So when you let a property to a, you know, the the better the property is, the better located it is, the better that the town that you're buying in, the better tenant covenant you're going to get. And obviously when you're, when you're letting to a tenant, you need to do checks and balances, you need to look at their accounts, you need to, to get security from them, whether that's rent, deposits, guarantors, personal guarantees, whatever it might be. Because that's going to give a valuer confidence that you've got more security in the tenant as well. And you say you can find a lot of this information out by working with local agents. I appreciate they're not the easiest people to break into. But Gian will be the first to tell you that if you, if you have credibility with them, if you've bought something, say off property filter and you've got a lot of knowledge because you've, you know, got a bit of inside track on how long it's been on the market for and everything, then your credibility is going to be increased. With 10 with commercial agents. So you kind of get one stab at these, these, these ladies and gents. So make sure that your credibility is good. You know, tell them you've built a portfolio already, tell them you're a cash purchaser, whatever it is to kind of get, get your foot in the door and definitely meet up with commercial agents and kind of build relationships with them as well. And then you will be sent a lot of off market deals because probably somewhere between 50 and 70% of commercial deals are done off market. So don't be surprised if you go into a certain location, say, well, there's just nothing on the market. Well, there's not going to be, it's not going to be publicly available. But once you get in with the commercial agents, you will get those off market deals and then kind of niching is something that Guillaume and I and those of you who've been on Property Entrepreneur before as well and will have had drilled into you. But it's something that I advocate very strongly with my clients in terms of niching of strategies as well. And it's about being an inch wide and a mile and a mile deep. It's about being laser focused, it's about finding kind of needle in a haystack opportunities where there's higher than average returns and it's about kind of getting from A to B quicker is, you know, rather being scattergun investing. You're actually kind of being really laser focused in what you're doing. So like I said, like subdividing large industrial is a really nice niche strategy. Buying secondary offices, refurbishing them and, and splitting them up into smaller units. There's actually quite a lot of demand for those, you know beauty, beauty practitioners will take a lot of offices and you know, Botox practitioners and stuff. You know there's a lot of demand from those kind of operators. Self storage is, is a nice niche strategy albeit it's a bit more of an operational business. You know there's still loads of demand in the market for self storage but for various kind of demographic reasons. Class E is great because classes come in basically it means that you can. Whereas we used to have to go for planning between use classes now you can bring a mix of uses into a building or kind of repurpose a building into different uses much quicker than you used to be able to and that's made it a lot easier. And you know just one thing to note, it's not just town centres that this is affected by. So you know, you can see this B1 also includes office, R D and industrial. And you know I've seen, now I don't do it myself but I've seen industrial strategies where they have high street uses in industrial units they have classy uses, offices as well. It's just made that kind of, it's made the lives much more blurred on how you can use commercial buildings permitted development so you definitely don't have to do conversions when you're doing commercial strategy. In fact I'm going to talk, what I'm going to talk to you about most in a minute is about doing paper based kind of asset management keeping as commercial but obviously one of the benefits of commercial is you can convert them and there's an ultimate exit that's really, really good. And mixed use finance on mixed use tends to be a lot easier as well. So mixed use is good and then just very nice strategies like banks where you can use class E to bring a whole range of uses into them like restaurants, wine bars, whatever, whatever else that's just, I mean that's issue a microcosm of niches Obviously there's loads of different, different niches. Next one, make sure that you're adding value and you've got multiple exits that's kind of, kind of slightly cheated because that's two in one. But when a market is low you can't rely on market increases to increase the value of your asset. So you need to make sure that anything you're buying is, has got value add opportunities and not just that, that you don't just have one option in terms of value add. So you can have multiple exits. So an example of that is you might buy a shop unit. Now it might be that you could let that shop unit as a whole or, and, and let's just say it's got some uppers that's, that's part of the shop. Or it might be that actually you need to carve that shop into maybe two units to make it more lettable and get higher rents. It might be that you can just do a lease renewal of the whole thing and actually just carry on with the existing tenant, nice and easy. But it might be that actually over time, if that tenant ever left, you could do a commercial conversion to residential. It might be that you can carve off the back of the shop unit and create a unit, a residential unit that way. It might be that you bring a different type of use in, you know, within class C. So what you need to be doing is, I mean, I always try and have at least five exits on my commercial properties. It might be that you have a flip, it might be that you, that you kind of mortgage it out. But it's really, really important with commercial to, to make sure that you've got multiple exits. And if you don't have multiple exits on a property, then