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Choosing The Right Property Strategy For You · The Property Unleashed Podcast

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: How do you know which the right property strategy is gonna be for you?
• 0:04
  SPEAKER_00: Let's find out in this episode, shall we?
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_00: Hello and welcome to the Property Unleashed with me, your host, Mark Fitzgerald.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_00: It's great to have you joining me here today.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_00: So a question I get asked all of the time is I'm not 100% sure which strategy I should use when building my property business.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_00: Because there are a minefield, a plateau of different strategies that you can use to create a property business here in 2026.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_00: So which one is going to be the right one for you?
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_00: Well, a lot of that actually comes down to your own personal circumstances, your own threshold for potential risk.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_00: Because let's face it, at the end of the day, if you're investing in anything, there are risks to be had with those.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_00: Now you can obviously remove those risks by making sure that you understand what it is that you're getting into, that you understand what it is that you need to be doing as well.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_00: Obviously, we can help you with that with ETA, our property investing community, which teaches you all the different strategies.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_00: But if you're just getting started in this and you're listening to this because you're quite new to property, or you may be still unsure what is going to be the right road or path for you to actually choose, this episode should be able to help you.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_00: But if you do need any help with this, then do check out educationtoaction.com as we have loads of trainings, tools, resources, coaching, support to be able to help hand hold you through all of these different strategies, techniques, and different ways of buying properties.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_00: So let's get started.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_00: Uh first of all, even if you're new to property, you will know what a buy-to-let is.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_00: Of course, a buy-to-let is where you have a traditional house, you basically buy the house, you make sure it's compliant for the local area, and then you let it to normally a family, a couple, or just somebody lives there, they normally live and stay there for around 12 months or more, and they use and live in the property as if it's their own home.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_00: Of course, they take on all of the bills, the council tax, and everything there.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_00: So if for argument's sake, and these are all hypothetical numbers which are quite close to my area.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_00: So if you're in a different area, obviously your rental income and numbers will be different.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_00: But I'm up north and it can be a bit cheaper in the rent, so to speak, there, but it's still pretty good compared to house prices, which are cheaper as well.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_00: But a traditional buy-to-let, a small little buy-to-let, will normally make you about£900 a month.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_00: You might have a£400 mortgage on that.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_00: Obviously, as I say, the utility bills and everything are paid for by the tenant, so you don't have any other costs apart from potentially having an agent manage it if that's the case, and any insurances that you might have as well.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_00: So, in theory, you could make about 300 pounds profit from a little vanilla buy to let.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_00: Now, sometimes that's really nice and a great little strategy to do if you're time poor, if you're working all the time, if you don't really want to have a lot to do with your property investment.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_00: The other strategies are going to be more intense, they're going to be more time consuming.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_00: Of course, with that comes great profits when done correctly.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_00: And it was this is all when done correctly.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_00: If you don't do it correctly, you can lose money, I say, in property as quickly as you can make money.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_00: So if people are just saying just turn up, do this and that, and you'll make all of this money, it's a pipe dream, it's not reality.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_00: We like to keep things real here, we like to tell you the truth.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_00: You can lose money.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_00: I've lost money on deals, but I've made more money than I've lost, so to speak.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_00: And what I mean by that is I've made mistakes, I've learned from those mistakes, and I now know what works very, very well.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_00: And that's why we help other individuals to do the same, to not make any mistakes that can be costly.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_00: Now, the next strategy is HMOs.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_00: Of course, they're houses of multiple occupation, and these are houses that are normally rented out by the room.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_00: So your tenants will batchly just pay for the room that they stay in.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_00: It might be an ensuite room, it might be a non-en-suite room with a shared bathroom, but you'll have different people living in that house.
