📈 Unlock 100% Funding: Finance Your Next Property Deal Without Cash Out of Pocket w/ Kirsty Rogers

Welcome to today's Deal Finder Corner. So this is your weekly prop talk show brought to you by PropertyFilter, hosted by myself, Guillaume Black, your favorite Frenchman, CEO and co-founder at PropertyFilter, the UK's highest-rated platform to find deals. And as you know, we are on a mission to empower our members to find thousands of deals each and every year thanks to the PropertyFilter Blueprint. And the purpose really with this Deal Finder Corner is to give you the best, you know, really the most current and best 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 and the reality of scaling high-performance business in property. So really, it's my pleasure today to introduce you to Kirsty Rogers on today's Steve Connor. Kirsty is the Auction Sales Director at Together Money. She's got decades of experience in the company. She's built strong, lasting relationships with clients across the UK and overseas. Many she's worked with and supported since the very start of their property career. She works very closely with developers and investors alike and very much helping them achieve their goals, you know, by giving them all the money they need to do their deal. So Kirsty is also known in the office for being the fastest to get money out of the door, you know, sometimes in hours and days, not in weeks and months. So she's a very, very good person to to know and to have in your, in your power team. So what we will cover today, so we have a clear— so there's some really cool stuff coming to the market as well, and I hope Guillaume Black are bringing. So clear breakdown of 100% funding, how can you get all the money for your deals, you know, how do you structure the deal so that basically Kirsty and the team together can help you with that, you know. So how to cover the entire purchase price, eliminate, you know, like the cash barrier for you to grow your portfolio. How to unlock hidden equity, so Maybe you can use properties you already own as a cross-lateral, as a way for you to get more money for your future projects. How more broadly Togther can work with you as a funding partner. You can discover how actually now is quite a good time to be doing things in auction and how auction finance can very well be something quite specific you look into working with Togther, working with Kirsty to help you with those deals. And then I know because she's going through lots and lots of deals each and every day, each and every week. We can pick your brains on actual success stories, actual deals she's been working on today, yesterday, this week, last week, over the last 10 years. And yeah, I'm very much looking forward to it. And the whole idea is you walk away with the confidence, the roadmap to be able to move fast, act decisively. As you know, in property there's two speeds. It's very much, you know, the vendors don't get motivated until they want to get rid. And then when they want to get rid, you want to be really fast, you know. So that's really where the team here is going to be able to help you. So very much looking forward to learn more. So thanks a lot, Kirsty, to join me. So if everyone else could join me, I'm giving a massive Property Filter welcome to Miss Kirsty Rogers. Hello, welcome.

Thank you. Thanks for listening, everyone. You'll have to forgive me. I'm a little bit of a technophobe when it comes to sharing screens. I'm not as hip as some people, and so I'm just gonna try.

If you need to, worst case, I've got your slides and I can very much support you, you know, worst case.

Let me just— I will try my utmost to not be— to get this up and running, but you might have to— you may.

Yeah, that's cool.

So yeah, for some reason it's not letting me.

I've got it, so bear with me just a sec. I'll open it up and share my screen. So do you want to tell us, uh, you want to start already?

