Early in our property investment journey, we decided we wanted to cement what we had learnt in training, by doing. So, since 2018, we've invested in buy-to-lets (BTLs) houses in multiple occupation (HMOs) flips, serviced accommodation (SA) rent-to-rent (R2R) sourcing and lettings management.
We soon realised that keeping track of the many moving parts of these businesses would be a challenge and so in 2019, we started work on finding a solution that would help us organise and systemise our property businesses. Something that would provide structure but was adaptable to change.
What started off as a system built around our needs, as property investors, quickly became something that would help other people in our industry and because we’d built it to support our varied strategies, as well as growing with us, we knew it would help other property investors anywhere on their journey, from newbie to seasoned professional. This is how PropertyPipeline came to be.
In this article, we share the four core areas that helped us generate the idea for PropertyPipeline. Four areas that are vital to systemise if you wish to scale your portfolio, alongside our ideas on how you can systemise them.
Before modern technology, you’d have needed to fill your house with filing cabinets to store all the information you need on your property portfolio. On one house alone, you need access to tenancy agreements, certificates, insurance policies, policy renewal dates and the associated services, like council tax, broadband and utilities. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg!
Even just reading that feels like a lot of information!
But the important questions are: what if you need to access this information in a rush? What if something happens to you, like an injury? How can your business partner or loved ones access the documentation they need?
Our advice is to have this information stored somewhere secure and to share the details with someone you trust. That way, you know where everything is, if you need it in a hurry and should something happen to you, you can rest assured that the person taking over can handle your affairs.
PropertyPipeline stores all this information in one place. However, there are other methods that take a little more organising, like Google Drive, or other, non-property specific customer relationship management (CRM) systems.
As property investors, we have an endless list of things we need to keep track of. Things like energy performance certificates (EPCs) rent reviews and investor repayment agreements. However, despite us having accountability, most of our tasks must be outsourced and assigned to third parties. For example, your builder or project manager is in charge of refurbishments, while your letting agent is in charge of tenancy agreements and renewals.
But the scary thing about being an investor or business owner is that, even though we outsource these responsibilities, if the businesses we use don’t live up to their agreements, then the consequences fall on our shoulders. Yes, your accountant should file your tax return, but if they forget, it’s you that HMRC will chase.
CRMs are often overlooked, but it is vital to have documentation of each task involved in your business and to have that task assigned to a key person. Not only does this serve as evidence should something go wrong, but it also allows you to keep an eye on who is doing what and when they should have completed their task.
Excel and Google Sheets are rudimentary ways of doing this, if you don’t want to invest in a system, but they’re time intensive with limited functionality (as it’s not what they were designed for).
We’ve faced issues countless times in our property business, with people not living up to their end of an agreement. It’s why we created ‘Tasks’ in PropertyPipeline, so that we can assign responsibilities to people and monitor progress. This has become especially useful as our portfolio has grown.
“It’s all in the follow up,” is a phrase you’ve probably heard people bang on about all the time. But, speaking from experience, it’s so true. Many of our successful deals have come from follow-ups. Here’s a great example: We were running Facebook ad campaigns for a while, to try get direct to landlords, for rent-to-rent deals. The ad itself was very simple, along the lines of, “Sheffield landlords are now enjoying guaranteed rent with no voids for years,” with a picture of the UK and a big pin marker on it for Sheffield. It had a ‘learn more’ call to action, which took the viewer to a Facebook lead form.
A handy tip here if using Facebook lead forms, is to ensure that one of the early questions very clearly proves that the person filling out the form is who you’re looking for (in our case, a landlord) and if they answer, “No,” to that question, you have the lead form end without allowing them to click ‘submit’. Why? Because this helps reduce the number of false positives; the Facebook algorithms would class any submission of the form as a success and then adapt the audience the ad is presented to accordingly. While this seems like a great idea, having it dynamically adapt, to build an audience that is more likely to fill out your form, all you need is a few people who think, “guaranteed rent” means you will guarantee to rent your property to them and Facebook starts pushing the ad to them more, not the desired person. The net result, without a well-planned form, is poor quality leads.
Anyway, based on this ad we were running and with some tweaking, we started to get good quality leads, costing us around £50 per successful lead.
One landlord we spoke to liked what we proposed. We viewed their property and were keen, but it took us a couple of days to get back to him. Unfortunately, in that time, he decided to take an offer from a local company he knew, but he did say to follow up with him in a few months to see how it was going.
We recorded the details in PropertyPipeline and scheduled a follow up task for a months’ time, to contact the vendor. When we did contact him, it turned out the local company was quite unscrupulous, but he was tied into a contact with them. However, he was keener to work with us. Because of this, he recommended us to a friend that had a flat next door to his and through that, we got a great rent-to-rent deal in the same location, which has now been in our portfolio for a whole year. We still follow up with the original landlord and he’s since offered us other properties, which we’re looking at taking on.
3-bed flat – sleeps up to nine people.
Rent – £700 PCM (market rate around £850)
Council tax, utilities, broadband, Netflix – £324 PCM
Cleaning, consumables, laundry – £430 PCM
Average income PCM – £2,903
Deposit – £0
Term – 5 years, with 1-year break clause for us
Setup (furniture, artwork, linen, bedding, kitchenware, staging) – £10,218
Professional photos – £100
It can be easy to get bogged down with calculations and spreadsheets when initially evaluating a deal. In reality, what you need to do is quickly qualify deals, so you know whether they’re worth your time, before you move onto viewings or other heavy calculations.
At the beginning of our property journey, we were using spreadsheets for this, which became progressively more complex. Eventually, one of our first mentors, Debbie Dorans, helped reset our view on this, by bringing it back to basics to focus on around ten key values, to qualify the deal, test different strategies and allow us to make an offer fast. Using this approach, we started getting more deals accepted by being quick to offer, sometimes on the spot at the viewing.
We’ve used a simple deal calculation and analysis approach in PropertyPipeline to make sure we stick to just the key factors we need to consider.
Now, if it looks good, we proceed to view and then have our numbers ready to offer on the spot. If we qualified it, then we just follow up in a few months, to see if it’s still on the market or if the price has reduced enough for it to work for us.
The comparing strategies approach helped us get one of our best cash-flowing deals – a 5-bed conversion into three flats, in an area that was good for capital growth. As a BTL it would have been a very low ROI at 6% and as an HMO, would have been not much more, at 8%. However, when we ran the numbers for serviced accommodation, we quickly saw it would be a great way to acquire this property, in a sought after area with a great ROI and then, once the SA income had paid off the refurb cost, it could easily fall back to a low maintenance unit of three buy-to-lets. Here’s the numbers for SA:
Purchase price: £250,000
Final valuation: £370,000 (bricks and mortar, multi-unit freehold mortgage, with permission for SA)
Mortgage: £1,050 PCM
Council tax, utilities, broadband: £980 PCM
Purchase, refurb, setup: £170,000
Gross income monthly: £9,900 (Nov 2023)
Get 10% off our system as a member of Blue Bricks Magazine.
These are just a few areas that show having the right systems in place, can power your success. Books like Atomic Habits and The Slight Edge, talk about many small changes having a big effect, or repetitive productive actions, making a real difference over a period of time.
We’ll continue to grow and develop PropertyPipeline, based on real user feedback and our own experiences, as we continue to grow in property, making sure our users can further benefit from the improvements and enhancements we introduce, just like Atomic Habits.
Get in touch with us if you’d like to know more , or book a 121 call here – to discuss how PropertyPipeline can help you. Blue Bricks members get 10% off.
Find out more about PropertyPipeline at https://propertypipeline.co.uk
Find me on Insta @hollyosbornproperty
