🔑 The Ultimate Design Blueprint that boosts monthly profits and valuations with Julian Maurice

Yeah. Welcome everyone. Welcome to this week's Dealfire in a corner. So this is your weekly property talk show brought to you by Property Filter and hosted by myself, Guillaume Black, your favorite Frenchman, CEO and co founder of Property Filter. As you know, the UK's highest rated platform to do deals and we're on a mission to empower our property investors. Do more deals, you know, like another thousand deals this year thanks to the Property Filter blueprint. And really the purpose with these calls and the defined corner is to give you more and the best of the available resources by inviting expert guests who will share with you the latest, most current strategies, tactics and secrets about what actually works right now in terms of finding and making deals, but also the reality of systemizing and running a high performance business in properties. So it really is my pleasure to introduce you, my good friend, Julian Morris on today's dealfinal Corner. So I met Julian maybe six, seven years ago and I have to say I, I've learned immensely from Julian on so many levels. One is today I look back at my portfolio and some of the first projects we done are like 5, 6 years old and they look like immaculately brand new. So some of the principles we're going to talk about today are to do with longevity in design. Something that's in temporal always works whatever the season is functional is a way that people love to live there and pay you more for it. And you'll see how you know, for not a lot of, you know, it doesn't cost you more to do something amazingly better, more functional where you have less churn more profits and then know your valuation, you know, if you do commercial valuations on HMOs and things like that just go through the roof just by these principles here. So we'll be able to tap into almost 30 years of experience Julian has in the property industry. So it's really worth lots of different hats from being a contractor to all the way, you know, a landlord himself, all the way to successfully delivering hundreds of refurbs and conversions. Specializing initially on student and professional HMOs but has got huge experience, you know, is being paid by hotel chains to design their space and service accommodation, apart hotels and things like that. But a lot of the things we're going to talk about you can apply today and really transform the way you run your refurbs, transform the way your portfolio is going to grow and sustain on a long time. So we talk about some principles of designs around software and things like that just earlier as we were catching up. But you Find the biggest cost you'll have on your portfolio is your churn, is your people coming in and out and leaving your property because your product is not functional or it's not up to spec or it's not pleasant to live. And Julian solves all of that. And I can't underplay the impact of what I've learned from Julian some years ago now, as I had on my portfolio and where I am in life in property, because of the peace of mind I've had with a rent coming in every month and just having this impeccable product that doesn't go bad. Five years on revalued portfolios and you know, like the valuers, they don't understand, you know, as some as anyone lived here for the past five years, it's immaculate, you know, because of all of these principles there. So he knows everything there is to know about project management, delivering on time, on budget, but really designing things in a way with the again functionality of the space and maximizing and unlocking value from clever layout and the way you play with lights and everything and it's like so simple, templated, even a French idiot can do it. So everyone in here should be able to unlock huge value. So really looking forward for the talk today for all of you who are live, but also I know this is going to be one of the recordings that is going to be most replayed. So an incredible resource for all of us. So in today's episode we're going to talk about, Julien is going to share with us all to identify reliable profit signals on property and features. You know, when you see properties at viewings on pictures before you even offer. And this will unlock your ability to do deals where people don't see the opportunity. Design shortcuts that can boost your rental yield. And you know, if you increase your rent by 20%, that's doubling your margins, right? And doubling your margins means you get better enterprise value, capital value of your assets, you know. So I can't undermine the importance of this and the impact this can have on your success in property if you apply it. And Julien is going to talk us through a proven framework to be able to help you find and spot all this value inside Propfilter as well. And why simple durable deals consistently build complex property schemes where people overcomplicate things and it's not durable. And three, four years, they make the headlines when pictures are great, when it comes out three, four years down the line, they have to redo everything because it wasn't durable in the first place. So I'm so looking forward to this today. So please join me and give my good friend Julia Morris a massive property virtual welcome for his talk today. Thank you so much.

Thank you. Well, you've explained all my slides. I might as well do them now.

I see.

