💪 Scale Fast: Build a £2M Property Portfolio in Just 2 Years with Michael Taylor

Welcome to the Deal Finders Corner, your weekly property talk show brought to you by Property Filter, hosted usually by everyone's favorite Frenchman Guillaume Black. But Guillaume is away today so it's hosted by your favorite Northerner Asif Omar from the Property Filter team. We are the UK's highest rated platform to find deals and we're on a mission to empower our property investors and Deal sourcer members to find 1000 deals this year thanks to the Property Filter Blueprint. The purpose with your Deal Finder 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 what is currently working right now in terms of finding and making deals and the reality of of systemizing and running a high performance business in property. It's my pleasure to introduce you to the very popular Michael Taylor on today's deal finder corner. Dr. Michael Taylor, the property GP is a GP and award winning property investor who was top performer on Simon Such's Property Mastermind program and won Property Entrepreneur the following year. He is the Southampton Pin host and has been featured in YPN Magazine and multiple podcasts. This being the best one of course he has successful HMO portfolio on the south coast and is working towards replacing his NHS income. He coaches mentors as well as offering a portfolio building service to help others gain financial freedom through property. In today's episode we going to learn the two year Wealth Plan. A step by step roadmap to scale from one deal to a multi million pound portfolio using high performing HMOs even if you're starting from scratch. Number two, the smart leverage Formula. How to recycle your capital, raise private finance and never run out of funding so you can keep scaling without hitting a wall. Number three, the bulletproof HMO Blueprint. How to create a hands free high cash flowing property business that works without you using systems, outsourcing and the right team. And of course at the end it's going to be followed by an exclusive Q A. So if you have any questions for Michael then pop it into the chat and we'll get to it at the end. So I am really happy and excited to have you on the Deal Finder Corner today. Can we please give a massive massive Property Filter Virtual welcome to Dr. Michael Taylor.