And yeah, perfect. So, um, I am Kirsty from Together Commercial Finance, and I've been with the company 10 years, um, in September this year. So long time. And I started out, um, on the auction team and driving up and down the country, going to various different auctions. So I'd be in Scotland one day, Norwich the next day, London another day. So done a fair few bit of miles, um, and predominantly my client database is clients who started their journey buying at auction, and some of them have changed tactics now, and some of them buy off-market, on-market, you know, direct to vendor, um, bank repossession. So I cover a wide range of purchases, but predominantly it is auction. And as a company, we are lending around £300 million a month, um, over around 1,600 transactions. And that is across the board, so that is personal mortgages, second charge personal loans, and bridge and finance development, buy-to-let, commercial. So anything property finance related we can assist with. And we like to build relationships with people. A lot of clients that I still deal with to, to this day, I have dealt with since the very first week we were together. So we like to support people We like to build relationships with people. We've been going as a company now for just over 52 years, and we want to get to £468 million a month in funding. So hopefully everyone on this call can help us achieve that. So you'll notice on my presentation that it says 100% funding. Not 100% loan to value, and that is really important. So there are a lot of lenders in the market who will lend, you know, if you're buying below market value, they'll lend a higher loan to value and potentially lend up to 100% of the purchase price. Unfortunately, as a lender, we wouldn't be able to assist with that. We like you to have some skin in the game. So what we mean by 100% finance is a lot of clients that I speak to are asset rich as opposed to cash rich, and they feel like that because they haven't got that capital in the bank, they can't expand as quickly as they would like. And also a lot of them are really lucky, and before all of the Bank of England base rate shot, or a lot of them are on really good deals with their first charge mortgage lender. So what we try and do is, if clients are asset rich as opposed to cash rich, we can utilise the equity in your current portfolio in order to put towards new purchases. Which I can obviously, I'll go through and explain in more detail. And I'm finding more and more people are looking down this route. So this is how we can do it. So by utilising property or properties that you own that have a reasonable amount of equity in or are unencumbered, which obviously means completely mortgage-free. Now, Again, sadly, we wouldn't do 100% LTV on those assets as well. So it's important for us to make clear that they do have to have a reasonable amount of equity in. And what I mean by that is really simple example. You know, you own a property that's worth £200,000 and we will lend up to 75% of that £200,000, which gives you a gross figure of £150,000. Now, if your first charge balance is £50,000, that we would have to minus that £50,000 that you already owe off that £150,000, which would leave you £100,000 worth of equity to play with, which leads me on to me next, the, you know, the example that that's being shared at the moment. So we deal with a number of examples like this. So new purchase, £200,000. Gross loan amount would be, um, £150,000 on the actual acquisition. So that's the purchase. Then you've got additional security worth £300,000. Current mortgage on that additional security is £100,000. So equity in the property under our criteria is £300,000 times your 70% leaves you at £210,000 gross minus the first charge balance leaves £110,000. So across both properties that gives you a gross figure of £260,000. Now that's just a really simple example. So the purchase is only on this particular example, £200,000, but you have got the ability to, as I say in that example, borrow 100% of the purchase price. And if you wanted to, you could borrow a little bit more to cover, you know, your stamp, your legal costs, and any refurbishment costs that the property may need. We can do it two different ways. It's entirely up to you. We can separate the purchase and the equity into two separate deals, or we can put it onto the one deal. It's entirely up to you. And we don't just— we don't have to just look at investment properties either. We can also look at equity that you own in your own residence. So again, a lot of people think that because it's your own residence, you're not able to utilise the equity in that because you might be buying the investment property in your— sorry, in your company name. So obviously residential is usually held in your personal and your investment could be held in a limited company or a trust dependent on on what your business model looks like, it doesn't make any difference to us as long as you're utilising the equity for business or investment purposes. We can still look at raising equity on your own residence as well. Obviously, you have got to be mindful that it is your own residence, so if for whatever reason the deal doesn't go as it should do, you would be at risk of of losing your own residence. So you've really got to make sure that those numbers stack. You've got to make sure that you've got a clear, you know, exit strategy in place, not just one exit strategy, you know, a whole host of exit strategies, especially when it comes to your own residence. You know, as I'm sure you've been told, you know, by many lenders and brokers, the most important thing when taking bridging finance on is making sure you have got that exit strategy in place. You know, you've run the numbers multiple times because this example is for a bridging facility. So usually our bridging facilities are for up to 12 months, but they are completely flexible and they can be repaid at any time during those 12 months. And there's absolutely no minimum term on them either. So you have got that flexibility to pay us back whenever you like, and there's no early repayment charges for doing that. Everyone with me so far? A lot of information to take in. Great. If anyone's got any questions at the end, more than happy to run through that with you. There will be. Yeah, I'm sure there will be. So that is a really— what I like, especially with the 100% funding angle, I really like to minimise the amount of information that you get on that because if you are just starting out or you've never thought about doing, you know, utilising equity in your other assets, it can be a lot of information and it can bombard you. So what I like to do is obviously run through the presentation and then if you've got any questions whatsoever about what I've discussed and if you've got any deals and you know that you think you might be able to utilize this with, you know, fire away. More than happy to run through with you.

Awesome, Kirsty, thank you. And I've got some questions actually on— so I think the reputation Together has built in my mind, and certainly you have built in my mind, is the speed of it all, you know. So every time I've been to the office, I'm seeing you like, oh, I need to go and close this deal, right? Because they've asked me this morning and I told them I'll give them the money today, right? Or some stupid things like that. I'm like, what the hell, right? So can you tell us a bit more about typically what are the deals you love doing, the great ones people bring to you and therefore you can help them the most with the speed? And you know, money like speed in the deal-making space. Of sometimes like distressed sales and getting, you know, giving the vendor what they want or what they need quickly, etc. So can you tell us more about your experience of this?