Let me just, let me just. Let me just get the slide. So. Okay, so you've kind of basically introduced everything that I'm going to talk about. So I'll get straight into the slides. Can you see the slide change? Can you see the slide change? Great. Fantastic. So we know it's working because I can't see both screens at the same time. I don't think. There we go. So I can see people now. So just quickly, who am I? Where am I coming from? And I think for those of you that joined just before I started that, we started a presentation from the conversation I had with Guillaume. I do approach things in a slightly different way. So I'll just share with you my perspective. And I just think, just to. Just to kind of clarify the fact that I believe that there are lots of different perspectives on buying property, not just one approach is all encompassing. I know that there are people that are looking to build big portfolios and there are people here who want to just buy a small number of properties. I'm one of those small number of properties investors. I have a business that I. A design business and I do training as well that provides me with an income. Property is really a security blanket and, and, and basically somewhere safe to put some money for the future. So that's my approach, really. I, I'm very risk averse, I guess. I. But. But having my own business for the last 30 years means that I'm also. I do take risks. But, but when it comes to investing my money, I do not want to make a mistake at all. I've seen lots of people fail at this and fail in business and I can't afford to fail. So if I do something, I want to make sure that it's done correctly and it lasts and it does what it's supposed to do. So that's the first thing. I'm fairly sensible as an investor. Another thing I would say is I do value time more than anything else. Um, so my own time. And people talk about financial freedom. For me, I don't think you need to be particularly rich to be free. I think you just enjoying what you do is an important part of freedom. You know, you could have lots of money coming in, but you might hate what you do. And so that for me isn't freedom. So that's another very important part. Freedom is one of my core principles. Time is something that I value most and I do have plenty of time for myself to do what I like important and I do value good design because I do believe it's one of an integral part of making our investments a success. So the reason why I focus and I, I actually teach design is because I didn't see anyone doing it in the past. When I first started looking at property, people weren't talking about design at all and there's somebody that was doing lots of refurbs in Leeds doing student accommodation years ago. I, I, I just applied a little bit of, I guess imagination into the design and what that did for me was it allowed me to always get repeat work. In fact, funny enough, this year most of my business has been repeat business from existing clients and I think good design is a really important part of that repeat business. And in property, in my own investments again was talking about churn rates which is basically having to find new tenants all the time that rarely for me. So I think the, the, the key message about design is it allows you to work less hard because you don't have to keep looking for new clients all the time. So that's the main thing. So that's the first thing. Just some testimonials before I go on. This is a somebody I think we've heard of who sent me a testimonial a while back so I won't bore you with reading them out, I'll just share, share that there. So that was a lovely testimonial from Yugiyam and somebody else. Now I, I'm quite well known for not being a fan of putting all ensuites into HMOs that there's a caveat on that. In some areas I think it is necessary but in other areas I don't think it's necessary. So I'm going to be talking about that, touching upon that. I'm not going to force the issue but a lot of people that do my training can achieve great results without spending fortunes and like I say, there's nothing, just one way to do something. There are lots of ways to do things and I would encourage a bit of creativity in what you're doing. Also I've been doing training, I've been training people and working with people in the industry for what about over 10 years now and these are just some people that I've worked with that have gone on to win industry recognition and awards. So I do a I don't want to touch too much about the training that I do, but I do teach people how to design property, how to be good interior designers and exterior designers. And it just, you know, it doesn't, you don't have to spend ages learning about it. You can just do a, you know, a day's training or if you attended my, my training, a few sessions and you'll be up and running and just some pictures, images of work that I've done and work clients have done over the years. So let's just get cracking on the presentation itself and I want to talk about profit signals first and I'm assuming that people looking for deals. So I'm going to try to make this relevant to this group and this community. So let's first I want to start with just sharing with you some sobering facts first of all about the industry and about the average landlord. Now I don't know what people's approach is, but I'm guessing that most people here who are using property filter will be using leverage. So we'll be using finance to buy a property. Okay, so that means that you're one of many, most people I would say in the industry are using finance. So this, these numbers and these figures that I'm going to just share with you relate to leveraged landlords. Okay, So I just want to share with you some facts about the industry before we start. So the first bit of information I would like to share with you is that the average landlord holds a property for between three to 10 years maximum. So the average time period that a landlord owns a property for is around about seven years. Now Guillen was talking about the fact that he's now had his properties valued after five years and they still look like new. I've come across so many people where their properties get to about the seven year mark and they're looking really tired. Which get it puts them in a position where they're forced to have to do quite a lot of work, spend a lot of money and they just don't have that money to reinvest into their assets. To me, if you've only owned a property for seven years, it doesn't work. The whole thing is pointless. I want to just promote the, the, the I guess the fact of long term growth rather than short term gain. Okay, the next bit of information I wanted to share with you is that Most landlor make 10% profit on turnover. So the at the average yields yet net yields for leveraged landlords is between 3 to 5% of property value, which translates to between 10 to 20% profit margin on turnover. So if we say 15% profit on turnover is what the average is for landlords, bearing in mind that a letting agent will take about 11% of your turnover, then that equates that. That really says that a letting agent is taking more than half of your profit. Nearly, in fact, more, probably just as almost as much profit out of the property as you might be as the average landlord. So I think it's really important if you're looking for a deal to understand your profit margin rather than your turnover or your gdv. I think for me it's all about profit. I don't care about really anything else apart from profit. That's the key thing, turnover. I've heard people say, oh, I've got a huge pipeline, several million pounds in turnover. That, to me masks a truth that might be difficult to tell, which might be that although you're making very high turnover, you're maybe probably making very low profits. For me, I don't care about turnover. I care about profit. So bear in mind that the average leverage landlord makes only 15 profit on their turnover. So I want to talk about profit. First of all, what is profit? And this is, again, I think, yeah, you said, am I gonna have a go at anything? Okay. And this is what I'm gonna have a go at. Okay. And, and it's just my observation of what I see when I, when I. Because I've been doing presentations around the country for what, 12, 13 years now, and I wanted to share this with you because I think this is a, A, a truth that is never told. Okay, so here's two products I want to show you here. So we've got, do we, do we have a, a chat box? Do we have a chat box? Okay, so we've got two products here. And it's not a trick question, but if I was to give you for free, you can have either one of these properties, I will give them to you. I will give one of them to you for free. You've got to pick one of them. But, but you have to keep it for 15 years. Okay? So what you have to do, you get it for free, but you've got to keep it for 15 years. Which one would you have? You don't have to put it in the chat box. Be interesting for you to put into the chat box which one you'd have. And I don't want to make it sound like a trick question, just have a look at the gdv and which one Would you have? If you could, you could be given either one of them for free. It would just be interesting to know. But my experience has been that a lot of people are driven by gdv. Okay. And I just want to share with you that that could be a big mistake first of all. So I can't see the chat box, but I'll have a look now bear with me a second. So we've got a chat box, it's got a thing there. So okay, so Michelle knows. So we've got three tenants versus 500 tenants. Yes. So. So chat box, three tenants versus 500. Yeah. So which, which would be, which would be the one that you would take. And I think what I'm going to try and share with you is GDV is not the figure you want to be looking at if you're looking at investing in property long term. Okay. Because if you look at gdv, that just gives you the value of that property when it's brand spanking new. Now I'm just going to show you the 500 room. Now I'm not anti 500 room project. I just want to share with you the failure point of just looking at GDV and not looking at other things. Okay? So this is the lovely big 500 room development. This is the interior, beautifully kitted out, lovely shared spaces, you know, chill out spaces, chill out rooms. We've got gymnasium, we've got a cinema space and they have live events. And this is the bedroom. So all fully fitted out, 500 room development. And this is the house. Now the GDV on the 500 room development is about 100 million, something like that. And the GDV on the house is 126,000 pounds. And you do have to invest money into this one to get it you have to invest 17,500 pounds deposit. And the other one you can probably pull all your money out. So, so that's the difference between the two. If you're looking at gdv, there's a huge difference in these two products. And one of them is infinite return on investment. The other one not so infinite. This little one here, and this is the interior, much simpler, three bed. No, no ensuites, nothing. Okay. Now what I want to just talk about very briefly is ldv, which is a. I guess it's the only way I can put it, which is long term design value. Now when I look at something, I look at the ldv, not the gdv. Now how do you look at LDV and compare that to GDV well, the definition of LDV is what is the enduring financial value? What is the sustained profitability? So how much value will, how much will it be worth after 10 years? How much will it be worth after 20 years? What is it going to look like after 10 years? What's it going to look like after 20 years? How easy is it going to be maintained? To be to maintain. Can you afford to maintain that product? This is my issue with a lot of ensuite developments is that most people do not have the money, they are going to be using that income for themselves and they don't have enough money to put aside every month to cover the sheer enormity of the cost of maintenance when it comes up to redo in about 10 years after heavy use. So that is something I think about very carefully before I buy something. So we're looking at compound effect of what