In February 2018, we were both working in corporate roles, earning good salaries but living beyond our means. We worked hard, played hard, and had no savings. It reached a point where we asked ourselves: "What is the end goal here?" That question led us down a path that would change our lives—a path that took us out of debt and allowed us to finally live life on our terms, fulfilling our dream of travelling the world and living off our rental income.
This is everything we have learned along the way, and our advice for anyone who has started their journey into property investment and seeks to find that true ‘freedom’ we all promised ourselves at the start.
We discovered property investment through a training company and spent a year learning everything we could. That education helped us build a sourcing business and start growing our property portfolio. But more than that, it forced us to ask deeper questions: “Why were we doing this?” “What did we really want?”
Initially, we struggled to work out our “Why.” Through the training, we were told it needed to be something huge, something worthy. But we could never find something that connected with us. In the end, our "Why" turned out to be something as simple as “freedom”: financial freedom, time freedom, and the ability to travel the world without worrying about our income. We set clear goals: pay for our wedding, travel for six months, and replace our salaries so we could leave our jobs.
One of our first steps was moving from London to Sheffield, our investment area, which saved us over £1,000 a month in rent alone. That financial shift helped accelerate our journey, and now we always say to other investors starting out, “What can you change now to get you closer to your goal?” What things do you really need in your life? And are those things getting you closer to your goal, or pushing that goal further away, whether through a lack of time or unnecessary luxuries?
In Sheffield, between 2019 and 2022, we sourced over 30 properties, built a portfolio of seven rental properties (though we’ve bought and sold more), and experimented with various strategies like houses in multiple occupation (HMOs), serviced accommodation (SA), rent-to-rent (R2R), and single buy-to-lets (BTLs). By the time we reached our goal, our portfolio was generating over £3,000 a month in passive income, covering our essential costs and giving us the lifestyle we wanted.
The real game-changer, however, was systems. In 2019, as we juggled property deals, networking, and finances, it became clear that managing everything manually was exhausting and inefficient.
That’s when Nick, with his background in IT, started building what would eventually become PropertyPipeline—our custom CRM designed specifically for property investors and sourcers.
I would return from viewings overwhelmed by calculations, offers, and negotiations, wishing for a tool that could manage everything seamlessly. There wasn’t anything on the market that truly catered to the needs of property investors—from analysing deals to sourcing to portfolio management—so we built it ourselves.
Initially, PropertyPipeline was just for us. It was built to help me manage viewing schedules, log property details, calculate deal returns quickly, and generate offer letters and deal sheets at the click of a button.
Over time, we realised we could systemise our entire business. We stored key contacts, including agents, tradespeople, and investors, all in one place. We logged maintenance schedules, renewal dates for certificates, and set reminders for tasks like mortgage reviews and refinancing dates. This meant that everything we needed was accessible wherever we were.
As the business grew, we started outsourcing. We hired virtual assistants to handle admin tasks and relied on local contractors for viewings and maintenance. The system allowed us to communicate clearly with everyone involved. Lockbox codes were logged, key dates were tracked, and any issues with a property were recorded alongside the appropriate contact details for a quick resolution. Every property had a digital hub within the system, containing photos, legal documents, tenancy agreements, and even notes on tenant preferences.
By 2020, PropertyPipeline had become so effective that we launched it to the public. Since then, it has helped hundreds of investors systemise their businesses, just as it helped us. Thanks to our CRM, we were able to automate deal sheets, track investor relationships, schedule maintenance, and manage everything remotely.
This level of systemisation allowed us to step away from the daily grind. By 2023, we had fully automated our business, allowing us to travel across the Philippines, Singapore, Bali, Lombok, the Komodo Islands, and the Gili Islands for six months while everything ran smoothly in the background.
We’ve learned a lot on this journey, and here are our biggest takeaways:
Having a clear vision of what we wanted (financial freedom, six months of travel, and first-class flights for our honeymoon) helped us break down our goals into manageable steps. For example, by leveraging Avios points gained by using a British Airways American Express card for refurbs, we were able to get first-class flights that would have cost around £14,000 for just £1,700 for both of us. Planning with the end in mind makes every decision more intentional.
Systems aren’t just about efficiency; they’re about freedom. With the right systems in place, you can:
Build and nurture investor relationships
Automate deal sourcing and follow-ups
Track key performance indicators to stay on target
Streamline property management, from maintenance schedules to compliance tracking
Automate deal sheets and generate professional documents instantly
Outsource day-to-day tasks to VAs
We’re often asked how we found our VAs, what we pay them, and how we work with them. Here are some tips:
Go on recommendations: If you see someone you know in property getting a great service from their VA, ask them if they wouldn’t mind asking their VA if they can recommend anyone for the tasks you have in mind. A good VA is unlikely to recommend someone unreliable.
