🏢 Commercial-to-HMO: From Vacant to Profitable Properties with Matt Baker

Hello you fantastic lovely people. Welcome to the Dealfinders Corner, your weekly property talk show brought to you by Property Filter, hosted by everyone's favourite northerner, Asif Omar from the Property Filter team. We are the UK's highest rated platform for finding deals and we're on a mission to empower property investors and deal sourcer members to find 1000 deals this year thanks to the Property Filter Blueprint. The purpose with your Deal Finders Corner is to give you more and the best of the available resources. Invite expert guests who will share with you the latest and most current strategies, tactics and secrets about actually works right now in terms of finding and making deals and the reality of systemizing and running a high performance business in property. It's my absolute pleasure to introduce the one and the only Matt Baker on today's Deal Finder Corner and trust me, you're in for a treat. Matt is an award winning developer, mentor and best selling author. He has been developing real estate since 2015 and prior to that was a professional musician. He is the UK's leading expert on HMOs and co living and has delivered hundreds of rooms across the UK and between himself and his clients. He also runs the UK's leading HMO training platform, the HMO platform which has won multiple awards for education and support services and most importantly for the results achieved by their clients. Matt's best selling book Next Level Landlord is deemed essential reading by leading industry experts for Anyone who's exploring HMOs as a property investment strategy. Having been both a tenant and a landlord for many years, Matt's personal experiences has shaped his approach to property investment. In this episode we are going to learn three main things. So why commercial to HMO is the strategy to watch in 2025 and how changes in legislation has made it more accessible than ever. How to spot the right kind of commercial buildings and using Matt's simple deal identification framework and then number three, the three Ps price, profit and possibility. How this strategy stacks up financially versus buy to let and residential HMOs and of course followed by an exclusive Q and A. So if you have any burning questions for Matt, then pop them in the chat and we'll get to it at the end. So as usual, can we please give a massive, massive, massive property filter welcome to Matt Baker.

Brilliant. Thank you very much. As Asif mentioned, we're going to be talking about why commercial to HMO is the strategy which I believe is one of the best to be getting into in Property in the UK in 2020. 5 and why all the signs are pointing towards this as a strategy which is highly profitable and just easier in many ways, but harder in some others. I'm also going to share with you the framework that we use to identify the right kind of commercial buildings and the three Ps of commercial to HMO about why commercial properties outperform buying residential properties these days. This session is for people who are maybe a little bit stuck in their investment journey, who are looking to grow their business. The commercial to HMO is not really a beginner strategy. So if you're starting out from scratch, you've got no experience in property, it's probably not the strategy for you. But a simple commercial to HMO might be a next logical step. After you've a house or something, say a shop with uppers for example, could be a logical next step. So for those of you who are in the room, who are still with us, who are looking to do commercial projects, whether it's commercial to resi in general or HMOs and you're scaling your business or you have become a little bit stuck, maybe the areas, the properties are just too expensive. So then what we're able to do is to look at different ways of, of working. So why now? Why are we talking about doing commercial to HMO now? So ultimately there are a number of reasons and the first one is that interest rates are really quite high now. This has got quite a lot of knock on impact. So interest rates as a general rule are historic highs. Over the last 20 years, I think we hit five and a half percent, we're at 4.25, but the bank of England had just held them at 4.25%. What that means is that we had inflation yesterday rising and the expectation is by the end of this year things should be starting to settle down, interest rates will come down. And my prediction at the beginning of this year was that we'd have a base rate drop every two meetings and that's held true. So I reckon next drop, by the end of the year we will be sub 4% and that'll be a nice place to be. But as any savvy investor knows, the base rate doesn't actually impact us as investors. What it does, it impacts the rest of the market. So, and the confidence and the, and what the general public do. So with interest rates being historically high, it means that people have been sitting on their hands. It means that people are, are not actively investing, they're not actively buying, they're keeping their money sitting in their savings Accounts. And this is why the Rachel Reeves is trying to get people's money, get them tax people's money that's in their savings accounts. Because it's just sitting there doing nothing. It's about. In ISIS at the moment. There are about 2.6 billion pounds in. Sitting in people's ISIS right now. I can see that my camera has been a bit slow. Can I just check that you can still hear me? You can. Brilliant. Thank you. Thank you, Bruce. You can be my thermometer, barometer and everything today, which is brilliant. So a lot of this comes down to the state of the market and why opportunities are right now. So this, this government, I would say, is continuously shooting itself in the foot. It's. It's trying to do things which. Oh, hello, we've got some slides we do essentially.

Would you like to go from now the government is.

