Interview with Naima Johnson (property investor and founder of the Key Achievers Club) about using Property Filter to find deals and manage listings. Naima describes earlier challenges with time-consuming portals and lack of CRM, how Property Filter streamlined comparables and pipelines, and recounts two vendor finance deals sourced from the same seller (purchase price £80,000; market comps ~£115,000). She gives practical tips: use the pipeline stages, use tags, and act on leads rather than hoarding them.
At Property Filter we love hearing about the successes of our members. I was just wondering if you could introduce yourself, tell the people who you are, what it is you do, what strategy and maybe location as well.
Yeah, sure. Hi, thank you. Thank you for having me. So my name is Naima Johnson, I'm from the northeast, you can tell by my accent. I live near Durham and I was. I come from Richmond up in the North Yorkshire and I've been using Property Filter probably about two years nearly. It's probably not long after it came out actually. So yeah, I invest in properties myself and I'm also the founder of the Key Achievers Club which is an accountability support membership for property investors who benefit from like weekly accountability. We have like monthly like support and things on themes that can hold investors back. Things I've struggled with in the past as well. So like procrastination, time management, negotiation skills, things like that. So yeah, really keen. Well I would say there was two main challenges that I had. The first one was it was really the time consuming troll through like the main sites like the Zoopla, things like that. I didn't find it was. Haven't used them for such a long time now because it's like a distant memory because I don't need to. But yeah, it was just multiple screens and you can't track what you're doing to any one of them. It didn't. And the second part actually links into that where there was no consistent CRM that linked into them. You could actually just save it in your favorites and that's about it. So yeah, they were the main challenges. It was time consuming, it took too long to get a deal through or check in comparables. It. It was just hard work. I think it was when I saw. Where did I first see a property filter being advertised by Gilliam. I can't remember if it was on. Might have been a PIN meeting or something like that. And then there's like the light bulb moment. I need this. Yeah. But then I realized actually when I started to use it and I closed my first couple of deals fairly quickly, I can't remember exactly how quick but then recently paid for itself and also since and that that was using the filter of for sale to rent, which is obviously for lease options. But I managed to get that deal through creatively as a vendor finance deal and then on top of that, off the back of that, sorry, I bought another property through the same seller on vendor finance. So I got two. So that obviously came from Property Filter in the first place.
So yeah Nice quality. Yeah great.
Not at all. Yeah so it was a three bedroomed property. It's in teesside middlesware and so semi detached and the purchase price that we agreed with the seller, I agreed with the seller was 80,000. I already knew that they were just fixated on that's all that's what they want for their own personal yield in their head. But yeah I already knew the comparables in the area 115 so I managed to get that term 35 cable or market value So I was really pleased about on my first creative deal the rental value is 750 in that area and the refurb cost was 5,000. So upfront costs including legals I spent approximately 9,750. And in terms of the vendor finance because he didn't need all the money now and you know using the the scripts and the training and putting it into practice about you know them being why why give my money to the bank and get a mortgage if you. Because it was unencumbered. Yeah pay you instead. So we agreed 6 interest on this property over five years so that works out as £400amonth interest to the seller. Yeah in total over five years that's 24,000 so that comes 104,000 and the comparable at the moment is still 115. So this is in five years time. So I'm. I've already bought well on this property. Yeah I don't necessarily always look for the below market value ones because I think if you can get it over a longer period because I quite like the creative deals but exchange, delay completion whatever then I don't necessarily so I don't necessarily use the template for below market value but there's a lot of the other ones that I do but particularly like the motivated seller graphs you know that I call it the motivated seller graphs where you can see you're the history and you can see the you know and I feel that empathy again feel so sorry these people even though I haven't met them and you can see the struggle and the prices keep reducing and reducing and ah and just when it puts it in black and white instead of trying to search through the right moves of the world and doesn't give you the full history so I really use the motivated Telegraphs a lot. I like this comparables feature and how easy it is to compare also with the withdrawn features as well when you're looking at comparables and for rental comes up there. Yeah last sold price is really easy with it links into Land registry, because I use it on everyone. My first top tip would be don't just save them and add them all into the first pipeline funnel screen due diligence. Yeah, yeah, yes, exactly. And then it'll just back up, backlog up there and then after a certain amount of time there'll be that many that some of them might have even sold or whatever and that you end up. I figured it like not doing anything with them or it just seems too overwhelming to go trawl through them. So my, my main top tip for that one is to follow through the pipeline through the different steps, the five stages. You can also change the stage to your own preferences as well if you want. I've kept them as they are, that, that's already set. But use the pipeline and take action. There's tag section, that's another value. One of the value sections. That part of features I really, really like because I use. So it's like my little personal bookmarks. I've got quite a few, but it's really, really good. So my second tip would be use the tags and make it work for you. So you can. Yeah, exactly. You can have it. If you've got different categories, if you've got different people that you're working with or different strategies, you might be looking at low market value and assisted sales and something else. So you can have tags however you want. This is.
So maybe like each of your investors would have their own tag, would they or.
Absolutely. Yeah.
Okay, cool. Yeah, yeah, nice. And then tip three.
Tip three would be use the training and the, the weekly calls that are in there because there's so much value and even if some people might think, oh, I know everything I need to know about a certain strategy or whatever, but this. Things are happening all the time. Markets are shifting all the time. And while you might have a training session or a weekly call from a guest come on about a topic, there's all these nuggets of information coming in through the conversations that you might miss. So I would. Top tip number three would be to make use of all the extra value that's behind the scenes. It's not just in the software, it's in the people behind it. So, yeah, use that. I don't think so. I just think my, my main message is to try a software that works for you. Give Property Filter a try. If you haven't done that one, done that yet, and you can make it your own. You can make this, you can make all the headers and the sections of it your own and how how you want it to work.
