About
I spent seven years buying property badly before I worked it out.
How a bloke in banking with one underperforming rental ended up leaving a director's job eight years later.
/waliur-about.jpg- 2013
- 2015
- 2018
- 2021
- 2023
2013. The first one.
I bought my first investment property while I was at Lloyds Banking Group, working on the demerger between Lloyds and TSB. I was an assistant manager at the time and, if I am honest, I had no idea what I was doing. I did not know what to look for. I did not even know what I was supposed to be checking. All I knew was that I wanted bricks and mortar, so I bought bricks and mortar. Builders saw me coming and I spent money on things that added no value at all. For seven years it more or less broke even.
2015. The conversation.
I moved to Nationwide Building Society and got talking to someone there who told me he was leaving. I asked the obvious question, which bank are you going to. He said he was not going to a bank. He was retiring. He was in his mid forties. He started talking about BTLs and BRRs and HMOs and honestly, it went straight over my head. But I could do the arithmetic on the part that mattered. He was not smarter than me and he had not won anything. He had just done something properly that I had spent seven years doing badly.
2018. The £40,000 education.
I did what you do when you come from a corporate background. I did a training needs analysis, on myself. I worked out what I knew, what I did not, and what I needed to know to build a portfolio properly. Then I went and bought it. Over three or four years I spent roughly £40,000 on courses. Some of it was excellent and some of it was people selling a dream. But what came out the other side was a process. Buying and letting stopped being a project every time and became a conveyor belt.
You do not wait to invest in property. You invest in property and wait.
2021. Keeping the lifestyle flat.
Meanwhile at work I became Head of Financial Services, then a director of product management, on the board, responsible for a £54 million P and L inside a company turning over more than a billion. There were nights I worked straight through in the office, drove home at five in the morning, had a shave and a shower and drove back in, because the release was going out and the board was expecting it. Through all of it I kept my lifestyle exactly the same as when I was earning £35,000. I sold my car and drove my wife's Aygo for a while. Every extra pound went into property. When everyone was piling into Bitcoin and Ethereum I shut it out and kept buying. I call it laser focused execution.
2023. The number.
My target was never a number of properties. Nobody actually wants twelve houses. In 2015 I wrote down what I wanted my life to look like by 2025, and put a monthly figure against it. Ten thousand pounds a month. Business class with the family every time, rather than rationing it. My own house, out of the area I was in. The car I actually wanted. And never missing a family event again, whether that is a wedding in America, Australia or Bangladesh, because I was budgeting annual leave. I hit all of it in 2023. Ten years planned, eight years done. The house I ended up in is worth more than double what I had the nerve to write down. When you plan long term, you almost always underestimate what you can do.
Why this business exists
When I got there I looked back at those seven wasted years at the start, and what cost me was not money. It was not having anyone who had actually done it, in my shoes, with my constraints, telling me what to buy and what to avoid. That is what this business is. I come from financial services, so even though property sourcing is an unregulated industry, I run it like a regulated one. Documented process, written scope, and every property viewed in person before it reaches you.