I would definitely think twice. Especially at the, at the moment you want to make sure that you've got these different potentials and you know, you can make as much or more from commercial by keeping it as commercial, but make sure you've got multiple exits. And it's all about the commercial lease. You know, you, you can renew leases, extend leases and I'll, you know, I'll talk to you about that in a minute. I, I'm very, very tongue in cheek. I'm calling this easy money at the moment. The fact that you don't need to go in and do big developments, big refurbishments of commercial. You know, you can do paper based asset management strategies like letting a vacant shop, extending a lease, whatever else it might be. And the reason that you add value that way is because it becomes less risky. You're probably increasing the rent and it just, you know, this yield will improve because it's less risky. And if anyone's interested, there's a QR code here. I've written a report on it which I call the Easy Money report. As I say, I know there's no such thing as easy money and property. I'd be pretty naive to say that there was. But I guess what I'm Doing is a comparison between that and doing big refurbishments because you just don't have to do that in commercial. So if anyone's interested, scan that QR code and you can download that. So in the spirit of looking at these paper based asset management strategies, the first you can do is let a vacant property. So because of our calculation, rental divided by yield, if there's no rent on a property then the value is going to be lower. So very simply, again, this comes back to tenant demand. You can let a vacant property and when you've got it let Maybe a 3 to 15 year lease, whatever the type of property is, then it becomes less risky. You've got a tenant paying rent and therefore the value will increase, sometimes doubling. I've got clients who've doubled values just by letting a vacant property. So, and I'm going to give you a couple of case studies in a minute as well. The way you can find out tenant demand, there's, there's loads of ways you can find out through commercial agents. You can use your own knowledge. You can, you can put adverts on, on Facebook Marketplace. The requirement list is a nice bit of tech that is in the commercial space where you can, you can basically put a type a location of a town in and it'll tell you kind of what the tenants, you know, what the tenant demand is in that location. It'll have the requirements in that location. So letter vacant property, you can change the lease. So say you've got a, you know, a one year lease of a property. So that property should be, should be offered for sale for a lot less money than maybe if it had a 15 year lease because obviously it's more risky. That tenant could go in a year's time. That's entirely up to the tenant whether they want to do that or not. So if you can buy a property and then extend elite the lease or ideally do it before you buy it, then obviously you're going to make that property much more valuable. So that's a, you know that, that's a really great strategy to do. And in fact I actually target short leases. So I look for properties with short leases because, and then obviously I'll talk to the tenant before I buy and I'll work out whether I can actually change the leases and improve the value. So that can be a very specific niche strategy in its own right. You can add income to the property, you know, taking our rent divided by yield. The more rental income you've got, the higher the value. So you can add units, you can subdivide space like I said and get higher rents. You can reconfigure space because it's to make it more suitable for the tenant requirements. You can add advertising, hoardings, EV charging, you know, you can put a pod on the, on the, on the car park, you know, whatever it is. You can, you can add, add income. You can definitely change the use or you can do some refurb or development or reconfiguring, but you just don't have to. And the only reason you'd actually put a spade in the ground with commercial is because you're going to get a better tenant or a better rent or a better lease or ideally all three of them. So you don't just do it just for the sake of it to make it look better, you do it for an end product basically. And then you can do things like sale and leasebacks. So I've got quite a few clients at the moment that are buying industrial properties which are owner occupied and the owner occupier wants to recapitalize the business. And they, they'll take a, they'll do a sale of their occupational property but they'll take a lease back and they might do that for a couple of years while they get, find a new location and then you can do your asset management, maybe splitting units up or whatever after that. But selling a leaseback is a very commercial specific strategy. So a couple of examples for you. So this is a client who bought a property, Subway. They've got the shop and all the uppers. She bought it to do a commercial conversion. Subway had about a year, six months left on the lease when she took it over. Yeah. So she had all the plans drawn up for a commercial conversion. She was about to put a PD planning in and then I said to her, well have you looked at over five years? Because with commercial. Because you have longer leases you have to look at the returns over a longer period of time. Have you looked at the potential of actually just, just doing a lease renewal to Subway? And she actually had the national like group tenant for Subway. Anyway, long story short, when she did the returns she actually, it actually was better for her just do a paper based lease renewal. And she's actually gone off and done a load of other commercial and she, she knows that her multiple exit for a commercial conversion is ready. If subway leave in 5 years time she could still do that conversion but she just didn't have to do it at that point in time. This is, this is another property that one of my Clients has recently bought. This is a real doozy of a deal actually. You don't get many of these, but