Haha. Hasn't quite translated, but if we just jump down a few slides, please. There we go. There we go. Fantastic. Amazing. And keep going, keep going. Fantastic. There we go. New government is shooting itself in the foot and ultimately, if we just have all these points on the slide, please, Asif. The government is not liking the amateur landlord and then they're doing everything in their power to make it a really unattractive thing to do, unattractive things to do to be a landlord and regulating it to the hilt, taxing it to the hilt. What it's doing is it's making people sit in their hands, whether they're a. A residential buyer or whether they're a tentative investor. They're not doing anything, which means that the market is stagnant. When the market is stagnant, this means deals, deals, deals. I was actually chatting to an estate agent earlier today who we've got a deal going on with at the moment, and he was saying that they're having to try and do anything to keep the money coming in because the. It's not a seller's market, it's a buyer's market. Things aren't going through. It's a stagnant place to be. So right now we're the busiest we've ever been. I'm going to make more money in 2025, 2026 than I have in the last 10 years about investing in property. Now. This opportunity isn't going to last forever. This opportunity is fleeting. So, Asif, we could keep the slides moving. I can't see whether they're moving or not. Okay, so mortgage interest rates are coming down very, very slowly. This new government is taking time to bed in and get that new legislation through. They said they were going to have things through straight away, but as we know things take time and legislation hasn't come through. And I actually don't think we're going to see masses of positive change in their term. But I don't think anyone else is going to elect any other party to power at the moment with the potential for reform getting a big. Becoming maybe the second biggest party in Parliament. But I'm pretty sure Labour's probably got 10 years in power in total. So I don't know whether that's good or bad. But ultimately they cannot afford to lose professional landlords, landlords like us. And so what it means is that it will get better and it will get worse at the same time. Things will settle. People get used to this as the new norm and the market will stabilize and confidence will return. So if confidence returns to the market, I give it 2026, maybe spring 2026. Caveating World War Three. That's outside our, outside our sphere of influence and no one knows what may or may not happen there. But all the evidence at the moment is that we're due a boom in the market, lots of pent up demand when as soon as buyers, because investors don't move the market, everybody else moves the market. Assuming buyers are moving the market and they can suddenly afford mortgages again, things are going to heat up. What it means. And also Rachel Reeves is talking about relaxing the lending requirements. So having higher multipliers for mortgages, having higher, having less stress tests on residential mortgages, 100% mortgages back on the table. So these are the things that are going to be coming. It's a bit like 2007, 2008 again. We're starting to see them loosen the purse strings to allow people to grow and there will probably be a bub. But right now prices are cheap. It's right now you will never be able to buy any property as cheap as it is today. So you should be buying up everything right now. That's what we're doing. We're having offers accepted on things every, every, every week, every other week. Because now is the time to be really, really active. But. And when it comes to HMOs, I'm going to focus on the HMO bit first of the commercial to HMO and why should we be doing this and if we can move on, please. Asif, I just like. Do we have a chat here? Is there a chat function? There is actually. It's too late. We've shown the slide. But there we are. So the number of HMOs in the country is dropping quite quickly. We've lost 10% of our HMOs in the last six years. So if we could just, you see the stats there. So 9.5% since 2018. So we're now down to 475,000 HMOs. So we're losing rooms on the market constantly. And this is due to landlords exiting. Landlords exiting. A lot of these properties are actually ending up back in family ownership. It means that fewer new good HMOs are being created than ones that we're losing. I'm not saying that losing the HMOs is a bad thing because generally they're quite poor, maybe not to standard, etc. But, but ultimately the amount of accommodation that's required is. Well, the amount of accommodation is reducing. So if we compare that with the demand. So that's if we can have the next slide, please. We are losing 40,000 rooms disappearing every year. And with immigration and we know that about 4.7% of the UK population live in an HMO and we've got a net immigration number. And if we assume that 4.7% of those people need an HMO, we're going to have new demand of about 27,744. So in total, what is that number? Asif? 67,500 rooms needed every single year to meet demand. That's 11,262, six bed HMOs. That's ridiculous. Can we build HMOs at that rate? And that's just to meet existing demand and growing demand. But ultimately if we look at the commercial to HMO, that's only 2,720 bed HMOs. Is that more achievable, do you think? Between us we might be able to do a few thousand twenty bed HMOs in the next few years? Yeah. And how many of those are you? How many of those are you going to do? Asif, we need to get this, this. There we go, push the button. How many of those are you going to do? Brilliant. Okay, so interesting point here from Abisaya. So some towns appear saturated. This is a universal. Well, I'm saying it's the national demand for hmo. So it takes into account the ups and downs of different markets. Yes, Abiy, there are a couple of towns I would not invest in right now because the market is very busy. But on the whole I would say 90% of locations in the country work for HMOs and over the next 20 years you can pretty much invest anywhere and it will work over a longer term period. But that's why you really understand some of the fundamentals about where we're going to do this. So there is a perfect storm of opportunity. We've got other strategies which are not working. Buy to, let's not stacking up because of interest rates and we've got service accommodation becoming highly regulated and planning permissions, et cetera, coming into play. And we've got this perfect storm of opportunity where prices are the lowest that they're ever going to be. Right now if you're umming and arring and if you fast forward to next year and you think back to the price that you could have bought a house for this year, maybe negotiating an extra five grand off the price is less relevant to a property today when getting a deal done and getting cash flow and income from a project is more important, it is more important to do deals that are okay than waiting for the perfect deal. I would say that most of my deals are okay and I've done maybe two or three perfect deals and even those just not perfect. And I've also done deals I wish I'd never done and I've also got the regret of the deals I wish I'd done. But everything happens for a reason. So moving on, before we get into the kind of nuts and bolts of some of the things I want to share with you, I just wanted to give a bit more background to myself. So as Asif said, I'm a piano teacher and a musician and I've been ever since my late teens I've been a professional musician going out there doing gigs as a pianist. My income was very up and down as a gigging musician. I didn't like the unreliab of it. So what I would do is start to teach because that would be more reliable income. And then what I was trying to do was to grow that business that I was when I was teaching people and I got really busy and started a music school that had other people teaching students. So about 35,000 of income between my income. So I was used to multiple streams of income. So and ultimately I was trying to grow a business. I was always had this entrepreneurial mindset and I wanted to get this business growing but I was very bad at saving, always looking for the next thing. So I went to a couple of events trying to find how to grow my music school business and I started to invest or spend money on help coaches Training mentors became a bit of a course junkie and I spent thousands in looking for the answer to my future prayers. And I did quite a few different things. There was a guy there speaking about how you can make money from public speaking. This is an event about business growth. There was another guy talking about how you can make money from Forex. And I spent £10,000 on a one year mentorship with them and I lost quite a bit of money on that because I definitely was the wrong type of person to get up every morning and check the markets and place my trades consistently. But ultimately I also did some training in property investing, did a three day training and then a one year mentorship. And ever since then I've had mentors from different guises along the way and thankfully property investing was the one that stuck. Next slide please. Today. Well, I don't like to focus on what I'm doing today because a lot of people see that as you can't