⚙️ Work Less, Earn More: The Tools That Save Property Pros Time and Money with Chris Kirkwood

Hello, good afternoon. Welcome everyone, welcome to this week's Deal Finder Corner. So this is your weekly property talk show brought to you by Propertyfilter, hosted by myself, Guillaume Black, your favourite Frenchman. I'm the CEO and co-founder of Propertyfilter, the UK's highest-rated platform to find deals. And as you know, the theme really with this is we are on a mission to empower our property investor and deal sourcer members to find thousands of deals thanks to the Propertyfilter Blueprint. And the purpose really with this Deal Finder 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 secrets, strategies, and tactics about what actually works right now in terms of finding and making deals. And in our case here as well, the reality of systemizing and running a high-performing business in property. So it is my pleasure to introduce to you my good friend Chris Kirkwood today on today's Deal Finder Corner. So Chris, if you don't know him, has been investing in property for more than 15 years, and since he joined Sourced, the big the Big Sourcing franchise in 2018. He's helped hundreds of people make millions of pounds with, you know, with Source and the whole support and things they get as part of the franchise system. He's been mentoring through the system, well, you know, people to do well over £300 million worth of deals, which is really, really impressive in his tenure when he was running it. And now with his wealth of experience applied to what's the way Source is expanding, They are doing lots of other really cool products to assist investors to do more deals, be more profitable in property. So we'll learn specifically about one aspect and one big problem these guys have solved. And it's a topic I've been asking for for ages. And I'm very much looking forward to hear more myself because I've got a few companies that I'd like to put through to this system pretty soon because I want to sack my accountant. I'm really unhappy, right? So today we're going to expect to cover The profit killer exposed. So we talk about buying limited company and things like that, but the truth is your accounting and management costs are really costing you a lot compared to the old traditional approach and it's really destroying your deal profitability if you don't structure it well. We're looking at real deals analysis. So Chris will walk us through a live walkthrough of actual deals showing us the cost, the impacts, return. So you're not blindsided by the invisible expenses that come again. And we're going to talk about how you can reclaim your time. So get your Buy Back Your Time, Get Your Time Back. So the system that will take you from running around 20 hours a month of admins to a scalable automated property business. So really interesting stuff. We'll talk about their enterprise-grade solutions. So how they can propose SPV management, automated bookkeeping, tax compliance, annual filings and things like that without hiring a full-time accountant at a fraction of the cost. So that's really interesting for any one of you who is starting or scaling. You'll know like this is quite a big issue. It's just a matter of time before the shoebox full of receipts catch up, catch up for you, right? So, and then all this can then and therefore become your competitive edge, you know. So why professionals who invest in their business infrastructure outpace anyone who DIY their way and miss out on deals because they're just busy being busy doing the stuff that don't really add value. So very much looking forward and, you literally looking forward to hear more about the service because I'm really, really keen to use it myself as well. So to hear more about Chris today, so please join me and give a massive props to Ultra Virtual. Welcome to Mr. Chris Kirkwood, over to you, my good friend.

Wow, well, thank you very much. What an introduction. And your accent is mesmerizing, always mesmerizing. I've got some French people in my family, so it's kind of like being back at a family reunion for me. Me hearing like the French accent in the background. But no, thank you very much for that introduction. And shall I share my slides? Because I've kind of done the slides and look, for everybody that's here, I don't want you to think that this is like some big heavy sales pitch. This is just a thought process that we've gone through here at Sourc3d and it's based on us being in property and being involved in property for a long period of time. And so I want to talk you through how we've got through to this thought process, which is genuinely, genuinely 99% of the people that look at properties and look at deals that you're going to find on PropertyFilter, you don't take these costs into consideration, and they are absolutely critical when you work out at the end of the year how much money you're making from your property deal. So let me share my slides because I want to show you, I want to prove to you that I actually, you know, we do genuinely do property deals here at Sourcet for ourselves. So give me just a second, I'll share my screen. And I need to go to share that one. Okay, so hopefully you can see my slides now. Is that, is that the case?

Yeah, yeah, if you want to go in presenter mode and then—

yeah, I will do.

All right, and then perfect, thank you.

There we go. So, so that's an old picture of me, um, which I've been begging to get updated, uh, but that was— that's probably what I looked like the last time, uh, when we were at the Property Investor Show, Guillaume, um, maybe about 18 months ago.