Thank you Asif. Thank you ever so much for that introduction. That was super, super kind. Now thank you for having me. Thank you everyone for coming on the call. This would be pretty dull and boring without you guys. I really appreciate you taking an hour or so out of your sunny Thursday to come and hang out with us? My name is Michael Taylor and it's a real privilege to just share with you a little bit about my journey today and a little bit about how to grow a healthy 2 million pound portfolio in just two years. We've done it, we did it using HMOs, and I just want to share a little bit with you today exactly how we did that and ultimately, of course, how you can do it too. That, of course, is the whole point of all of this. So what if you could go from, say, no properties or a single rental to a multi million pound portfolio in just two years? What would that do for you? What would that do for your family, for your finances? What would that do for your work life, your play life, your holiday life? Where would you want to be? What would you want to be doing if you could go from having no properties or a single rental up to a multi million pound portfolio in just two years? Now, most investors, of course, take decades to do that the traditional way. You buy a property, you might do a little refurb, you rent it out, it sits there, it accumulates over time, capital growth, and eventually there's enough in there for you to refinance it, pull out some money and buy your second property. And that's the traditional way of doing it. Of course, there's nothing wrong with that, it's just a little bit slow. So today I'm going to show you how to do it a little bit quicker, a little bit faster, how to turbocharge your journey and get your portfolio up on steroids, moving along much, much quicker. It's not going to be slow, it is going to be quicker. Now, the small print here, of course, is that property is not a get rich quick scheme. If you're looking for a get rich quick, you're probably not in the right place proper, but there are definitely ways that we can move this along at a pace and get things done quicker than traditionally. And for us, we have found that HML HMOs have allowed us to do this, they've allowed us to do this pretty well. They've allowed us to do this over a couple of years and before you know it, we've stopped, we've looked around and we've gone, oh, that's, that's what we've created, that's what we've built, this is our portfolio. HMOs absolutely got us there. So who is this for? Well, if you're a new investor, and you're thinking, well, hang on, I'm not loving my day job. Like I'm not loving the eat, work, sleep, repeat, the getting up every morning, going into work, sitting at my desk. I'm really not loving this. I want to move away from this sooner rather than later. Hopefully there's going to be some stuff in here today that will really, really help you on your journey. Perhaps you're an investor already, perhaps you have some buy to lets, perhaps you might even have an HMO or two, but you're just a bit stuck. Maybe you're just not really sure how to scale, not really sure how to move on, how to take that next step and get things moving again. Or, you know, perhaps you're just looking for high cash flow property without the burnout. Now this is really important because we all know that there is plenty of opportunity out there in the world to earn high cash flow. Most of it of course, involves us swapping our day job for most of it involves, of course, swapping our day job for money, or rather swapping our time in our day job for money. And if we want to earn more money, most of the time we have to work harder. That's just the natural flow of life, it's how the world works, etc. But HMOs are allowing us to generate high cash flow without the burnout. And we'll talk a little bit more about that as we go along. As Asif has already said, hopefully what you'll take away today is this two year wealth plan. So this is kind of, I've called it their proven roadmap. It's proven because I've done it. But just how are we going to scale this HMO portfolio faster? How are we going to use leverage in order to do that? Property is all about leverage. And finally, this bulletproof HMO blueprint. Please excuse the slightly cheesy names, but you, you get the idea. This, this. How can we create an HMO portfolio? That doesn't mean that we are spending hours and hours and hours and stress and energy working in the business. How can we create it so that we're working on our business and not in our business? And HMOs, you've probably heard, in fact, you've probably spoken to people already who have said, don't do HMOs, they're noisy, they're busy, leave them well alone to do a different strategy. And I think I want to kind of debunk that a little bit actually. And I think again, making money is not easy. Just making money in the world isn't easy. And we are. We do have to put in the hard work, we do have to accept some stress if we want to make better returns. But in my day job, if I'm not the one sitting at my desk seeing patients, then I'm not earning any money. I can't pay someone to do it for me. But in property, I. I can pay someone to take a lot of that stress, a lot of that noise away from me and I can still reap the financial benefits from that. So we'll talk a little bit about that a little bit later on as well. So who am I? Well, some of you know me, forgive me, please, if you've heard this little spiel, but My name is Dr. Michael Taylor. I've been a doctor now for about 20 years. I've been a GP for 15 years. I was a partner for most of those years at a practice in Hampshire. I was senior partner for eight years. Very, very much involved in the strategic positioning of the practice and the day to day running of it. I've been a GP trainer for 10 years. So I have spent the last decade training doctors to be GPs, taking them from little baby doctors and turning them into fully fledged, hopefully competent gps. That, the way that, that works in the NHS in general practice is that we would have a registrar, a baby doctor, for about 12 to 18 months and work very closely with them one to one. So I have lots of experience of mentoring and coaching and problem solving and helping people get to where they want to get to. I was a PCN Clinical director for a while. So this is the primary care network. This is where often in towns or cities, in bigger areas, practices, individual practices, would come together to create what's called a pcn, a primary care network, where they can make some economies of scale, but also where they would make decisions about commissioning care for their particular area. You know, what is it in our area that people need? For example, there's not much point perhaps doing an old age physio service for a university GP practice. So, you know, what, what does our demographics need? How can we provide for those patients in that area and then get on and get on and deliver that? And I was the clinical director of that for a while. I'm also a GP appraiser. So on behalf of the gmc, every doctor once a year needs to have a sit down with an appraiser, chat through their goals for the last year, just see how they've achieved against that, chat through any challenges or issues they've had in the last year and then come up with a plan for the year ahead. So I do that for all GPs, but I also have a role doing that for GP trainers as well. 2019, I was sat in my office staring at the same four walls, thinking, can I keep doing this for the next 25 years until I can retire? And of course the short answer was no. That was the end of 2019. In March 2020, of course, Covid hit and our lives all got turned upside down. That was a new challenge. That was we had to adapt very quickly to that changing environment as a practice, in terms of the care that we provided, in terms of our finances, etc. It was a new challenge. It was something to get stuck into. But then coming out of COVID it became pretty clear again to me that this wasn't perhaps my future and I needed to do something a bit different to get out of the hamster wheel that eat, work, sleep, repeat pattern. So someone gave me Property Magic. Simon Zutshi's book, went off and read it, signed up to Accelerator, his three day educational course. I then signed up to the one year Property Mastermind, which is we've already heard from Asif, which I won in 22. I then went on to do something called Property Entrepreneur, which many of us probably know that's run by a guy called Dan Hill. And I guess Property Mastermind is all about how to invest in property. You know, it's great and quite often we go and make a bit of a mess because we do lots of property things. But then Property Entrepreneur is about how do we turn that into a fully functioning, profitable business business. So I went and did that the year after and and also ended up winning that. I was also a finalist at the HMO Investor of the year awards at 2023. That's the national Property Investor Awards. Absolute privilege and an honour to be there. Southampton Pinhost. I've been in ypn. You've heard this I we've done a case study and have provided some training for the HMO Roadmap. That's the the UK's largest online HMO community. Go and check them out if you've not heard of them. And we've been on various podcasts and we also have our own podcast, if you don't mind me doing a quick plug called the Property GP Diaries. Go and check it out. It's a bit of real life, week by week realities of investing in property. So hopefully you'll find a bit of value in that. Now I just Wanted to show you our first deal. So this came to us via a landlord letter. So I'm sure many of you know about landlord letters. This is where we write to landlords and say, hey, do you want to sell your property? And this lady replied, she said, yes, I do. And she wasn't local. This was their only hmo. A little bit of a sad story, but her hubby did all of the work. She was in her 70s. Very sadly, through Covid, he developed dementia very, very quickly and ended up passing away. And she was left with a property that she didn't really know how to run, didn't want to run and just wanted to get rid of. Now she wasn't local, she didn't wish to faff about with estate agents. And so she replied to my letter and she said that she wanted 310,000 pounds for it. Now market value for this was 335. At the time it was a five bed student HMO. So three bedrooms upstairs, two, two bedrooms downstairs. I did my sums, I thought okay, it probably works. Well it does work at 3, 10, but you know, I've done the courses, I know that I need to negotiate here and I know that I need to drive down, you know, drive down the purchase price and blah blah, blah. And after about four and a half weeks we shook hands and agreed on a price of 310,000 pounds. She was an absolute monster when it came to negotiating and I learned a lot from that lady. But at £310,000 the numbers worked. We bought it and we set about converting it into a 7 bed all ensuite luxury HMO. Now the rent that she was getting on that property at the time was £1,500amonth. Our rent roll now is close to five and a half thousand pounds per month. It's constantly let out the rooms rent very quickly once somebody is leaving. It is a great, great, great little property and lovely to have in the portfolio. So we paid 310 for it, we spent about 180 on the refurb it valued at 600. We created about 100k in equity and it cash flows at over two and a half thousand pounds a month after mortgage and bills and maintenance and voids. So a nice little deal got ourselves started. Check out this little beauty. Now this property we actually found, in fact my wife found this property through property filter. So big shout out to you guys, thanks for having me today. But we found this property through property filter. It had been on and off the market as you can see. Hopefully you'll agree it is beautiful. I. I think the pink and the white bathroom suites is, is particularly delicious if that. That photo in the top left corner, it looks like part of the kitchen. It's not. It is actually the kitchen. The rest of the kitchen was camping tables and that sink you can see there, that drained directly into a bucket which, looking at the state of the space under the. The cabinet, if you can call it that, and around the bucket, I'm not sure the owner emptied it all that often. The house absolutely stank. It was quite disgusting and we bought it at auction in an Article 4 area without any planning. Sounds a bit risky. We bought it for 250. Similar. There was a property on the road at the time that was done nicely, but same size and that was on the market for. Well, it went on the market at 500,000. We knew that there would be an exit strategy there if we just needed to flip it. But also we'd done our due diligence beforehand so we were confident that we would be able to apply and achieve planning on this. We had done it. Like I say, we've done our due diligence. We checked the Portsmouth City Council website. We had a planning officer working with us. Everyone was confident that, yeah, it should achieve planning. So we bought it without, went on to get planning and it is now, guess what it was three beds. It's now a seven bed all ensuite luxury HMO. So remember the last one we bought at 310. This property is bigger. It's in a great area of Portsmouth. We purchased this at 250, 200 on the refurb it valued again at 600. And this cash flow is over £3,000 per month for us. Now we rent these rooms out. This is the most expensive rooms in our portfolio. The rooms rent at over 900 pounds per room. When we first marketed it, we broke through the rent ceiling in Portsmouth. It was the most expensive house on spare room and it went within two weeks. We had let the rooms out. Many of the rooms had let out even before we had finished. People came and looked around and said, yep, I see what you're doing here. This, I love it, this is what I want. We have an interior designer who works with us. She had drawn up, or rather she'd done some mock ups of the interiors beforehand. So we had images that we could take to market it. Rents, always rents very, very quickly. It's the easiest property in our portfolio to let out and it's doing quite nicely for us. So I've put there why HMOs are the fastest path to earth. Now, you'll forgive me a little bit. I mean, we all know that HMOs probably don't really make us wealthy. I think wealth will come in property over many years, maybe even decades, as property prices, capital growth comes. That's where there is good, good, good money to be made. But HMOs really do help you generate cash flow over and above other types of property investments. So maybe you've got a standard buy to let in your portfolio. Maybe it's making you 2 to 300 pounds per month cash flow, maybe a bit more. Maybe your mortgage hasn't yet changed, you've not had to refinance it yet. Maybe you have no mortgage on it. But 2 to 300 pounds per month is where most standard buy to lets at the moment are probably sitting. Once we factor in current mortgage rates, etc. You've already seen a couple of my examples. Simon Zutshi says a good HMO should generate you £1,000 per month. Well, all of ours are well over 2,000. As I say, we've got one up above £3,000. And of course you can compound that. So we are trying pretty hard not to take much money