it's a real, it's a really good one. This is in Chichester. So Chichester is around an 8% yield town. It always has been, always, probably always will be. Might have a few wriggles in the market but basically he bought this at auction. He bought it post auction. He bought it for 50 grand less than the auction reserve price. It's got two, it's got two flats on the uppers and three commercial units. One of the flats was empty and one of the commercial units was empty. What was scaring investors off was what this commercial unit had been vacant for nine to 12 months and what he realized very quickly was it had actually been on with a residential agent. It was a friend of the landlords. And the first thing he did when he bought this was change the agent to the main retail agent in the location. Upon my advice as well, he put an incentive fee in place so that for them to get it let within a certain period of time. He went in there and he spent £3,000 on a lick of white paint as well. That's literally all he spent on it. And he's actually got that let now and he's also got the residential flat let. So he's actually bought, I think the income was about 42,000 when he bought it. That's actually increased to about 80,000 now. He's actually doubled the income. He's also done a title split. So he's got buy to let mortgages on the uppers and he's got commercial finance on the ground floor and he's added £300,000 in six months. Basically an all money out deal within. Within six months. It's a real, it's a really, really nice deal, that one. Okay, so moving on. So number five is if you can buy cash, then this is the time in the market to buy cash. So however you can raise your cash, whether that's by refinancing existing assets, selling assets that are salable at the moment, working with investors, whatever it might be. Buying cash at the moment is, is a guaranteed way of getting the best deals. And that's because speed and certainty is really key in this market. So one of the first things agents will say to you is do you need commercial finance or are you a cash buyer? If you're a cash buyer, that's the first door opened, you're much more likely to get away with cheeky offers. So if you're a Cash buyer, obviously I appreciate not everybody is going to be able to do that, but if you can think of a way of getting hold of some equity, then it's definitely the market for cash buyers at the moment. And you know, there's a lot of motivated sellers out there and you can put out multiple offers. I've got clients putting out, you know, we're putting out option deals, we're putting out exchange delay completion, we're putting out low, low ball, unconditional offers at the moment. Now is the market for that. Obviously the key is finding out the motivation of the vendor and kind of working that through. Number six, a really important one is buying for tomorrow. Just ignore asking prices at the moment. Oops, I haven't got a good slide for that. So yeah, just ignore asking prices. Like I look at asking prices and it's almost like laughable what agents are asking now. There's a few reasons why they're, they're asking high asking prices. One, just because they're agents, right? And that's what they do. But you know, quite often I, I spoke to an agent the other week and I said to him, you know, why, how did you get to the price? One of the first questions I asked commercial agents is how did you get to the price? And, and sometimes they black it and go. And this guy just said to me, well, that's what, what the client wants. And it was some ridiculous yield. And I was like, well, they're slightly flying a kite, aren't they anyone? Yeah, they are completely. And he just, he just fessed up straight away. He's obviously quite an honest agent. And so, you know, just ignore the asking prices and don't think you've got a good deal because you've got 50k off the asking price or 100k. Like you need to work out exactly what that is worth for you. Work through your multiple exits and you know, buy for tomorrow. Like don't, don't be optimistic. And I would say one of the best ways to buy commercial deals as to buy lots of other, you know, residential deals as well, is follow up. Because a lot of deals fall out of bed. So follow up is a really great way, you know, just make sure you've got systems in place where you can follow up on deals. The other thing is that commercial finance has been, it's definitely loosening at the moment, whether it tightens up again, but over the last couple of years has been more difficult because, just because lenders get more jittery when markets drop. But there's A game you can play. So if you can buy cash, great, we've talked about that. But there's a game you can play in commercial finance which I'm going to tell you about now. So obviously there's lots of different ways you can finance commercial. You can buy it through with angel investors, you can use banks, you can get vendor finance just the same as Resi. You can use Sasses, which is a great way, you know, you can invest in a SASS or a sip, which is a great way of investing in commercial. Or you can lend your SASSA or SIP into a limited company and do it that way. But what the way that commercial lenders are instructing their valuers at the moment is to value on vacant possessions. So even if there's a, even if there's a lease in place and a tenant in place, they're trying to protect their downside, basically. So they are assuming that the property is vacant and then, then if that tenant leaves because the business has been affected by the economy, they're not in any worse situation. The trick here, really, and this is where the game starts, is to find properties. So basically the methodology that valuers will use is they'll basically say, right, how long will this property be vacant for? And I'll just take that off the net rent over five years. So say the property, they think the property was vacant for six months before it let, they'll take six months off the off the annual rent and then they'll kind of average that over five years or three years, whatever they do. The trick here