So yeah, when we were on the— on that panel.

Yeah, on the panel, that's right. Yeah. Um, so it's about working less but earning more, right? And the first thing that I want to show you is this is Source'd. If you go to Source'd, because, because you've listened to this webinar, you're probably going to see lots of different things, and we do do lots of different things at Source'd. Um, the, the thing that I really want to share with you that I think is a top secret that the majority of people that are involved in property do not consider until it's too late— and you said, um, you use those magic words, right, starting scaling, and then, you know, kind of exploding your, your your property business or your property investing. People that are starting don't consider this. It's only when you're kind of halfway through scaling up and you've been in property for a couple of years that you notice that this is a massive cost that when you originally started you didn't really take into consideration, right? So this is— these are some of our projects. I just want to show you that this kind of scale of project that we're now into. This is called Victoria Sea View. It's a hotel that we bought in Scarborough. We've turned this into 13 flats. And those flats, those flats, you know, very, very modern. We've completely re-rendered, re-polished this building. Now it looks like a very modern, very modern seaside, seafront building, and we're going to use these flats for serviced accommodation. We're setting that up, we're managing that from HQ. So not only do we do these big conversion projects, but also we try to retain as much as possible. We try to build our portfolio and and we try to monetise these projects because it's not just about flipping and getting out of that project, it's about long-term wealth building. So hopefully, you know, you can sort of empathise with that. This is another project. We've literally just bought this. This is a pub that we've bought and we currently rent— I'm sitting in our HQ, our offices at the moment. We rent our offices and we're looking at building our own offices. So we've just bought this pub. This pub's been razed to the ground. And now we're going to build a brand new, very modern development of offices for ourselves, which we'll own. And then for those of you that are a little bit more technical about tax savings, and in the future we'll probably put that into an SPV, we'll probably put that into a SaaS pension and, you know, take the rental from the company to put into pensions. This is a development of 6 It's farmland and there's a farm building at the front, and these are new build properties that are behind that original farm building. We own this site, we've developed this site, we've sold— this is one of the ones that I'm talking about actually when I say that we're— the agents are really earning their stripes because we've sold half of the units that are on this site, and half of them, because the units are about £800,000 in as a purchase price. That's the part of the market that's really tricky at the moment. And so these are the units that I've just instructed a new agent, and we're going to have an open day, we're going to have viewings, we're going to invite all the local people, we're going to have like a little festival on site, uh, you know, we're just getting as many people in as possible. And that all came from the estate agent and the estate agent's ideas as to how we should try and sell that site. But we, we created that, we planned that, we got the planning permission for that, all of that process. Was us putting that into place. This is a monster. So this is, this is actually, you probably, you probably would have some of the, some of the properties that I've just shown you were off market. So you might not have seen them on Propertyfilter, but this is one that would have been on Propertyfilter if Propertyfilter were around in the same capacity about 4 years ago. This is a commercial building. The whole thing is a commercial building. We've currently transformed half of it into 55 flats, and now we've started transforming the next half of it into another eventually 55 flats. We've done the first 17. We're currently allowing some of the commercial units to stay there. Um, and again, this is— it was available on Rightmove, so you would have seen it in Property Filter when all that data was taken in, it was filtered through. Um, and you would have seen this, you definitely would have seen this one because it was actually on the market for 2 years before we bought it. So the point of all of this is not to— as Tony Robbins says, this is not to impress you, this is to impress upon you that when it comes to property, we kind of— we've earned our stripes, we kind of know where we are. We've done a lot of property development deals. We've got another— I could have shown you a new build development of 24 houses as well that we've currently got ongoing. So that we've got a lot of property experience behind us. But that, and that perspective, has now led us on to looking at different things that we can do in order to save money. Well, to increase profit, because everybody wants to increase profit in the deals that they're doing, right? So we create this deal calculator, and this deal calculator we give out to all of our franchisees. So when we talk about the franchise business, that's just part of what we do. And we have training and support and a load of tech that we give to our franchisees to help them become property investors. And this is part of it. This is the deal calculator and it's pretty comprehensive. I'd say that the only thing that this deal calculator doesn't have is staged drawdowns. So if you're doing a big project and you have a staged drawdown process and you calculate interest at different stages of that drawdown process, it can't