out of the business at the moment. All the money that our business generates, we just want to reinvest and reinvest and we're essentially there. We're compounding, right? It's a little bit like putting money in the bank for years and years and not taking out your interest and you get interest on your interest, etc. You know, this is. We're running a business here. We don't want to take out every last penny. We want to keep generating that profit, keep reinvesting that money and growing our business. HMOs are great for that. They provide you with that monthly cash flow. You don't have to touch for a few months, and before you know it, you've got another tidy little deposit for, you know, a little flip project or otherwise or whatever it is. HMOs are great. So how did I do it in two years? Well, I just wanted to break down two years for you and just give you guys a little bit of a feel as to what that might look like. Essentially the first three months, really, you need to be doing your prep now. We were obviously, we were prepping a little bit longer than that, if I'm honest. So we knew nothing about property. We did the 12, as I've already said, we did sort of Simon Zucchi's 12 month program. He does, of course, he runs a three day course which is sort of a brain dump of all of his, all of his knowledge in three days. That is what all you need really to get yourself started. And we'll talk a little bit about some of that a little bit later. But initially you want to be spending about three months. This doesn't need to go on forever, guys. You need to be spending a fairly tight amount of time planning and prepping. What are you going to do? So you need to be thinking about education. Am I educated enough? Do I know what I'm doing here? Do I, do I have the people? If I don't, do I have the people around me who do? Where am I going to invest? What's my location going to look like? What are my finances looking like? And do I have the network and support around me to do this for me? Those are probably the most important questions that you need to get, you need to consider and you need to get sorted before you really start. Where am I going to invest? Have I got my finances sorted? Am I part of a good, do I have a good support network around me and have I got myself educated? Three months, right? Three months, guys, get it done, get it sorted. Because then once you've sorted that out, you're ready to go, you've had some education, you know where you want to invest, your finances are all lined up, you're not faffing around still trying to remortgage or trying to raise funds or just, you know, waiting to see what the market does. You know, you are, you're ready, ready, ready to go and you can get that first deal, first deal done, perfect, you're off after that. In our experience, we then embarked on, I have to be very honest with you, a pretty hectic two years where the deals were spaced and they just kept rolling. So we bought our first deal. About three months later, we had bought our second deal. The first deal was obviously in refurb, whilst the second one was in conveyancing. Three months later we bought our next deal. So we had one in the later stages of the build, we had one in the early stages of the build, we had one inconvenience thing. Just need to keep thinking about that pipeline, keep thinking about, right, where's the next deal? Sometimes I've seen it time and time again where guys, you know, especially on the first time, and I get it, but they'll get a deal, they'll get an hmo, they'll start the whole refurb thing. And that is just all consuming. And they'll spend Saturdays in B and Q trying to pick out colors. They'll spend their Sundays in IKEA trying to look at furniture and measuring and deciding which one they want and scratching their chin and nothing wrong with that, guys. But it's not going to get you there particularly quickly. This is the stage where, where you're juggling money, where you're juggling build teams. This is the stage where it's a little bit hectic and there might be some sleepless nights and you might find that you need some help and it's all a bit crazy. But in order to scale quickly, this is probably what you need to be doing. And maybe from a money point of view, I've put their recycling capital on jv. So about nine months after our first deal, we refinanced. That big wad of cash came back to us that went into the next one. And you go again. And you go again. We did some joint venturing. We've used some investor funds, etc. Etc. This is where that money. You're looking for money from different places thinking, how are we going to fund this, how are we going to get this done? I can't quite remember which deal it was. I think it was our third one that we agreed to buy without actually knowing where the money was going to come from because we had. We knew that the refinance wouldn't come in soon enough. We didn't have any investors lined up, but we had some courage and we took the leap and we went through conveyancing and as we were going through conveyancing, we found an investor. Perfect, right? That's paying for that one. On to the next one. One is coming off a bridge, we're getting refinance in there, that one's nearly done, etc. Etc. Etc. This is where you need your team around you. This is where you need an interior designer, an architectural builder. This is where we had our team where we could quit call. Right, next one, guys. This is the address. Let's go. We had WhatsApp groups that we were a part of, but that we didn't really have to communicate much in. So our interior designer, for example, and our builder, there'd be a message from the builder saying something's not arrived, there's an issue with something. The interior designer would answer it. Yeah, I got a message this morning, say it's going to arrive tomorrow, whatever it is. All of this stuff was just happening without us. So obviously it was our projects. Obviously we were interested in what was going on, but we weren't there making decisions. We weren't in BQ all day Saturday picking out the paint. We didn't have to wait until two weeks on Sunday to get to IKEA for the furniture because we couldn't go for two weeks because we were busy. You know, this is. We're leveraging people around us, all of their skills, all of their expertise. Frankly, they are better at it than we are. We're just coordinating, but they are doing the work for us and getting it done. And then in that two year stage, we had four HMOs, they all were all valuing up over £600,000. That's when you really then start to knuckle down and systemize and get those processes in place. Or at least that's how we did it. That's where we were like, right, we've created a bit of a mess if we're honest. Let's now sort it out and get ourselves set up so that we aren't working in this business 24 7. That we aren't answering tenant calls at 11 o' clock because they've lost their keys or because Joey nicked Sammy's chicken. It happens. It really, really happens. But we're going to talk a little bit about that just in a moment as well as to exactly how we did that. But I've talked about prep a little bit and just that first three months and I just wanted to talk about that again in a little bit more detail. Guys, please, please, please educate yourself. I don't mind how you do it, I don't mind who you do it with. I've put there get some organized property education. I really believe that YouTube and reading books, they're great podcasts, they're all good. But it, but there is something about having all of the information in one place from trusted sources that is difficult to really quantify. But it makes such a big difference in that prep stage. Work out your strategy. So maybe a coach can help you. Who knew? But maybe someone sitting down with someone who's done it before, who knows what they're talking about. Is it that we want to achieve out of property and how are we going to get there? Where's the roadmap? What's the plan? What's the plan? We all need a plan, guys, again, we've talked about it before. We need to work out our location. So what is the demand? Where do we want to invest? Is it local to us? First question, I'd always encourage you to think local. If you can. There's lots and lots of hidden costs from not investing locally. I would argue that most, if not all big cities in the uk, maybe including London, actually, will have opportunities here for you to find. So where is a good place to invest? Is it local? Is there a high demand for good quality HMO rooms? So spare room is a good place to go looking for that open rent. Again, you can do lots of your own research. Is there good transport, good amenities? Is there good employment opportunities locally for people? What's happening in the future? Every council will have a little bit of a future plan. Somewhere in the depths of the council website, you know, where is the industry, the new developments coming? I'm sure, guys, you've heard this all before, but this is really important. If you're not doing this, you really, really need to be getting on with this. And where is the strong rental yield? So again, you know, where is, where's the rent? That's our business model. We're looking for rents. Where are the rents out there? What rents can we achieve? Are there areas with better rents, with likely better tenants, etc. Etc. This is all in the prep. It shouldn't take you that long. And then you need to work out what you need to do to just get it done. Slightly tongue in cheek. I appreciate that, but I've met so many guys who talk about it who do lots and lots of study, if you like. They do lots of courses, they're thinking about it, but they just never really quite get it done. And there is something about just getting it done which is so important. People often don't get it done in my view, because they've not had the education, they haven't got the support around them that they need or their mindset isn't quite there. Now, for those of you, a couple of you on the call today that come Southampton pin, you will have heard me talk quite a lot, apologies, but quite a lot about this idea of a 10 meter diving board so there's any divers in the room. Forgive me, but as a non diver myself, I just know that if I'm getting up onto the top of a 10 meter diving board that my legs are going to be knocking together. In fact, it makes my legs feel a bit weird now just even thinking about it. I'm going to be clinging onto the rail on the side, I'm going to be on my belly sort of crawling towards the edge to try not to look down because it's really, really high and it's scary and it's a Big step. And I might have had some education, so someone might have sat me down. I don't know how much education you need to jump off a 10 meter diving board, but I imagine there's something about how to hit the water or how not to bang your head on the way down on the whatever, whatever education. So I would have gone out and spoken someone and he or she would have told me exactly how I need to do it. Is that going to help me when I'm on the top of the 10 meter diving board? Well, a little bit maybe. All my friends and family are down the bottom, they're cheering me on, they're going, come on Michael, you can do this, you've got this. And that's great. But for me, that final thing that's going to get me to jump off that 10 meter diving board is mindset. That final thing's got to click up here really to really help me. I've had all the education, I've got all my friends and family down there supporting me and cheering me on, but there's something up here that is just going to need to click to really get me over that 10 meter diving board. And some of you, there's so much good mindset stuff out there. I'm a doctor, you'll forgive me just for embellishing this a little bit, heading off down this rabbit hole. But Simon Zutshi, he talks about ABC of mindset, attitude, beliefs and courage. And I think that's a really, really nice way of thinking about mindset, what it takes, you know, what is holding us back. Because that is the thing that generally will hold us back, jumping off that 10 meter time board. There's a thing that will hold us back from taking that step of purchasing, spending a quarter million, half a million on an hmo. For me, I just wanted to share with you the three things that have really made a difference for me with mindset. And number one is looking for growth. So I think everyone on the call today, I reckon we can all probably stop, turn around, metaphorically, look behind us and just see where we've grown, see where we've come from in the last six months, the last year, the last two years, maybe even in the last couple of months, you know, where has that growth been for you? Maybe it's, maybe it's not property, maybe it's business or work or your family or your relationships or your garden or who knows. But there will be growth there that you can turn around. I really believe there's growth there that you'll Be able to turn around and look at and go, yeah, do you know what? I can do this. I'm growing, I'm constantly developing, I'm constantly improving myself. There is growth there. And for us, for me, turning around and looking at where I've come from can be really helpful to then set my mind to where I want to go. This sounds a bit naff. Forgive me, forgive me. Be thankful. Like there is something about gratitude, There is something about being thankful that we can be here today on this call, for example, that we can have the opportunity to invest in property again. It sounds corny but you know, I can on top of that 10 meter diving board, I can stand there and I can say, right, I am really grateful that I get the opportunity to jump off this demi design board in front of all my friends and family with people that love me and support me. And I've had the education, I've got money to invest, I know how to invest, I know how to change my life, how to generate more income for me and my family. Like this is a pretty positive place to be. And again, that has really helped me in order to make those steps sometimes to get over those hurdles which invariably we put up for ourselves and finally believe like oh my gosh, there is so much power in just believing that you can do it, believing in what your future looks like. And no presentation of mine would be complete without some sort of Ted Lasso reference. So apologies if you've not seen Ted Lasso. It's a great show, I'm just going to put it out there. But AFC Richmond, their coach, Ted Lasso. Like, you know this sign is up in there changing room, the locker room for pretty much the entire three series. And there is just such power in believing, in recognizing that you can do it and getting it done. And yes, we probably need that education. Yes, well we do. And yes, we need that support around us, etc, etc, but we need to get out of our own ways as well guys, sometimes and just get this stuff done. So what gets us stuck? Well, we run out of cash, right? We over leverage and we sometimes struggle to scale past one to two properties. This is probably the biggest reason that people slow down that they go, well I can't do four deals in a year, I don't have the cash now we didn't have the cash, we ran out of cash super fast. But it doesn't have to get you stuck. And leverage here of course is so, so, so important. And I'm sure, again guys, I'm sure none of this is