Yeah. So the deals I love doing the most are the small little 2-bed terraces. They are our diamond deals. They are low risk, you know, and we would do them all day, every day. So With a typical, you know, 2-bed terrace property purchase, dependent on where you are in the UK, you're probably looking at anything realistically from, you know, £40,000 purchase right up until, you know, £400 grand, you know, purchase. As I say, dependent on where you are. But those types of deals are what we call our bread and butter deals. So We can do a free desktop valuation on the property if it's fully residential, and we can lend up to 75% usually, as long— and I say usually because if the property is fire, water, or structurally impaired, we may not lend up to 75%. It might be a little bit lower. And but typically, if somebody comes to me with a deal today, and it is a fully residential purchase. There's no quirks, and what I mean by that is a lot of people are getting creative with how they purchase property, which I can fully, fully appreciate. People want to retain as much capital as possible so they can spread the capital out over a, you know, multiple deals. So we're getting a lot of vendor deposit deals, deferred deposit and things like that. With those types of transactions, they can get a little bit sticky. But if it's, you know, straightforward, 75% to purchase, client's got 25% to put in the deal, whether that be asset-based or capital, and we've got images of the property, application form, some proof of income, we can literally get the deal done within 24 hours of you submitting the application to us. Now, we wouldn't necessarily do that on every single deal, but we have got the ability to do that. So I've just had a call from a client saying that he needs half a million pound by Wednesday of next week, but it's on two really nice cottages. We've got a previous file that he's done for. He got done via another lender that unfortunately let him down. So we'll be able to get that application in today, get legal documents out tomorrow, and we'll be able to turn that around by Wednesday next week.

Yeah, that's good. People might be thinking, okay, that's great, you are quick, but my solicitor is shit. 'How do we go about that? Because my solicitor really wants to do the searches and this and that.' Can you give a bit of advice from your 10 years of experience?

Yeah, absolutely. So yeah, I agree, some solicitors can be the issue rather than part of the solution. And I don't like doing this, but especially when clients are buying at auction or they are on a really tight deadline and they are at risk of losing their deposit. And I have had to say to some clients, if you continue to use this solicitor, you are going to lose your money and you're going to lose the property. And we've all, you know, we've had to— I have had to have that conversation multiple times. We have got a list of solicitors that we deal with on a day-to-day basis. We can't recommend them because we haven't personally dealt with them, but we know that they're quick, we know that they understand our process and understand our legal documents and what we require in order to release the funds. With regards to the searches, we can accept no search indemnity, which doesn't cost very much, so we don't have to wait for those searches to come in.

So just for everyone to understand, so the normal conveyancing is the buyer solicitors make sure everything is right. So they do report on sort of titles, reports on the searches, all the different available data around the property, do some due diligence, and then they go back and forth and query and this and that. But you can buy an insurance policy basically for like £100 or £50. That basically say, okay, any risk that comes from future searches, you know, you might have it. And then sometimes in auctions, part of the auction, the legal pack, you have those documents available. So yeah, it's working with the right solicitor who basically is not your normal residential home buying recommended by the estate agent type solicitor.

Yeah, it's important for everyone to be on board with the timeline. And it really is because, you know, if your solicitor doesn't understand that if they don't complete within this timeline, you are either going to lose your deposit or you're going to get, you know, you're going to incur fees. You can really get into trouble, you know, especially with auction purchases. And with us, we offer a dual rep, which means that your solicitor on purchases, your solicitor works on both sides of the transaction. So for me, the benefits of that are it keeps the cost down and it eliminates the, well, your solicitor hasn't replied and my solicitor sent replies a couple of days ago to you. It eliminates that because they are the solicitor working for us and for you, so it cuts that out completely.

So me as an investor, uh, can I go around, do deals, and, and, and suggest to, um, a vendor, say, you know, because you want the money so quick, etc., maybe one thing you could do is we can have dual representation. So these are— here's a list of 3 solicitors we've worked with before, like, just pick one, doesn't matter, and they're gonna have on both our behalf, your behalf, and they understand, you know, the, the lender is going to lend me the money to do the deal with you, as long as the solicitor is happy with that and there's no they don't feel there's a conflict of doing that.

Yeah, we haven't got an issue with that. And as I say, it's really important when you're working under strict timelines that you get a really good solicitor behind you because that is the key to getting the money out the door quick.

Okay, that's cool. So let's go through some of the questions here. So yeah, thanks a lot for that. So on your 100% finance, you know, basically is to have an asset you can put in collateral. So the question is, what if I don't have a property on my own? What other structures you'd be happy with? You know, so sometimes you'll have, you know, private investors' money, someone else's property you can put as collateral, you know, your parents' property maybe. Yeah, we can explain different structures you've seen, you know, where I maybe I'm new to property. I'm really good at doing deals, but I don't have this collateral I can bring to things.