you're doing rather than just the instant picture of what it's going to be worth when you first get it done. You think about the compound effect rather than the instant gratification effect. I guess. So if we look at the difference between the profit on these to after 50, after seven years, after. Well, I'm looking forward at 15 years. So if you've, if you chose the big development over the little one after seven years you would have gone bankrupt because the development failed due to poor maintenance and care. So that was after seven years it failed owing 20, 20 million pounds. Whereas over 15 years the little HMO, the little three bed, kept going and is still rented out today. It doesn't need major works doing to it and the total profit, including capital growth is 545,000 pounds. So you compare minus 20 million after seven years to plus half a million in 15 years. If you would have carried on owning that property for another seven, eight years, you'd be many, many millions in debt by then. It would really drag you down. So the difference between these two products, the 500 room and the 3 room is over 7 years the 500 room block made a 40,000 pound loss per room and the 3 bed HMO made a 42,000 pound profit per room. If we take it over 15 years, the 500 room block made £85,700 loss per room and the 3 bed made £82,335,000 profit per room. So it's a massive difference in profit between the two products. The 500 room made a huge loss and the little three bedroom made a very decent return on investment and made a really good profit. So that's what I mean when I'm talking about the difference between GDV and long term value, gross development value and long term development value. Long term design value is you've really got to consider your resources, you've really got to consider your capabilities. And for some people, a big block of flats might suit them. If you've got a big pockets, if you've got deep pockets, plenty of money to cover maintenance and repairs, plenty of money for staffing, then that's fantastic. But if you don't have a lot of resources, if you may only have a limited amount of money to cover maintenance and repairs over the period of ownership, then you really have to be thinking about a totally different type of product that might suit your pocket. And another thing is, is that my, my own portfolio didn't really make any money for me for about four years. I was building up, it wasn't making any money. Now I've owned it now for about 10 years. It's now making me good profit, consistent profit every month. All the houses are still in good condition and they are very salable products. So that is the difference. And I just wanted to share that with you. If we're looking at deals, everybody is going to be looking at a different type of thing. And if you're looking at GDV and you're looking at return on investment, I would urge you to think about your capabilities, think about what would suit you long term and think about how long is this thing going to last, how is it going, how easy is it going to be to maintain? What kind of a headache is it going to be to maintain? Because imagine if you've got a house that's rather complex in its design. You've got lots of ensuites and maybe kitchens and every room. Imagine if you've got to update a room and organize contractors to get them in to do the work, and you've got people living in the property, it might be an absolute headache to deal with. So that's what I think about when I'm looking at a design rather than just looking at the shiny penny. So just to summarize, just to summarize really, how many rooms is too many in the in lifestyle? In life cycle prediction and maintenance studies, the consensus is that wear and aging are accelerated by higher usage intensity, environmental stress and design complexity. So I'll read that again. In lifestyle prediction and maintenance studies, the consensus is that wear and tear aging are accelerated by higher usage intensity, environmental stresses and design complexity. So if you want your product, you're Building your investment to last longer, then you have to have less usage intensity and less design complexity. Simple as that, basically. So hopefully that might be a lesson learned. So when assessing a deal, look beyond the headline rent. So headline profit, think about headline profit rent minus the basic costs. What is. So you've got the spreadsheet, which just gives you the profit. But think about maintenance, Think about long term maintenance. Think about how long it's going to be before you might have to do a refurb again. How much is that refurb going to cost? And what is going to be the disruption when you do a refurb to that property? And how is it going to practically be done if you've never done a refurb before? Then it might seem like a huge task, in which case, then be careful. Think about profit. So think about profit that matches your resources, your reserves. My partner always calls me buffer boy, actually, because I believe you really need to have a financial buffer when you own property. You know, if you don't have money put aside in the bank to cover maintenance, I think that's a very dangerous position to put yourself in. So always think about, I'd rather have one property with enough money in the bank to cover maintenance than three and no money to cover maintenance. Because I know that I could make that one property last 15 years. Whereas if I didn't have enough money to cover maintenance and I had three houses, they would probably only last seven and then I have to sell them all. And actually that one house that lasts 15 will make just as much profit as three houses that last seven. Does that make sense? So think about long term profit. What remains after 10 to 15 years? Because everyone that I speak to says we want to own our property forever. But how many people actually own their property forever? Very, very few. It's like how many businesses last more than 20 years? Very, very few. So I would urge you to think about things in a slightly different way. So I don't know whether there are any questions on that, because I'm going to move to profit signals you can trust. But if there Should I just carry on, Guillaume? Yep. Okay, so let's look at profit signals now. So let's look at location first of all. So this might not come up on profit property filter, I don't know. But think about your parking. Parking is a big thing. I've actually looked at properties that was located on the corner of a street, so the bottom end of a street on the corner and parking outside would have been a nightmare. So I would avoid Something where parking is going to be an issue because I think if you're looking at professional tenants, you probably find that they'll drive or have a van or have a car and they will ask about parking. So you might have the most wonderful ensuites and kitchens and decor. But if you can't park nearby, it's going to be a bit of a pain. Look at neighboring properties as well. You're never going to, probably never going to hear everything, I guess. But you know, if you've got high density in the street, maybe think about, you know, if you're going to be doing bedrooms downstairs, for example, if you've got a family next door with young children, then they're going to be making a racket next door, right next to the bedroom that you've created on the ground floor. So soundproofing might have to be an extra issue if you don't think about what your neighbors are like. So look for telltale signs like trampolines and kids toys left outside and stuff like that. Another thing to think about is employment, employers close to where you buying the property. So look for things. I look for things like large distribution points. So I've got Amazon, Haribo, some really large big companies in my area and they're big employers. You might want to be near a hospital. But look, look for things like that. You want shops to be conveniently close, walking distance, nearby transport links, bus stops, motorways, things like that, train stations, are they nearby? And also think about the overall feel of the area because people do say location, location, location. And the biggest mistake that I made when I started investing in property was buying in an area that wasn't brilliant and it just drove my, my tenants insane and I ended up having to sell it. So that was a lesson learned. So sorry about the poor text on fitting into this thing. So another thing to think about is density. So how many, I guess HMOs, how many, how much competition you've got in your area? So for example, this shows you a, a page off of spare room. So when I looked at, I think this was Leeds here. So this is. No, this is actually Walthamstow, E17 Walthamstow in London. So I, I've just looked at Walthamstow in London and that just one area has got 146 results, which is 14 pages of rooms. So I would always. First thing I would probably do is look at the location on spare room. If you're looking at HMOs, if you're looking at serviced accommodation, then I'D be looking on Airbnb and look at the density of competition in your area and then I would be looking at the quality of the competition in your area. Because if you are going to be doing something nice and a high quality and I think it's important to know what high quality is. But if you're going to be doing a nicely presented HMO, seeing a lot of rubbish HMOs in your area to me is a good sign that you don't have any competition because you can't compare apples and pears. If you've got a lovely apple and you've got a load of rotten apples, then that you can't compare the two. So I, I would always try to differentiate myself. So it's important to understand what your competition is doing. I'd be worried if I was looking at an area where everything looked great because it would be really hard to compete in that location. Really hard to compete. How do you compete? This is the, this is another problem I've got with ensuites is that, you know, if everyone's got en suite rooms and if everyone is doing the same thing, then putting in the ensuite is pointless because you're just competing with everyone doing the same thing. So you might actually find that actually doing a lower priced property, a value product in that area, it's like Ikea going well. All my competitors are doing furniture that's assembled and then going well, why don't we disassemble our furniture and sell it flat, pack and sell it cheaper and look what happened. So sometimes looking at your competition and understanding who you're up against, I think would could shape your product. I would be looking at the number results. So first of all, how does the area feel? How far is the nearest bus stop? How easy it is, Is it to find parking? Are there any large employers nearby? Are there shops within walking distance? How far is it to the nearest motorway train station? How good or bad is your competition? And can you compete now, number one. And then think about can you compete in 15 years? Because remember, there's going to be new products coming on stream all the time and how are you going to compete with new products after, let's say 10 years? So this is why I talk about longevity in design. So let's look at the property itself. So these are property signals that you can look for in the property itself. And again, I apologize for some of the text not fitting but think about external noise. Sorry, hold on. Think about external noise. Look at natural light. So if it's very dark in the property. That may be a problem. Another thing that commonly comes up where I look at Facebook and people posting a floor plan and going, will this work? As an hmo, the important thing to think about is the, is the means of escape. Can you close off all the rooms so that somebody can go from the top floor out of the house without going through a kitchen or a living room or something like that? You have to have a clear route of escape. So think about the route of escape. That's one of the building regs. Priorities. Think about flow, communal flow. So is the, is the, is it easy to get to the kitchen? Is it easy to, to get to the bathrooms? Storage for me is a huge thing in properties. If you miss, if