new to you. But the, you know, model of investing, you can do that 100, you can do that with HMOs. You, you buy an HMO, you refurbish, you refinance for a higher amount, money comes back to you and off you go again. It will enable you to grow, it won't enable you to do four deals in a year. That money won't come back to you quick enough, but it will absolutely is a good way of refinancing, replenishing your cash stock to go again. It works. It's what we did. If you're not using bridging finance, you need to, number one, ask yourself why and number two, get on and start using it. Because bridging finance from a broker, they'll fund you 70% of your purchase price and all of your refurbishment. So say you had £100,000. Well, you don't need to spend £100,000 on buying a property. You can put in 30, for example, if it's £100,000 and the lender will pay the rest of the purchase the 70 grand plus then all of the refurb, which obviously gives you more money to then go again and look to do another project at the same time. And of course we can joint venture, we can use other people's money. Like I said, we have joint ventured. We've also used investor funds. If I'm honest, we ran out of cash towards the end of our second deal. We were new to it. There was just a few things we hadn't really accounted for, didn't really appreciate. And we went out looking for finance. And we really went out looking for finance. We went through our phone book, we text people, we called people. We weren't asking for money, we were just putting out messages saying, hey, you might have seen we're investing in property. Do you know of anyone or who. Do you know who would like a good return on their money? You're not asking directly. And we, we raised the money that we needed pretty, pretty quickly. We then had a deal. We'll come on and just show you again in just a moment. We had another deal where we bought it. The lender wasn't very keen to finance the refurb. Long story. It just so happened we'd been on social media a lot, putting, telling everyone what we're doing. And I had a little DM just dropped into my Insta and from someone we kind of vaguely knew, sort of a. An older friend, I guess, a friend of the family, if you like. And he said, can we go for a coffee, went for a coffee. He'd just retired. He, his Isis were full, his investment vehicles were full, his wallet was too small for his 50s, his diamond shoes were too tight and he had 200k that he had nothing to do with. And we pretty much agreed a percentage return right there and then. And four days later the money was in our account. So there is money out there, guys, I promise. Like it was such a stumbling block to us right at the beginning, thinking nobody would want to invest with us, nobody would be interested in giving us money. But there is money out there. It will come. Sometimes you need to work for it, sometimes you don't. But there is money out there for you to do the deals that you want to do. So check out this one. Another beauty. At some point in this house's life, the owner decided, who needs a living room? Not me, I would like a garage. So he stuck a garage instead of his front living room, complete with an inspection pit and all. The garden had a fox set, I think that's the word in the back there, which was both lovely and also apparently quite screechy overnight. Obviously we didn't live there, but according to the neighbours, three bed terrace, guess what this is now. Seven bed, all ensuite luxury hmo. You get the idea. Cookie cutter. We're not, we're not doing lots of different things, having to learn lots of different things. We've got a model, we just. Next one, next one, next one. This one again, you remember we bought at 310 and 250. This one we bought at 230, spent similar amount as the others on the refurb. This valued at 655 and this cash flows for us at over £2,000amonth. Now we've given this to a social housing charity. Our mortgage is two and a half grand a month. They pay us four and a half grand a month. That's it. This is as hands off, I think guys, as we're probably ever going to get. It's a five year deal. The money just drops every month. Happy, happy days. This property as well was. We left in some finance costs, but otherwise we got all of our money back out. And I just want to show you this one as well. So this was family home. This has got quite, quite a great story. Epcs. Do you guys know who is doing EPCS in your area? The EPC guy or gal will be going to properties, meeting owners who are wanting to sell their property but who don't yet have it on the market. As you know EPCs are needed to put a house on the market. So these guys are literally meeting sellers who wanting to sell but the house is not yet on the market. So our EPC guy went and did an EPC on this, had a chat with the owner. I've got a colleague who buys properties just like these. Would you be happy if I introduced you? And perfect. We met him, we agreed a price, he was happy to wait for planning to come through. We waited for planning to come through, purchased it obviously off market, below market value. Off we go. Next deal. Now it's a three bed terrace, right now of course it is a seven bed all en suite luxury HMO. We bought this at 270, spent 215 on it, valued at 650. And this again we are giving to a supported living charity. This will cash flow for us over £2,000 per month. Again, again, again. As passive as it comes. Income that just keeps dropping month after month. Well that all sounds great, Michael, I hear you say, and it all sounds really, really easy. Well it isn't and there are risks, of course. So we need to make sure that our HMOs are tenanted. Every void costs us money and tenants frankly can be a pain in the ass. So we need to get this right at the beginning. We have panic tenanted a house before and that really bit us on the backside. So there absolutely are challenges with these, with any property. If you have a single let, of course, and your tenants stop paying or they trash it, well, you're getting zero money on that as an hmo. If you've got one annoying tenant or you've got one who's not paying when you got maybe one and you maybe got a void, well, it's still, it's still wiping its, its face. It's still, you've got four other tenants that are paying you good money. It's still, you know, it's still ticking along. So getting it right at the beginning is really important. And we now take longer to vet and to reference check our tenants. We no longer just take the first person who says yes. If they want the property, that's great. We then need to decide whether we want them as a tenant. It is worth waiting to get that right. It is very easy to burn out, I would argue it's very easy to basically give yourself a job as an HMO owner if you self manage. So you must automate and outsource. We're going to talk about that next and we need to make sure that we are fully, fully up to date with the regulation, the compliance, etc. So all of the councils will have on there, on their website exactly what it is that you need to do. The regulations you need to comply with your gas, your electric, safety, fire, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's really important. We can't ignore it, it's out there, we need to be getting that right. But how do we do this and not burn ourselves out and cause ourselves a whole new job, swapping one headache for another and causing carnage? Well, guys, I would argue this does have to start with you. So if you. This opinion probably isn't shared with everyone, but if you want to invest in HMOs, I would really, really encourage you to self manage for at least the first sort of 12 to 18 months. I know that sounds slightly crazy and there are probably better things to do and I get all of that, but you'll be in the zone, you'll be getting deals done, you'll be refurbishing, you'll be sorting out finance. It's your business, it's your baby. You want to make sure. Excuse me. That you are doing everything that you can to make sure that after all that hard work, your property is returning to you, returning cash to you, that you expect it to return. So I think it's got to start with you. I would encourage you to self manage. You'll know exactly what's involved, you'll learn what to do a little bit and what not to do. It will be a business that reflects your visions and your vision and your values. Your. If you do an HMO and hand it over to a letting agent and that's fine, and you can totally do that. Guys, if you do that straight away, there'll probably always be a slight nagging, sort of. Am I being taken for a slight ride here? Does that really need fixing? How much are they charging to change a light bulb, et cetera, et cetera. If you're doing it yourself, if you're on it, if you know what things cost, you know how to organize things, it's a great. And ultimately, of course, it's your business. It's a great way to start out, to really get a feel for what's involved. You're not doing it forever. So there is a cutoff to this and we thought we'd do it for the first two years. We ended up lasting about 15 to. I think it's something like 15 to 18 months here. We were like, right, we need to sort this out. But we did start, we did learn the Ropes. And I think as an investor, as someone who owns a property business, I think that is really important. But the next step, of course, is to then get some help. Now, we didn't want to hand it over to a big high street letting agent. We still wanted, as I said, we still wanted some control. We still wanted our values to really shine through as part of that business. So, couple of tips. I mean, we use an app called Koho. Koho is great. It's full of compliance and regulations, everything is there. You know what's required, what you need for each property, checks your rents. It's also great for maintenance issues and communication with tenants. So we used to have our mobile number on the wall. Any emergencies, call this number. Honestly, like the number of tenants who thought that Billy nicking some milk, some of John's milk for the tea was an emergency is unreal. So, you know, as a bit of a tip, I think you, you want these guys, you want to be slightly further away from your tenants. If you can group WhatsApp house WhatsApp groups, oh my gosh, please don't get me started on those. If you've got a house WhatsApp group, have a little think about whether that's necessarily the best way of separating yourself a little bit from your tenants and your business. Still want to be in control. We still want to have hands on to some extent, but we employ a virtual, a UK based virtual assistant. She's a qualified letting agent. In her spare time, she essentially manages our portfolio for us. She does everything other than going to the property. So she can't do check ins and checkouts, she can't do viewings, but she does everything else from reference checking, from advertising to reference checking, to managing maintenance, to managing the compliance, etc. Etc. She really is hands on, day in, day out on our business, looking after our tenants, looking after maintenance issues. She'll get something through on the app with photos explaining what the issue is. She's got a list of contractors, she'll get in touch. It all just gets done without us, no fees on top, etc. Etc. We love it. It's a great, great way of running our business. And we will sometimes still do viewings. We also have someone in Portsmouth who does viewings for us. There's lots of different ways we sometimes have our tenants do viewings for us. We always insist there's a couple of tenants at a viewing or we try to encourage that so that they can meet the new tenant. Is it going to work? Are they going to fit in if they're not. Nope. Then we'll wait for the next one. It's fine, but get some help. And then ultimately, of course, we need to outsource everything. As a doctor, I can't do that. If I need want to earn money in the nhs, I have to be the one sitting there seeing patients. There's not enough money in that for me to pay someone to do my job, for me to go and sit on the beach. HMOs property, HMOs especially, really do allow us to do that. And we genuinely spend about 90 minutes a week managing well. We're getting on for close to 50 rooms now. 90 minutes per week is all that it takes us. We've set up our systems, we've built a small, effective team around us that gets stuff done. And every week, every month, we just review it, we just have a little check. We get an email once a month from our va. These are the things just to let you know, like, right, are we doing what we need to do? It's our business. I really don't want to give it to someone else. Completely forget about it. I. It's my business. I want to be making good money out of this. What do we need to be doing? How do we need to change it up? How do we ultimately is generally, if I'm honest now, it is just a bit of a rinse and repeat. Great. Next month, Great. Next month, great. Next month. 90 minutes per week. So, guys, we just come in to land. I really hope that that's been helpful. So hopefully just a little bit of encouragement, a bit of inspiration about how to grow that portfolio up to 2 million and beyond. In fact, within two years, our portfolio is closer to 2 1/2 million in two years. There's been a little roadmap for how to do that. We've talked a little bit, of course, about leverage. If you want to move quicker, you'll almost certainly need to use other people's money to help you get there. And of course, to continue that theme again, if you want to move quicker, if you don't want to just give yourself another job where you end up getting sucked into the running of being in the business rather than working on the business. There's some great tools and hopefully a couple of tips about just how to outsource, how to automate some of this stuff, how to just get stuff off your plate. Still happens, it still gets done, but it's not you who is the one doing it. So final thought, well, two years from now, guys, you could be sitting on a multi million pound portfolio or of course you could still be waiting to start. You could be on top of that 10 meter diving board, clinging onto the handrail, not quite managing to make that jump, to have a bit of courage and to get it done. The difference, of course. Well, ultimately guys, it does just come down to taking action. All that stuff we've talked about, some, hopefully some hints and tips, a little bit of a roadmap, a bit of work on mindset, etc. All of that stuff's really important and it's there for you and you may find that you need to work on some of these things but ultimately you need to take action and if you want to get that stuff started, if you want to keep progressing, you need to, you need to be doing it straight away. So I think we've got three options. Well, yeah, do nothing right, Option one, bad option, option two, I've got a free HMO cheat sheet. You're very, very welcome to if that would help, just to help get you started, get you rolling. And also very, very happy if you want to book a little call with me. You see the QR code there. Really happy to sit down and chat with you about, about your journey and just see what we can do. If there's anything that we can do to help you along the way, there's any way that we can support you with that, I would love to do that. So thank you Asif. That's pretty much me done.