do that. But everything else it pretty much can do. And I was looking at this one day and I was looking through our bank statements and I was looking through our costs and I was going through our P&L and I was thinking, there's something, you know, there's something that we're missing out on here. There's a big cost that we haven't considered before that we pay for every single property that we do. It increases our cost, and we need to seriously look at this to mitigate for this, because if we can mitigate for this cost, then we're going to make a lot more money per property deal that we do. And if you look at this, this is an example of a deal that— and I know that somebody, an investor, has has bought a deal like this. I've put the highlights of this deal in the bottom right-hand corner. So it was a property that was bought for £140,000. The costs were £33,000 going into it. The GDV was £240,000, refinance at £180,000. So they've left in £7,200 in the deal, and the return on capital employed, because they're going to make £14,000 from the rent, the return on capital employed is 50%, which means that they're making on an annual basis by renting it out, they're making £3,600. Now £3,600 isn't a huge amount of money, but when you look at the ROCIE, the return on capital employed, that's healthy, that's a, that's a good return. And I know a lot of people that retain worse deals than this in their portfolio. But then if you look at the cost that we're going to talk about— I just need to keep moving my things from one side to the other, so sorry for the pauses. But there is something that would kill this deal, but nobody would take it into consideration until it's, until it's too late, until you've bought the deal, refurbished the deal, refinanced the deal. You put loads and loads of work into it, you're making £3,600, but you've only invested £7,200, and you think, you know, that'll do because 50% is an excellent return. If you think about the stock market, for example, your return on capital employed in the stock market on average over the last 10 years has been about 7%. So for every pound that you put in, you'll get 7p back, or you'll increase the value of that capital investment by 7p year on year. Well, this is increasing the value of that capital investment by 50% per year, so it's a, it's a decent deal, but your accounting fees are killing it. Now you're going to pay tax on it. If you're making profit, you're going to pay tax because that's the, that's the way that the system works, and that's fair enough. And your accountant or an accounting system that you put into place should reduce that tax bill as much as legally possible. But then the cost for that person to do that, for me, from experience, from the SPVs that I own, it's between £1,500 and £2,000 every single year. Now think back to that previous deal, and it's particularly relevant for deals that you decide to hold and refinance and rent out yourself because your margins, the amount of turnover that you generate from that property can be lower, right? It can be below £10,000. Now, if you throw a £2,000 bill at that and you reduce that by £2,000, then that makes a massive difference to the amount of profit that you're taking. But it's a cost that you are going to pay year on year on year. And look, if you're first— if you're getting into property now or if you've been in property for 5 years and you're on this webinar, Congratulations to you for even considering that this might be something that you can mitigate to put more money in your pocket. Because like Guillaume said at the beginning, I've been in property for more than 15 years and we've only just started thinking about this kind of stuff. So congratulations and well done for trying to mitigate for the liabilities that you are going to have going forward. But accounting fees can kill it. And from my point of view, when I first started investing in property, didn't have my head screwed on. I didn't know everything that I know now. I bought something because I thought I'd be able to rent it out, and that was pretty much the only metric that I looked at. And then 6 months down the line, before I even had to pay accounting fees, I thought, you know, I'm making £100 a month there. It was a property in Salford before, before Salford went crazy with Media City. I'm making £100 a month here. This is, this is rubbish. What am I doing? And it's because I didn't, I didn't think about the whole process and the whole thing all the way through thoroughly. And this is, you know, you get— you purchase the property, you go through completion, you get all of your finance in order. This fee— and that's where most fees hit you— but this fee isn't going to hit you until 12 to 18 months after that. But it's still a fee that you have to pay. Now, if you did— if you genuinely took this into consideration when you were finding the deals and you had a deal calculator like ours and it had accounting fees in there, I dare say that a lot of the deals that you look at from a refinance and hold point of view, you probably wouldn't take on because these accounting fees would scare the living daylights out of you. So it's a fee that you have to take into consideration, and it can— if you put it into your deal calculators and you really own that fee that you're going to have to pay, it is going to kill your deals. And it's harder to find good deals, but it's not impossible because you can find, you can find incredible deals. One of our franchisees found a deal with a 17% net yield in central London a couple of months ago. So for all those people that think that there's no deals in London, it just depends on how hard you look. So deals are still out there. However, you need to take your accounting fees into consideration. So what you're going to learn on here is how to have more time to find the best