On the face of this…sounds crazy…..How can one buy property sight unseen?
Sight unseen in our thoughts is not physically doing a viewing. Our JV partners make a video of the properties they view on their phone. Just by watching the video get a very quick cost to cost out a new refurbished Professional Or Social HMO. The lynch pin however is you need to work with people you trust. You earn that trust over time. However we are in Liverpool, Manchester as well as other locales frequently to personally put our eyes on the works of the Professional HMO or Social HMO.
The question I have been asked is how to know they are honest? What we do is make it very worth their while to be honest. They end up making a great deal of money over time. This is not a get rich quick property course. This is grinding out, overcoming issues, dealing with the councils, dealing with delays, dealing with a myriad of issues. We have had potential JV partners that probably thought we were rather stupid. We have been in property since 1994. We know what things cost. We go to the properties. We watch the works of the builders of the Professional HMOs….more so we pay all the trades people immediately. We appreciate their work. We have mutual goals….Yes there are delays…but we attempt to limit the disappointments.
We buy HMO properties sight unseen, too. In fact, the vast majority of what I buy is sight unseen. These days, it’s very rare if I ever see them. If I were to look back at the last time I saw a property before I bought it, it would have to have been over 4 years ago. When we tell people we do this, hear the same thing over and over again…“I have no idea how you do that! I don’t know, I just need to see the property with my own eyes. I need to drive by it and know it’s there. Thank GD for Streetview and Google Earth is now a thing. Tough to fool Google Earth.
When you’re looking to buy the perfect house to raise your family, you want to see it yourself. The floor plan, the cars on the street, the color of the walls, where the TV will go. You want to make sure the house will work for your very specific, very unique, very custom needs. At least my wife would all of that. You want to feel in love with your house. You want to feel at home…
However when we are buying a buy to let….or a Professional HMO, it’s different. The very last thing you want is to fall in love with it. It is rather simple…DO THE NUMBERS STACK UP.
For instance one of our JV partners found a 5 bed HMO. It needs a lot of work. He sent us a video and in less than 3 minutes of viewing the video and checking comps & recent sales….he got the Whatsup response..
BUY IT!!!
Emotions like fear or greed make people do some weird, mostly dumb things. They can skew our decision-making and lead us in ways we know we shouldn’t have gone. When I talk to people about investments that went sideways and how it happened, I can inevitably tie it to an emotional connection they felt with the property.
I have seen too many investors come up to Manchester and buy off plan flats thinking they will make a small fortune. They seem to forget what happened in 2008. You could not give those pretty flats away….and was a losing proposition. Don’t fall in love with your properties. We buy unloved 100 year old properties that even my wife hates walking into. However, this is where the money is….even more so with Professional HMOs or Social HMOs.
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