Pay them fairly: We pay between £5 and £8 per hour for our Philippines-based VAs, and they provide us with an itemised breakdown of their work, which we then pay once they have invoiced us. We don’t believe you should have to pay upfront.
Keep your work requests concise: Give your VA tasks that they excel at to avoid overwhelming them. Before asking a VA to start a new type of task for us, we send them a Loom video explaining the task and ask if this is something they think they can do for us.
Remember, the more structured your business is, the easier it is to scale—and the more flexibility you have to step away when you need to.
It’s easy to get caught up in comparing yourself to others in the industry. But success isn’t about having 100 properties; it’s about building a business that supports your personal goals. Whether you want to travel, spend more time with family, or simply have peace of mind, focus on what matters to you.
Entrepreneurship is an emotional rollercoaster. We’ve had incredible highs and devastating lows. Staying motivated meant surrounding ourselves with like-minded people, setting accountability calls, and constantly investing in personal growth. Over two years, we’ve read more than 30 mindset books in our podcast Shelf Improvement Bookclub, which helped us stay focused and resilient through challenges.
Here are two of our projects from which you can hopefully take some tips—both on what to do and what not to do:
This has been our favourite project to date. The property was marketed as a five-bed end-terrace and wasn’t in the best condition. The asking price was £250,000—closer to the value of a fully renovated home of this type.
When reviewing the floor plan, we noticed it appeared to have been previously configured as three flats. After a quick chat with our planning consultant, we explored the possibility of obtaining planning permission to formally convert it into three separate flats. Our goal was to have it valued as three individual units, which would give us a GDV of around £370,000—an uplift of approximately £120,000.
The consultant advised us that we had a strong chance of securing a Certificate of Lawful Existing Use or Development (CLEUD), a strategy we weren’t familiar with at the time but is now a key part of our toolkit. A CLEUD allows you to formalise a property's existing use by proving it has been used in that way for a certain period—typically four or ten years, depending on the usage type.
To strengthen our case, we maintained open communication with the agent, who connected us with the vendor. This allowed us to obtain the necessary documentation, including Gas Safety Inspection (GSI) records showing the flats had separate addresses, utility bills, and a signed letter from the vendor confirming the property had been used in this manner for the past ten years.
Securing a CLEUD is a much faster and more cost-effective alternative to full planning permission. Since it confirms prior use, it also bypasses requirements such as amenity space provisions and overdevelopment restrictions—making it a highly valuable strategy for similar projects in the future.
The Figures:
Purchase Price: £250,000
Refurbishment, Furniture & Full SA Setup: £137,000
(This included a full refurbishment with a high-end finish—layouts were reconfigured, and all new windows, doors, heating systems, bathrooms, and kitchens were installed, along with furniture for SA and staging.)
Current Value: £430,000
Bonus: £24,000 VAT refund (as the SA business was later VAT registered)
Gross Rental Income (PCM): £9,500
Net Income (PCM): £2,000
Successes are great to learn from, but failures are just as important to share. Here’s a case study of what not to do, based on a project where we lost money.
We bought this property as a flip in late 2019. At the time, we were getting busier sourcing deals, so we brought on one of our tradesmen with project management experience and paid him an hourly rate.
Lesson one: Never pay trades by the hour or day. Always agree on a fixed price. When we reviewed his timesheets, we found he had spent around 15 hours just pressure-washing the driveway. Needless to say, we no longer work with him.
The property went on the market just before lockdown, and the sale process was slow. We were on a bridging loan, had an angel investor with a nine-month term expiring before the sale could complete, and our buyer was struggling to get a mortgage at the agreed price. A quadruple whammy.
To make it work, we extended the angel loan at a higher rate and dropped the price to get the sale through.
Lesson two: We should have stayed calm and switched to our second exit strategy by refinancing as a buy-to-let and putting it on a mortgage. Of course, at the time, no one knew what was coming with COVID, but this experience reinforced the importance of having multiple exit strategies.
The figures:
Purchase price: £81,000
Borrowing costs (nine months): £6,800
Sale price: £115,000 (based on comparables, we should have been able to achieve £125,000)
Refurb: £30,000 (around £5,000 over budget due to problems with the project manager)
Legals and sale costs: £3,500
Net profit: -£6,300 (thanks Covid)
Property investment changed our lives, but systems gave us freedom. If you’re feeling overwhelmed in your property business, ask yourself: What do I really want? Then, start building systems to get there.
If you’d like to learn more about how PropertyPipeline can help you achieve the same freedom, get in touch with us directly using the details below. You can even start a FREE trial of PropertyPipeline by visiting our website.
Website: https://propertypipeline.co.uk
Email: holly@wolfandsword.com or nick@wolfandsword.com