picture themselves going from here to here. So what I want to do first of all is focus on my first four or five years when it wasn't easy, but it was easier than it has been in the last few years, especially around Covid. I started investing in 2015 and built up a portfolio. If we could get the numbers up on the slides, please just go through, there's a few on here. I built up a pound 5 million portfolio in my first four years, turning over about 50k a month. And the number that I'm really proud of is the number of happy tenants we have. It's something which we have a tenant first mentality. I am my own demographic. As Asta said at the beginning, I've always rented my own home. I'm only just starting to buy my own house and it's going to be a deal, but it is a deal. So it's going to be purchased on commercial finance and then I'm going to exit it onto residential finance. So it's something which, using the skills that I have now, I can start to buy my own property. So the first five years were very active. We doubled the size of the portfolio every year and then we got into Covid and Covid made it quite hard. Some of those deals were commercial deals, some of those were residential, started by to let. And then the thing that really made the big impact was those commercial to HMO deals which I'll come on to in a minute. I'm going to share my very first accidental commercial to HMO deal shortly. But today I'm very proud to have been featured in lots of magazines, lots of articles. The Times wrote an article about Co Living, interviewed me. I regularly write for YPN and as in Blue Bricks, just last month. So talking about commercial to hmo, actually, and it's something we're very proud of. We won an award for one of our Co Living schemes a couple of years ago at the Property Investors Awards. And as Asif said, I've written two versions of Next Level Landlord, which looks at pretty much everything you need to know. It's like a bit of a handbook for how to get HMOs right, regardless of your starting point. And this year, 2024 has been a brilliant year for us because we won quite a lot of awards. The HMO platform. We won an award for being the best training provider. We're up for it again. We're shortlisted again this year, the HMO Awards. We've also got clients and partners who've won awards at the HMO Awards and clients that have been finalists at the Property Investors Awards too. So I'm very proud to do that. I'm actually a judge at some of these awards as well. Obviously not the ones that we enter ourselves, different categories, et cetera. I can't vote for myself or my clients, but I'm very proud to be able to do that and share success. Yeah. So what does the future look like? Well, right now, as I said, I'm the busiest I've ever been. And on the screen you can see Aura Ventures, which is my brand, which is my. The development company, which I do say I am, or Adventures, but everything we do is in partnership. And on the left you can see a hotel which we're converting to a 15 bed HMO. On the right you can see an office which we converted to a 13 bed HMO. These are two perfect examples of taking unloved buildings and in areas where no other strategy would have worked. Flat values are too low, but commercial values, absolutely fantastic. So I'm scaling up. So you'll see that I'm scaling up a part of the developers club as well as my new network. As if we could bring. There's lots of animation on the slides and we've got £20 million worth in the pipeline right now. In fact, it's more than that at the last count, we're very busy and we're doing things from flipping straightforward properties commercial to HMOs and Supported Living schemes as well, which I referred to at the very beginning. And for those of you who are on. Okay, so that's what we're doing. But what does it give me? It gives me time to spend with my family. It's very important to me to be able to spend time with my two kids, my wife, and it also gives me the ability to do my passion on my own terms. I now have a band called Lo Que Bar. I was a jazz pianist. I absolutely love Latin American music. We wrote some music. It was basically Afro Cuban saltzer music. And we gig this every two to three months we're out there. We're a 12 piece band and if I say so myself, we're very good. The portfolio also gives me the time to travel. Last year we were out of the country for three months. One month at Paris for the Olympics, two months in Bali with the family before Emmy went to school. Emmy's my eldest child, so we do that and this year we're traveling less, but we're starting to do a bit more. So we're looking at skiing. We'll be away for Christmas. Just bought a bell tent. Nice. We say we go and spend some time in some fields somewhere and it also gives time to help others. So I like to give back. The Clock Tower Sanctuary is a charity that we support, based in Brighton, helping young people before they become homeless. Every time we run events, we support Clocktail Sanctuary through our efforts. So that's a little bit about me. So I just want to go to you guys. What is the problem with HMOs? Why am I talking about doing something different with HMOs? So in the chat, just type. What's the first thing that comes into your head about why doing an HMO be difficult? What is it that might prevent you from going and buying a property? Buying an HMO, buying a house, converting it, etc. So just in the chat, let's see how, see if we get a bit interactive here. So article four. Bad public image. Brilliant. Licensing requirements. Managing tenants, Tenant turnover. Finding the right property, Tenants planning for larger HMOs. Yes. So if you're, if you're void, says Chris, tenants. Quite a few people worried about being worried about tenants here. Nasty tenants. And I think this is the perception about HMOs and we solve that in, in a different way. Building regs, Ron. Yes, Building regs became more, more, more stringent, basically. More costly. People not getting on with each other. In fact, if you look at the subtitle of my book this join the top 5% and develop HMOs and co living spaces where tenants stay and pay because they love where they live. So we create spaces where they love where they live and I'm going to show you some examples of that shortly. Okay, so what is from the HMOs? If we could just go through the ones that I've identified as well. It's interesting how you've looked, you've come up it, come at it from the void and the tenants perspective. I've come at it slightly differently, which is I'm going to do HMOs anyway. So I know how to solve some of these by actually creating nice spaces to live and managing them well. But if I'm doing a house to hma, I'm, I've got too much money left in deals. I've also got me to bring them all on the screen, please. My profits are being squeezed. We talked about things being expensive. People Talked about Article 4, high expenses, a high running cost problem with going and buying a property, a residential property, buying existing HMO, buying any house to turn into an HMO, it's stamp duty, it's 5% on top of what anyone else pays. So it's devaluing these types of properties. The actual revaluation of HMOs is going to take a hit in the next 12 months because investors who buy these when they're done are taking the 5% off. So that's the problem that we're trying to solve here. And the commercial property can solve this. Oh, there we go. There we go. So why commercial to HMO? These are the three Ps number one price, number two is profit, number three is possibility. So let's take a look at the first one. Price. So price, what say I had a commercial space is cheaper and how much cheaper? Well, I had a chat with my good friends at Property Filter and they scoured the data and gave me the, the average price, average sale price of all residential property in the UK versus the average sale price of all commercial property in the uk. And these were the results and we can thank flow for that. So commercial average was between 1500 and two and a half. So let's say two and a half thousand pound a square meter on average for commercial, then two and a half thousand to three and a half thousand for resi. So it's, you're getting more bang for your buck. So commercial space is 50% cheaper than, it's 50% cheaper than resi. And you also get much, much cheaper stamp duty. So anything which is commercial in nature, you pay commercial stamp duty. And the Chancellor has not tinkered with that, has not played with that at all, because technically they'd be taxing businesses more. The extra additional 5% is designed to target landlords and people who've got money to buy property. If you tax commercial stamp duty, you're taxing businesses. But thankfully there's some gray areas where we can play in the middle of that as well. But price. So we're getting more space. If we're buying a house, converting it to a next level hmo, which is a good quality hmo, en suite rooms, good communal facilities, nice design, where price actually it gets rid of the bad tenants just through pricing your property correctly or pricing your rooms correctly. And what we find is that you're going to spend a decent amount of money to get there. Yes, it's expensive. So if I'm starting at a high price and then spending a lot of money on it, I need a lot of meat on the bone to make it stack up. Whereas