deals, because it's, it's a fact of life, the more time you put into something, the better you're going to do, the better you'll perform at it. So I'm going to show you how to save time, and I'm going to show you how to make your deals a lot more profitable, specifically with this angle of paying for your accountant to do your tax returns for you. Now, where you find the best deals, you've got a great head start by being part of this community. To be, to be perfectly honest, this is a fantastic place to start to find your best deals. Um, but then when you find that deal, you need to then do the finances for that deal. You need to do your comparables, you need to do your research, you need to see how, how everything's performing in that local area and the strategy that you want to use. Is it going to be buy-to-let? Is it going to be HMO? Is it going to be serviced accommodation? You know, how do you want to monetise that unit, that product? So once you've found that deal, you then go into your deal calculator and you put all the information into your deal calculator. And if you're flipping, if you're going to be, you know, just tarting up the property— and an old colleague of mine used to call it a tart and turn, so tart it up, turn it around— if you're going to be doing that, then you're, you're probably going to be making £20,000, £30,000, £40,000, £50,000, you know, tens of thousands of pounds at least. And so you can tolerate this £2,000 cost that's going to hit you further down the line. But if you're holding the deal, then it's going to be much more difficult. It's definitely a cost that you should put in there, right, that roughly £2,000 for your accounting costs. But we started thinking, surely there's something we can do about that. Surely, you know, this going down your high street and finding an accountant and getting that accountant to do your setup for you, surely there's a better system. Than doing it that way. And with the sort of prevalence that everybody has these days for when they're buying deals and going down the SPV route— so for those of you that are maybe new to this terminology, an SPV, a special purpose vehicle, which is basically a limited company that is specifically set up just to hold property. So you can use an SPV to hold that property, and that means that your— that property isn't subject to your personal tax. The income from that property now goes through the same rules as the limited company would go through and pays corporation tax. But as part of that, you need to, you need to create a return for that SPV every year. You need to file that return. So there's paperwork and legislation that you need to go through, and that's what the accountant charges for. The accountant charges roughly £2,000 to create that return for you and then file that return. And that's even if you've been doing your own bookkeeping. So we thought there's got to be a better way. There's got to be something that we can do to mitigate for all these costs. And we've actually got a webinar going out in a couple of weeks' time from the enterprise team, and they've, they've looked into our history and we've owned over 100 limited companies in our time. And you know what, I've not worked out how much money we could have saved if we'd have invented this system 10 years ago, because to be quite frank, it would make me feel sick. So what Enterprise does, it sets up that SPV for you. Now the signups, the signup alone for Enterprise is going to cost you £10. If you set up your own SPV, that's going to cost you £50. So already you've saved £40. So it sets up that SPV for you to put that property into. If anybody knows, if anybody's run a limited company, you have to do a confirmation statement every year, and that confirmation statement is basically writing to Companies House or confirming with Companies House that all the details of your limited company are exactly the same as they were last year, or if there's been any changes, that's where you need to declare them. Now, it's a bit of a pain in the backside, to be perfectly honest with you, but again, there's a cost to that. Not if you come through the Enterprise system. If anybody uses bookkeeping software like Sage or Xero, there's also a cost to that, and that cost For me, my, my Xero used to cost me £22 every single month, and all that did was allow me to do the bookkeeping so that I could then send that, all of that bookkeeping from that limited company across to my accountant. Then the accountant would complete my annual corporation tax return. So they'd make the corporation tax return for me, they'd hand it over to me, they'd ask me if everything was okay with it, and once I confirmed that everything was okay with it, they'd get me to— they would then file that return. And for the privilege of just those last two things, I was paying £2,000. If you add everything else in, so the Xero bookkeeping, £22 per month, so that's what, £260 a year, £50 to set up the SPV, £12 I think it is for the confirmation statement, it's a significant amount of money. And this is just into your accounting bill. So you need to take it, you need to take this seriously because this is a, this is a significant amount of money. However, there is a different way of doing it, and that is to let our source enterprise take care of all of this for you. And for that, it will cost you an ongoing monthly charge of £29.99, £10 for setup £29.99 for an SPV, and you can add more SPVs. The cost will go up per SPV that you add, but it wouldn't be, um, £29.99, add another £29.99. So all of that stuff, that's nearly the cost of just the bookkeeping software alone, and yet the corporation tax, the annual corporation tax return is done for you, created for you, and it's also filed for you. Now if some people are watching this and they think, yeah, but have you been using the same