is to find properties that will let pretty quickly. And if you can buy on a bridge or buy cash, get the evidence on the property that you've let it pretty quickly. So like the example I gave you in Chichester, that client could have showed you that within six weeks he'd let the property. Which means that actually the evidence is fantastic. It's on the subject property. When he goes for term finance, he can evidence that actually, you know, the vacant possession value and the market value are very, very close together. The other thing is that banks really like multi let investments at the moment. And that's because there's lots of different tenants paying the mortgage. And so therefore if one or two or three fall away, they're still going to get their money on a monthly basis. So they really like multi let properties. So this is where the strategy of taking industrial property, splitting it up, taking an office, splitting it up, they really like it and you're going to get some good loan to loan to Values on those at the moment on a multi let industrial you can get 75% LTVs. You can get rates beginning with a 6. One of my clients got quoted 6.1% the other day, which actually believe me is good. Like if we were here a year ago, we'd have been talking about 8 and a half to 10%. So rates have really come down for that kind of stuff. And you know, don't be afraid by commercial finance. If you've got income coming in from a buy to let or you've got a track record, you know you will be able to get some commercial finance. Your rates might be a little bit higher to begin with until you get the experience, but you can still get the commercial finance. And remember, always model things for the longer term with commercial because you have longer leases and sometimes you need to look what factor in a two or three stage finance process. So yes, it's entirely possible to get money out of deals but you might need to go for another refinance maybe in a couple of years to get all of your cash out just because of the way that it works. You've got the evidence and, and then potentially the market might rise as well over that time. So how do you find the best deals? Well, you want to find motivation. This is a ridiculous picture. I must change it actually. But yeah, so, so you want to find motivation. That's what you're looking for obviously. And I probably don't need to teach anybod that. I'm sure that Guillaume has kind of drilled that into you in terms of finding motivation. The way you can find out about your investing locations and about the market. So the main industry magazine is Property Week. You can find out from local commercial agents, you can find out from local, local newspapers, some of the key big agents they have yield guides and, and there's lots of research papers, publishers, no lack of information about what the market's doing. And then if you want to find good deals, find them through local agents, as I said, build great relationships, you know, and nothing will do that like buying a deal through them. So they know that you've got that credibility. Property filter obviously great way of doing that and a great way of kind of introducing that first conversation to a commercial agent and you know, telling them that you understand the history of that property and obviously they don't know that you've got this prop tech that's helping you do that. The, the other portals you can look on are LoopNet and eg, Property Link, right Move and Zoopla Commercial obviously Director vendor campaigns. You can also use tech like Searchlan. I've got Costar, which is a fantastic bit of prop tech for, for commercial. But is is it, is it is on the, on the high side. I mean property filters is all you need really for finding commercial deals and really where you want to get to with your commercial investing is building such good relationships with commercial agents. So you get off market deals and that quite often can be direct to vendor. But more often than not it's through commercial agents and kind of tapping into this 50 to 70% of deals that actually happen off market and that's about kind of improving your credibility with commercial agents. So you know, I tried to find a, I find out a picture of a female commercial agent and there wasn't one on my, on my platform. So that tells you a lot about, about the market. But yeah, try and try and build those, those relationships. So what can you do to get going? Well, first of all, start with the end in mind. Formulate your strategy. You know, I'm highly strategic because I've got a corporate background and that's, that's what we used to do. You know, you, you are highly. So I'm very strategic because with my own investing and you need to start with the end in mind, work out what you're investing for. I cannot take any credit for this model. This is Dan Hill's model. But you know, if, if you're looking for cash flow, don't go and do profit deals, don't go and do development deals. You know, if you need to get your basic cost covered, find cash flow deals. Entirely possible to do that. You might want to raise equity. So you might want to then go off and do some, some profit deals, do some flips. You can do flips in commercial. A little bit more difficult at the moment I would say because of the market. But and then kind of start with the end in mind, work out where you want to get to. So many investors just keep going and keep going. But actually if you've got an income target, you know, kind of work out how you're going to get there and then, you know, kind of execute it. And you know, you can niche and find properties, you can tick the boxes and invest in trends. So you know, more, more people wanted to go to industrial units, self storage, whatever else it might be like talking about too early about, you know, the couple of retail locations I invest in where there's small high streets and you can get long leases, you know, identifying those kind of areas, strategies. You can find properties Like I said with short leases and then you know that can be your strategy. You can go off and actually extend those