if I'm going to spend that money anyway, why not buy more space but more cheaply? I'm going to spend that amount of money on the property regardless. My cost of acquisition I'm trying to reduce. So that's why price is important. Now let's look at profits. So for profits we're looking at higher cash flow. So generally these are going to be slightly larger properties, more creative properties that might be mixed use. There might be, you know, 15 bedrooms, 20 bedrooms. They might be as one unit, it might be across clusters of HMO flats. Then ultimately we can get higher returns as well because we get really good uplifts. This okay then we've also got high cash, high returns and a commercial valuation guaranteed. Every single commercial project we've done has ended up with a commercial valuation. Unless you're buying an office that used to be a house which ends up being a 4 bed HMO in a. So an office that used to be a four bed HMO and then now looks like a family house that'd be valued as a house. Every other commercial style prop HMO will get a commercial valuation. And in most of the country this makes the deal more attractive, makes it work better and makes it worthwhile investing the money and creating possibility. So profits generally are improved and what have we got next? And also it increases the chance of getting all money out deals because if we buy well, we spend decent, we spend a lot of money on it because we're making it future proofed and designed for our ideal tenant. But then we can get this massive uplift at the top as well, which means that we can get equity, we can pull money out. And then we're creating a project which is going to survive us for 20 years and gave us a fantastic cash flow for that amount of time. Now let's move on to possibility. A possibility we get more scope because a commercial property normally gives us a bit more. A bit more space normally is a blank canvas in many ways. We can do a lot more with it. Sometimes you're buying properties that are Victorian, sometimes you're buying which have walls and stuff everywhere, like a terrace house. Sometimes you're buying office blocks that are built in the 60s, 70s where they're very easy to divide up into rooms. So you get more scope. We've also got or we've also got more scale. So we can do multiple HMOs in one building, we can do larger HMOs, we can do a combination of commercial HMOs, flats doesn't have to just be one thing. We can mix it up and we get more planning potential. So we sail through these projects, through planning most of the time because we're doing something different. We're overcoming a lot of the hurdles that taking a house and converting to HMA have, especially to the loss of a residential dwelling. So we can operate in Article 4 areas where other people can't. We can take properties that no one else can get stuck up and we can create amazing spaces with lots of tea. And so we can be more creative with these types of projects. We can add more communal space like we could throw in like cinema rooms, game spaces, outdoor areas, etc. Etc. And also because we've got scope to spend on the property, in theory we can add more energy efficiencies to get through building regs. Right now we have to get to an EPC of C. Most of our commercial versions now are getting Bs and we've just had an A on one. So I'm going to show you that in a little bit. Okay, so those are the three P's. Now let's take a look at my first accidental commercial to HMO C to HMO deal so we can bring out the pictures, please. So this is a property in Warrington in the town center. And I didn't realize that I was really doing a commercial to HMA because it looks like a house and it was just cheap. So I'd done a couple of HMAs in Warrington already and we walked around the town center. I saw these deals that'd be amazing project today. Lots of space, big rooms and it came up on the market. It was on with the wrong agent. It was on with an agent that was sell it. It was on with a residential agent in a different town. So they didn't know what to do, it didn't know what they had. And this was on the market for 150 grand. We got it for £147,000 and we converted into an eight bedroom HMO and a one bedroom flat in the basement, leveraging permitted development rights, planning permission and basically getting a fantastic product that we did in 2017. So I'd been investing for only about 12 to 18 months before we did this and this was my third HMO. So you don't have to wait to get into commercial to HMOs. You can get there very, you can get there quickly. But I generally suggest doing another project first and then doing commercial to hmo. So this can really scale your business up. And if you think about the cash flow from this. And I've got some. I'll tell you what, let's look at some photos. So this was a 2017, 2018 style HMO, which means. And so if you just go into the next slide, please. Actually, yeah, you can see this is what it looked like on the inside. Very beige box, conference room, poor carpets, random blinds, strip lights. And then we converted it into an eight bedroom HMO and you can see through the pictures that it's nice. Let's see the pictures please. Asif. So we could say back in 2017, 2018, to do really good HMO, we were talking gray feature walls, furniture pack and this, this was the best HMO in Warrington in 2017, 2018. Now you'd look at this today and go, oh my. It's all right, there's nothing special. We have tweaked it a little bit since then, but we've got a plan to up spec some of these rooms and make them next level or more next level. But we never need to because these rooms rent like that because this is town centre. Rooms that are between 12 and 16, 17 square meters with an ensuite that are fully functional and about two minutes walk from the train station. So we don't need to. Some of our older HMOs where they're a bit smaller, the rooms, you know, they do, they need to be tarting up, bit of maintenance. In fact, I just put a couple with rent to rent because they're going to, you know, they're the ones that are going to take the effort to, to do it. Whereas this one, this rents out all day long still. And that's why I love it. But I learned a lot in this deal. I learned about builders and how not to work with builders. We actually had three sets of builders on this. The first one did the rip out, couldn't cope with it. The second one basically ripped the entire house down without telling us and then spent an absolute fortune getting, like hardly anywhere. And then we had to. Then we had to bring in a project manager. So I learned that actually I was the wrong person to be dealing with builders. And ever since then, I've never instructed a builder directly, always through a highly qualified person who knows what they're talking about, about. Because my job is not to do that. My job is to package the deal. I am the investor and the developer. And then other people who do that, day in, day out are the ones to deal with that say I learned a lot about my strengths and weaknesses there and what we should and shouldn't do. So if we can move to the next slide, please. Here are some numbers. So, purchase 147refurb quarter of a million pounds. That was more, much, much more than we thought it was going to cost, but a lot cheaper than it would be today. But the rent, 5000 pounds a month monthly mortgage, 1500 management bills, maintenance, cash flow. And valued up very nicely, just under half a million. And so we're getting over 1700 pounds a month cash flow from one HMO. And these days in a house to HMO, you'd be lucky if you're getting £150 per room profit. So this is actually quite a nice way of doing it because you're doing one project, it's a bit longer. Yes, it's a bit longer, but you're getting this reliable income at the end, which is someone's home, they're going to keep paying. It's not the up and down roller coaster like service accommodation. It's not the. And also service accommodation which you might not be able to do in the future because of all the changes. I know because I've experienced it in Scotland. Scotland are generally ahead of the curve with these things. So Scotland are. They stopped us doing Edinburgh service accommodation. So it's now a flat. Makes me no money. So I'm doing HMOs because they are more reliable income generators. Foundation of any portfolio, any residential property portfolio that you've got. Then I've got some service accommodation that works all right, but it's not. It's not reliable. It's not as reliable as the HMOs. They're the workhorses of the it's like a buy to let. Part of your portfolio used to be the workhorses and the HMOs used to be the risky bit. Now the HMOs are the workhorses because the buy to lets don't work anymore. And then service accommodation, bit of a punt, bit riskier in places and a lot more hard work, a lot more maintenance than HMOs. And also this HMO was revalued recently last year at 610,000 so we're getting equity as well. In fact this is worth more now. It's probably about 630, 640 because we had one over the road valued at a better, better yield as well. So we're very happy with this and Okay, I can see I'm getting comments about audio. I'll stop going before. I'll stop for a second as if, if you just confirm that everyone can hear me. Yeah, you're okay. Before I go any further, a little bit.