accountant for the last 50 years and I'm a big fan of that accountant, well, what we can do is we can still help you mitigate for your costs by doing all of this stuff for you and then giving that to your accountant so your accountant can look over it and make any suggestions or changes if they wanted to, and then they can give it back to us and then we can file that again for you. Now again, you're still going to be paying your accountant for that, but you might be paying them £300, £400 instead of £2,000 for every single one of these properties. So, you know, we got— I think we've currently got 50 SPVs set up. So we've basically got a full-time person here at HQ that files, sets up SPVs, manages the SPVs, files confirmation statements, um, and creates and puts returns together for us. Every single one of those SPVs we're going to put through our enterprise system, because with the automation that we can now put into this system, we ourselves are going to save a huge amount of money for doing this. And every single other person that's out there in property can do exactly the same. Now, the benefits of all this and the way that you save your time is because you don't have to be doing your admin. You can now be out there building relationships with agents going to— going on, going on viewings, finding stuff through property filter, going on viewings, building relationships with agents, getting into those estate agents' little black books so you get property deals before they even come on the market, and then getting those killer deals. And then knowing at the back end you won't have these chunky unexpected bills that are going to hit you further down the line. So I'm going to give you a bit of a, an overview as to what Source Enterprise looks like in the back end. You would go to our website, you would create an account on our website, and then you can go into Enterprise Enterprise, and I'm actually going to give you a bit of a treat at the end. I'm going to give you a code that gets you 3 months of Enterprise for free. 3 months of using this software on us. So this is what the kind of main dashboard will look like, and, and you can see on, on here each one of these are limited companies, each one of these are SPVs that hold, that hold property. So when you click on one of them, you'll then go through to like the overview and you've got the bank accounts and the expenses and the balance, and then you've got a list of all transactions, all your accounts, and then you've got all of the, all of the information that you— that, that to show you what status your account is. The other really cool thing that this does, which has plagued me for years and years and years, is that it keeps all of your documents in one place. So, you know, when you need— I don't know, you need some documents, some, some that you wouldn't have seen for the last 10 years, but you need something to show that you own this property. All of that stuff can be kept within our system. And then when you go into the property, again, more information. Everything's in the same place. So it's not just a bookkeeping facility, it's not just a mitigating for your huge tax bills, um, or your huge accountancy bills facility. It is the place that you come to to store all of your information for your property so that it's all taken care of for you. And then you can see a list of transactions. So it's a very— it's a— these are bank statements that you can look at as well. So you've got your historic bank statements, you can click on them, you can open them straight, straight into the screen there. And you can see you've got— you've— I think you need to keep bank statements for something like 7 years. It's all in one place for you. So that headache, that admin, that stuff where you kind of don't mind doing it, but it's not moving the needle, to use an expression that one of my colleagues uses all the time. What is moving the needle? And moving the needle for you is securing finance, finding the next deal, putting those two things together, building that property out, and monetising that property. You moving the needle isn't in all this admin that a lot of people get stuck in. So we save you time. We can save portfolios as well, because I've, I had a— I've got a friend who's up in Morecambe, and he showed me his portfolio. I did a portfolio review with him, and he had, you know, 15 properties. He'd done a good job, but when we took his accounting fees into, into consideration, is some of the properties that he had that he thought he was making a few grand from, he was making a loss on. So it can save portfolios. Obviously it's going to increase your profit because it's reducing your cost. And then just for you guys, because Guillaume really is my favorite Frenchman, I'm going to give you free SPV setup and 3 months of using Enterprise absolutely free. And the way that you go about this is by using this code: PROPFL90. PROPFL90. So if you go to source.co and you go to Enterprise and you set up an account in Enterprise, if you use this code— and I don't know whether you guys send out emails, or maybe I'll put it on the, um, uh, put it on your community that this is the code. I'll put it in there so that you guys can, can experience this system. You can move stuff into it, you can see how easy it is. Um, actually, one of the things that I forgot to put on there is not only does it set up that, that limited company for you, but it also creates a bank account for you as well, and that's all included in the price. So that bank account is set up and you can see the transactions in that bank account from the, the, the, the, um, the screenshots that I took of the system through Source.co. So that's all done for you. That headache, that pain in the butt, it's all done for you so that you can spend your time on PropertyFilter finding your next deal.