Brilliant. That was absolutely fantastic. There was so much value given. I'm sure our community members absolutely love that. So before we go into Q and A, I've got a few questions as well. So as mentioned at the beginning, I am somebody who has started out doing HMO investing myself, I think stage three of your two year wealth plan and I've taken so many notes here, I think I've taken five pages of notes in my property filter book in my profit using my property filter. No, I have a pen. So my question to you really is, I suppose the first thing that I wanted to say was top, number one, top tip that you gave for me in terms of everybody here is to always be looking for deals, even when you've got a project on. And this is something that really frustrates me because I speak to so many of our members and I say to them, hi, how's, how's the property filter going for you? And they're going, well, I'm currently busy with a couple of projects at the moment. I'm not really using it. And then I'm asking to them, oh, how long is it before you're going to be. Start using it? And it's like, well, I'll start using it when my project finishes. And it's going to take them, let's say, on average, three, maybe four months to find the next deal. How long does it take you to find a deal, would you say, at the moment?

So it. Deals are. They are a bit like buses, I've got to be honest. They. It's. It's a funny combination of this funny combination of sometimes not really, or struggling to find stuff, but then also suddenly you go, oh, my gosh, it's like this beautiful deals there. This is amazing. And that. That's partly why we've started portfolio building for this, because we are finding deals. Property filter is a really great way of doing that and it's certainly one of the tools that we use and there is, as we get better, of course, we're finding more. So three months really is, for HMOs, I think, is more than enough. If you're regularly on there, if you're regularly, if you're sending out landlord letters, if you're networking, if you're speaking to estate agents, going on viewings, Property filter, three months is enough time to find deals. And certainly as we've sort of gone along our journey, if you like, actually the time to finding deals is reducing. So, yeah, three months is a good time to think about in terms of. Right, I will get a deal within those three months.