But he's fine, you're good now. Seems like he's disappeared now. Sorry about this folks. Having quite a few technical difficulties aren't we today. But I mean I suppose that is life, isn't it? So hopefully Matt will come back.

Because.

That was a really, really good presentation and as we all know, Matt is one of the best in the UK regarding HMOs. So I'm really, really excited to see what the rest of this presentation will be if Matt does come back. If not, I'm happy to take over his slide and pretend to be Matt for the next half an hour.

I'm just, I'm just dying to know, you know, those planning issues, you know what, what, what change of class if, if need be, that we need to that make for this strategy. But also how you do risk it hopefully is it's in this slide somewhere.

Yeah, I'm sure it will be and hopefully it'll come back into it. But I mean whilst we're waiting, let's talk about a few things as well. So we're talking about HMOs. That is one of the strategies that I currently do and actually I've got a really interesting story of what happened last week. So I am three weeks old away from finishing a project in Bolton, but as you may have known or may not know, last week Bolton with immediate effects put in article four. So on Thursday there was no article four and on Friday there is now article four. And what makes even worse they announced it on Friday afternoon and the HMO officer is now away till 27th of June. So nobody knows what is actually happening. So be aware. That's one of the things that can happen with HMOs. But I suppose with the commercial to HMOs. Yeah, well timed holiday. I know. I suppose with the commercial to HMOs it is, you have to do planning so that doesn't affect it. But because we were doing it through PD initially, just unlucky I suppose. But I think that's the first time I've ever.

No.

So Simon, they basically, there was rumors of it happening and then on Monday what happened was they had an emergency meeting on the night. The counselors wanted an immediate article 4 whilst the officers wanted something, wanted it to be within 12 months. So they didn't actually agree on that. So then that came up. I rang the HMO officer and I was like, oh hello Mrs. HMO officer, what's the situation? And I said well she was like that's what's happened. It might be a bit of time before we actually agree with it. I've come and seen your project so you should be okay because it's, it's, it's, you know, they came and seen it, it's happening, the conversion is happening. And I was like okay, fantastic, brilliant. And then literally Friday afternoon we heard it went into a media and there's people who are doing quite a lot of conversions at the moment and we don't know where we kind of stand. So all else have a cert of certificate of lawful use? Not at the moment. Oh, hello Matt, we are back.

I'm back. I don't know what's going on. I apologize.

It's okay.

For connectivity issues I logged out and back in again. So we're here. Which area has got the emergency article for and meet?

It's Bolton.

Interesting. Is that, is that, is that council wide or specific areas?

Council wide, the whole of Bolton.