you, if you fail on storage. And again, this is again why I've got a bit of a problem with people focusing on, on suites is because what that does is it takes your attention away from other really important things. So for me, storage is just as important as ensuites. If you have loads of en suites but not enough storage, then the house becomes a mess really quickly and you're never going to appeal to great tenants. If the house looks a mess, then you've got non value add maintenance issues. These are really important. I think if you've never bought property before, this might be just something that you need to check. List your, you have to make sure you focus and remember this is that windows, gutters, roof downpipes, brickwork, pointing woodwork at external woodwork, things like that, even the garden, how do they need maintaining, do they need replacing? And the reason why I've called it non value add maintenance is because if you replace the windows, it doesn't increase the rental value. It probably won't even increase the GDV because a value won't really care about that. They'll be looking at rental value. I guess if you're looking at commercial valuation, a roof is expensive, windows are expensive, landscaping is expensive and it's difficult to maintain. So these are things you might want to look at. So for me, something maybe with a smaller, easy to maintain garden or backyard is much better than something with a big garden, for example, because I just don't want to deal with gardeners and maintenance. And then room sizes, you know, people say, you know, what's the minimum room size? Okay, well the minimum isn't really what you should be worried about about. To be honest. If you're really having to worry about the minimum, then you're never going to be doing that well a A tiny bedroom with an ensuite will result in a high churn. So I would rather do a, a medium sized bedroom without an ensuite and maybe add some other features, maybe like a tv, a coffee station, boost the design a little bit. And I'd probably do better than having a tiny little room with an ensuite where I'm going to have lots and lots of churn. And I think churn is becoming even more of something to be careful of. Now that we've got all the new tenant regulations coming in about shorter term tenancies, it's becoming more difficult to remove problem tenants. Churn is going to be your big problem. So just to clarify, room sizes must be big enough to house en suites and still meet HMO license licensing standards. A large room split badly is just as costly as a small one that doesn't comply. Building fabric, the roof, the windows, the point in the gutters. These are unavoidable spends. They don't increase rent or valuation, but they drain your profit if you underestimate them. Light and ceiling height. Tenants rent with their eyes. Dark or cramped rooms lose value fast, especially once the en suites are added and you've got poor storage services. If plumbing and drainage runs are straightforward, ensuites aren't really a problem. Remember what I talked about over complication in the design. If you've got, let's say, I'll give you an example. If you've got the soil stack at the back of the house or you've got concrete floors on the ground floor and you want to add en suites in the ground floor and en suites at the front of the property and all you've got is a soil stack at the back and the house was designed for three people and you want to put six in there. And then the, the, the pressure on the drainage, the complexity of the pipe runs, the difficulty of running pipes, soil pipes into concrete is just going to be an absolute headache and that's not going to come out on your spreadsheet and it's probably not even going to be seen on property filter, I don't know. But these are just things that you need to be aware of and in tune to when you're looking for property. So other things, so fire safety and escape routes. If the layout creates inner rooms or bottlenecks, you'll spend a fortune retrofitting compliance. I've worked with clients doing HMO layouts where they've put a bedroom and they've gone, we're going to add an extension and they've designed a bedroom with no window. So just be careful when you're looking at adding maybe extensions and you might be closing off a room that, that won't have a window. So also think about communal flow and storage. Many investors underestimate this, but tenants don't. A house that feels comfortable to live in reduces churn voids and complaints and that protects your profits. Condition of walls. So I, I'm. If I walk into a house with Artex. If you walk into a house and there's Artex in it, number one, be prepared for. I forgot the name of it now it's gone out my head anyway. So if, if you've got Artex, be prepared to for a back to brick refurb. It's really difficult. It's impossible to. To make it look nice if you've got wood chip wallpaper everywhere. When you start pulling off wood chip, you're going to have to replaster the house. That's very messy and it's very expensive. So look at the condition of walls. I would personally look for a house that's got nicely plastered walls. Unless you've got big pockets and you want to do an extensive refurb. Avoid Artex and avoid walls that are in poor condition. Otherwise be prepared for back to brick. And there's nothing wrong with the back to brick refurb because you'll get a long lifespan. But it's not cheap. So I just want to also talk about the difference between going from a standard HMO to a sui generis hmo. So I do work with people doing larger projects and one of the things that they come a cropper with is they don't understand or they don't realize the jump in in compliance that happens when you move from let's say a seven bed to an eight bed. It's insane. So there are major fire safety upgrades with regards to fire doors compartmentation. So you have to sometimes add more fire doors between a kitchen and a hallway. It's insane. I mean, I just recently did a project where they had to fit in and they had to fit two fire doors between the hallway and the kitchen. It was just crazy. You have to put in sound insulation. So there are higher standards between rooms and between units. You also remember if you're putting in plumbing and drainage, you've got to think about your extraction soil pipe runs, extractor fans, having pipe work for the extractor fans. You've got to drop ceilings. All that additional complexity in the design. Remember what it said about lifespan of the property going back to my ocd, when I look at a house that's over designed, it makes me feel really uncomfortable because my gut feeling is it's not going to last. And one of my overriding design principles is good design has to be long lasting. And that's my gut feeling of doing hundreds of refurbs over the years. My spider sense, when I walk into a house with very complex design and I'm talking, like I say, pipe runs, extraction runs, lowered ceilings, all that complexity in pipe work, I feel really uneasy. I wouldn't be comfortable owning a house like that, personally. The figures might look great at the beginning, but like I showed you with that 500 MHMO, complex design requires a lot more maintenance. Unless you've got deep pockets, you might want to bear that in mind because a seven bed and an eight bed, the, the profit margin between a seven and eight bed might look great on a spreadsheet, but when you look forward 15 years, the spreadsheet means nothing because one of them won't exist anymore and one of them will also. Think about kitchens and facilities. You might need multiple cookers, you might need more kitchens. If you're on three floors, you might need a kitchen in between the top floor and the ground floor, or if you're on four floors, you've got extra cookers, sinks, worktops, you need more fridge freezers. There's a lot more involved. Think about space and amenity standards. So you might need larger communal space requirements for some councils. This all depends on the council. If you are looking at a sui generis hmo, I would say gen up on what the council require in terms of space, amenities, communal space and communal standards. And think about the cost of all of these extra, all of these extra requirements and maintenance obligations. Some. For me personally, I would go for a much simpler model, but that's me. So this is my perspective on complexity. I work to a set of design principles that were created by a man called Dieter Rams. If anyone wants to do any research on great design, I will just give you a complete shortcut and say, just look at Dieter Rams's principles of good design and then just follow them like they are religion, like they are the Ten Commandments. Because if you do, you might not have the most trendy product in the world, but you will have a product that I guarantee after 10, 15, 20 years would be really simple to maintain and keep up to a good standard. So for me, the sleep at night factor matters just as much as the spreadsheet. Profit isn't just about money, it's about peace of mind for me. So just a quick shortcut tip for those of you that are going to be viewing properties. Okay. If you don't have a floor plan, you may be able to get an estate agents layout. Okay. I would always take maybe one or two copies of the estate agents layout plan with you to a viewing. I'm guessing that if you're doing a viewing you're probably kind of already done a few numbers on the deal to and you wouldn't be looking at it if it wasn't interesting. So this will help you assess the property a lot better and save you having to go backwards and forwards all the time. So take the estate agents plan with you and mark these things on the plan. Socket and radiator location. So existing plug sockets, existing radiator locations, chimney breast measurements. A lot of estate agents drawings do not show chimney breasts. Okay. And I've got, I've got a big thing about people having taken out chimney breasts in rim. I don't think you need to, but I think it's important to know all those dimensions. Mark the fuse board location, mark the gas meter location, broadband in location. Because if you're creating a lot of the time now with fiber broadband, you cannot change the broadband in location. And if it's in a bedroom that could be an issue. It might just mean something. You've got to plan out. Soil pipe location is really important. That's where the toilet runs. It's normally quite a big heavy pipe that's normally out the back of a house. Another thing is a lot of houses might have odd structural elements like, you know, pipe runs. So like a bit of a, you know, boxing in, down a wall, in the middle of the wall and that indicates maybe radiator pipe run or something. Mark those out and any areas of concern, like you've noticed some cracking on the walls. Take some, you know, mark that as a red cross on a drawing. So at least when you go back, you know all these things. The other good thing is, is that if you mark down all these socket locations when you're doing room layouts, if you're not making any big changes and you're looking at room layouts, you may find that the radiator is where the bed wants to go, things like that. And so you'll need to put that onto your schedule of works. So here's something else that affects, that's longevity in the product. So I've spoken about what you, what you should be looking for. If you're looking at long term investment when you're looking at a property, things to think about, maintenance, how the property is going to be, what it's going to be like to maintain. Now what I'm going to be talking about is operations. Okay. And again, this is something I don't hear people really talking about that much in fact ever. Okay. And what I do hear people say is just like they've heard something and they'll repeat what they've heard. So I'm just going to add a little bit of disruption into this. Again Guillam. Okay, sorry about that. So don't just. When we look at tenant demand, I know that in the past people said put in a fake ad into spare room. Okay. And they put in an ad of some really great property when actually it wasn't, it didn't represent what they were going to create. So