maybe a low value use in a high value area where you know, like I really like MOT garages in really nice areas because actually you're not going to get that planning use again because you're not going to get a planning use again. There's usually quite good tenant demand but you know that if you, if ever there wasn't, you could actually just make a really nice house or a housing development out of it and actually you know, you'd get the values to make that at work and obviously available finance. We talked about kind of playing the commercial finance game as well. This is one of my clients, some of you will know her, she's, she's really nailed her niche. She basically, I just love this post that she put out. So it's taken her a while to do it but basically she, she buys industrial, she splits it up, she does some sourcing as well for other, other people. But basically the main two things she looks for is that the, she buys a larger industrial unit, she splits it up and she looks for the combined multi let rents, one split or at least 70% so more than the single let rent. They're usually 100% actually with her in her investing location and the total cost to convert the property to multi letter is no more than 40% of the purchase price. And that's just the sweet spot for her strategy and you know, it just works. And she's literally cookie cuttering. I mean she's buying properties for herself, she's buying them for clients and they, you know, I've look, I've looked at a lot of them and they, they just work. It's just a really, it's just a really nice strategy. If you're looking at kind of commercial then it's always good to be interested in something and you know, have some knowledge about it. So you know, if you're a residential developer then you know, you might want to move it to commercial development because you know about development. If you're, if you've got a trading business you might want to kind of use that leverage equally. You know, what do you enjoy? I had one client who was really stuck on their niche and then I said, well, what do you enjoy? And he said well, I love martial arts. He was like, oh, by, oh yeah, just thinking about it, my martial arts instructor wants to expand on the south coast and suddenly he had this whole strategy in his head about buying industrial units and Putting this guy. And obviously you need to be bit careful about being too tied to a, to one tenant. But, you know, he kind of had his niche in a nutshell. Call a commercial broker. Like, it's the first thing I recommend clients to do because it just tells you what the art of the possible is with regard to your own finances and what you can and can't do. And then as soon as you find a property again, one of the first calls you need to make is to a commercial broker. I use Callum Brooks at Bond Finance. A lot of my clients use him. He's fantastic. But there's plenty of great commercial brokers out there. And then go and look at property and locations, you know, get in the car. There is literally nothing like getting in the car and going to a investing location, whether that's industrial offices, retail, just getting the feel of the place, looking at how well let it is, you know, there's a really nice industrial estate I really want to buy near me and if I go, if I go at different times, I can see kind of which tenants are in which, which are out, you know, kind of maybe if they're struggling a little bit on letting. And I know there might be a bit more motivation because I've got a strategy in mind about what I want to do. So there's just nothing like, you know, you've gone to a high street on a, a, on a Monday lunchtime, you know, what's the footfall like, you know, how, what does the town feel like? You know, compare it to going on a Saturday. Just, just get out there and look at property. And once you kind of get your head into this stuff, your reticular activating system, which is the part of your brain that starts to notice the familiar, will start to really engage and you'll, I mean, literally, you'll, you'll spot opportunities everywhere. I mean, I must drive my family nuts because I'm, I'm kind of spotting deals everywhere. So like, you know, you can't say there's no deals because you literally, literally find them everywhere and build relationships, you know, not just with local commercial agents, although they're, they're probably your most important ones, but also with local key stakeholders. I've got one client and he, literally everywhere he goes, he will find a deal. I don't know how he does it, but it's amazing. He, because he goes and talks to news agents, he talks to pub landlords. He, you know, he will, he will go out there and he will, he will really, you know, he, he Will just, just, just talk to people and, and find deals and you know, the way to talk to commercial agents is really about building your credibility both in terms of who you are and what you've done. The fact you're a cash buyer will really help. But also in terms of your integrity, saying, doing what you say you're going to do when you say you're going to do it. If you commit to a deal, you know, kind of following through properly with that and then once you build your reputation with them, you know, and you build that rapport, then obviously, obviously they will start to send you, send you deals. So hopefully that's been useful if I made it a little plug. I'm hosting a free online commercial conference on the 8th of May. I ran this in January and it was really, really successful. It's me and it's a group of other commercial experts talking about everything from capital allowances to how to buy property, how to borrow commercial finance, how to get pd, planning, all kinds of stuff. So if you're interested, it's on the 8th of May online free, totally free of charge. So scan that if you're interested and if you want to, I'm really happy to talk to any of this group because you're part of Guillaume's community. So that, that's, that's a, a link to book a call with me and I'm really happy to take, take calls on, on commercial and that's it. Guillain, thank you.

