It must have been a pretty slow day if you go by the length of my last blog on here. A great deal has happened since my last article for us all. Maybe your a totally new investor who has never heard about BMV Property, BMV Finance, etc or you maybe more experienced than me. I totally forgot about this blog if I'm honest and in some ways only started it to help with my google rank on my struggling buy to let mortgage business.
There was a good helping of bull sh*t in many of my posts and probably desperation to get client to use me for their buy to let mortgage.
We'll here's a brief run up to what I've been doing since along with what I plan for this site:
- Continued to struggle growing the buy to let business for a further 6-9 months along with struggle to keep all my highly geared portfolio tenanted and paying the crippling rates of interest.
- Towards the end of 2008 I realised that making a small proc fee on buy to let mortgages along with the high drop out rates from clients not completing I was working 12 hours a day for an OK salary but high risk business model.
- Still being fairly young I decided I didn't mind the high risks but I should at least be getting paid well for working under this kind of pressure. I was still being crippled each month with the buy to let mortgage payments on my "millionaire BMV property portfolio". If being a mortgage millionaire was the aim I was sure there but unfortunately many were untenanted and the gearing was at up to 100% real open market value.
- Being a big fan of property and still, against many negative vibes from property experts, I still felt/feel below market value property is a great place for people of all walks of life to become wealthy. I'm not talking millionaire but rather happy and not worrying about the credit card statement.
- I fell into looking at trading property myself from developers and vendors to sell to investors I had on my books or via other property clubs. Apart from the odd mortgage for current clients (there were not many) I focused all my efforts on helping find below market value property and structuring the deal with client, bridging lender, etc and making a fee for my efforts. I'd say through a mixture of luck and desperation I pulled off one big development which didn't make me a cash millionaire but did put me into a much, much better financial footing. I went from lots expensive un-secured debts such as credit cards, etc to £0 debt and a good chunk of cash in the bank.
- 2009-2010 I spent much of the time trying (un-successfully) to replicate the same bit of luck I had in first big deal. Although I did a couple of OK deals and my bank balance was not going down, it was also not going up much either. Probably around mid 2009 I realised that chasing after these big BMV property deals nationwide was pie in the sky and wanted to create a long term business rather than short term high risk gains. Up until this point all the deals I sourced were through third parties which resulted in lots of sharks stealing money, deals falling through, etc so the only way I could think to fix this was going direct to vendor myself.
- It was during this time I realised that sourcing 1 good local deal a month would make me a living, one a week was a very good business.
- Property Buyers Wales was born during this time and I started with 1 assistant, a load of leaflets, small website and plenty of mobile credit. It started slow but deals then started to come in and completing the first real deal I created from scratch was the best feeling I had in years. We slowly started to get a good local reputation for helping sellers sell property qucikly.
- Until late 2010 I have continued the same system and complete an average of 4-6 deals per month. My team has grown to 6 office and field based staff along with our first franchisee in North Wales in 2010. With our North Wales guys we now cover all of Wales. The whole business concept is in my eyes a small local bmv property investment company will look after their investors needs better than some National agent who had no local knowledge.
- 2011 - This is the year we want to grow out investor database. Up until now around 80-90% of our deals are sold via property investment clubs. I'd like to see us selling 50% of our own deals this year to ensure we can offer a much better personal service to both vendor and investor.
- During this time I've also become a bit of a builder as sourcing local deals mean you tend to find more referb projects which has given me the opportunity to cash buy horrible little houses fit for rats and turn them into lovely homes for local families.
Where is this blog going?
Not sure yet. Although I don't advise on mortgages anymore I still know a great deal about bmv property finance and buy to let mortgages in general. We run a couple of medium size websites which act as the day to day business so I'd love to somehow bolt this onto our property investors wales brand website to share with readers. If anyone has any ideas please drop me a line. Maybe we all decide this blog is best put to bed and I'll forget about it again for a few years but I do feel theres some good content in this blog so it would be a shame to delete it. In the meantime I set up a free property education portal on our main website. You don't need to pay anything and you may find it answers your questions better than a long post like this.
Please feel free to get in touch.
Kind Regards,
Daniel
