When I started my property company I had no idea what strategy I wanted to use. I spent 6 months travelling all over the UK investigating many different types of property opportunities, including ;

• House to Flat Conversions (Bridlington, North Yorkshire)

• Flips (Coventry & Birmingham)

• Social Housing (Folkestone, Kent)

• Turnkey HMO developments (Manchester)

• Sui Generis HMO (Kettering)

After each of these trips (often involving 1 nights stay away from home) I was left feeling as though I was missing something. Did I really want to create a business that required me to travel hours from my home in London. My kids were still at school and I knew that being away from them wasn’t what I wanted. I had to find something closer to home. I started looking at what I could do in London. My search drew an almost immediate blank. Investing in London to create a cashflow would require huge amounts of money. Money I didn’t have.

Then one day I came across a website that would change my life forever…..

This website was offering some of the most amazing rooms I’d ever seen for rent at super reasonable prices. One of the houses in Brixton was valued at over £2m and this website was offering rooms there from £950 per month! I dug a little deeper and was stunned to find out that this company didn’t even own of these buildings. How was this possible? To cut a long story short they were using Rent to Rent; a strategy I had completely dismissed as being one only used by chancers and those looking to  “get rich quick”.

But what this company were doing was completely different. Unbelievably high quality shared homes for young professionals. On the back of my mind for years had been the ridiculous rise in house prices in London and the realisation that when my kids moved out, if they wanted to stay in London, they’d be renting. But most of the rental properties I’d seen in London, I wouldn’t have let my dog live in. After seeing this shared house in Brixton I could now see a way of making shared living in London super desirable. I decided this would be my blueprint for success. My initial goal was to find 1 property in Clapham that I could Rent from the landlord with an agreement to re-rent to my tenants. I wanted the house to be somewhere that people would be genuinely excite to live.

That evening UrbanShared was born.

Unknowingly I’d unlocked “the secrets” to creating a successful business in property

1. Have a clear understanding of your strategy
2. Set Goals
3. Be excited by what you are creating

I also realised very early on (in my banking career I’d started out as a software developer) that it was super important to develop a set of repeatable systems and processes to ensure you remain consistent in whatever business you did.

This ultimately became the “4th secret” and enabled me to create the business that is UrbanShared today.

So what exactly is the Rent 2 Rent Biz Building Program? read on to discover more……