Chris, that's, uh, that's really cool.

Uh, you're gonna like it, right? Because it's a tech thing.

So this is right, I mean, it's gonna save me, uh, it's gonna literally save me like 3-4 grand a year, right? So, um, that's quite a big deal. Uh, I've got a few questions on that, and I'll put the link to the community space, uh, in a moment. So how, how do you manage to get the, uh, the limited company set up cheaper than if I go on Companies House? Well, Is it just the volume deal you've got with them or what's— how is that possible?

I could tell you, Guillaume, but we'd have to meet up in person and then once I told you, I'd have to kill you.

Yeah, right.

I mean, is it worth that? Everybody else on the call would be disappointed if I did that. So I don't think that's fair on everybody else. You're too valuable to the property industry, Guillaume.

All right. But is it just like trade secrets, this?

Yeah, I mean, it's volume. To be perfectly honest, it's volume. As soon as you throw volume at people, then you can arrange discounts, right? So we're the intermediary and because there's more volume that goes through us, we can be very aggressive with the discounts that we negotiate on your behalf. But it's you guys that benefit from it.

Yeah, that's cool. And then you said you don't need to subscribe to the software like Xero and stuff. Is that because you pay for Xero or is that because the software you've got replaces this?

The second one, yeah. So we've got software and again, it's all accessed from that one place. So when you're doing anything that comes to property, it's all accessed from that one place rather than having, I don't know, you might use Google Drive to keep your returns in. You might use Xero to do your accounting, to do your bookkeeping. You might have your SPV set up on your desktop, on your computer. You know, all of this puts it all in one place. So every time you go into that account on source.co, it'll show you what needs to be bookkept. To remind you to keep on top of your admin rather than leaving it till the night before everything needs to be submitted and then going through a year's worth of transactions in one go.

Nothing I've ever done like that.

Sure.

Never happened before, right? And do you offer migration from companies that are set up on Xero into your system?

Absolutely, yeah. And you can still take advantage of that discount code as well. But yeah, you don't— we don't have to set that up for you. We can take over your existing limited companies as well, which I mean, that's a huge deal, right? That's a huge deal. And I think we'll probably get more people that want to do that because you'll already be familiar with how much you're paying your accountant to do your tax returns.

It's ridiculous. Just like, it's just so archaic. They're milking me. I'm like, I've got literally some companies that accountant makes more money than me, right? So because of this just one little buy-to-let in there., you know, invest in limited companies, you're gonna pay less tax type thing. But then you're like, you have to give all the bloody thing to the fucking accountant, right?

So absolutely.

And then it pisses me off because he doesn't want to be on the phone, right? So like, what the hell, right? Yeah. So this is a problem I've had for a long, long time. And so I've been scouting and scouting, trying to find people who are doing this. So I'm happy we, you know, we, you guys came up with this, you know, on the On the £29 a month or £29.99 a month, is it the same for holding companies? And is it— have you got a limit of the number of properties and transactions? Are you got like tiers? Or is it starts at £30 a month and then it goes up if there's more volume or if the structure is more complex? Or how does that work?

Yeah, so with the holding companies, that's something that we're working on at the moment. We don't have that. We don't have that over the line. We're currently in negotiation because at the moment we can't we can't get a discount on those holding companies, but we'll have that in the next couple of months, I should think. Everything's just a hurdle to jump over, right? So the holding companies we will be able to do at some point in the future.

Okay.

What was the second part to your question?

On volume, you know, like if I've got one property in there and then a number of transactions therefore, or if I am actively developing 5 HMOs at the same time, I've got loads of bills coming in and out, lots of rent coming in and out. Is it the same, you know?

Yeah, absolutely. There is a— it's not a limit on the number of transactions, but the monthly fee would go up if you've got— I think it's over 15 transactions per month, but it's only up by a couple of quid. So it's probably worth, you know, to get the accurate numbers of what that would look like, it's probably worth running by your situation by the guys that work in enterprise. Molly knows the system like—

I'm sorry.