I would just say look at what your competition is doing first of all. And me personally, I try to look for higher end HMOs in the area that I'm looking in or if I'm looking at serviced accommodation, higher end serviced accommodation in that area. Okay. And then what I would highly recommend that you do if you're looking for HMOs is go and visit a couple of your competitors properties. Okay. If you're like me, a little bit old and it seems unusual that you'd be looking for a room, if me I would just say I've got, just got a divorce and I'm looking for a room or if you could say it's for my daughter and she's coming back from uni in whatever, just make up some excuse but just go make viewings because you never know whether the competitors properties are as good as they show things that a comment that's often said to me by people that come and see my house and this is another reason why I'm not a big fan of En suites is because I know that most landlords use letting agents and most letting agents don't really look after properties that well. And so something that might look great on a picture if it's been managed for about five years tends to be quite poorly maintained. And it's messy, it's not well looked after by the tenants. And so you'll go, you'll see lovely pictures but when you go in it's a bit of a mess. And so I've personally would prefer, and it's been my experience that a lot of tenants prefer a room that might be slightly cheaper but is really well maintained and well looked after than a more Expensive room that's poorly maintained with an ensuite. That's been my experience anyway. But you won't know that until you look at your higher end competitors. So go beyond the photos, visit in person. Pictures often flatter. But reality shows the true maintenance standard, poorly maintained high end stock is an opportunity to outperform, avoid fake demand signals. So focus on real tenants, real properties. So the for me the real signal is quality of competition. If there's loads of rubbish in the area then I know that I'm not going to have any competition. Competition. If there's a lot of really good quality HMOs in the area, I probably would find it difficult to stand out in that, in that pool of a pool of pool of HMOs. So I want to talk about customer demographics now because I think that's also really important. So when I go to lots of property events, people always use the words young professional when they talk about their demographic for their HMOs. Okay. Young professional seems to be the kind of typical tenant type that people are looking for. So this here is a typical young professional person. So I have a question for the group and if you would like to put it into the chat box please, that'd be great. What do you think a young white collar professional person like this, what do you picture his room looking like after a year? So you've got a house full of these lovely young professional white collar workers in your houses that you spent a lot of money on with all ensuites and little kitchenettes. What do you think the rooms are going to look like after a year with this demographic? Into the chat box please. So let me have a look if there are any chats. Let's have a look. No answers yet. Am I seeing the same chat box as you? So let's have a look, see if. So we've got she Shahida typing and so let's have a look. So what we got? Have we got anyone posting in the chat box? Let's have a look. So messy. Shahida says it's going to be messy and that's one. Imagine if you've got eight rooms full of these people. So stained carpets, messy with stained carpets, very dirty rooms with all types of empty cans. Okay, so very simple is, I've learned over the years and it's an observation is that young professional 10 tenants are the probably the worst tenant type to look for when you have an HMO because you get stained carpets, you get dirt and mess because they don't clean, they don't know how to clean and I've got two young boys who are just renting their own space and I wouldn't rent to them. But that's very typical of that demographic. So when you hear people talk about HMOs, there seems to be this kind of industry norm that people talk about. What, what type of property are you going to get? Well, it's going to be an eight bed all ensuite. What type of tenant are you looking for? Well, it's got to be young professionals. And for me, if you've got an eight bed all ensuite with young professionals, how long do you think that's going to last? Or what do you think that's going to look like after 10 years with young professionals in it? After 10 years? You don't have to answer that question. I'm just, this is how I think and I'm maybe adding a little bit of an extra dimension into your thinking when it comes to your long term strategy. Okay, so that is the young white collar worker. And like you, that has been my experience when I've been looking at that tenant demographic. Okay, now let's have a look at this tenant demographic. This is a more mature tenant. Okay. So let's just, I'll just say it for what it is. A guy in his late 40s, early 50s. And what do you think his room is going to look like after a year? Answers in the chat box, please. So you've got, you're aiming for a more mature tenant male. What do you think this guy's room might look like after a year? Tidy. Guillaume has said so on balance, and I am being quite general here, I'm sure there are going be to, to be more mature men that are going to be a little bit messy. But my experience with this type of tenant and let me go back to my slides, has been that they are immaculate. They keep their rooms clean and tidy. Another thing that they do is they will take care of small maintenance issues, whereas younger tenants can't change a light bulb. So that's also something that I found with more mature tenants is they are able to deal with maintenance, small maintenance issues and they don't even tell you they've done it. It's just literally they'll go. By the way, you know, when I go around and visit, oh, by the way, one of the fire alarms is beeping so I just changed the battery. No problem. That, that has been my experience with this type of tenant. And as a consequence I would say you're probably going to increase the lifespan of your property just by the choice of customer by a few years. So I would probably say if you've got young professionals as your target audience, your big HMO might last 10 years maximum before it's in a real state. If you choose a older age group for your tenants, you'll probably maybe increase the lifespan, maybe by five to 10 years on that product. That's a huge increase in profit if you factor in the cost of maintenance, the cost of repairs and refurbishments, capital appreciation and, and the cost and the rental appreciation as well. Massive difference. So now let's look at serviced accommodation. And I don't need to, you don't need to answer this, but I've, I've known people say we're going to have a house that appeals to groups of people, weekend stays, you know, hen parties and things like that. Okay. So for me, that kind of customer demographic will lead to this kind of end result. Okay. I would always think about my customer demographic when I'm looking at serviced accommodation. Who do you want to appeal to? Who's going to lead to more maintenance? Who's going to lead to more aggravation? And that's something again, the spreadsheets don't show you that information. So demographics, different customer types bring different challenges and cleaning communal habits are among them. This doesn't mean one group is bad, but it's a trade off to consider when designing, marketing and managing your property. So I don't know if there are any questions, but I will move on to design shortcuts. So let us go. So I don't know how I'm running on time. Am I okay? Yep. Okay, so let's talk about design now. So the first thing, first design shortcut I would say is think about function. Function is much more important than form. So think carefully about the function of the room or the space that you're creating. Is it a place where people cook? Do they, are they going to work there? Are they going to eat there? Are they going to relax there and make sure that that room fulfills that function? For example, if it's a place that you want somebody to work from, so you're going to provide a desk, are they going to need a drawer? Are they going to need a cupboard? Are they going to need shelves? Are they going to need a light fitting, are they going to need a comfortable chair to be able to use that space effectively? Because to me there's no point in having a workspace with just a flat desk and an uncomfortable plastic chair that will not fulfill Its function. If it's a space where you want somebody to relax, how comfortable is the seating? How comfortable is the lighting? You know, if you've got bright inset spots shining down, making, you know, bright white inset spots shining down, it's not going to be a really nice place to relax. So always think about function when you're designing and specifying the space. Another important thing to think about is how do you want people to feel when they use the space? Do you want them to feel safe and secure and warm and cozy, or do you want them to feel, you know, active or whatever? So how do you want to make people feel when they use the space? Another thing that's really important is a layout plan. It's really helpful when you're trying to plan all these spaces out. If you do it right, you'll get better customer retention. So here's something. I got off spare room the other day and I hope this doesn't. Isn't anybody. This isn't a property who's owned by anyone here. But this is a really great example of a, of a. On the, on the face of it, a really nice space. It's. Aesthetically, it looks great. I mean, it's got all your bit, all your trendy bits in. It's. It's got your gray accents, it's got your acoustic paneling. But what's it going to be like to eat in if all you are doing is sitting on a stall facing a blank wall? What is the sole purpose of that sofa if it's just staring at a wall with no television on it? And if you look at where this plug socket is located for the television, it's actually located quite high up the wall. So how comfortable is it going to be to sit on the. That sofa looking up high at a TV that's not even there at the moment, or is placed very high up on the wall? All of that money is spent on a space that is hardly usable. Yes, it's got all your kitchen facilities, but again, I'd probably argue if that was a six bed, I don't think there's enough, even enough storage in that kitchen for six people. So as a place to cook, it might not be a great place to cook because there's going to be stuff all over the counters. It's not going to be a particularly nice place to eat because you've got a stall facing a wooden panel in an alcove. It's not a particularly great place to relax because the sofa doesn't look particularly comfortable. And there's no tv. And if there was a tv, it's going to be high up on the wall. So a lot of money spent. But is the space going to work? Well, I don't think so. So in this space, this I would say is, is better, better design because first of all, the TV is in a place where it's not uncomfortable to view it from. You could probably, you don't have to stretch your neck to see it. There's decent amount of seating so people can sit and chat. There's a nice dining table. And I would probably say that in a kitchen, open plan kitchen space, it's much more likely that people are going to eat there than do anything else. Most people in an hmo, from my experience, spend most of their time in their room. They might organize a movie night. But I would, I would say this is another thing that people don't realize about open plan spaces is another thing to think about here is if you've got, let's say six people sharing a kitchen, what's that space going to smell like on a day to day basis? What's it going to smell like if you've got six people coming in every evening and cooking food in that kitchen? Are they going to want to stay there and watch a movie if it stinks of food and there's bins and