#63 - Think outside the box

What I’m Watching

Gold Fever is a BBC documentary which is a behind-the-scenes look at Sir Steve Redgrave and his team on the way to his fifth and final Olympic gold medal.

Resource of the week

I use TurboScan for almost all of my documents, it’s on the app store I think there should also be an Android version. You can scan documents natively on the iPhone but I just love how intuitive this app is.

Quote

“I have often wondered how it is that every man loves himself more than all the rest of men, but yet sets less value on his own opinion of himself than on the opinion of others.”

Marcus Aurelius

News and trends

• Yet another shock to the mortgage markets as hundreds of mortgage products have been pulled as the Bank of England unexpectedly threatened further base rate rises.
• UK houseprices fall by 1.3% according to Hometrack, a minor blip or the start of a longer-term downtrend?
• Yet another reason to get familiar with the use of AI, in a recent Goldman Sachs report they estimate that up to 300 million jobs globally could be automated by AI. The plus side is that additional jobs will be created and it could lead to a 7% increase in global GDP. The question is how will this be distributed?
• In an attempt to solve Britain’s ‘broken’ housing market, Labour are proposing to force landlowners to sell land using compulsory purchase orders.
  

Other stuff

My brand new free Cursive Handwriting for Beginner’s Skillshare class is out.

Thoughts

It’s a strange time in the property industry. Uncertainty seems to be at its highest in the whole time I’ve been investing, at least that’s what it feels like to me. We have a massive rental shortage overall, but yet at the same time, large portions of landlords exiting the market. We’ve seen some of the biggest reforms in a long time. We had COVID and instead of a widespread market crash like what most people expected it led to a property boom the likes of which we haven’t seen since the financial crisis.

Now the Bank of England has been forced to pump the brakes by aggressively hiking the base rates to control inflation. In the past, this is been the catalyst for many downturns but thanks to more stringent stress tests and affordability requirements the market has remained relatively resilient.

Having said that conditions make BTLs much tougher than before. It’s to the extent that I think it will force a lot of investors to look outside the box. I’ve started searching and screening investment properties and there’s no doubt, fewer properties are now meeting the criteria. So my plan is to do what I did when I started out: doing a lot of networking. In terms of return on investment, I've always found that it's the highest return on my time by networking with the right people. It only takes one contact to make a big difference.

I think the opportunities are there, but investors need to be more open-minded in terms of what strategies are most suitable for them.

Hans