What's My Strategy?
Having a Property Strategy is vital when starting to invest in property. You need to select this strategy based on two main factors:
How much money do you have?
How much time do you have?
How much experience do you have?
When I started out in property I had no money (I’d given up working in academia and invested what little I had into starting www.seedball.co.uk), no time (we already had two year old twins and a new business), and also no experience (apart from watching a few youtube videos)! This, you would think, was probably not the best starting point for a career in property. I also had not had a credit card so no real credit score, not got a high wage (in fact I was self employed so wasn’t even taking a wage) plus I’d borrowed money to do my property training… so I started out actually in debt…
Nothing however, is impossible to achieve if you have the right mindset! I had a number of ‘whys’ (having both push and pull ‘whys’ can be a great advantage:
I now had a family to provide an amazing life for, but I had no income and was literally living off Tesco 20p spaghetti.
I had started to develop painful arthritis and during my training I had to wear wrist supports to write and could hardly dress myself in the days after training courses, and had to send voice notes instead of written text messages or emails, as I had written so much. This meant that my bridges back to academia were burnt, my chance of making a success with a manufacturing business like Seedball were low, and I had to quickly find a way to make money that literally just involved me speaking!!
I wanted to do something big with my life! I pushed myself to get a PhD (despite not even doing A levels) in order to make a difference in conservation for the world. I worked hard after my PhD working with government and training academics to make a difference. Eventually leaving academia and training to start Seedball as a way to generate enough money to buy nature reserves. With property I could accelerate this path and achieve my goal!
To make this work I knew I had to do whatever it takes, and that it might take me longer than most to get anywhere!
First, I started to build my credit, then I began to build my power team and found myself an amazing accountant. I then started a business and used the name of a street that I wanted to move to as inspiration (we were currently living in a two bed flat with a cat, dog and two toddlers)… I then got myself a coach and began a rent to rent portfolio. Rent to rent is a fantastic strategy when starting out with little or no cash and looking to create an income. I used the income from the rent to rent portfolio to employ our first Seedball staff member.
I then used the spare income (yes! finally spare income!!!) for travel and subsidence and set about finding my investment area in the North of England and doing tons of research! My next strategy would be sourcing property (or deal packaging). Sourcing property meant that I could for a fee find run down BMV deals for other investors and guide them through the purchase process from solicitor and surveyor to refurbishing and letting. I created an amazing power team and repaid my debts from taking property training.
It was now time to move to buy to let investing! I still focus predominantly on this strategy and have built my expertise here, in finding grotty houses and below market value, refurbishing them, letting them out and refinancing them to pull money out and go again. Having built a solid base of cash flowing Buy To Lets my current strategy has added in HMO investment and minor developments.
What’s your strategy? Do you have any tips for me as I move toward bigger developments? I’d love to know! Drop me a comment below…
Ana ♡
Want to connect? Find me on insta @dranaattlee, or why not pop along to a meet up? If you think I can accelerate your journey to your goals get in touch or book a coaching session!