I know a couple of people who are very happy about that. Yes, but you're absolutely right. They, they legally need to do a 12 month consultation and if they're doing an emergency one they have to be able to justify it. And, and then it's essentially they're doing a retrospective planning application to the planning inspectorate themselves and if they didn't have justification to bring in an emergency one, then it could be undone because the planning inspector has to sign off on it. They can't just do it without having the Secretary of State essentially say yes. And then the Secretary of State delegates that power to Planning Inspectorate. So it's one of those things that may still be in place. But the certificate of lawfulness, which you can't get unless you've got tenants in. So it's. Yeah, but you've also got a case to sue the council and I think there is a precedent for that as well. So you can sue them for your losses by the emergency thing coming in. And so again, you should not be out of pocket if you have to put it back to being a house. But I don't know how that works and obviously there's legal fees associated with that, so. Yes, interesting. Okay, yeah, no worries. If we could continue please, to the next bit. Where are we at? So, yes. Ah, now if we go back one. So essentially over the last eight years I've been doing. I've done a number of these now and have focused my. Condensed my thoughts into a seven step process, which is what we do. And it's something that if people want to learn more about, if you stay to the end, we've got a bit of a. A way you can get in touch. So our seven step process we put in place and then now we implement that in every deal that we do and then that leads us to improving and upping our game and it gets us to deals like this that you can now see on the next slide, which is a project we've just finished in Portsmouth and that's how you can take a rundown office on the high streets and turn it into a next level hmo. Now I don't have the final front picture of this because they're still finishing the frontage. But if we go to the next page, we have the internals. We photographed this a couple of weeks ago. This is our standard of accommodation that we do today. And all of these rooms are between 10 and 26 square meters each. So these are two attic rooms, all en suites. If we keep going, there's a few slides like this we've got. Every room is ensuite. Here we go. We've got one room which has got a dry kitchen in it. Keep going please. This is the main kitchen. We have three kitchens in this place. This is the main one which is like a sitting dining kitchen. And then we have this which is our cinema room, living space. Very happy with this. I stayed in this house for two nights when we did all the photographs. I think absolutely loved it. I could have lived there, could have stayed there. And there's also upstairs there's another co working style kitchen with a bench. And essentially this is what we do when we know how to do it properly. And this property has an EPC of A. This will cost me nothing to run apart from water, insurance, council tax, etc. And it's 13 bedrooms, Darren. So we went through planning, we had to, because we started this in Covid. There were some delays that were unexpected, there were some cost overruns that were unexpected. So the market in that regards, you know, took us to a difficult place. And then the market is saving us as well through the rent. Rent that's risen. You know, our average rent that we did in our initial deal appraisal, £650 a room. Now we're looking like we're going to get between 850 and 950 on average for these rooms. So that's saving our bacon. And the EPC of A is also going to save our bacon because our valuation is going to be dramatically higher because of our net running costs are very low. So that's the start of property that we're doing today. Now, I just want to share with you project that was done by one of our clients, Michal. Michal has been doing some HMOs for a number of years. She did 13 HMOs with us when he did his first 12 months. Mastermind. Now he's one of our mentors at the HMO platform and he co wrote and co presents some of the training we do around commercial to hmo. And this is a project that he did. If we could go to the next slide, please. And he's getting a fantastic infinite return. This is an example of taking something ugly and unloved. This warehouse, which is at the end of a residential street, and we go through the numbers, you have to push the button quite a lot, as if here. So we've got a purchase price of 350. He did vendor finance with this. They put no money in to get the purchase over the line. Then he was able to use a bridging development finance to develop it. About £900,000 worth of costs and it has planning for 17 units. So if we fast forward this to the end result, GDB about 1 point, just under 1.8 with a mortgage at 1.3. Lending 262. Go repay, go repay with the vendor with their interest and basically you have no money left in the deal and about 85,000 pounds cash out as well. Let's look at the cash flow. So this particular project is worth 1.8 million and it turns over £15,000amonth mortgage at five and a half. To be fair, that would be less now, because you can get a commercial mortgage at less than 6% management fee at 12 other costs, 3,700 pounds cash flow of just shy of 4,000 pounds a month, which is an infinite return. So if you would like to be doing deals like this, just give me number one in the chat. If you'd like to be doing deals like this, give me number one in the chat. Yes, these are the types of deals that are game changing. Well, I call them step changes. So adding small amounts, small increments. This is how my journey started. I started off adding a buy to let 3,400 pounds a month profit and HMO thousand pounds profit. Say you'll think you're slowly adding cash flow to your bottom line, which then starts to give you a little bit of choice, bit of flexibility, a bit of freedom with your time. But it wasn't until I did my first commercial conversion where all of a sudden is like adding two grand a month in one go. This one's adding four grand a month in one go. Yes, it's an extended project, but at the end you've got that cash flow for 20 years and instead of doing 10 projects, you probably do three. So you're getting to your goals faster in the long run. It's like the tortoise and the hare, you know, and we're taking the slow start, slow start. All of a sudden, as soon as this project finishes, you're just like, oh my God, I've just spent a million pounds on this. But now I've got X amount of money coming in and I put all my money out. Isn't that a fantastic place to be? And that's what we do and that's why we put together the seven steps that Asif is going to show you. And the final thing I want to share with you, which is this convert framework. I'm not going to spend it. So, yeah, we just quickly go through, because I want to get to Q and A, so I don't have time to go through this in detail either. But there are seven things that we need to look for to work if a commercial to HMO is going to work. So first of all, can we get the right configuration that we need for the project? So we're talking about, is the layout internally flexible? Do we have sufficient ceiling heights? Do we have any open plan spaces that can be reworked? Do we have where are the structural walls? Can we play with them? Do we have to take them out? So what's that configuration like? The second is openings, because we're using A combination of prior approval, permissive development and planning. We need to ensure that we've got windows where we need them. A 20 bit HMO needs lots of windows, so if you don't have the windows, you can't get them. It's not going to work. So can we be creative to get more more window space or you can very, very quick notice it's not going to work for a commercial to HMO by looking at the layout like terraced houses, narrow terraced houses. I noticed actually the worst ones are deep terrace properties because the deep, the depth is unhelpful because you've got no windows in the middle. You might have loads of floor space but none of it is usable for rooms, only usable for non habitable spaces like kitchens and bathrooms. But is there any way that we can be creative to make more openings n neighbourhood? So neighbourhood and location. So we're looking for the strong local demand, drivers, transport links, jobs, universities, amenities and also looking for the kind of that positive rental demand. And Darren, roof lights do not work for windows unfortunately because people, they need to be able to see out of the window. So unfortunately not. They can work for windows for communal spaces sometimes, but for bedrooms, no, they need an openable window generally. Then we get onto V viability for planning. So with this we're talking about what use class is in. Is it in a helpful use class like class E or is it an unhelpful use class like class F1 or class F2 which is a lot harder to convert. So class E is generally what we're looking for and how viable is it to get through the policies? So how restrictive are policies for HMOs or commercial properties? Because it could also potentially be a care home or a hotel we've converted. So how likely is it? So what's the viability then? Easy. EPC and environmental impact? We are, you know, we're promoting, you know, spend the money, do it up front, get these properties as energy efficient as possible whilst you, whilst you're gutting it. Because it's a lot harder and it'd be a lot more expensive to do it in 10 years time. In five years time. We've got EPC changes that came in last week, we've got new EPC changes that have been consulted on over the next year. So EPC is only going to get harder for bad properties. So make yours future proof. And then we get to our regulations, routes of escape. So we're talking about building regs, compatibility, fire escape compliance and number of exits to a building? Have you got multiple exits? What's the distance from the furthest room to the front doors or the exits? Can you get out the windows, can you compartmentalize the building and can you retrofit it safety? Now, most of these are overcomeable, but your worst case scenario is you may have to put in a sprinkler system, which we would massively try to avoid because we are getting to larger commercial spaces. Then finally t which tenure, title and utilities. So what the utilities like, are they usable? Is it going to be a massive cost to sort out utilities? And what's the tenure of the building? Is it freehold leasehold? Is there anything in the title, restrictive covenants that would stop you converting the building or stop you from doing what you want to do with it in terms of HMOs? So, yes, those are the seven things that that tick list for getting it viable for doing a commercial to residential. So we've zoomed through all of that. Sorry about the issues at the start. We have kept it to roughly 45 minutes. If you cut out all the fluff in the middle, as if. But what I wanted to do is just to let you know that if you would like to learn more about this and dive deeper, I am doing a special commercial to HMO workshop next week, next Wednesday night, where we're going to go through the 7 Steps commercial to HMO profit pathway. I'm going to show you some examples of how to beat Article 4 and we're going to look at some how Michal made more out of that deal because he didn't pull out 80 grand, he's going to be pulling out a lot more. So if you would like to learn a bit more about that, then use that QR code or go to that link, which I don't know if we're able to put that in the chat. I might just type it in. Okay. And we can go to. Does that work? I don't know. Links I see to work in here, Asif. Okay, so brilliant. So that's me. If anyone has any questions, we can go to Q and A.

Fantastic. Thank you so much and thank you for being so patient, especially through the technical difficulties. I absolutely love that presentation, especially what you've done in Portsmouth. So let's take a few questions from the audience. I think you kind of touched on this one already. So we've got this from Norman and it says, are essays more lucrative and better off than HMOs? I know what you're going to answer, but would you like to Answer that.