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_00: Now, obviously, there comes expense with that because unless you're doing students, you'll probably will be paying the council tax, you will be paying the bills and everything, and of course, you will be paying a mortgage.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_00: But because you've got more than one tenant or family or whatever paying you rent, you can earn more on a month-by-month basis.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_00: So, again, taking our example here and around this area, if you had a five-bed HMO and the gross income for the rent was 2500, let's say, for each of the rooms, you have the mortgage to pay, which could be 600 pounds.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_00: You've got your bills, utilities, that could be anything from 400 pounds, 500 pounds with everything included there.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_00: And you might have a cleaner as well that goes in a couple of times a month to clean the communal areas, not people's bedrooms, but the communal areas.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_00: Then you might actually have that managed as well.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_00: So, unless you're doing a strategy like rent to rent, where you'll probably manage it yourself, you might have a management agent there, so they'll take their cut, could be 300 pounds there.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_00: So you might make 800 pounds a month.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_00: Now, if you looked at the buy to let, you're making 300-310 pounds a month with an HMO.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_00: Obviously, you've got a lot more cost going out at the beginning, but your profits will be better.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_00: So you could make you know between 800 and 1,000 pounds a month by having the said same similar property but converted to a compliant HMO for you know almost treble the profits on there.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_00: Now, the other thing that you could look at is serviced accommodation, short-term rental holiday lets.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_00: If you had the same property and you had the nightly rates in your area that were working, so again, if you had a five-bed property, so you you decided that you weren't going to do an HMO with it, but you still had the five different bedrooms plus communal areas, so that you could let your property out on a nightly basis to maybe a family that are coming to stay.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_00: But because you've got more bedrooms, you can actually up the occupancy so you can earn more money potentially as well.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_00: You might be looking at a gross income per month, potentially of£3,200.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_00: You would have again a mortgage on that, a serviced accommodation mortgage, which could be anything from£600 to£900.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_00: You will have the bills, you will have the utilities, you will have potentially cancel tax if you're just starting out, but you'll probably want to move that to small business rates.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_00: You'll have your cleaning fees as well, you'll have your actual management running it as well.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_00: But your profits on that can be anything from£800 to potentially£1,500 per calendar month.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_00: Now, when you look at all three of these strategies, the buy to let you can pretty much get rent insurance.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_00: So you know that you're guaranteed to make that month-on-month money.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_00: You will have maintenance costs, you will have the upkeep of the property.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_00: When people move out, you tend to sometimes have to redecorate, change carpets and things.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_00: The HMOs is going to be more of a going concern because when people move out, you'll still have people living there.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_00: But again, there's going to be a high wear and tear on the property.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_00: And serviced accommodation, you have to furnish all the property, you have to maintain that furniture.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_00: It has to be to a five-star service because serviced accommodation, think about it, it's all about the service that you offer.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_00: So it has to be maintained to a very high standard, and of course, that can come with a cost as well.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_00: So all of these strategies that we've talked about there are great property investing strategies.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_00: As I say, the buy to let's great if you just want to set and forget and build a little portfolio and not have to worry about it too much.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_00: The HMOs, it's going to be noisier, it's going to be a bit busier.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_00: You are going to have to get involved a bit more.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_00: Now you can still have obviously a management agent managing that for you.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_00: But the the there is going to be a higher churn in the people that are living there.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_00: And serviced accommodation is all churn.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_00: You might get some long bookings and things, but you have to be mindful of the fact that with serviced accommodation, you will have some good months and you will have some bad months, depending on the time of the year.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_00: Now, for me, I've actually I've done all of these and I do all of these as well.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_00: But what I realized is serviced accommodation is a little bit more up and down and seasonal, of course.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_00: Now I knew this getting into it, but for me, I like to know what I'm going to be making each and every month rather than guessing and hoping that people are going to book.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_00: Now, we do well out of this, and we we work more with contractors than we do holidaymakers or anything like that, or we work with corporate clients as well and companies that want to take the property on for you know a couple of months, six months at a time with a housing, the workers that are coming into the area.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_00: But you need to be mindful of the fact that whilst you might say, well, service accommodation all day long, better profits and things, it's not always guaranteed to be like that.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_00: So when you're looking at a month-on-month deal when it comes to service accommodation, you want to plan to look at it over 12 months rather than individual months.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_00: Buytilettes, HMOs, you can look at basically if I'm full, this is what I'm going to be making.
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_00: Service accommodation, you've really got to go into it for the long haul.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_00: You can't just set a service accommodation up, have it go in two months and say it doesn't work.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_00: You really need to be able to do it for 12 months and then review the 12 months.
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_00: Did we make good profits?
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_00: Were we making what we set out to make?
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_00: Have we hit the goals that we and targets that we set ourselves?
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_00: So it's just getting your mindset right for the different strategies that are out there because, as I say, people ask me questions about this, which one's best for me.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_00: It really does boil down to how you want to operate your property business.
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_00: Now, you can do rent-to-rent with HMOs, you can do it with service accommodation, you can potentially make it work with buy-to-lets.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_00: We have ourselves, but it's not that profitable.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_00: We just happened to have a landlord who had a couple of HMOs and a couple of buytolets and wanted us to manage them all.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_00: So we put his Bytalets into there.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_00: We did actually do service accommodation on those buytalets in the end.
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_00: Now, the other strategy that you can look at doing is of course social housing and supported living.
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_00: Now, I like this strategy because it's a lot more hands-off than the HMOs or the serviced accommodation.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_00: Of course, you again, like I say, you can have it managed by a company, but when you actually work with supported living or social housing on your properties, they manage the property so you don't have to pay a management fee, they take care of any of the minor maintenance if they've got an FRI, a fully reappairing and assuring lease.
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_00: And of course, you can do this for three, five, ten years if you want to.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_00: So, whilst if you're owning property, it's great to look at those different strategies, and you might earn more as having it as an HMO, you might earn more as running it as a service accommodation.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_00: There is going to be more time and care needed to put into it.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_00: Whereas traditionally, if you had a buy to let, I would now be looking at putting a provider in there on a long-term lease.