Brilliant. So always to be looking for deals, my next question is going to be. So I think you mentioned it and it may be your wife who's doing it, but what do you look for in terms of a HMO deal on property filter?

Great question. So we are looking for. So we are looking for properties in Portsmouth that we can convert into an hmo. So we're not really looking for properties that are already HMOs. We will have a look at it. But in general, because it's Article 4, those properties often demand a bit of a premium because people find those easier. Of course, they. If they already want to buy a property that's already in HMO, they want to faff around with planning, etc. So we'll look at them, but we are looking for three bed properties that are generally terrace properties that have a floor, floor space of over 100, 105 square meters. And to be honest, in Portsmouth, that's pretty much it. Portsmouth is great. It's a little island. So it's everything is pretty close. There's not much growth going on because they can't. Because it's just sea all the way around it. So we are less bothered about actual location within Portsmouth itself. We really need to know that the property is big enough now. We're looking for motivated sellers, of course, and Property Filter is great for that. It was always bringing up properties that are back on the market, that aren't selling, that have sold or come back on the market, etc. So that's always our first go to. We just work our way along the tabs, as probably many of us on this call do. But for us it's all about the size of the property. If the property is not big enough, it's not going to work for us. We need. We're not going to get the space in to have the rooms size that we want with the ensuites that we want and a big enough living space as well.

Okay, fantastic. So would you say when you go on Property Filter itself, you sort it by the highest surface area? Because that's something that I do personally. I go on Property Filter, click on the high surface area and then work the way through that.

Correct. Yep. So depends what mood I'm in. So sometimes I'll do that, sometimes I'll do Most Reduced. Love that. That's all. It just feels like a. Feels like you're browsing the rack at TK Maxx or something. You're just thinking, right, what is. What has come down the most? The I mentioned earlier on the call, before I think most people joined our. We've just for Christmas we bought a nursing home. Ex nursing home. That on Property Filter is one of those classics where it was on it. It went on the market at 750. It'd been on the market for close to a year, had kind of whittled its way down to. It sold a couple of times, whittled its way down to 600 and we ended up, you know, buying it at 5:30. But again you just go, yep, they're motivated. It's been on and off. It's not selling. It's a beautiful sort of downward trajectory on the old. On the old price. So yeah, perfect, perfect. And it. And it. When it came back on, that's when it was highlighted to us. It's like, oh, look at this one. Because it obviously reappeared and that's when we bought it.