I'm going to say it depends. They're different. Just to summarize my view again, HMOs done well are very resilient, very reliable income. You can probably predict 90% of your income. Every single month will be the same. And then you've got a little bit of chop on top. That 10%. With service accommodation, you could probably predict like, 40% of your income. The rest of it is chop on top. You'll have months where you're making loads of money, then you'll have months where you're losing money. You have to subsidize the property. So as a business, it is more of a trading business rather than investment. That's probably a good way of thinking about it. Service accommodation is a trading business, which is very noisy, very busy and a lot more costs associated with it. An HMO is an investment because it's someone's home and they're not turning over every night or every two nights or every week. They're turning over every 18 months. And in HMOs, most tenants. Most of our tenants stay 12, 18, 24 months. Our longest tenant has been with us probably five years. Yeah. So my answer would be, you can do both, but I'm not doing any service combination right now because the rules are changing. Double council tax service combination. They're trying to hit HMOs with double council tax, but they're going to lose because they're applying the laws incorrectly. They are introducing planning permissions. I know people who are running SAS on flats and have been taken to planning enforcement because they believe they're in the wrong use class, because it's not certain what a service accommodation actually is, because it's not a hotel, but it's not a house. So what is it? Somewhere in the middle. So different councils taking different views and there's starting to be some case laws, some which is helpful and some which is unhelpful, but they'll just do what they've done in Wales and introduce a new use class that'll come in the next couple of years.

Brilliant answer. Right, the next one we've got is from Roxana and it's on average, how much does it cost to convert a commercial to hmo?

Okay, that is a very hard question to answer, because every building is so unique. This is why. Partly why I love it, because it's because you get so much of an uplift. But every project is different, so it does make it harder to appraise, it makes it harder to know whether a deal is going to stack up. But once you get to know it and you have a fantastic team around you, you can start to know roughly how much we've done things. So we've done things from, you know, back in the day. I've done conversions for like £80 a square foot. Right. I mean that. You can't do that. I can't do that now. You probably double that now, but, you know, there's nothing to stop you from doing. I'm just actually thinking the most recent one is probably about 100.

Mm.

It's about 120 pounds square foot, something like that we're converting so it can range. And if you want to find out more about the porcelain, how that, how much that one cost me, you definitely need to come and spend some more time with me because I don't share that number willy nilly because it's very high and it needs context as to how it got so high and why it's still. Okay. So you say Roxanne and answer your question. I can't answer it because every project needs its own appraisal and it depends on how much structural work you're doing, what you're doing with windows. But once you get to. Once you're. Once your layout, everything is sorted, it's very easy to predict the fit out. But it's like building a new build. All the money on the uncertainties in the ground. Once you're out of the ground, the cost to build a house is highly predictable to within a few hundred quid, literally. So same with an hmo. Once you've got your structure formed, it's highly predictable to know how much it's going to do to do the plumbing, the electrics, the en suites, the kitchens, because they are standard things. What is unstandard is everything before that.

Brilliant. Right, next question is, how do you identify areas where HMOs would thrive near city centres, close to train stations, what else?

So this is all about where the people are. So it's, It's. I have. It was called the rule of three. Trying to remember. Now it's a rule of three. It's easy. So I always want three major employers from three distinctly different industries. Okay. So towns like Derby, very heavily skewed to one industry. At the moment. We're going through a bit of a. Bit of a renaissance in work, in energy. And it's all to do with AI and energy. AI and energy are the two things which are changing on a daily basis. One of them is going to put loads of People out of work. And the other one is going to put loads of people in work. And it's understanding what companies are doing and where. The pandemic changed the way that we work. AI is changing the way that we work. And certain sectors are going to die and not work in the future. Other sectors are going to massively grow. So we need to understand which are the growing sectors and the growing employers and the locations where those industries want to be. And then if that dies, what's my backup then? What's my backup of the backup? So location is key, but as I said, because of the demand for HMO rooms, it will work in most town cities and most town centers and city centers and there's even a market for outside of cities as well. But you have to I. The key thing here is to understand your ideal tenant, to have the tenant at the heart of every decision you make and then your rooms will be filled for the long term.

Fantastic. Just a follow up question onto that. So when you say close to, for example, employment close to, what is your definition of close in terms of actual? Like for example, is a mile close is half a mile close.

So most. So we've surveyed quite a lot of tenants and we founded the Shared Living Survey a number of years ago, which has just been rerun by Coho. And the Shared Living Survey shows that as long as you're within 30 minutes door to door of employment, then your rooms will rent all day long. When you start to go beyond 30 minutes, it gets harder to rent your rooms. So that 30 minutes could be a 30 minute walk, it could be a five minute walk to a train station and a 25 minute train ride. It could be, you know, a 10 minute walk to a bus stop and a 15 minute bus ride and a 10 minute walk to work. So it's not necessarily around the closeness. And again, it is area specific. So we do actually have some checklists that we like to follow and then ultimately that leads to a bit of a gut feel. A property filter is brilliant for helping with those checklists because of the tools that it has to look at things like local amenities and local transport links.

Right. The next question this is from Michael is please, are you able to talk about planning and change of use, if any, please, how do we derisk that?

So change of use, we've got, we've got permitted development. Permitted development as long as there's nothing to stop us from using the permissive development rights like an Article 4 for commercials of resi, which do exist in certain towns. So as long as nothing to stop us that gets. That establishes the resi use. So we can de risk it from. From a changing from commercial to resi and then the actual layout of the property is going to be subject to what you want to do with it. So if you're doing HMOs, are you doing 3 beds, 4 beds, 5 beds? Is it 15 bed? Is it a couple of flats, is it one big hmo? And that would be determined by our planning consultant. So we would always be running our schemes past our team before we make any financial decisions and have a backup strategy. Know the rules, know what you can, know what you can't do. And if all else fails either can you fight it and win because you know you were right in the first place, which is one of my tax because I win. With councils we always win, even if it takes a little while. Sometimes they just need to tell him what's what. Or could you get out of it another way? Or could you offer subject to. So that's how we would de risk it. But we have a lot more arguments in our favour going commercial to HMO than we do with other types of HMO projects.

Brilliant. Okay, so the next question is, is there any restriction from commercial HMOs in Article 4?

Yes, there's a restriction for every HMO in Article 4. So everything has to go through planning. But some Article 4 policies are more navigable than others. So I know for a fact I can get a commercial building through planning. So an HMO in Birmingham, where you cannot get a single house through planning in Birmingham. Really? So that's possible. It's understanding the rules again, coming back to that and knowing what you're looking for. And yes, it's tricky. You need to know what you're doing. Not a lot of people are going to do it because they think it's too hard. If you want to go and make your life easier, go buy a house in a non ask for area, make it into a 5 or 6 HMO, but it's not going to be highly valuable. It's going to be an expensive acquisition cost and your conversion costs are still going to be relatively high and then you're not going to get this huge uplift of value. But that's easier. If you want to do something which is going to give you a big result, then commercial to HMO can do that.