everything else there? Highly unlikely. So the focus for me is more on the eating space really. This is an example of a room in that I got off of spare room. And for me, if you're looking at, Sorry, not spare room off of Airbnb. And for me, if you're looking at serviced accommodation, holiday accommodation, it needs to feel warm, cozy and relaxed. Okay? So an all white room with a wood floor for me doesn't make me feel cozy or relaxed. It might have everything there, but for me it doesn't achieve that warm, cozy, relaxed feel. For me this feels much more warm, cozy and relaxed. And what I would urge you to do if you're looking at spare room is look at the difference in price between the quirky properties and the kind of standard properties. You'll see a massive jump in nightly rates between the quirky properties and the standard design ones. So again, think about how you want people to feel when they go into the, into the property. This is an HMO room again, that I took off of spare room yesterday. In an HMO room, you really want to be able to live, sleep, eat, play and work in that space. And I don't think there's anywhere there's nowhere to work, there's hardly any storage, there's nowhere for entertainment, so there's no television. And for me, that's a very poorly designed HMO room. It's got everything there, but to me it's poorly designed. This is a couple of examples of HMO rooms that I've done or a client I've worked with or trained has done. And you can see there's tv, there's a space to work, there's plug sockets in convenient locations, there's comfortable seating. It just looks and feels comfortable, cozy, relaxed. And also there's space to work, you can watch television, there's place to store stuff. And I think that if you are designing an HMO room where you want people to stay long term, even if they're small rooms, think about storage, think about how the space is going to be used. And this is just showing you an example of a layout plan that I did for a client this month and just showing you how what, how I work. When it, when I'm doing my design for HMOs, it's not really about color at this stage, it's about where things are going to go. Is there enough room for everything? Is there a space for television? Because people do like to watch tv. If you. What features are you going to put in? Do you want to put extra fridges in? I, I do like these coffee stations and I have been putting in little fridge freezers and workspaces and a space to put a coffee machine. I also always try to make sure there's lots of cupboard space. I always make sure that in a kitchen you'll notice I've numbered all the cabinets. I always make sure that there's two cupboards for every tenant, a base unit and a wall unit. If you've only got one cupboard per tenant, that's going to cause problems. So that's what I focus on first when I'm looking at an HMO design. Another thing I always think about is where's the hot water cylinder going to go? I've come across so many designs done by architects where it's a huge layer, everyone's putting in en suites and there's rooms are laid out really tight, everything's there. But then you put a bed into the room and it doesn't fit. You think, where's the hot water tank going? There's no hot water tank. These are all things that you really should think about. Where are the bins going in the kitchen? Where are the fridge freezers going to go? Are there enough fridge, freezers, where's the washing machine going to go? Where's the dryer? You've got to think about that. The earliest stages when you're planning the design. Once I've done the layout plan, then that allows me to do things like lighting, sockets, radiators. For me, lighting is a really important part of a design, of an aesthetic part of a design. It creates ambience. So I do think about different types of lighting. I don't like to put spotlights everywhere. I think it's important to have plug sockets in all the right spaces. To me there's no point in having a USB socket down on a floor behind a bedside table. It's got to be where you can see it. So all of those things are in important. And then I do a color plan. The last thing that I do is a color plan. Next is, is think about style and coordination. So if I was to ask, I think probably 99.999% of people doing HMOs, I say what style are you doing it in? And people look at me as if I'm mad. Okay. The problem with just following trend is this. You'll do a design and it'll be trendy and then you'll put it onto spare room and you'll see half a dozen properties that look exactly the same as the one you've designed. Because you've just basically copied another design that's in the industry, which is what most people do. They just copy a design and think that's trendy. I'll do that and then everyone is doing exactly the same thing and then you've lost your advantage. So I would pick a style rather than copy a style from another landlord. So I'm just going to show you some examples. But you don't have to just copy everything according to that style. But if you, if you follow a style, then you create a coherent design that it looks intentional, not accidental, it doesn't have a mishmash of everything and it won't date as fast. So I look at design styles that are long lasting. So this is where probably something like Chat GPT might help you because you can just go to Chat GPT. Can you give me a list of interior design styles that will last the test of time? And you'll get a long list of design styles and I'm just going to show you some examples of long lasting design styles that have been around for a long time. So you've got industrial loft style. This is just showing you some examples of industrial loft Style interiors. You've got mid century modern, which actually appeals to a lot of millennials. When you look at pictures of a style, focus on the detail. For example, something you'll notice about mid century modern interiors is that tiling in kitchens and bathrooms is stacked vertical rather than horizontal or brick fashion. So a style will have certain things, certain elements to it that are, that are distinctive to that style and those are things you want to look for when you're looking at styles. Modern classic, another one of my favorites. Very broad kind of style that covers lots of different kind of ways of doing it. I guess it's a bit of a kind of mix of industrial and mid century. It works in all different types of properties, but that's modern classic. Then you've got boho, which is brilliant if you're on a budget because you could literally just paint a room white and then go to Ikea and just buy loads of stuff from Ikea and plonk it in. IKEA does a lot of boho stuff. Scandi is a popular one because I think, because a lot of millennials like Scandi style. So Gen X people like me like, tend to prefer industrial and millennials tend to like mid century and Scandi, which is why a lot of probably property investors of that age are probably doing designs like this. But this is a, another design style that you might want to put in. And you know, I can hear people saying, well, what if somebody doesn't like that style? Okay, I, I don't think that's an issue because I think that if you have a coherent design, it really doesn't matter what style you do it. And it's better than just having a mishmash or nothing or no style whatsoever. Because I just think that even if it's not to people's exact taste, it's going to be a hell of a lot better than anything else available in your location. But again, I'll just clarify, try to follow a style rather than a landlord. Here's another one. Use color and decorating techniques. So I use a layered neutral scheme for a lot of my projects. I also use color blocking and I use decorating techniques. So I'll quickly go through those. So this is a layered neutral scheme. So rather than just painting everything one neutral color or a neutral is a neutral. But I'm kind of, I'm kind of being, trying to over complicate, but I tend to use a combination of a light amid and a dark neutral when I do an interior space. And that will work for empty bitelettes It'll work for furnished buy to lets, it'll work for HMOs and it'll work for holiday serviced accommodation as well. So it's just using three neutrals, a light, a mid and a dark. And there's a couple of other examples of layered neutral schemes. Next, use the decorate, use a different decorating technique. So most people, if they're going to decorate a room, will use a neutral on the walls and paint the woodwork and the ceiling white. That's standard way of doing things. Well, if you use a non standard decorating technique, it will differentiate your products straight away. It's the cheapest way of making a property stand out is just doing woodwork and trim differently to how most people do it. So this is the standard way of doing woodwork and trim. So if you've got a decorating, just say I want it beige and I want white woodwork. That's what it looks like. This is one way, another way of doing it. You just do one color. It's called color drenching, where you just paint all your woodwork one the same color as the wall. It creates a much calmer space. I remember as I was talking to Gam at the beginning, I always look at the reason why people do things and the reason why designers use this technique is because it makes a space feel calmer and it makes a space feel bigger. So that's one technique. And if you are going to be doing things like feature walls or you know, having a room lighter and a corridor darker, you'll go, how do I do that? Well, as a rule, whatever color the wall is, the woodwork is the same color. So when the color changes, the color on the woodwork changes. You will never have a door frame or a skirting board a different color to the paint color on the wall. That is this technique. Another, another very clever technique to use is something called color blocking. And this is actually a retail strategy. So again, if you ask the question, why do you do color blocking? It's because it's a retail strategy and retailers use this technique to boost sales. So it makes us a product stand out basically. So I, I use color blocking in a couple of different ways. I'm just going to show you you how I do color blocking. So there's functional zoning, which is one way of doing color blocking or just doing blocks of color. So this is a defined block. So this is just a purely neutral scheme. And what I've done differently to just painting a feature wall is I draw, basically draw a line up a section of wall, it goes across the ceiling and mat down the opposite wall. So you're basically creating a defined block, block of color or a defined darker space or a lighter space. And you can do that pretty much anywhere. Less is more, so you don't have to do it everywhere. But I think this is a very clever technique. You can also do light and dark zones. So if you've got a hallway with a wide section and a narrow section, or you've got maybe a. A section coming off of the hallway into a little kind of sub, you know, sub hallway, then you could do a dark section and a light section. You can do it with color. So it can be done with neutral or with color. So that's a defined color block in a color that is a zone in a color. And then when you want to add your bits and pieces, it all comes together beautifully. So I use this a lot when I'm doing designs. I don't. I just going slightly off track. But I have a room. I have one of my oldest properties that I did many, many years ago. I've had a small room that's become more difficult to rent out. And I finally bit the bullet and said, okay, I'm going to give myself a budget of a thousand pounds to do up the house. Okay, so this is a house that hadn't been touched for 11 years. My budget was a thousand pounds to redo it all up. And I've just done a bit of color blocking, added some nicer accessories, and I've gone from zero inquiries to loads. And I've got loads of viewings booked for the weekend. So it's really powerful stuff. Then I just want to talk about if you want to start bringing in color in accessories, an easy thing to do is color pulling. So that is where you take a. Find a rug or a picture and you take