Yeah, she's— I mean, she knows this incredibly well. So put that question to her. And you know, this is property, right? So nothing's fixed. You can always, uh, you can always do a bit of negotiating to, to try and get that down. But absolutely, ask Molly about that. And you would do that— Molly would actually be in touch with you when you went through the system and set up the account. So she's the one that would reach out to you. So you can do that. You can use your 3 months for, uh, free, and then you can ask her that, that question going forward.

And, uh, on the, um, can we speak to someone, you know, so when we're part of this, because like it's so cheap, you know, like so, so inexpensive, you know, as a cost to do for all the sort of tax questions and stuff like that, we get to speak to someone or like an accountant or does that work?

Absolutely, yeah. So you've got, if you want to speak to an accountant, we've got an accountant that's working, that's working with us. Um, if you feel like you need to use some of that accountant's time, she's, she, uh, will charge her time out at £30 per hour, which if again, if anybody's ever used an accountant, that's incredibly competitive. So if you just need a conversation for a couple of hours, you don't have to commit to that accountant. You can just book her out for a couple of hours, go through your situation, go through your system. She'll probably bring some stuff to that, to that conversation that you'd never considered before because she's incredibly, uh, well-educated when it comes to the property world and, and, uh, tax mitigation in the property world. So yeah, she's, she's fantastic, um, but it— that is only billed out at £30 an hour. Yeah.

Yeah, that's cool. I mean, it's fair enough. And the, uh, for the bank account, so that's the cherry on the cake. You should definitely include this in the thing, right?

I can't believe that. I'm really hoping that Molly's not, not watching because if she is, she's going to give me some grief for that. Yeah, that should have been on one of the dropdowns. Yeah, but yeah, the bank accounts, and it's all set up for you. And I've been through this process, you know, I've done it with my own, I've done it with my own SPVs. And that little, there's a little list and you've got red crosses when it's being set up and you've got little green ticks when it's been set up for you. And it's just like you can go into it from one day to the next and it's like you'll see more ticks have come off. It'll take a matter of days to get the whole thing set up so you can start.

So like within days I sign up with this and I've got a bank account I can use for property transactions.

Correct.

And is it an high street bank or some online banks?

No, it's an online bank.

And they're familiar with property, like for example, I'm just off the phone with some guys in France who do like peer-to-peer lending and things like that. And they're like, I've told them what they, you know, the sort of projects were involved and like, oh, you know, can we send you a million pounds and can you do stuff? You know, how does a new company, new account react to sort of big money moving like that into your system?

Yeah, no, absolutely not a problem with them. We're— I mean, the way that we set this up is, is very transparent with everybody that's, that's, that's affiliated with this product and helps us deliver this product. Very transparent that this is the kind of thing that we're going to be doing. They know exactly what— that it's, that it's got stuff to do with property. So we are talking about hundreds of thousands of pounds in transactions. So really, again, not a problem. Yeah, yeah, we foresee— because we come from a place of property, because we're at our hearts, we are property people, we're property investors, we're property developers. You know, we ask exactly the same questions there, and your questions are really good, and they're the same stuff. It's the same stuff that we ask of everybody else that's involved in this. You know, we're not— we're not— we don't come from a banking background. We are specifically property developers, um, in, in our history. So we ask exactly the same questions, make it very clear to everybody that's involved in it that— to make sure that they can deliver to invest— to property investors.

That's cool. And with, so any banks can link with the system? So if I come with, I don't know, I'm banking with like NatWest and Barclays and what's the other one, Starling and stuff like that, I can plug into your system the same way I plug into Xero? So I don't need to move into another bank account to use the system?

You would need to move to our bank account. It would have to come across, so you'd have to migrate your bank across to us. And you'd have to use our system because it's so well integrated. We don't have that integration with anybody else, which again, when it comes to saving time, you want to do that in order to save that amount of time that will free you up to find the next deal.

I'm giving you a grilling, Chris, but I hope you see this as a true interest, right?

I've got an effigy of you just underneath where everybody can see, and I'm currently putting pins in it, Guillaume. No, of course, I don't mind at all.