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_00: I might still only make 300 pounds a month, but I have no maintenance costs, I have no management costs.
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_00: So, all in all, I'm actually gonna earn more money, which is great.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_00: So, if you do have any properties and you're wondering about whether or not they would work for supported living or social housing, you can look at my company which is called Social Spaces.
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_00: Check it out, socialspaces.uk is our website, uh, and we have a little form on there which you can fill in and we can see because we work with different charities and providers all across the UK, whether or not we've got any providers or charities in the area that would be happy to take your properties on.
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_00: The other thing that a lot of my students are doing at the moment is doing this alongside rent to rent.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_00: So they're renting a property off the landlord, letting the landlord know that that property is going to be used by a charity and a provider, but they'll take care of it all.
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_00: So they act as the middle person, if you like, between the provider and the landlord, and it's called back-to-back leasing.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_00: Now, in my property investing community, in our vault of trainings, I have put in there a very in-depth back-to-back leasing training for you to be able to go through to understand this strategy that you can potentially use, and also for you to be able to go out there and find these charities and providers for yourself as well.
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_00: Because if you can find a landlord that's maybe got a traditional buy-to-let property, as I say, maybe they let it out for 900 pounds.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_00: You've negotiated that you'll take it on for five years and you'll pay them 800 pounds with a rent review yearly of between three to five percent.
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_00: Bear with me on this because I'll tell you why we'll be doing this.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_00: Then you take that property on, they've got the peace of mind that you've guaranteed the rent.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_00: Then you find a provider that is happy to take that property on, and maybe they're happy to pay a thousand pounds or eleven hundred pounds, but they're going to take it on on an FRI lease.
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_00: So you sit in the middle and you could potentially earn 200, 300, you can earn a lot more than that as well.
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_00: But I'm keeping the numbers modest because we keep it realistic here.
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_00: But by acting as the go-between, you can actually get paid for having a provider in there.
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_00: The provider has all of the cost, all that is the provider has a problem that's the landlord's responsibility.
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_00: They will contact you and you contact the landlord.
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_00: So it's a great way that if you're actually looking at doing rent to SA or rent to HMOs, having a look at potential opportunities that don't stack up as HMOs or don't stack up as service to accommodation.
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_00: But being able to put a provider in there also means that you can potentially help that landlord because we're always out trying to help people, but equally, on top of that, you can actually make money yourself from deals that just don't stack up for maybe your chosen strategy.
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_00: So if you're doing service to accommodation and you've looked at a property and you just thought maybe it's not quite in the right area, maybe the landlord wants a little too much rent, maybe it's just not right for service accommodation, and that's your primary strategy.
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_00: You could look, with our help, potentially if you need it, at putting a provider in there and just sitting in the middle and actually getting paid for, if you like, babysitting the landlord's property on their behalf and looking after them.
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_00: So there's loads of different ways that you can go out there with property and you can make a successful business from it.
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_00: And as I say, I help people in our community, which is very cost-effective.
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_00: Education toaction.com, go ahead and check that out.
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_00: We it's only a monthly fee if you want to come and learn these strategies and then be able to ask me questions when I do my live calls in the actual community, and of course, my inner circle members as well, my one-to-one clients that I really do work closely with, helping them build their property businesses.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_00: You don't have to do this on your own, but do keep checking out the podcast because I'm always dropping useful nuggets here.
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_00: I'm always happy to help as well.
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_00: So if you want to reach out to me on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, you can do.
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_00: If you want to have a chat about anything, see if I can help you with your property investing, then do feel free to reach out to us because we offer lots of free tools and resources to help you do that.
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_00: But I just wanted to really get you thinking about the different strategies that you can do because there's a lot of people that either think, well, it's service to accommodation and that's it, it's HMOs and that's it, it's buy to let and that's it.
• 15:08
  SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna flip properties and that's it.
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_00: There's not, there's so many different tools and strategies that, of course, you can use in property.
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_00: Why learn just one when you can go out there and you can learn a whole host of different skills to help you create the future that you want?
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, that is all I've done since I started in property.
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_00: I've just tried to better myself on a consistent and persistent basis each and every day, each and every week, each and every month and year.
• 15:39
  SPEAKER_00: I want to be the best version of myself that I can possibly be, and I love working with others as well, helping them to do exactly the same.
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_00: So don't just get caught up in the melee of buying one training course that gives you six weeks access to a coach, and then basically you're on your own.
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_00: Listen, you want to learn as much as possible.
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_00: Get out there and educate yourself.
• 15:59
  SPEAKER_00: So keep watching the videos, keep reading the books, keep listening to the podcasts.
• 16:03
  SPEAKER_00: And if this podcast has helped you and you've actually gone out there and done some deals, reach out to me and let me know because I absolutely love that.
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for joining me today, and I look forward to you joining me in the next episode.
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_00: Take care, go out there and smash it.
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_00: Bye for now.