{"id":3207,"date":"2015-08-12T16:55:10","date_gmt":"2015-08-12T15:55:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.colinmcnulty.com\/blog\/?p=3207"},"modified":"2015-09-21T13:10:55","modified_gmt":"2015-09-21T12:10:55","slug":"july-property-update-flat-flats-flats","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.colinmcnulty.com\/blog\/2015\/08\/12\/july-property-update-flat-flats-flats\/","title":{"rendered":"July Property Update &#8211; Flat, Flats, Flats!"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>July has seen been a good month with some good progress and some great prospective deals. I&#8217;m buying my first flat in Manchester at a genuine 23% discount off it&#8217;s market value; have agreed to buy 4 flats and their freehold in Bristol, and getting close to 3 other deals.<\/p>\n<p><strong>1) Lease Options <\/strong>&#8211; The 3 Bury flats I&#8217;m acquiring on lease options are progressing. We&#8217;ve had some remedial work done (damp proof course and wood worm treated) and have started interviewing tenant buyers, with one interested in taking all 3 flats for his extended family.<\/p>\n<p><strong>2) LHA HMO<\/strong> &#8211; I&#8217;ve finally got read of my most troublesome tenant so far. He was a pleasant and intelligent enough chap&#8230; when sober, which wasn&#8217;t too often sadly. However I used some of the techniques taught by Jim Haliburton (the HMO Daddy) from his DIY Eviction course which I went on last year, and the tenant left without any issue and without the need for expensive and time consuming court action. Marvellous, thanks Jim!<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\">The tenant who intercepted 2 months worth of housing benefit has started to pay that back by earning his keep and I&#8217;ve put him to good use cleaning up after the tenant who left and painting his room. So far, that&#8217;s working well.<\/p>\n<p>Now I need turn the same eviction techniques on my second to worse tenant. As I&#8217;m writing this I&#8217;ve just had a call from one of the local bobbies asking for access to the HMO as one of the neighbours have called the police due to his arguing with his girlfriend. *sigh*<\/p>\n<p><strong>3) Property Sourcing<\/strong> &#8211; The repo properties I mentioned last time haven&#8217;t come off. It&#8217;s a long story but unbelievably, 3 houses within 20m of each other have all been repossessed within 2 months of each other. The insider info I had was that one of the houses splitting them had been sold setting a new sealing price for the road, which was what I was basing my post-refurb value estimates on. Sadly that property has fallen through, so I&#8217;m no longer confident of the end value and have withdrawn my offer&#8230; just as the bank were saying they would accept it next Thursday when they dropped the price again!<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\">Last month I was hoping to try a rent 2 rent \/ lease option, with advanced LHA strategy with a local landlord I&#8217;d contacted. However my powers of persuasion are clearly not yet perfected as I&#8217;ve been unable to convince him to go for the deal. Which was a shame as a fake ad on GumTree has resulted in about 15 possible tenants, of which 4 or 5 were serious possibilities.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s taken some looking but I&#8217;ve finally found a property sourcer who&#8217;s doing things what I would call &#8220;properly&#8221;. There are many wannabe property sourcers out there, many of whom are really nice and earnest people, but who aren&#8217;t able to come up with the goods. This guy can and is though and I&#8217;ve already bought 1 deal off him: a cheeky little flat. I&#8217;ll give you the full details once we&#8217;ve exchanged but it&#8217;s a genuine 23% BMV (Below Market Value) deal, from another property investor how just wants a hassle free and quick sale. Perfect.<\/p>\n<p><strong>4) Flats, Flats, Flats<\/strong> &#8211; You know it&#8217;s funny, I never had any intention of buying flats, but like London buses, 3 deals seem to have all come along at once.<\/p>\n<p>As well as the flat above, I&#8217;ve agreed to buy 4 flats and their freehold down in Bristol as a JV with a southern investor friend of mine. I&#8217;m putting up the cash, he&#8217;s doing all the work and we&#8217;re splitting the deal 50:50, nice and simple. Hopefully I&#8217;ll be able to give you more details next month. This deal also has the benefit of leveraging my friend&#8217;s previous relationship with Shawbrook for the financing, which gets me an &#8220;in&#8221; with them for future deals.<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\">I&#8217;m also looking at a block of 15 flats in the NW that I&#8217;ve come across, which I think I can pickup for less than \u00a320k per flat! It&#8217;s early stages at the moment but I suspect there&#8217;s a planning issue, so I&#8217;ve booked a call with a planning consultant; if I can fix that problem, that&#8217;s a game changing deal for me. It&#8217;s been helped by using a bit of internet sleathing to get the phone number of the vendor directly. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n<p><strong>5) Pub to Flat Conversion <\/strong>&#8211; Yet another flat deal is a pub that I&#8217;ve found that&#8217;s half way through a conversion into flats, but the project has been stalled for several years. The developer who owns it just hasn&#8217;t got the time &amp; resources to finish it, so I&#8217;m negotiating with him on a price to take it off his hands. The tricky bit is working out how much it will cost to finish the job, as he&#8217;s a thumb in the air kind of guy, so there&#8217;s no schedule of works to go off.<\/p>\n<p><strong>6) Direct to Vendor<\/strong> &#8211; As I mentioned last time, I&#8217;m still working on improving my patter for direct to vendor negotiations, and it&#8217;s improving. One deal I&#8217;m working on for example is a divorcing couple, however the relationship has broken down and they&#8217;ve both said to me that they&#8217;d be happy for the property to be repossessed before they see the other half benefit from it!<\/p>\n<p>As June was, July has been another good month, with some real progress and some tantalisingly large deals within reach. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>July has seen been a good month with some good progress and some great prospective deals. I&#8217;m buying my first flat in Manchester at a genuine 23% discount off it&#8217;s market value; have agreed to buy 4 flats and their freehold in Bristol, and getting close to 3 other deals. 1) Lease Options &#8211; The [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":161,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1,327],"tags":[59,361,356,362,328],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.colinmcnulty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3207"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.colinmcnulty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.colinmcnulty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.colinmcnulty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/161"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.colinmcnulty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3207"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.colinmcnulty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3207\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3208,"href":"https:\/\/www.colinmcnulty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3207\/revisions\/3208"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.colinmcnulty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3207"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.colinmcnulty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3207"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.colinmcnulty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3207"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}