Yeah. So if you're going to bring an investor on board or do a little bit of, you know, do like a JV and they've got assets in the background that you can utilise, that's fine. You can use family members, friends, parents. They have got to understand they will have to get independent legal advice because they've got to understand that. If they put their house— if they are putting their house up as security on this deal and if they are not involved in the company who is raising the capital, they need to understand that in essence they've got no control over what goes on with that, you know, with that deal. So if for whatever pay— if the borrower decides that they don't want to pay or the deal doesn't fit anymore and they default, again, they're at risk of losing the property. So as long as they're comfortable with that, they get independent legal advice. You know, I've got a client and he uses his mum and dad's house consistently on every single deal that he does as additional security, and they, they've got no issue with that. They trust him, they trust the process, and, you know, he's proven— he's got a proven track record. Buy and selling, you know, buy and refurb and selling. So yeah, they're completely comfortable with it, and he's been doing that for, for many years now.

Yeah, the cure to the best risk mitigation to all of this is to do great deals, you know. So if you do okay deals, you know, or average deals, yeah, it's quite a risky business. But you have to do great deals.

Yeah, and there's times where I have, you know, this you know, what we're doing, you know, raising capital for business and investment purposes. This is an unregulated, you know, space. However, we still need to act, you know, responsibly, treat customers fairly. And there's times where clients have wanted to do a deal and wanted to raise capital on their own residence, and I've said No, because I don't believe that the deal stacked and they would get stuck and they would be at risk of, you know, of losing their own property.

Yeah, thanks for that. The next question from Manisha is, how does it work with interest? Are they serviced, paid upfront, or is there, you know, whatever different—

we don't have a preference. So on all of our bridging facilities, we don't offer roll-up. We only offer retained interest, which, as you may know, if you opt for retained interest, it just means that you're going to get— you're going to net less when we come to fund the deal because we deduct the payment from the loan amount. And obviously, if you say, if I say, you're going to get more money day one. Now, The retains option, a lot of lenders will not give you a choice. A lot of bridging lenders will not give you a choice. You will have to be— they will make you retain the full 12 months worth of interest. Whereas, as I say, we've got no preference. You can either service it if you like or you can retain it. And you can also tailor the retains option as well. So if you don't want us to take all of the 12 months upfront because it's taken too much capital out of the loan for you in order for you to complete. We can do 3 months retained, 6 months retained, 9 months retained. We will tailor it to meet your needs.

Yeah. And for anyone who's asking, what happens if I repay early? You pay back the interest, right?

We do. So I've just had a client on. It was yesterday. He was redeeming his loan. And he opted for full 12 months retained and he only kept the loan for 3 weeks. So he will get 11 months back as a refund on the redemption balance. So you will only pay interest on the loan for as long as you keep the loan. If you repay daily, we wouldn't keep those full 12 months.

It's calculated on a daily basis. Yeah.

Unfortunately, our interest is calculated on a monthly basis.

So as you go into like 1 month and 2 days, that's 2 months interest.

Unfortunately, yeah. And I do try and highlight that as much as I possibly can with clients. Hopefully with our new amazing system that is going to be launching later on.

I've heard about it for 2 years, your system.

Don't start Scott off. You'll never get him. You'll never shut him up. That's my boss. We've been integrating this system for a good while now. Fingers crossed, we're almost there. But hopefully once that's all integrated, embedded in, we can hopefully look at daily interest because, you know, it's important to clients.

Yeah, yeah, I get it. You know, it's the admin of it, you know, so reconciling everything. So yeah, cool. Next question is from Stuart. So could this work? So I'm guessing the question is about collateral and 100% funding. Could this work with a buy-to-let property as collateral? £400,000 value, there's £200,000 first charge mortgage on it. What could be the additional borrowing on it?

So sorry, did you say it was worth £400,000?

£400,000, and the balance of the current mortgage with the first charge is £200,000.

Yeah, so there'd be £100,000 capital to play with, equity that you could utilize on that.

If you remember the— so if I managed to go back to this, the formula was Yeah, so on that, apologies.

So usually on a second charge, it used to only be— we could only allow to go up to 70%. That has recently changed to 75%, so it gives us a little bit more, you know, it gives us a little bit more flexibility. So apologies for that, that's a typo. It's now 75%. So in that scenario, it'd be £100,000. The key to utilising this equity is your first charge mortgage lender. There are some first charge lenders who don't allow second charges. So if ever I speak to a client about unlocking the equity by way of a second charge, I will always say to them first, have a chat with your first charge lender. You don't want to be going full steam ahead with deals and putting money down unless you categorically know they are going to allow that second charge. Because if they say no, you're unable to utilise that equity as a second charge.

Do you know on top of your head, like, which are the high street lenders that wouldn't allow it?