Thanks so much. That was so cool. Can you put the, the conference thing back? Because I'm qu. The one you.

There we go.

Yeah, and I'll save it, I'll share it in the later on as well. Yeah, thanks a lot for that. Really. That was really cool. You know, so it's interesting how there's a lot of crossover between the rezi commercial and you know, so about finding the motivated sellers and doing the follow ups, you know, and who knew, right?

Yeah, exactly.

And I picked up on something. I don't know if you, you, it, you roll off your tongue, you know, like it was normal, you know, like. So there's this really nice industrial estate I want to buy near where I live, you know, like Susie Carter 2025, you know, so yeah, we should all think like this. So do you have time for a couple of questions?

Absolutely, yeah.

I made a source. I made us all late to start with. On the, you know, on the, on your commercial valuation, you said there was an asset they were taking deductions about the void they were taking an assessment of how long it will take to rent on a five year basis. Are there other deductions? So for example I'm more familiar with HMO commercial finance where they take the bills and all sorts of other cost or does it work for commercial?

Yeah, so because there tends to be, I mean not always but there tends to be kind of all inclusive leases where landlord doesn't have to do maintenance that specific case they'll basically take off how long it takes to let so they'll take off the void. So as long as you, I mean always do a value pat with commercial, as long as you can prove that that void, you know you've got comparable evidence or even better the evidence on the subject property, as long as you can prove that that period is pretty short, then your vacant possession value and your full market value is going to be pretty close together.

Would you work on re tenanting the property before you own it or you don't want this would add value before you buy it or would you do any, anything of the sort or.

Yeah, I mean it's very common in the commercial world to pre let property. It's not uncommon at all. The difficulty you have is obviously if you, if you haven't got the legal ownership then if, if, if you know, if a tenant can go to another the existing landlord and say they'll, they'll, you know from them then obviously. Sorry, there's a dog bark in the background. Hopefully it's not too annoying. But yeah, so, so a little bit careful. I mean obviously this is where things like options, exchange, delay, completion can come in. So rather than doing works in between exchange and completion you can obviously get it property let or you can extend the lease or whatever. I mean sometimes the timings don't work but you can very much do that.

Yeah, that's cool. I think there another question about what do you consider primary and secondary office space and is there a tertiary or more.

Yeah, so prime. I'm talking about the shiny brand new builds that the corporates will go to and you know a lot of corporates are wanting, you know, they'll take long leases but they're wanting all the renewable credentials, you know, ground source heat pumps, high specification, you know, shiny and bright and new and that market is doing really well. Then you've got, you've got a lot of stuff even the City of London, you've got a load of secondary stock coming on which is basically secondary. It's just that it's been occupied hide for a reasonable length of time and there Just isn't that much demand for it because the EPCs aren't great, the, you know, the specifications, not great. You know, we've all seen them, those kind of 80s and 90s office buildings that are just a little bit dark, a little bit grotty but they're, they're perfect for repurposing, splitting up. There's much more demand for kind of sub subdivided space. There is, there is a tertiary market, they can be really grotty. So you need to be a little bit careful about them and just make sure, you know, sometimes it depends on obviously on the purchase price but sometimes those kind of places can need a lot of money spending on them. So you just need to weigh that up and just make sure the deal stacks. But yeah, and you'll find that in every type of commercial you have exactly the same, you have prime, prime, you have secondary, you have tertiary and sometimes you have quaternary. So you've got like on a retail high street you've got the prime pitch where all the brands are and then you get a bit further out and you've got your McDonald's and your banks and you go a bit further out again and you've got your kind of one man band, one woman band type news agents and stuff. And then you go a bit further out again and you've got your proper grot, like probably vacant now, kind of grotty, probably needs repurposing type of property. So it kind of, it kind of works across all the sectors really.

Yeah. But there would be value in repurposing them in some cases.

Yeah, as long as it stacks. Obviously there's a lot of locations where that doesn't stack and so that's where some of the problems in these town centers happens.

Yeah, where it costs more to add value than the value it adds.

Exactly.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, thank you for that. Jan is asking for distressed commercial properties. What strategy are commonly, commonly used? I'm not sure the context of the question, but maybe you, you can figure out.

Yeah. So quite often distress comes about. So there's a lot of distress at the moment about finance because there was a lot of finance, five year, five year term finance taken out in 2019. I don't know why there was just a peak then. So there's a lot of owners coming to refinance this year and loan to values are lower, rates are higher, stress test is, is harder and they're trying to offload kit so they're definitely distressed. Obviously you get distress when a tenant goes. Because Obviously there's nobody paying the rent. And so, you know, this is why vacant properties, quite often you can, you know, get a better deal on them because the landlord's more motivated to sell when things are in disrepair again, you know, and the landlord's got no motivation. There's also a lot of generational commercial owners. You know, I speak to a lot of daughters and sons of maybe commercial owners who've passed away or retired and they just don't know what to do with it. And there are, they are distressed because they're like, this is really complicated. I've got, not got a clue what to do with that. I don't know how much it's worth, you know, and so that's where kind of sometimes targeting people who've owned property for like 20 years, 30 years could sometimes, sometimes be quite an interesting director vendor strategy. So there's lots of different types of distress. It's slightly different than in resi, but some not too dissimilar.

Interesting. How do you value a property if it's, if it's vacant?