Brilliant. And a question that's kind of related to what we've already said and it's from Yuki. He. Yuki has mentioned in order to make seven beds from. From three beds.

Yeah.

The criteria of the property is over 90 square meters achievable. So you mentioned over 100 square meters. Is that for seven beds or is that for six beds or is that for five beds?

Okay, good question. So there are national space standards, of course, for HMOs, different councils, and I include the wonderful Portsmouth in this. We'll look at those space challenges and say, yeah, that's great, but we don't want that, we want to have bigger space standards. So Portsmouth Council specifically, they do have larger standards with respect to their rooms and their living space. So for us to go from a three bed to a seven bed down here in the south, we of course you've got two bedrooms downstairs, three on the first floor and then two up into the loft. We want to future proof our rooms as much as we can. So the national space standards is 6.51 for a single room. We want all of our bedrooms to be above 10 square meters. That's really important to us. We just want to have rooms that are. And to be honest, the bigger rooms for us have always let quicker. So we want bigger rooms. All of our bedrooms are 10 square meters plus. And then you've got about two and a half square meters for an ensuite. So, yeah, for us, and then living space. So for us, actually, 100, 105 is probably what we need. Sometimes we'd need to pop a little extension on the back, sometimes we don't. But that's the kind of size that we're looking for for seven bedrooms, all ensuite.

Fantastic. Okay, the next question is from Sarah. What is your views on the type of tenants, so students or professionals? And we'll also put in social housing in there as well because that is obviously a really popular topic at the moment.

Yeah, great, great question, Sarah. So I think. So for us, we've not gone into the student market. I think when we started there were and there still are actually. There's, you know, lots and lots of student blocks going up everywhere. So we looked at that and thought, not really sure what the future there looks like. But with our landlord letters, we were getting lots of replies from landlords who were student landlords who were struggling to rent out their let their property for the coming year. So we just thought, is that a market we really want to be getting into again? In Portsmouth, it's traditional. Most students pay for 11 months out of the 12. So, yes, they sign up for the whole 11 months. But when we were Trying to weigh everything up. We were thinking, well actually we'd rather know that we're getting some rent for 12 months, not 11 months and there's some voids and this, that and the other. But I think on balance I think that was probably the right decision. However, without doubt our favorite strategy right now is supported living social housing. So that is, we've got two to supported living, we've got a third that we're hopeful of passing over to supported living as well. That is it saves us management costs of course, because we're not paying someone to help manage. Does save on the whole just maintenance and this and that and all that stuff and it's just five years and it's done. I don't know, we've not done it long enough of course to get a property back at the end so I don't know quite what state the property will come back to us in the end but we've spent time trying to get the contract right and etc. Etc. So, so time will tell but at the moment it's a great strategy of, of as passive as you can get.

Really fantastic. We're going to come to Edward in a second but following on from your question just now, Janice Shearer said for social housing type of HMOs do you get bricks and mortar valuation or commercial? This would affect how much money you could pull out. So be interesting to hear your opinion on this.

Yeah, commercial, full stop. That's it.

Even with the social housing?

Yeah, social housing, they'll happily do commercial. In fact we've had some of our best valuations have been because we've gone to the value with a five year lease, signed lease and gone. Look, this is a commercial entity, this is the money that we're going to be getting for this property. 50 grand, whatever, plus per year and they valued it off that five year lease.

Fantastic. And what type of social housing tenants do you usually use?

So I don't mind. So I'm pretty relaxed about that. So I. So I spent the first three years of my life living in social housing with my mum who is like escaping domestic violence and like there is like as a single mum, like there is a real need and, and if I'm honest, I don't particularly want to be particularly picky about who I put on or otherwise. That in some ways is for me, I, I'm creating a house, I'm creating some, a home for somebody, somebody else is then going to manage that, is going to look after that, is going to pay for that and maintain it, etc. It all, I think, lives and dies on the strength of its lease. So you've got to make sure that the lease is right and the lease is good. But I'm not really worried who goes in there. Now, one of our properties has. So is used by the council for homeless people. When I say homeless, I. I don't mean homeless homeless, if you see what I mean. But just guys that say single men and women who don't have anywhere to live, who've been made homeless for whatever reason. Again, not homeless homeless, but just the council. So that works well. And we've got another one that they rent it to. Again, they're council tenants, but they are coming out of foster care. Like, you know, what a. What a need there is out there for the kind of 18 to 25, these guys to kind of have somewhere that they can call home that they can really start finding themselves and sorting out their lives and all of that. So, yeah, we're pretty relaxed about the tenant type for us, if I'm honest. It's important that the rent keeps coming. It's important that the property is returned to us in a decent state at the end. And like I say, I've not done it long enough to be able to say here and say that that's happened because we've not been doing it long enough. But again, I think it. It boils down really to the strength of the lease on that.

Absolutely. No, you're doing that amazing job. So Edward's been really patient. Edward, would you like to ask your question? Because you've raised.

Hello, Edward. Hi. How did you find investors? You mentioned a bit about phoning around your mates, but it wasn't my mates, it was literally everyone. So. So how do we find investors? So first thing is that we told everyone what we were doing. So we were on the socials. It was not in secret. We were out there saying, do you know what? We're doing something new. We're starting a new business. It's property again. This is where some of our training perhaps kicks in. But, you know, we can help you sell your house quickly and we can offer good returns for investors. So that was just out there, out there, out there loads. My first investor was my mum. Great place to start. Yay. Yay, mum. But, you know, we. We ended up in a position where. So right now we've ended up in a position where. And someone's going to shoot me for this. But we ended up in a position where we had to turn down investment. We had people contacting us, saying, I've got some money. Can you use it and, and actually send them on to me? Well, this is the thing, right? So, so I think telling everyone what you're doing, we, we, we panicked because we, we realized we were running out of funds at one point. So we, we literally, we literally went through our phone book and text everybody, and we got two investors out of that. All right? So it absolutely worked. And again, you're not going with a. With your cap up turned, cap in hand. You're not begging for money. You're asking people, you know, who. Do you know, who would like to get a better. Invest a better return on their money than what they're getting in the bank right now? And I think most people would say, well, yeah, I would. So then it's just, it just opens a conversation. Well, how can you do that? Well, because we're investing in property. And actually our tenants who rent the rooms from us, they pay our mortgage, they pay our bills. They then pay enough money in there to be able to pay you a return on your money, and they still pay enough for me to have a profit as well. So you can just, you know, it just opens up these conversations. Investment probably won't come if you're shy about it, if you're quiet about it, or if you go begging. So I think you absolutely, you need to be, you know, you need to be confident in what you're, what you're doing. You need to be confident in your numbers. You need to. I think being a doctor probably helped. To be honest, I think that that probably did help me. Just from a professional point of view, it's helpful if you can borrow money short term, get in and out, pay them back again, you can. Then socials, you know, money returned, you can. People go, oh, great. Like, you know, they're not just gonna go on holiday with it and spend it. And so having something to show is really helpful. But there is, I think a lot of it is belief, Edward. I think a lot of it is. And I didn't really believe it when I started, but the more we do this, like, the more, the more we do this, the more we post on social media, the more networking I do, the more I hang out with people, the more and more. The more I talk about money, the more money that just is out there, the more, you know, Southampton Pin, again, you know, Patrick, I know from Southampton Pin, but, you know, people don't really get out the door without me asking how much money they have to invest. It's just, it's just an open conversation. You know, people like, oh, I want to do that. It's like, great, how much you got know, what are you going to do with it? Have you thought about, well, that might not be enough to do an HMO deal. What about this or what about that? Or have you thought about investing in someone else for a while just to increase the funds? Like you can just keep having these types of conversations. It's a numbers game. It's a numbers game, but it is. They won't all stick. But that's, that's fine. You know, it only takes, literally only takes one or two. You got someone with £200,000, you're off, you're off. So it will come. What other networking groups other than PIN do you attend? So I, I attend two PIN a month and because Southampton, obviously I host and then Portsmouth is where I'm investing. There's also one called HPN down our way, which I don't know if you are Hampshire based, Edward, but okay, there's another one called HBM which is, which is quite a big one. But there's property in Poppy Doms, my wife goes to that. There's obviously Progressive, amongst others. There are lots out there. I would say a couple of months is probably a good start. I think if you're full time in property, one a week probably is. Right. But if you're kind of, you know, getting started, I'd. One a month probably isn't going to cut it. But with networking meetings, you need to be known. So you can't dip in and out. You've got to be, you've got to be in, you've got to be committed, you've got to be there regularly, you've got to be like, oh, yeah, it's Michael, it's Edward, it's Patrick. It's, you know, you just need to get yourself known. Because that's when people are then thinking, oh, I've got a deal, I don't want to do it or I can't do it. It's like, who, you know, who might like it. Oh, I know, Edward, you know, I've got some money, who do I invest with? Like, you just need to keep getting yourself known. So that would be. Just go regularly would be my advice on that. Thank you.

