Dave Goodfellow spent ten years flipping properties and renting them out before a tenant default in Chester changed everything. In November 2018, he listed a townhouse on Airbnb and made £3,500 in the first week, compared to £1,300 monthly rent. That led him to rent-to-rent, hire virtual assistants, quit his job, and scale a property management business across the UK.
Questions this video answers
November 2018
£3,500 (approximately)
About 10 years
£2,000 per month
Chapters
I've been a property investor for about 10 years, but I did it as a side hustle as part of, as kind of as a side hustle to a job that I was in. And I started off with flips and then I went into a small buy to let portfolio. Everybody knows you buy to lets over in the UK that you know, you make a couple of hundred pound per let per month. If your boiler goes, you know, you wipe out your profits in the year. So I was working away lots of hours. I was leaving home on a, on a Sunday evening and coming home on a Friday evening, not spending any time with the family, being a zombie for a day and a half and then getting back to normal and then going off again to work. And I thought, this just can't be the way that I want things to be. This is not the way I want things to be. I want. The missus there fell pregnant and I was like, you know, what can I do to get myself out of this, this mess I'm in? And by accident, one of my tenants in, in one of my buy to let properties in Chester, it's a three story townhouse. She, she stopped paying and she'd been, she stopped paying for about three months. I managed to get her out and I thought, right, if there's anywhere that's going to work. Center of Chester, it's a lovely little Roman city. Three story townhouse. I give it, tart it up a little bit. I'll try this sale we call it over here, serviced accommodation. I'll give that a whirl and see what, see what happens. Didn't really know what I was doing, to be honest. Got it on Airbnb, got it on booking.com and I had somebody else managing it for me at the beginning. But in the first, first week of it being on similar to Ryan, I took a booking for three and a half thousand pounds in its first week and I was like, you know, my rent for this property normally is about 1300 pounds. I'm gonna clear like 1500 quid on this property. Net profit this month, which was like, which is crazy, crazy money. So that was in November 2018. In December 2018, I bought another one. I bought an old, a masonette in the center of Chester, three, three bedroom and turned into a four. Got that on the market as well. But that kind of was taking too long, you know, to buy a property, refurb it, refinance it and then get it on the market. So I thought there must be an easier, quicker way of doing this and there was. So I got into to rent rent to rent or rent to service accommodation. Started growing, taking on properties there because we. The demand that we had in the city was just, was just great. We still had somebody managing it for us at that time. And then we went, we got to a point where we were paying the management company about 2,000 pounds a month in fees and we thought, you know what, that's a, that's a wage for somebody else. So I left my job, I got into it full time. My business partner and best friend got into it with me. We then started building really smart systems around our business so we could use sort of VAs in the Philippines and all that sort of stuff. And then we, we use that on our rent to rent and owned properties. First made it, made it tweak and brought in all the really cool systems that could be run from our phones. We call our office in our pocket and yeah, went from there. Then started taking management clients on and yeah, we're kind of expanding right across the UK at the moment. So looking forward to this year. It's going to be a big year for us. Looking to triple our business. And yeah, that's it for me.
Having a blast. Gonna get it on the Bruce Lee podcast. Bruce Lee, like Bruce Lee. Cause it's so hard on the T is loosely making up those rhymes. Don't write it, just do it loosely.