So usually it's Landsbank, The Mortgage Works, Paragon.

We are competing on the accent here, Kirsty.

Sorry, I have tried to slow it down as best I possibly can because I couldn't do my presentation in 60 seconds normally if I was in Liverpool. So yeah, Paragon can sometimes be a little bit tricky. Most of them, to be honest, aren't too bad. Birmingham Midshires, they're fine. Kent Reliant, you know, your high street lenders, they're normally fine. It tends to be the smaller lenders that don't really like the second charges, and I've never understood it because if for whatever reason, you know, we had to repossess the property, they would get their money first anyway. So it doesn't really make any sense to me, but obviously it's their criteria. So I've got I'm doing a deal at the moment for my partner's friend, and he's actually with Aldermore. Aldermore have said no, but they don't usually. So sometimes it can be dependent on what mortgage you've got with them as well. So Aldermore have said no, but he needs to utilise that equity. He's on a variable rate with them anyway, so the rate isn't great. So what we've decided to do is rather than take a second charge, we're going to lend him a little bit more money and take out Aldermore completely. And then when he refinances the new property he's buying, he'll just refinance both properties at the same time and pay us off in full.

Okay, that's cool. Thank you. The next question is from Sarah. So can you explain how financing works with you guys when buying at auction?

So more than happy to send this over in the chat in a second for you, but we have a pre-approval link. I can dig mine out in a second and pop it in the chat for you. But we've got a pre-approval link, and if the property is fully residential, you can go on that link. It asks you for a couple of questions: are you buying in a limited company? And are you buying for business or investment? And it'll ask you also, um, just how much your maximum bid is, a little bit about the property and things like that. And with that, and once you've filled it in, it will give you an instant decision in principle prior to the auction. So it'll do a soft search on your credit file and it'll also do a free desktop valuation on the property so we can get you pre-approved prior to auction if you want to. Some people aren't— some people don't mind, they will just go full steam ahead and then call me up once they've secured the property and then we can take it from there. But usually the process would be you can either complete the Decision in Principle link, get your pre-approval, Then once hopefully you've successfully bought the property at auction, you would then come back to us if you want to.

Is that this, Kirsty? Can you see this? Is that—

yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Perfect. So what will happen is once you've bought the property at auction, I will call you up and run through make sure all the information on the decision in principle is correct. If you want to service the loan, we'll get proof of income off you and we'll also get your solicitor details. And then that's it. It's just as simple as that. We'll need to understand what your exit strategy is. So whether it's sale or refinance to buy to let. But it's really simple and straightforward at buying at auction. What I always say to my clients when they're buying at auction, even if you're a, you know, you're a really experienced investor, there's a lot of vendors at the moment that are putting special conditions in the legal pack and they do it in such a way, unless you are looking for it, it can be missed. So I'll always say to clients, get your solicitor to read the legal pack in full, even if it costs you a little bit of money. It's worth its weight in gold. I've just had a client buy a property at auction and he didn't realise that it was a bank repossession and the bank were making him pay the tenant arrears on top of the purchase price, which was another £15,000. So always read the legal pack, always go and view the property. If you can't, if you don't know much about what is it, what the refurb entails, take a builder with you and try and, if you're buying at auction, you know, try and get your pre-approval in place. Give me a call, we can run through it. And then once we've got your proof of income and your solicitor details, goes over to our underwriting team, they'll review it in 24 hours and then we'll get the legal pack over to your solicitor., and they'll obviously do what they need to do in order to satisfy our requirements. Hopefully they'll then report to us, and we usually, once we've satisfied all of our requirements from a legal paperwork perspective, we'll usually fund either the same day or the next day.

So, Sarah, a question.

Sorry, yeah, just a really slick process, which is exactly what you need. When it comes to buying at auction, because you really can't have any delays or hiccups. There's so many people that come to me that have tried to get, you know, buy-to-let mortgages and things like that, and the lender just hasn't been able to deliver within those auction time frames.

More broadly, if you want to learn about auctions, there is the— so this is the first edition, right, before the Hammer Falls, from the guys at Hammer, you know, Piotr and Jay. We've had them on Did Find a Corner before. If you come to the— we are doing an event, a Property Twitter event, in like 3-4 weeks' time, and I've got copies of this I will give to anyone who joins. It's a great one, you know, the best book I know in auction, for auctions, and certainly one of the best ones in property. So I'll give you a copy when you come to any Property Twitter event, right? So really cool stuff. And the second question was, how does your rate compare with other, other bridgers or other lenders?