Brilliant. And on that question, brilliant, thank you. And on that, Edward as well, if you are interested in networking events, what we're doing on Property Filter, every single week, I think it is on a Saturday, we are posting in the community, all the networking Events that are happening across the uk. So you can just jump on the community and have a look and choose which ones are close to you. Okay, brilliant. Okay, so Michael, following on from Edward's question, I've got one as well in terms of it. So you mentioned you offered on a property but you did not have the funds as well. How did you deal with the anxiety of that?

So, yeah, so I think there's a bit of trusting the process. There was a bit of what's the worst that can happen here? So the worst that can happen is, is we spend two or three thousand pounds in conveyancing and we, and we can't complete. That's probably the worst that can happen. And for us it was a good deal. We had reached that point where we believed that the money was there. Comes back to that mindset thing. Believe like we believed that the money would come. So yeah, so we just thought, well, we had a bit of courage and threw a bit of caution to the wind and, and did it and then had again had conversations, went back to people that previously had said they might be in stood but wasn't the right time or whatever and followed up and, and the money came basically. So as if, So I, I think we weren't like I say the worst case scenario was losing a bit of face with the estate agent and letting people down, which we don't want to do, of course, we don't want to do that financially. Not a huge amount in it to lose. So it was, it, it was worth it. And you know what now like, I, I would happily do that again. I've completely, I think just reached that point of just going, yeah, like there is money out there, there is money available, it will come. Like people talk about the deal is good enough and there's a bit of that. But actually I think people invest in you. I don't think people invest in the deal personally. We, we did a. Took me hours. I put together like this valuation pack once for a property to, to for investment. Took me hours. And one guy basically met, met a guy and he was like, yeah, I've been investing. I was like oh great. And so I went to meeting for coffee. I took my, took my pack with me. I was, you know, ready and so sat there, had a coffee and I popped on the table in front of him and you know, he's a seasoned investor, I suppose, and he basically wasn't interested in the deal whatsoever. He just spent an hour asking me about myself and about my business and all that kind of stuff. And then at the end of the meeting agreed to invest and off he went. He didn't even take the pack with him. So we've personally, we've never done a, an investment pack per se. That doesn't mean that won't work for you. And I think it's probably good practice and it's probably good to have but I think for me, I think people invest in people. So again, networking, getting yourself known, putting stuff out there. All of our investors, all of them are people that we have built relationship with and who we know. So none of our investors are complete strangers. They are all, I, you know, old friends. I've, we've got one old friend who is a university friend, trained with her years and years and years ago. She again, she contacted me on the socials. She's like, I'm getting fed up with all this doctoring stuff as well. What can we do? And you know, we're working together and this is stuff people just sort of come out of the woodwork but they wouldn't know if you weren't posting and putting it out there.

And yeah, people are always watching, aren't they?

They're always watching. They are always watching.

Might not comment, they might not like, but they're always watching.

Yeah, I, I think exactly that, exactly that. Sf.

Yeah, brilliant. So we've got a few more questions but we run here so I'm just going to wrap things up.

Yeah.

Next. Michael, what is next?

Well, good question. So we are. So the, for us in terms of projects, the nursing home is the big one that we're just trying to sort out. Had a phone call today from our planning officer who says that the planning department are recommending approval of our Planning application for 13 bit HMO which would just be amazing. The what we are finding now is that we, oh, we've also got, forgive me, we've also got two joint venture partners that we're going to do some flips with. So we've got folk who want to invest but don't want to lock it up too much again, they're a bit cautious about it. So we said, okay, why don't we use your money to do some flips? You bring the money, we'll do the work and we'll split the profit 50. 50 great return for them. It's money for us that works really nicely. So we've got two of those projects currently the cash is sat there. We've not got any projects to work them yet but that's going to be a couple of flips. This year. But what we have found is that we're just finding lots of deals that we are having folk come to us saying, love what you're doing. Is there a way that you can help us with the journey? So that's the focus this year really, is keeping the portfolio ticking along. Couple of deals a year. It's not loads, just keeps it ticking along nicely whilst doing projects for other people, obviously taking a fee for that or working with them and just growing our business that way. So it's pretty exciting, it's pretty full on, but really enjoying it, doing less NHS work, if I'm honest. It's a nice. Yeah, it's a nice balance. It's. It's a nice balance. And then in the summer, we're spending the summer Greek island hopping with the kids. So that will be a nice reward to look forward to when we get there.

Fantastic. Well, thank you for joining us today. So, folks, everyone, I hope you've enjoyed today's Deal Finder Corner. It's an absolute pleasure, Michael, for you to be here. No doubt our members got lots of value from that and a number of golden nuggets. I suppose all there is left to say is 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 within seconds and load your pipeline and make deals happen. Have an endless supply of deals, join the top 1% and become a high achiever. Deal Finder. Looking forward to seeing you all next week and catch you soon. Thanks, guys.

Thank you.