Hey, how are you doing? My name is Samuel Leeds and I'm a property investor and in this
video, I wanted to give you my five top tips for being a profitable buy-to-let property
investor.
So tip number one is when you're buying a property, and you're buying it to hold onto
it and rent it out, I would always say, try and find ways that you can add value to the
property. So for example, if the outside looks a bit shabby, it might only cost £500 to
paint the outside, but it might add £2,000 worth of value to the house. So for every
one pound that you spend, you want to be getting three pounds back or lifting the property
three pounds in value. That's tip number one. How can you add value to your buy-to-let property?
Tip number two is to run a successful buy-to-let property company is to find the tenants yourself.
I know I'm a very systemized kind of person. I speak a lot about systemization on my other
YouTube videos. Letting agents often charge a lot of money to find a tenant, to vet the
tenant, to move the tenant in. You can be talking hundreds and hundreds, sometimes even
thousands of pounds, depending on the property. So what I would recommend, a little tip trick
for you guys, is go to a website called openrent.co.uk and you can list properties yourself on Open
Rent very inexpensively. Now when you do that, the property will be then featured on rightmove.co.uk,
through Open Rent, which is going to get it masses and masses of exposure.
Not only that, but when you have a letting agent advertising your property, they're getting
inundated every day, from all kinds of requests from tenants trying to view properties. Whereas
you, if you get called about this property that you've put on, you only have one house,
so every tenant that calls you, you're going to be trying to sell this house to them. I
think advertising a house yourself through openrent.co.uk, it's certainly going to mean
that you're going to save money from paying a letting agent, but it's also going to mean
that you can probably get a tenant in better and faster and you can do all the references,
all the checks, as an agent would do, you can do that through openrent.co.uk.
Tip number three is find a good tenant. For goodness' sake, the only things that's worse
than no tenant is a bad tenant. You do not want bad tenants. So again, if you're using
Open Rent, you can vet the tenants yourself, not only on the references and the credit
checks, but you can also physically meet them at the property and you can see, you know,
"Do I like this person? Does this person seem to be a good, reasonable, clean human being
that I would want living in my property? Or do they seem like they're on the run and they're
shabby and they've got 21 cats and three dogs", not that there's anything wrong with cats
and dogs. But you'll get a real sense, rather than just looking at a piece of paper. Do
you like the tenant? Because I'll tell you something, you want to make sure that you've
got a good tenant in your house.
My properties that on paper are now doing the best, that are giving me the best return
on investment, it's always the case, they've got the best tenants, they've had the same
tenants in for many, many years. So find good tenants.
Tip number four is give gifts. Give gifts. What do I mean by that? The agent who found
you the house, give them a bottle of wine. Your tenants that are paying you your rent,
give them Christmas gifts, send them cards, because a gift, what might only cost you £10
or £20, but believe me, when you're in the property investment game, a gift will go a
long way. Buying a £20 bottle of wine for an estate agent that found you a good house,
might mean that they phone you next week with a property which has got a £20,000 discount
on it, just because you were thinking of them and they like you. Buying your tenant a Christmas
card or some chocolates and saying, "Thank you for being a great tenant", could be the
difference between them staying in your property for 10 years or two years. It could be the
difference between when they leave, them leaving the property a bit messy and untidy or doing
viewings for you, making your life really easy for £20. So it's one of the best investments
you can make in property, is giving gifts to people that have helped you in your journey
as a property investor.
Number five, when you've added value to your property and you've found your own tenants
and you've moved them in and they're good tenants and everything's going well, always
try and refinance the house. I think, don't leave equity sat in properties. Most people
say, "I'm going to pay the mortgage off as fast as possible". That is actually not very
smart, because debt shrinks over time. You're best to avoid paying off the mortgage. Let
the debt shrink over time, because money shrinks in value as inflation goes up and then refinance
as often as you can and then use that equity to buy more properties. You've got leverage
to make a lot more money.
So those are my five top tips to how you can be a profitable property investor in the UK
buy-to-let market.
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leave your comments below and I'll try and answer as many as I possibly can. Thanks so
much.