colors from that rug or from that picture and use those as your accent colors. I normally work with, with three colors, I'd recommend you use two or three colors. You could use more. But this is a great example of color pulling from a designer called Ilse Crawford. If you're looking at holiday accommodation, definitely look at Ilse Crawford as an inspiration. If you look at the rug in this picture, you will see the rug has got gold accents, dark blue accents. It's got a. You can't quite see, but right in the corner here, you've got this tiny bit of green that you can, can see in the rug. And you can see orange, this kind of burnt, burnt orange in the rug as well. So Ilse Crawford has used this rug and taken color from that rug and used that color in furnishings and accessories around the space. It's really easy to do. So find something that's colorful and then pick three colors out of that colorful item and use those as your accessories. I'm not a big fan of using lots of color on walls in hm. I, I definitely think it's useful in serviced accommodation. But this is all of this, these techniques applied to a vanilla rental. So this is the vanilla rental. And most people will just use one accent. And again, this is a job I did with a client. And this is once you've applied all those techniques into that room, same room just designed using color blocking, there's some color pulling from the rug, thinking about function. So making sure the sofa is comfortable, making sure the TV is in a comfortable location. Again, I'm not a fan of mounting TVs on walls because it takes the. Makes the viewing angle really uncomfortable. So again, thinking about that, thinking about cleaning. You know, the flooring is easy to maintain. There's tiles on the wall here to stop the paintwork getting splashed or stained. So again, also the paintwork is used acrylic paint. So it's very durable. So it's not only looks good, but it's also very durable. So that's all those techniques put together. So just a summary. When you're designing something aesthetically, think about layered neutrals, dark and light neutrals in the same space. Think about pulling accent colors from a piece of artwork or a rug and then you get a cohesive and calm, timeless space. So next one, four out of six is mood boards and planning. So I know that I've got a. I'm just going to go a bit faster. I will always do a mood board for a design, for a client and for myself, because I want to give everything a test run before I actually buy everything. So I create a mood board for every room. When I create a mood board, the mood board shows the actual product that I'm going to be using in that space. I don't just create, create an AI generated mood board because to me that is pretty useless. It's good if it, if you just want a kind of bit of inspiration. But if you're going to be buying cushions, chairs, tables, cupboards, TVs, lamps, flooring, kitchens, bathrooms, an AI generated mood board doesn't really help you very much. So I create a mood board, adding all the bits and pieces that I'm going to be putting in, and then at the same time as creating the mood board, I use a spreadsheet and I put everything that I've put into the mood board onto my spreadsheet. So it will have the item description, the supplier link to the product, how many I need, what things cost, and any notes onto that spreadsheet so I don't have to remember where I found everything. I always keep a record of it on a spreadsheet and I do a mood board for every room. Kitchen, dining room, bedroom, bathroom, everything. And everything you see on the mood board are things that I've specified. If you want to know how to create mood board easily, easily is use an app called Canva. It's a really good app for creating mood boards. And there's lots of tutorial videos on YouTube on how to use Canva to create mood boards. The next thing is staging and photography search. So I've got one more after this and then I think I am done. So staging makes a massive difference to your profits. Now, going back to my first slide, which talked about how much landlords make profit on their turnover, the average profit for a leveraged landlord on their turnover is 15%. Studies have shown that if you present your property well and use great photography, you can increase the value by 10%. So what's that in terms of an increase in profit, Guillaume? I'm not brilliant at maths, never was. I'm good at design. But if your Profit margin is 15 and you then increase your profit by another 10%, how much have you increased your profit by? I. I've got. I've got. I've got a. I've got an example. Okay, so my son was looking for a flat in Leeds and he had a budget of £700 pounds originally. And this is typically what he was seeing. And this is a picture taken from rightmove. Okay. Flatten leads. £700amonth. Now, if we look at the average landlord profit for a leveraged landlord, he's making probably about £150amonth on that. Yeah, that's the average. So he's making probably 105 pounds a month. If he's making 15 profit margin on his costs, he's making 105 pounds a month. That's 1,260 pounds a year. Doesn't sound a lot, but he's probably going to get decent capital growth over 15 years if he owns that property. Now, here's a nicely presented property with nicer photography. And that flat is on the market at £850amonth. So the Price range jumps. This is what you get. If your budget is 850, this is what you get. If your price range is 700100 pounds a month, this is what you get. There's millions of these. There's not many of these. Now let's look at the difference in profit between these two. Because this guy, if he's getting the. If he's leveraged and he's making the same kind of profit as the other guy, but he's been able to charge an extra 150 quid, then his profit margin goes from 15 to 30%. His monthly income goes from 105 pounds a month to 255 pounds a month. So the difference in profit between these two products is the nicely designed one, the well presented one with the nice photographs is making double the profit than the poorly designed one. It's exactly the same location, it's exactly the same product type. It costs exactly the same to buy. It's only cost a little bit more to do the nice paintwork and to add the staging and to do the nice photography. But that is a consistent increase in rent every month. Not only that, but I guarantee you'll get a better tenant. But that's double the profit by making the room look better and taking nicer photographs. So for every one flat this guy has, this guy needs two to make the same profit. And how much does it cost to buy it flat? It's insane. And this is why I really find it odd when people go through all that expense to buy property and they don't present it well, it just. To me it's insane because they'll need double the amount of properties to make the same amount of money as somebody has done a nice job with a nicely dressed interior. Because people don't realize the difference between turnover and profit. And I'm getting a little bit emotional here. But this is insane. So the last design shortcut I want to talk about is durability and thinking about products and materials. Okay? So a lot of people in the. I see this a lot. Where's the place I can get the cheapest paint? Where's the place I can get the cheapest beds? Where's the place I get cheapest this, cheapest that? Cheap doesn't mean cheap. It can often mean expensive. Okay? Because the major cost when you're doing a property refurb is labor, not materials. So if you choose materials that don't last very long, you're going to have to get somebody back to repair it and maintain it, which means labor and that's the big cost. So, for example, I spend more on fitted furniture because I know I'll never have to replace a wardrobe ever again. It's not the cost of the wardrobe that is the thing, it's the labor. It's going and buying a new one, transporting it, disassembling the old one, getting rid of the rubbish, assembling the new one and paying for that. That's the cost. So firstly, think about the durability of the materials you're choosing. Black taps, lovely, but they're a pain in the backside to maintain. Be careful of integrated technology that may not be able to replace if it fails. So things like digital locks, for example, on doors, problem with that is if the product fails and you can no longer buy that product again, you might have to replace the, not only the digital lock, but the whole door. Because when they've drilled the door to fit the digital lock, when you buy a new lock, it won't fit into the same holes. So you have to replace your whole door. And imagine if you've got a development of, let's say, you know, 20 flats and a digital lock goes, and you've got to replace the door and you can't buy the door again. Pain in the backside. So think about integrated technology really carefully. Think about simple upgrades like for example, better quality paints, things like that. So just a bit of advice, think about materials more, spending a little bit more to get a better quality will mean much longer lifespan. So this is just some examples of things that I do when I'm designing an interior. I think about like, for example, light switches. I won't ever specify shiny switches, so gloss switches, you know, chrome or, or brass because they get covered in finger marks. Really difficult to clean. I'll never specify super matte kitchens, again, impossible to keep clean. I will never specify black taps and shower accessories. I might specify black radiators and black accessories, maybe if they're stainless steel. But everything is going to be rust proof and everything is going to be easy to clean because cleaning is something that will, is not always done in ensuite bathrooms. And so it's got to be something that will probably last maybe a year before it gets properly cleaned. So things like chrome showers, chrome shower attachments for me are much better than anything else. So just think about your accessories, think about paint, think about the quality of the furniture you're going to buy. And finally, just a quick note is be an effective boss when you're doing refurbs. This is not something on your, your spreadsheet this is not something that factors into profitability. But if you are not a good project manager when you're dealing with builders, you'll probably get a poor job done in terms of quality. They'll cut corners and that will affect longevity of the product. You'll be doing a lot more maintenance over time. So a very quick thing to do would be either use ChatGPT or Google and, and just Google what are the traits of an effective boss. And it will tell you thorough planning, give the builders decent specifications they can follow, follow a strict tender process, communicate well, insist on good communication and be diligent at quality control. I had somebody I was talking to in one of my training sessions and she said that she was advised that if she provided a builder with detailed plans, a schedule of works, a lot of bit puts a lot of builders off. Yeah, it puts bad builders off. That's what it does. It puts bad builders off. So that was, that's terrible advice that was given. So I will do layout plans, schedules, mood boards, and I'll also look at health and safety as well. I've done a, I've done a tender pack document which outlines all of this stuff. So this is my final slide. If you, if you scan that QR code I've created, it's. It really doesn't cover aesthetic design. 50 of my training covers project management, how to. How to create the design itself. And this is a really good guide on what to do when you're preparing your, your tender pack for your builders. So if you scan that in, you can download the tender pack. There we go. So that is me conclusion is the average landlord chases yield and sells early. The design led landlord chases longevity, earns more every month, holds for longer and creates triple the profit as a result. So when I talk about design, remember this presentation, it's a lot bigger than just picking cushions. And that's me and that's my contact details. I will actually, I'll leave the slide there and I will let Giam take over.