Brilliant. Okay, so I've got a question and it's about planning as well, and we're talking about it. So what's the quickest you've had planning approved and what's the longest it's taken for planning?

Quickest we've got planning approved is through a prior approval. So before class MA, when we had class O, class M and class N's and class Q's and class P's etc. It would just be 56 days and we'd be able to convert those into HMAs. And so that's the quickest. 56 days. The longest planning battle was four and a half years. Wow.

Wow.

But we survived, interestingly, because we were able to run it as service accommodation in the meantime and they still made a decent income and we finished it. And the council just had their be in a bonnet about one particular thing, which actually after four and a half years turned out to be a non issue. So they're just, generally they're just very slow. So if you sit down in a room and thrash these issues out, you do it in a day rather than four and a half years. It's just the whole process is very long and drawn out and I was right and they did things which they shouldn't have done and we've won appeals, we've lost appeals and I think people are afraid of not getting planning on things. But getting a refusal or planning application can be the best thing because what it does is it gives you a list of things to fix because everything not mentioned is deemed acceptable. If they give you two reasons for refusal as long as you can overcome them, or a planning inspector thinks that they're rubbish and then they shouldn't have been put there, then you'll get your permission. We had a couple of clients who have got a commercial to HMO deal up in Bury, your neck of the woods. And it took them 12 months to get their planning and in the 12 months it was two prior approvals, three planning applications and one appeal and the council just had their beer in a bonnet about it. But the inspector put the council in their place and they got exactly what they wanted because they weren't asking for anything controversial. The council for just some reason didn't like it, even though it was policy compliant and everything that the they. The council was so bad that the planning consultant wanted to do an in person hearing. So they did a hearing at the Town hall in Bury and the planning inspector absolutely ripped the planning officer apart because she couldn't answer questions, they'd not read relevant information and ignored things that have been submitted. They didn't know what they were doing. So yeah, so they got their permissions and it was a Lot less punitive than it could have been. They could have conditioned the hell out of it, but they didn't. Right, okay. Wow. Okay, so it's not so. And the reason that was okay was because it was tenanted the whole time with commercial tenants and some residential tenants in some flats. So they weren't out of pocket. And they'd done a couple of HMOs before, so they know how to do it, they like getting the income and so they were happy to wait for it. And they had three backup strategies of what to do with it, which were supported living, just standard flats and what was the other one? Hmo anyway, because you could do it through prior approval. Another property because you had existing flats. So they were able to prove that they could over intensify the building with people without planning and what they were asking for was actually less. So everything they're worried about was a non event. There we go. Understanding planning. I love planning.

I can tell.

Yeah, I got planning accepted on something today which is good.

Congratulations. Okay, so we've been overrunning a little bit, so I'll take one more final question and it's to do with Property Filter and yourself. It's from Matt and it said, do you use Property Filter templates for your lead generators to find opportunities?

Yes and no. Yes for things that are on market, no for things that are off market. Which I think is probably the same for anyone using Property Filter. There is not a specific template for commercial to hmo, but there is a template for commercial to resi. So I would just use the commercial to resi template and then what you're doing is you're looking at that. Convert those seven things and just get. Does it fit those? Because you know, some of our clients bring us deals in our deal clinics which we turn around and say the best strategy for this is flats, not hmo. It's not one size fits all, especially depending on where you're operating. So there are some areas where your capital value of taking something to flats will be lot higher. But there's also solutions where you can mix it up and you can mix up commercial valuations plus bricks and mortar valuations plus commercial units and having like say for example, if you can get like a Tesco on your ground floor, you know, 10 bed HMO on your first floor, like co living, proper epic space and then four, five flats above it, you've got different things you can do with it. Which is why understanding how to look at a floor plan, look at all of the openings, look at what you could do with it, how you could configure it using what you could do with PD and then what you're likely to get to your planning application to reconfigure it as well, and then kind of add it all together. So I think it ties in with this final question here about conversions of commercial to hmo. How long does it take from completion, planning finished product to the market? It all depends on that planning process. If you do an easy one, a small one, it might take you nine to 12 months. The same amount of time as buying a house and converting it, mainly. So a little bit longer than that if you're doing a big one. So our Stockport one, which was a 20 bed, that one, if we hadn't had the planning issue, that would have been probably 18 months again in Portsmouth, that's been four years. But two of that was in planning during COVID It was a year long. It's a year long development on site. And then we had issues finding reliable contractors, which is the same for most people. And actually we ended up with a fantastic solution, but we wouldn't have done that. We wouldn't have got there and we wouldn't have known about them if that happened earlier. And we probably would have fallen apart because we had the right contract at the right time.

Brilliant. Thank you very much. Is there any final remarks you've got for our wonderful community members?

Yeah. I look forward to seeing you at this commercial to HMO workshop next Wednesday night. This is a reminder, do use that QR code, use your phones to do it. Is there a way of having a clip, clickable link in the chat? I know, I'm aware some people might be on their phones. Can we share the link somewhere afterwards, Asif?

Yeah, of course. We can send so we can put it on the recording at the bottom as well, so we can put it on there in the community. Not a problem.

Brilliant. And it's just finally, thank you so much for your patience and for bearing with us whilst we sort this out. If you want a quick recap uninterrupted, once they've edited the video, please do re watch this because there's a lot of value here that you. That you may have missed as we went through the sticky points, technically. But thank you so much again for having me, Asif. I look forward to seeing some of you as well. Hopefully all of you next Wednesday night. I should say, free commercial to HMO workshop.

Brilliant. And thank you, Matt, for being so patient as well. I know it was quite difficult, difficult with the technical difficulties. So thank you so much. As you mentioned, we will edit the recording so it'll look like it's gone very smoothly. So everyone's going to be excited for that. Right, so it's time to wrap up folks. Just a quick, quick heads up. There won't be a DFC next week because I will be two stepping my way through Glastonbury instead. But don't worry, we'll be back the week after with our very own Steve McCarthy. He'll be sharing his story from classrooms to conversions. How I Found Hidden Gems with Property Filter for now, all that's left to say is the usual visit propertyfilter.co.uk and log onto your Property Filter account. Check out the deal blueprint, define your gold mine area, engage with motivated sellers, assess properties in seconds and load your pipeline and make deals. Have an endless supply of deals, join the top 1% and become a high achiever deal finder. So that's me, Asif from Property Filter. Looking forward to seeing you all again in a couple of weeks time. But in the meantime, go and grab them deals. Thanks folks. Catch you soon.