No, no, it's quite honestly like, like this is, this solves a real problem, you know, like because it costs so much money for no reason, you know, like for some statutory admin, you know, when we want us to do so.

Well, if you look at it from a point of view, if you, if you kept bought a property and then you rented it out and you were making 10 grand from that property every year, but 2,500 pounds of that was going to your accountancy costs, that's 25% of your profit you're just throwing away, right? We're going to reduce that 2,500 pound bill to £360, right? That's a huge saving, and all of a sudden you've got thousands of pounds extra that you put in your pocket that you can spend on the stuff that you want to spend on, rather than your accountant spending it on things that your accountant wants to spend it on.

Yeah, that's absolutely right. Uh, any other sort of questions? I've seen some people were typing in the chat, but, uh, I don't know if I've, uh, leapfrogged with, uh, my own questions or if there was anything else. So please, uh, just put yourself down in the chat if there's any other question for Chris there. And I'm going to look into on the props filter thingy. I think we had a link for that. If that helps you. Any, any other thing, Chris, that comes to your mind, you know, you want to share?

No, I mean, it's, it's, it's quite a unique system. It's quite a, it's a different way of looking at it. So I just want to say well done to everybody that was, that's made it to the end, hasn't fallen asleep. That is still watching it and still, uh, because like I said before, if you're 5 years, 4 years, 5 years into your property development and you're already thinking about this kind of thing and already trying to mitigate your costs, then congratulations. Because we, you know, I can't say that I was in the same boat. I was still, I was still upping GDVs, I was still reducing build costs, and I was looking at all of that kind of stuff as the way to make the most profit. But if you're looking at this kind of thing, then that's, it's a very sensible, very, very sensible way to do it. And it'll it'll serve you well for many, many, many years in the future as well if you stay within property. So well done to everybody that was here.

Yeah, that's cool. I'll share the recording with my finance manager and then you'll hear from us too. Obviously we kind of talked about this and then you get busy and stuff, but I'm just so fed up at my accountant and the year end is soon, so now is a good time to thank everyone and move across.

This is perfect timing for you and me then. Yeah, absolutely.

Cool. So if there's no other questions, so yeah, please give some feedback in the chat. It'd be great if you learn one thing or two from Chris here. And then if you think that this is going to be, you know, everyone wants to save £1,000. So you get to spend your £1,000 on your Property Filter subscription. So this is like property filter for free, right? This is property filter for free 5 times. If you're like me, you've got 5 property companies you want to put through the system, right? So it's really cool stuff.

And I'll go back into the community. And if I see any questions, I'll jump on and I'll try to help out with them. If I can.

Yeah, that's awesome. I'll do a little post, you know, because I think it's quite important. It's these unsexy things, you know, that we kind of leave to the side. But this is where the money is, right? So we all think, you know, we want to make money, we want to make money. But it's so much easier to actually walk the line and look at the cost and can you mitigate some of the cost. And then literally you can divide by 8 this accounting time for every company you've got. So is quite cool, right? So really appreciate you coming and sharing this with us, Chris. And then I'll do a little post as a follow-up. And I think people saying I can't wait to join. So that's really cool. Any sort of closing sentiment for us before I let everyone go?

No, just thanks for spending the afternoon with us. Really appreciate it. If you've got any questions for me, I mean, my email address is chris.kirkwood@source.co.uk. I'll put that in the chat in just a second as well. If you've got any questions for me, please feel free to reach out. If you want to talk about property, I'm always happy to talk about property. Always have been, always will be. But thanks very much, Guillaume. I appreciate the chat.

Yeah, and actually it's really refreshing to actually have got service providers who come from the same world as you, as your world, you know, like from the property angle. Because believe me, I've tried to solve this problem myself a few times and spoke with accountants and this and people who outsource and that and all the reasons why it's impossible. So yeah, really pleased that like literally this alone pays for PropFilter, you know, so Quite a cool saving. So thank you everyone for joining us on today's DeFi Corner. So I hope you enjoyed it like I did. So very much looking forward to seeing you next week. And in the meantime, you know, visit propertyfilter.co.uk, you know, become a top 1% investor by actually following the Property Filter Blueprint. And I hope you enjoyed today's DeFi Corner like I did, and I look forward to speak with you next week and next time. Thank you, Chris. Thank you, everyone. Speak soon.

Bye-bye.