How We Negotiated £80k Off Asking Price Using Follow-Up Notes| Property Filter

Good to see you. So I run a property investment business with my husband Gareth. I was a hairdresser for the best part of, you know, 25, 30 years. And then we wanted to build up some cash flow. So Gareth and I decided to move into property. We started flipping properties down south to raise the capital because obviously, which we'll get into, but we now do HMOs, which is very capital intensive. And we decided on Manchester as an investment area. So we've been investing in Manchester for the past sort of of year and a half and using Propertyfilter to help us buy up more and more. Not easy, but, and it requires amazing organization. I'm very lucky, Gareth, my husband, is ex-military and he is a systems person, so we have a system for everything, like click, click, click on Asana. So you do have to be very organized. It just suited us, you know. I'm from North Yorkshire, Gareth's from down south. We drive and see my family, we drive and see his family. So we were just thinking, you know what, we we move around so much, why just invest? I know everyone says invest in one area because it's easy, but we were like, that's not our lives. We spend our lives going to see our family, so why not tie it in with a better investment area? I've always wanted to invest in Manchester. I think it's a fantastic growing community. I mean, I won't reel off all the stats, but it has some incredibly impressive stats which brought us there. And also, it's just a cool city. So to answer your question, we currently live back in London. We moved to London moved back to London in December, but we actually were living in Manchester for most of last year. Okay, fantastic. As we've mentioned, Manchester is the best city. Yes. The property filter— we used to have a deal tracker and analyzer. Now, I am— I'm not ancient, so I'm not useless on computers, but I'm not good. Like, I dropped out of school very young. I'm not good. So I used to have to try and navigate this spreadsheet to cons, because, you know, it's a numbers game, isn't it? You know, you're not offering on one property, you're offering on 300 properties, and you forget. You forget the estate agents, you forget what you've offered on, you just forget. So with Property Filter, one of the biggest purposes for me is I use it just to track. I use it— I mean, we use it for everything, but we use it to track and make notes on every single property we phoned about, which estate agents we've spoken to, name, everything. And we use it to help follow up, you know, what's the stat, is it like 30% of properties fall through. 1 in 3 fall through. 1 in 3. So we constantly have, um, because you know it's not just a numbers game, you— it's a— you want it for the right price. So we always offer low, as everyone does. And when we, um, select the box, you know, when it says, um, notify me when there's a change, so every time something comes back on the market because it's— because someone's pulled out because the numbers don't fit for them anymore, for whatever reason, we get a notification and we immediately phone up. And that's very often how we pick up properties. We heard about it through our old mentor Phil Bygrave. Big shout out, incredible. Yeah, yeah. Um, can't compete with them, so we said we might as well join him. He buys about 10 million HMOs a month, so, um, wealth of knowledge, as everyone in the property world knows. Great guy. Um, and he introduced us. We had used it before, but if I'm honest, I just didn't get along with it that well. And then he was like, no, try it again, like, I promise you try it again and it will help. Um, so we tried, and I'm quite erratic. If something just doesn't fit, I'm like, cancel, gone, move on to the next thing. I don't normally stick at something unless it's like a money-making exercise, like, you know, property or whatever. So I did have to stick with it, but now I've stuck with it, I'm like, we're on it every day, you know. We, we use, we use a lot of different plugins and a lot of different softwares, but ultimately PropertyFilter is the one we use. To track, negotiate, and find properties. So like you said, know your niche, know your things you're looking for, and you just input that into your search engine. So we look for square footage. It's really important to us because we only really do a certain size of HMO. We normally always do like 3 generous HMOs. Location. So that's a big deal. I want to know that our tenants can walk to a tram stop. Buses are okay, they're fine. In Manchester, buses are very good, but generally speaking, we want a walking distance distance to a tram stop. So we, we do that. And even things like amenities, you know, it tells you where your closest supermarkets are. You know, that's a real— basically, that's our 3 things, really. It's, you know, position, position to commuting, position to transport, permission, position to amenities, and also square footage. So we input those 3 things into our, you know, searches. It filters out all the other properties. And yeah, you know, sometimes you might be only left with not that many properties, but it's like we said, it's a numbers game. So you check in every day if there's new things added, you know, and it's knowing your niche. Sometimes if you aren't so specific, you then you'll get 10 million properties and it's overwhelming, you know. No one wants to sift through 10 million properties. So if you can niche it down and understand what you're looking for, it just makes the system easier. So Uh, I can tell you about two good ones. One we bought a couple of years ago that was— it was basically priced too high. We, we know it was priced too high, so we saved it, we tracked it, we put it into our, um, pipeline, and we just used Property Filter to phone. I mean, we, we phoned them a lot. We phoned them at least once a week, and we were like, oh, you know, you know. And so we write notes, you know, the conversation who we spoke to. Oh, you know, we see you haven't sold it again, you know. Are they looking to drop the price yet? No, no, they'll never drop the price. Yeah, cool, no worries. Well, you know, notify us when it changes. Obviously they don't notify you because they're useless. So you phone back again and again and again and again. We kept on writing notes, kept on writing notes. Anyway, we ended up getting them down from— they wanted 280, we ended up agreeing on 200,000. So, you know, but no one wanted it because it was too expensive for the area. It was— well, now it's not, funnily enough, but it was back then. You know, it's just a follow-up. It's the follow-up. It's the, you know, try to remember the names of who you spoke to, key things about what they said. You can write all of this down and you can write it in a timeline so it's dated. And, you know, again, back to the boring numbers game, Compound Effect, great book. You know, if you do it enough, it does just pay off. It's boring, but it pays off. So that was the first one. That was really good. That was a fantastic deal. That was a total unicorn deal, all money out, which we were thrilled about, which we used Propertyfilter for. The next one is something we're actually working on right now. Again, so with Property Filter, what's great, which is a fantastic feature, is you can see how long it's been on the market, if they've taken it off the market, if they put it back on the market, and how many agents it's with. For us, that's a huge thing because obviously the longer it's been on the market and the more agents it's been with, the more desperate they are to sell. This property is a property in Brighton, is— could not be sold, and it's been on the market for a long time, which we could see through PropertyFilter. It's been through several different agents. We can see PropertyFilter, it sold, and it was off the market for, let's say, 2 months. Again, you can see this on the timeline through PropertyFilter, and it went back on the market. So we came in at the perfect time, and it's going to be quite a creative strategy It will be subject to contract, it'll be a delayed completion, but we are putting down quite a hefty sum of money which will be non-refundable to service their debt. That's why they're so desperate to sell. So we're going to service their debt for them, but the numbers on this will mean, you know, we buy for £200,000, we spend about another £100,000 on it, and the reevaluation in that area, it will be around £500,000. So it's a very, very good deal. That's the thing with Propertyfilter, you know, you you can find these deals. So I'd say it's good for beginners and for advanced, really. Although if you are a beginner, know what your niche is, you're going to stick to your guns on that, and you could input that into the software, then yeah, Propertyfilter is great. Give us a follow, it's Taylor Smith Property. And yeah, you know, if anyone's got any questions on any deals, feel free to reach out and DM us. Um, we're always happy to chat. We don't necessarily get back to people on the same day, uh, but we are happy to chat.