Jam. Thanks so much. Thank you. That was super, super valuable. So you went above and beyond as always. So it's super cool. Super grateful. I did put the link in there. So with that you get is your, your template specification for your building works all right?

Yeah, it covers basically.

Are you able to show the QR code as well? Maybe people want to.

Yeah. Okay. Sorry, hold on.

I didn't say at the start of the introduction, but people will know the sort of story of props filter. And we started with bootstrapping it. You Know, and, and the story goes that I used to rent out my, my spare bedroom to pay developers directly, you know, so we started. And, and the, the truth is you designed my spare bedroom. Right. So that was my own home when I bought it. Just before or during COVID right, you came to my house and, and got it all set up there, you know and then from there, you know, I remember I had months where we made two grand a month just on renting out two spare bedrooms, you know and I just, that literally paid for you know like running, running the, keeping the lights on so, so we could create props filter, you know. So that was quite impactful for me there. And, and, and I don't know. Do you still run your course thing? You know, I've not heard about it for ages. You do your days or.

Yeah, I do, I do, I'm. I do. I work with YPN magazine. Right. Doing a, it's basically a training design training. If I'm just gonna try and find. First of all, let me just try and find the, the, the resource that I've got. Hold on a second.

Yeah, yeah. So for me I remember that because the, this translated into me being a bit creative or to bootstrap property filter in the first place. But also there was all the HTML conversions we did. Like we lived and breathed all your templates.

I'll just share with you, I'll share with you the resources. So bear with me a second because I'm finding it complicated to just share the screen. So I'll just share, I'll share the window. Bear with me a second. So this is the. Share this window. So this is basically the, the document, this is part of the resources that I, that we give out as part of the YPN thing. So first of all it just gives you an example of a layout plan that was actually created using estate agents plans. So you don't need to use an architect to do an initial, you know, rough guide as to what you're going to do. But it does show you my own mini HMO that I created. It's a four bed HMO conversion from a two bed house that has been probably my most profitable of all of my HMOs. Actually, you know, this four bed makes me over a thousand pounds a month. And, and I think if you were going to use, I think you more.

Than a lot of people are five and six bed.

Yeah, well if you've got us, imagine if you've got a six bed and you've got a letting agent that's taking half of your profit then you end up with a three and a half bed hmo. So, so for me I've thought that if I get a four bed and I make it easy to manage I can manage it myself and I'll have the equivalent of a six bed.

Yeah.

So this is why thinking about.

I mean I know like for me it was transformative to be trained by you, by you when we did. You know I think it's testimony in the introduction I, I gave you at the start I, I'm usually quite, I don't endorse many people because it always bites you back but I can do this lavishly with you because I, I'm a living proof and property filter. The portfolio we have the, the way we, we managed to fund the company to start with is living proof that this works. You know and, and I, I remember for me that's probably and I've told you this before it's got to be the, the highest multiplier on investment, not even return on investment education I've had and the level of details you go into and I think now it's all in. Is it the. Is it part of the total series?

Yeah So I was going to share that, I was going to just share this with you. So. So basically this document covers the layout plan that I've done how to do a set of site notes so for me schedule of works is really important if you want to be instructing trades and it gives people people, shows people how I do a set my site notes and then turn those into schedules for the different contractors and then it also gives you an example of my mood boards it gives you an example of I project admin and also a risk assessment because CDM is an important part of the process and if you don't do any risk assessments then you could be coming cropper and then I've got house completion checklist as well so there's a lot there just as a. Just a bit of a guide really. But then you were asking about the training and I do do a one day masterclass but the difference between the YPN one is I read a book while I was in Covid I read a book which I would highly recommend to the male of male men in the audience maybe not the women in the audience but it's called the 3% math right by a guy called Coach Corey Wayne. It's a bit rude but it was a brilliant book in terms of teaching me how to be a better person and it. But the thing was what it says in the beginning. What he says in the beginning is you've got to read this book eight times to be able to apply what I teach. Because what happens when you read a book once is you don't take it all in. And this only works if you apply it all. And I think it's the same with what I do. I think if you, if you're, if you are already passionate about design, then you could do my one day class and learn everything you need to know. But if you are not natural at design, you do need to repeat the training at least five or six times to be able to know it off by heart. And there are so many things, so many elements to getting it right that it takes time. So the YPN training and if you download, if you get the download for the, the Tender Pack document, I think it does give you details on the, on how to find out more about the YPN training. Is that it? I do live sessions every Monday and every week. Every other week I do a training module and then every other week is Q A where people can bring a project to me, ask questions about anything. I Also, there's a WhatsApp group, so it's a bit like mentoring, but I'm more of a coach than a mentor. So I, I also did training with the ICF International Coaching Federation. I don't know if you know property doctors. I've forgotten his name. George. Yeah, he's also done. Okay, so he's also done ICF training and, and coaching is really more about showing people, giving them the tools to do it themselves. So the, the training is normally people that are going through projects or buying, in the process of buying something and they need more than just to be able to repeat something, but they want to be able to understand it and apply it and then learn to do it themselves. So, you know, there's a WhatsApp group and there has been occasions where I've had people posting images on the WhatsApp. We're saying I'm nearly done. What do you think? And I'll go, we need to jump on a call because there's a couple of things that you need to do before you market this property.

You're the golden Ramsay of design.

I don't think I'm as, I'm as swear as much as he does.

Not anymore.

Yeah, that was probably when I was going through a divorce. So I have to say for anyone that knew me in that probably that one year period, I, I did go a bit nuts. I Wasn't. I wasn't right in the head, but I've got better since then, thank God. But, but, but it's. I've helped a lot of people over the years.

For me, you've redefined the standard, you know, you know, thousands of tenants are basically enjoying the fruit of your students and all the templates you've done and all people have gone and multiplied 100 fold, a thousand fold. I mean, I don't know anyone who's had more impact in ordinary people, tenants, well, being like you did unadvicely. So I think you should take a little credit for it. So.

I'm happy to take that credit. I've never won any awards, but credit from people that are in the industry is just as good. But yeah, another thing I would mention is it's not all about spending more money either. So I'm actually somebody that does things on a very low budget. So, you know, it's. It's more about making more from less than it is about anything else.

Yeah, totally agree. Well, thank you very much. I don't know if there's anyone with questions, otherwise I'm gonna ask you, Julian, if you have a. If you have a closing sentiment for us today and then.

Do I have a closing sentence?

Yeah. Do you have a closing sentiment for everyone?

Yes. I would quote Dieter Rams actually less, but better. Do it right first time and you won't have to ever do it again.

Not worth the headache. Awesome. Julian, really appreciate it. Thanks so much.

My pleasure, My pleasure.

I mean, this is going to be one of the really valuable resources for, you know, the community as well. So for everyone here today and then everyone who watch the recording. So. Yeah, thanks so much. So thanks for.

Thank you for having me. I was so excited about coming on today. I didn't sleep long. I didn't sleep last night, so I say I was really excited. So thank you so much, much for having me on your.

Oh, I really appreciate you and it was long time. No, no speak. You know, I've got a lot of time for you and it was a real pleasure having a chat.

Lovely. Right, well, I will catch up with you again soon, I hope.

Yeah, yeah, definitely.

Well done and well done you have. You've. You should be very proud of your achievement.

Thanks so much. Yeah, for people who know me from the start, it's always quite cool. So thanks so much, Julian. Really appreciate having you to today and getting all this value from you. That was really insane and superb. And for everyone who stuck around for this long extended session back to evaluate. So thanks a lot for joining today. Until next week, so in the meantime, visit propstutor.co.uk, log on to your Props Tutor account, have an endless supply of deals, join the top 1% and become a achiever deal maker out there. And I hope, Elsie, you enjoyed today's deal final corner like I did. And I'll see you just next week. Thank you. Thank you, everyone.

Bye.

Thank you, mate.