So being completely honest, we, from a rate perspective, we don't seem like we are the cheapest in the market because a lot of clients, quite rightly, will concentrate solely on the rate per month. Now what a lot of other lenders will do is they will add additional fees onto the deal. So additional admin fees, lender legal fees, valuation fees. So from an overall cost perspective, we won't be beating on Bridging. So we will always say to clients, we will quote you, you know, as best we possibly can on our best rate. However, if you can get a better deal overall elsewhere, we'll always beat it.

It's quite competitive. Great. Thank you.

Sorry, I was just saying the beauty of dealing with us is you don't have to go through a broker to get to us. You can come to us direct. So that saves you a little bit as well on fees.

So obviously it depends on the strategies you have and things like that. If you are mainly doing this one strategy and you have this one relationship, it's great. Sometimes I find people are doing a variety of things. Personally, I quite like my broker relationship, even though we'll go to Together as well. But say that, I would say have all the conversations, have the relationships with the broker, with Together.

Yeah, yeah, listen, broker, I'm not, you know, brokers are brilliant. They serve a purpose. They help a lot of clients out. But as I say, from a lending perspective or a Together perspective, if you like, you don't have to go through a broker to get to us. And we like dealing with clients direct. We like to build relationships with clients. We like to help you achieve your goal.

Yeah, love it. Manisha is asking, I am currently structuring a deal at £380,000 for a 5-bed HMO with a hybrid vendor finance and a mortgage by using equity from another property. Am I correct in thinking that I do not have to release the equity but could use the bridge facility?

Correct, yes. So rather than releasing the equity and from your current asset that you already own, we could look at just, just taking a first or a second charge on the property, dependent on whether or not it's got a first charge on. So the beauty of this is if you only need the funds for a really short period of time, you don't have to go down the remortgage route and pull an equity out that potentially you're only going to keep for a short period of time. And then once you've done what you wanted to do with that equity, it's the capital out of it. It's potentially just sitting in the bank and you're paying interest on it for nothing. Whereas with Bridgem and with this type of transaction, you can pay back the Bridgem facility whenever you want, and then our second charge comes off and you've still got that equity in the property if you wanted to utilise it again, if that makes sense.

And the question— I think there's the complexity here is also there's a vendor finance element to that, you know, Yeah, so we don't, we don't mind vendor finance.

It's with us, being blunt as I already am, as I always am, sorry, is we like you to have some skin in the game. So if a client comes to me and they're buying something for £100,000, it's residential, so we're going to lend up to 75% of that, which is obviously £75,000. And the vendor is giving them vendor finance for all of the deposit, it wouldn't be a deal that we would accommodate because we would see that as 100% lending because the client has got no physical capital in that transaction. So if it goes upside down, the deal, they don't mind just walking away, whereas if you've got additional security in the deal, or you've got capital in the deal, you've got more of an incentive to make it work. So in that scenario, if he decides, I'm going to get £15,000 vendor deposit, but I'm putting £10,000 of my own money in and doing the refurb, we—

Or is it, you know, like maybe £15,000 from the vendor deposit and then £10,000 from a security on my house, would that be okay?

Yeah, that would be, that would be perfect because we've got that additional security and, and the client's got that skin in the game. And as I said earlier, a lot of people are doing, you know, more creative deals, more creative ways to buy more property and, you know, and expand. And we understand that. And as a lender, we've always been very much, no, it's got to be capital or asset in the deal. But we've got to change with the times, like everything. So, you know, we've got to adjust our lending criteria if we want to grow and continue to support investors.

Yeah, that's great. You know, you can go and go again and go again, you know, which is really cool. Question from Muhammad: so the fees you charge if additional additional commercial security is used on a buy-to-let and buy-to-let on a resi property I'm buying, what cost is involved with that? So I'm guessing the question is, if you— have you got fees for cross-lateral and things like that, or is it all part of your deal structuring?

No, it's all, it's all part of the actual deal. If anything, dependent on the loan to value across the whole deal, you might find if you use an additional security, you get a better rate. Yeah, because you're reducing our risk.

Okay, yeah, it's good to learn. And then, yeah, I did share the link here to the Property Filter Community thingy, so to fill the form here. And from there you have also, I believe, there's some discount and stuff we sort of negotiated some years ago now together. Yeah. Next question, um, Alessandra. So, uh, could you please repeat the title of the auction book you mentioned. Sorry, so it's called Before the Hammer Falls. And if you come to a Property Twitter event, like we're doing one in March, I'll give you a copy because they very, very kindly gave us a pallet of it. So it's quite, quite good, guys. And anything these guys do, yeah, follow them, go to their stuff. It's really good. Comfort, interesting. Can you please give us some margins in the interest rate? So you got some broad, you know, like monthly interest rates or something for bridging? Yeah, you guys normally do.