So yeah, so basically you, you will take the, what the rent would be and the, if it was let and then you'll take off the void period. So say, say it's five years, say it was took six months to let. You basically take six months off the five year annual rent. So the rent will come down, the gross rent will come down and then there will be a yield put on which is obviously this multiplier which will basically reflect the risk of it being vacant. So whereas the yield might, if it was occupied, might normally be 8%, you might buy it for 8 and a half percent or 9% because that yield. And bear in mind that a higher yield in commercial means it's more risky. The value is basically reflecting the fact that there's more risk. And then obviously that's the upside. If you then get it let, you don't need to deduct any of those void periods and your yield should move in as well because it's less risky.

Interesting. So the longer it stays vacant for the, the lower it's worth. And that's like the case study you had where people were panicking because it was empty for like for months and months. So yeah, close to that point, that's really interesting. And someone asking, you know, the tenant cannot change the use of the building, right? You are kind of making these applications and then there was a question up about, you know, sometimes what those, those properties are owned in companies and you might be better off buying up the business rather than the properties themselves. You come across things like that. And for the next two hours that we've got together, can you tell us how do we value business with properties in them?

Yeah, that's an interesting one. So I wouldn't necessarily suggest that you buy a business just because it's got a good property in it, obviously because you've got all the liabilities that come with it. But I, for example, had a client who's an accountant on one of my boards and he actually, his niche strategy was to buy accountancy companies where they own their own freehold. And basically his strategy was to consolidate the staff in one or two properties and then asset manage the freeholds. What you tend to find, unless. Unless they're quite clued up, you tend to find freeholds are very often undervalued on balance sheets. So there can be an opportunity there to kind of look at that downval. But obviously you need to be a little bit careful about if you're not a specialist in that particular business, you need to be careful about all the other stuff that comes with running that particular business. So quite often you find that businesses will own the property in their pension fund, so the owner will own it in their pension fund if it's a small business. So sometimes you don't need to link the two. You know, if they're disposing of their business, they might actually want to dispose of the freehold as well.

Yeah. Remember, with commercial properties you have fewer stamp duty anyway. So you don't. It's not like you don't really. You don't have really an incentive of buying a portfolio inside a company. And also when you buy a business, you buy all the, the liabilities does go with it, you know, like the employee from three years ago who wants to sue me now because of some stupid reasons. Right, so you buy all of that mess, right?

Exactly. Yeah, yeah. To be avoided if you, if. Unless you, unless you really want run that business. To be avoided.

Yeah, that's right. So hence, yeah, you need to know the industry. And so someone asking, well, I thought Props Filter did not do commercial deals. We do quite a lot, you know, and so that's, that's quite relevant to, to us. And I think the market is really prime for it. So if you're interested, it's all about the stuff Suzy was talking about. So you use it to go and, and have those conversations, show, show yourself professional with the agent, build the relationship and then they will give you all the other stuff that they don't have on display once they trust you. Right. It's a bit of a. It's very, very different. So commercial agents are very, very different to residential agents. Don't ever try to bypass commercial agents. It's a small world. Your reputation is everything, you know. So, yeah, we can talk about that specifically as well. Amjad was asking about, can you give some examples of flipping commercial properties?

Yes. Like, if you think about those five ways of kind of adding value, obviously some of them could be physical, one of them could be physical works or pd. But very often, you know, letting a vacant property, maybe reconfiguring it, you know, so buying, buying a larger unit, splitting it up, doubling the rents, and then, you know, you've added value and then, then flipping it out with that higher value. Because you get a lot of people who want to, probably everyone in this community, sorry, my. You see my dash and running in and out of the room. Apologies, but okay, you see, you have a lot of people who just want to park their cash in commercial property. It's very different than resi. I think you get a lot of business owners, you get a lot of people with excess cash. Pension, pension funds, pension owners. And they're not interested in doing asset management. Probably everyone on this call wants to add value and to get money out and all that kind of stuff, although I might be making an assumption. But a lot of people buy commercial just to get income. So if you, if you can get a property where you buy it vacant, maybe or it's got a short lease, you extend the lease or you get it let, that suddenly becomes quite a nice investment for someone just to part their money in. And they might get a 9, 8 to 10% yield on their cash, which is much higher, double, probably double what they get in the bank. And so that's the kind of play with commercial is, you know, creating something that people just want to part their money into. And you can sell out through agents, obviously in auctions as well, is a good way of selling, especially at the moment.

I think it goes back to your slide about the five ways of adding value to commercial properties. Because with flips and br, people have got in their ads, you know, like buy, refurb, refinance, flip. It's like buy, refurb and sell, you know, but it should really be called buy, add, value, refinance or yeah, value, you know, sell, you know, and then, and there's all these asset management things and just changing the tenant and the lease just could double the value of your property, right? So which is really cool with commercial. So.

