Steve McCarthy, a former headteacher turned property investor, used Property Filter to negotiate a short-lease property from £160,000 down to £105,000 and a probate deal from £300,000 to £219,000, then sold it for £385,000 after refurbishment. The platform's filters and notifications helped him cut through dozens of listings and focus on six solid deals instead of twenty.
Chapters
So really it has been transformational. It's taken my property business to the next level. Yeah, I'm Steve McCarthy. I'm based in Leamington Spa. I'm a former school headteacher and I'm now full-time in property. Basically, I'm looking to ramp things up to the next level. I'm already an experienced landlord and my portfolio includes a mixture of single lets, HMOs, service accommodation, multi-lets, and recently supported living. So before Property Filter, it was sort of a bit of hit hit and miss. The biggest challenge at that time was spending hours trawling through different portals trying to spot the right deals, but not knowing the information about the deals to take it to that next level. There wasn't really a system in place, and I knew that I was probably missing the best opportunities. And like I say, once you get onto these portals, you can spend hours and hours just searching through them and then obviously arranging viewings, but not knowing the circumstances behind the sale. So they one of the biggest challenges and just like a lot of time being wasted and sort of going in doing the property viewings blind. And I felt that a lot of time was being wasted and it wasn't being productive really. Well, it just wasn't leading to anything really. And I knew that if I wanted to stand out from the crowd, you know, I had to get more serious. You know, I heard of Property Filter, I heard of other similar products out there. I just wanted to be in that sort of top 5% because there's a lot of, you know, by going to property meetings, you meet a lot of people. That are doing similar things. But I wanted to take things, like I say, to the next level. And I needed something like Property Filter behind me to have it in my toolbox so that I was able— yeah, there was a lot of hesitation at first, if I was to be honest. It was very daunting because the platform gives you so many options and obviously things are changing all the time, which is very exciting. So I wasn't really sure where to start. You know, I felt like I was behind the curve. And that when sometimes I went on to the meetings, you know, everybody, you always got that impression that everybody else knew what they were doing and then you sort of didn't know. But like with anything new, it's about playing around and experimenting with the features. And obviously the more you do something, the more you get involved with something, the easier that it becomes. And then I was able to then adapt different filters on the platform that would fit in with my strategies that I was working on at the time. So now a lot of it comes naturally. I know exactly where to go to and what features to use depending on what deal that I'm focusing on at that time. And the information is just immense that's on there. Also, you know, all the recordings from different speakers, the resources that are available on the platform is just superb really. You know, once I was actually going to the viewings with the information at hand that I was getting from Property Filter and was able to drop those, that information into the conversation with estate agents or with the vendors. And then also with the direct-to-vendor letter campaign that is available. Once I started getting calls from my letters that I was giving out, I suppose that's where I felt like it all came together because you hear about other people's success stories, but when it actually happens to you, then the penny drops and then you begin to see the bigger picture. A few months ago, and in that presentation I shared a short lease deal that I was working on in Leamington Spa. I was able to get a real good reduction on the price. So the asking price was £160,000 and with negotiations taking place with the estate agent, I was able to get that down to £105,000. I was then able to talk to the freeholder, renegotiate the lease extension from £55,000 down to £22,000. So I believe that Property Filter was instrumental in those negotiations and it was able to allow me, so it gave me that ammunition, things up my sleeve so that I could present in a certain way. I was also working on a probate property in Coventry with a JV partner, and I've never done JVs before, so that was a real good insight, and that has worked extremely well. So that was a 3-bed semi-detached. It was a probate property, a very old-fashioned sort of set in the 1970s, needed a lot of work doing to it, and we were able to renegotiate that price from an original asking price of £300,000 down to £219,000. We spent about £60,000 on the refurb costs, which brought it up to £280,000. As of a couple of weeks ago, we've managed to resell that property for £385,000. So that's over £100,000 profit between the two of us. When I first started, I had all of them, I think it's 20. 20. Yeah. So I was all over the place kind of thing. And then talking to people on the Inner Circle, the main emphasis was to get that down to 4 or 5 because, you know, and get more focused. So I think I've got about 6 now that I'm focusing on. Again, that's made me more focused. I'm not shooting in all directions. I know what my strategies are. I know the areas that I want to focus. I've managed to filter that right down. I like the notification features in the top right-hand corner. So the properties that are in your pipeline, it will notify you if there's been a change of circumstance. And I quite tend to find that a lot of the properties, when they're sold, they will often come back onto the market. And I think it's statistics say that 1 in 3 property sales fall through, which is quite a high figure. So when that happens on my notification feature, when a property maybe is on the market, then is sold to contract, and then maybe 6 to 8 weeks might go by, and then all of a sudden that property reappears back on the market again, I've been able to sort of get in there quickly, act in a swift manner, you know, in contact with the estate agent. I think Property Filter is for Anybody that wants to be serious about property. I think too many people treat property as a hobby or may have fallen into property by being an accidental landlord. But if you really want to ramp things up and scale things up and become in that sort of top 1% or 5% of property investors, I feel that this is where Property Filter comes into play. It stops wasting time and it allows you to focus on the right deals. So it gives you that edge. Definitely gives you that edge when talking to vendors and talking to estate agents. It gives clarity and it positions you as a professional in the eyes of an estate agent.