Yeah, no problem. So if the property is fully residential, our interest rates start from 0.77% per month. All of our arrangements—

sorry, once more, I got distracted. What was that? Was that a question?

Sorry. So if the property is fully residential, so a house or a flat or HMO, then our interest rates start from 0.77% per month. Okay, yeah, all of our, all of our arrangement fees are 2%, and but we do have a minimum fee of £1,000, and because our loan sizes, um, our minimum loan size is £26,000 on bridging.

Okay, okay, and then if you use the link, you've got, uh, basically a quarter of that fee that is waived.

Yeah, so yeah, and then on semi-commercial and mixed-use properties, the interest rate's slightly higher. That starts from 0.83% per month.

It's still very competitive, you know, to be fair.

Yeah, they are. I mean, listen, don't get me wrong, they are the best possible rates. You know, it depends on LTV, it depends on loan size, but if you give me a call, and you let me know that you've come via Property Filter community, we'll always give you the discount on the arrangement fee and our most exclusive rates. And that goes for bridging and buy-to-let commercial rates as well.

Beautiful. Any other questions? So Claudia is asking for the link, so I'll just put it back again. Uh, here we go. Any other questions on bridging, doing deals? Uh, once we get people to, you know, find their last questions, uh, because if you have any sort of, uh, interesting stories, you know, some anecdotes from your career, some crazy, crazy shit you've seen, you know, I don't know. So, you know what, things that have happened, you know, I see it, I see, I see it every single day, if I'm honest with you.

It's, it's so the The crazy deals are slowly becoming more and more the norm, like, because as I say, a lot of people are getting more creative, but, you know.

What do you mean crazy? As in the crazy characters of the people you deal with?

Yeah, yeah. So crazy characters, crazy assets. So at the moment, I'm lending on dog training kennels. And I'm also lending on a large property that does holiday lets, but they've got like an equestrian center on there as well. We've lent on public toilets before that went into auction. Couple of gentlemen's clubs We do as well, you know, we don't judge together, you know, if it's worth something, you know, we'll lend on it. But yeah, I mean, from our perspective, we'll lend on any type of property in any condition anywhere in the UK. If there is a deal to be done, you know, we will absolutely do it. I don't know whether anyone's interested in getting into social housing, We do a lot of social housing deals at the moment, and we lend to a lot of overseas investors, and we don't penalise. So if the client is overseas, we don't increase the rate, we don't increase the loan-to-value, and so we're more than happy to, you know, to lend. But yeah, and as I say, the deals are getting crazier, and so are the clients. But I like it because, you know, I've been doing it for 10 years, so I like that no deal is the same, you know, you're speaking to a variety of people all the time and it's good, it's interesting, it's stressful, especially under, you know, because people are relying on you and they don't want to lose their money, they don't want to lose the deal. And even though, you know, it's— we've all got to work together to get the deal through, you do feel like that. The onus is on you to make sure everything goes through swimmingly.

I think you are addicted to the chase, you know, the deadlines, you know, you love it.

Yeah, yeah. Like, I moved over into a different sector of the business a while ago, and it was more dealing with financial advisors and getting deals from solicitors and things like that. But them deals are slow-paced, whereas I like the fact that somebody, you know, someone phoned me up a couple of weeks ago and was like, I need £300,000. I've just agreed to buy a new villa in Dubai, but they didn't tell me that when I agreed to it, I've got to pay them this £300,000 in like 3 days. And if I don't do it, you know, I've got to pay them a heavy, heavy penalty. So those are the deals that I thrive off, and it really does show, you know, what we can do as a business.

That's quite cool. A question from Ira: do you take into account income for those deals, or do you have to have a minimum income? Do people need to be in work or demonstrate income?

No, so we don't require you to have minimum income. We don't require you to be employed, you know, either or self-employed. So a lot of clients that I touch base with are either only working part-time or they've come out of work completely to do this full-time. So if they're not, if they're only just getting into the property game and they've got no, you know, regular income coming in, we can look at it one of two ways. We can either just do straightforward retained interest and the affordability element doesn't come into it, or if they are going to rent the property out, we can also look at the projected income that the property is going to make.

And you consider if it's something else than buy-to-let, you know, like for example, maybe it's a serviced accommodation or maybe it's a some kind of supported living type contract or something like that.

So I come, as I say, I do a lot of social housing deals at the moment, more long-term mortgages I do in the social housing world, just purely because there's not many lenders out there that will lend on those types of leases because it's not your standard AST or, you know, it's a lease, isn't it, on a residential property. So Some lenders just don't like it, whereas we don't mind that. We, you know, we understand the process, we understand how it works. Obviously we've got to be cautious about what social housing providers are going to be leasing the property. We've got to make sure that they're reputable and ethical, and because ultimately, you know, we don't want anybody, you know, vulnerable, you know, living in the property and the the social housing provider can't pay the rent, so then the landlord can't pay the mortgage. And we don't want to be in a position where we've got to evict a vulnerable person. So we do make sure that we do all our necessary research, but now we can look at all types of income.