Yeah, exactly.

All right, I've got one last question. If commercial has been empty for a long time, how do you know how much the rent to consider appropriate?

Yeah, so. So like with the case study I gave you, it could just because it's been marketed wrong, so don't assume that it's unlettable. But obviously sometimes it can be that there's just no demand for it. So, yeah, this is where it could have been marketed for too much money, whatever. So you need to do some research through local agents, through local comparables and work it through. And if you've got a way of reconfiguring an asset so maybe splitting it up or even making it bigger or, you know, chopping the back off or whatever to make it more lettable, that's better. But the way that you'll find that that rent is to speak to a local letting agent, a commercial agent who lets property locally and they'll be able to really help you with that.

That's a really good point and I should have brought this earlier. Some people ask me about commercial comparables, you know, and, and it's like, what do you mean? You know, but it's not comparable. So. So the building, that building with the same, you know, like, I want to see the comparables, you know, how much it runs for Salesforce, you know, like we do in Raisi. Like, wait, wait, it's not how it works. Right. Remember the value. How do we value properties in commercial? You know, it's all based on the rent it gets and the yield of the area, the particular lease, the particular covenant or the thing. Can you comment on people coming to you asking for comparables, maybe?

Yeah, yeah, exactly that. I mean, you can. I've got Coast Co Star. It's quite nice because you can see what other properties are let for and it gives you kind of like a rate per square foot, ballpark. So. So there will be kind of like a theme that you can hang your hat on, but you need, if you're really going to buy it, you need to really drill down and look at the specifics, as Guillaume says, because you know, the difference between 8% yield and if you do the maths on a calculator, between 8% yield and 8 and a half percent yield can actually be quite a lot of money. So you need to make sure that you're not making false assumptions when you buy.

Sounds perfect. Suzy, do you have a, like a closing sentiment for today?

Yeah, I suppose it's. It's Just, you know, listen to the noise, but don't be intimidated by it because I think at times of problems that there's great opportunities. I would just say the most important thing is at the moment, just don't overpay. I would rather leave a deal at the moment than overpay for it or, you know, to, you know, because I do think we're going to probably drop a bit more. So, you know, look for the motivation buy for tomorrow and then, you know, look at all the ways you can add value and you should be okay. And. And also look at your loan to value. I mean, you know, we all like to max out our loan to value, but you know, if you want to be a little bit more prudent, maybe just drop your loan to value a little bit and just, you know, then that'll kind of should proof. Future proof you.

For.

For if. If the market does drop.

Someone's asking me about the. Yeah, the qr, the QR code about the conference and other things. Can you put it again? I, I. Sure. I scanned it, but it. I think it goes to the one. That one. Yeah.

Does that not work? If it doesn't work, I can give it to. To Guillaume, but I thought I. Let me see if it works. But I thought I checked that before I came on.

Oh, yes, I got it now.

Yeah.

Cool. Yeah, that sounds really interesting. So you might see me there.

Excellent.

Thanks a lot for that. I'll share it as well in the community after. Really appreciate it. So. All right. There's one more question. Do you value the flat based on bricks and mortar and then the shops based on yield for property value or the whole property value based on yield? It's a really good question, actually.

Yeah. So if there's a lease over the whole thing and the upstairs is being used as a manager's flat, there'll be a discount on open market rental value because it's tied to the ground floor. But yes, if it, if it's. If it's a standalone flat, you'll just value it on open market comparables for resi. So it's relatively straightforward. Obviously you'll be discounting it for the fact it's above a commercial unit on a high street potentially. So, you know, just need to reflect that. But yes, you can do a standalone.

Yeah, that's awesome. Suzy, I really appreciate you coming on today. Sorry about the late start from. All my fault. Right. So really appreciate you sharing all of these really cool things. I hope everyone scanned the QR code. If not, I will share honestly that's really cool of you inviting us on this. So we'll go and have a look. In the meantime go and visit your props filter account right and check out the commercial options and what signs of motivations could you find here in there and then what could you go and say to commercial agents and then you know build a relationship with them. Show yourself proceeded and you know professional in a way that they want to share with you all the other stuff they have under the desk, you know and what deals can you do directly because they are on propsfilter or with the relationship you would have built through the deals you brought to them by Propsfilter. So have an endless supply of deals. Join the top 1% Become an Achiever deal finder. I hope you enjoyed today's deep final corner like I did and I look forward to seeing you next week. Thank you so much. Thank you very much Susie. Really appreciate it.

Thanks everyone. Thanks Kian.