Just on your sort of, it's more of a qualitative feeling on that. Do you see like, you do, I'm kind of asking the Kirsty, house, you know, house price index, you know, like from the Halifax and Nationwide's price index, uh, the Kirsty Together strategy index, you know. Do you say you're doing more social housing and things like that? Can you comment on the volume of these you've done like the last couple of months compared to the last couple of years? Is it— do you find like people are shifting strategies?

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I, I've got a really good contact who refers all of their mentee, you know, the people that he mentors over to me. And because I've built that relationship, I've built that trust. So I've probably doubled, if not trebled, the amount of social housing loans, mortgages that we're doing at the moment. I'm probably on average get about 2 or 3 deals a week. Yeah, and it's, it's more, I think it's more a case of because the clients are overseas and they want a hands-off approach to the property, they feel like that is the best way to go.

There's a gentleman called David in this call who might want to resonate with that because he's got quite a lot of people overseas his packaging deals for, and it might be something there. Just putting it out there. And so yeah, David might, you know, should probably get in touch. And this goes to show, guys, you know, like the markets change, the strategies that used to work, you know, in 2024, 2025 are not the ones that are going to thrive this year, you know. So on the, did you see on the Kirstie Together Strategy Index, we can see that this has tripled, 4x, you know, in recent months, you know. So really want to get yourself up to date with these strategies. So yeah, so that's probably— I'd look more into these than, you know, stuff you've heard about since 2018 that don't work anymore, right?

So yeah, especially because as the time changes as well, a lot of the rights are going more for the tenant, you know, on your standard assured tenancy agreement. So people are diversifying into other avenues of their investment property. Obviously, I'm not saying that is the way to do it, but maybe mixing it up a little bit minimises the risk.

Awesome. Next 2 questions and then we'll wrap up. So Sue is asking, could you consider funding small viable campsites with outbuildings with development potential?

Yeah, so we can look at, we can look at financing land acquisitions. Yeah, we do a lot of that. So we finance a lot of land acquisitions that don't have planning. And what usually happens is clients will buy the land without planning, they will obtain the necessary planning permissions, and they will either refinance off to a development finance lender, or they'll sell it. They'll sell the land and hopefully make a little bit on the back of it.

Yeah, great. And then the last question we have so far from Comfort. So I think it's bouncing out on your— the funding of the villa in Dubai. So do you fund overseas properties, or this was structured into a different way?

Oh, apologies. So, um, he was raising the money on a new asset he was purchasing in Dubai, but the assets we were raising on were in the UK. So we only, we only lend on, on UK property.

Yeah, so if you think, you know, like people refinance their homes to pay for their, I don't know, kids' weddings, you know, so it's a bit similar here. So you go and refinance or put a put a security, put, you know, use your home or a property you own as a security, and then you can do whatever you want with the money, this kind of setup. So yeah, thanks. That was really insightful. Kirsty, thanks so much for joining.

If people want to put in the suggestion box together that they want us to open a Dubai branch, I will put my name in the hat to go and set that up.

Okay, if enough of us are moving there, we might get you there to fund a lot of deals there. Thank you so much, Kirstie. Have you got any sort of closing sentiment to leave us with?

Thanks so much for listening. And as I mentioned a few times, we really want to ramp up. We really want to assist people. So please don't hesitate to reach out if you've got any questions on what we've discussed. If you've got any potential projects that you just want to run past me, we're here to help.

Kirsty, much appreciated. Thank you so much. So, and thank you everyone for joining today's Deal Finder Corner. I hope you really enjoyed the same way I did. Look forward to seeing you next week. In the meantime, you know what to do, like stay in touch with the community, log into your Property Filter account, go and find these great deals so you can pass them to Kirsty. And I think today was a bit of a wake-up call on some of the strategies working right now on social housing and things like that. So do keep your eyes peeled for information emails and things from me. And come and see us in person on the 14th of March to talk about these strategies working right now. So you can help Kirsty triple, 4x, 10x, because she's got, I think, £100 million per month as a target to go and lend. That's 3,000 more deals to do per month. So let's go and help us do that. But you can only do this if you're doing it on the strategies working right now. So I look forward to seeing you next week. Looking forward to seeing you in person next month and speak with everyone very soon. Bye-bye. And thanks for the good feedback on the chat. Thank you.