Watch: How to build and manage your HMO support team remotely

Grant Amos (00:09.688)

Thanks very much.

Grant Amos (00:14.146)

Good afternoon, guys. Good to see you all. As it says, I’m Grant Amos. My brand is HMO Matters and I run a portfolio of HMOs. So we basically, we develop our HMOs and then we retain them and we self-manage those properties. Now, it’s been some really good talk today, but I just have to say something really quickly about the instant generation that Lee referred to. My kids are at home on their own at the moment.

because my wife’s abroad in Italy with some friends. And my daughter just literally 10 minutes ago, she texted me and said, dad, I can’t turn the oven on. And I said, darling, I’m just about to do a talk. I’ll FaceTime you in a half an hour. And she went, can’t they wait? Can you just tell me now? I need to know now, I’m hungry. So yeah, it just resonated the instant generation. But anyway, I’m to talk a little bit first of all, just about my background. So I…

There we go. So basically I was in the corporate world until my late 30s. I was a recruitment consultant working on a very busy recruitment desk. But because I was never really interested in the corporate ladder, I soon found myself surrounded by people in that kind of mid-20s and I was kind of, you know, just about to turn 40. I had a long commute and a long day and was sympathetic to my wife an hour and a half away with young kids.

and felt that I needed to find something to address that work balance a little bit and just to give her a bit more support. Not that I was ever going to the pub with these 25 year olds at all, so yeah, sincerely just wanted to try and put that into place. I basically decided to look for a franchise. We spent about a year going to different franchise exhibitions and it was a little bit disheartening actually because we kept going to franchise exhibitions. It was the same exhibitors.

And we couldn’t really find anything that I thought would tick the boxes of what I wanted to do, which is mainly utilizing my sales skills. And I remember a specific day when we were meant to go to the, is it the NEC or NIC in Birmingham? it’s, think it’s the BIC, something like that. But it’s an exhibition center there. So we were meant to go to Birmingham and we very nearly didn’t go because it was a really nice day outside and we thought we could just go and have some lunch, you know, not worry about this. I’m sure we’re not going to be missing much, but.

Grant Amos (02:38.081)

My wife prompted me to go, so we went up to Birmingham and it’s just little things like that because had we not gone, I probably wouldn’t be standing here today and I don’t know what half my life would have gone to. But there was a franchise up there around selling a product to properties that suffer from mold and condensation. So you know when you get condensation on windows and mold on walls and those sort of things. So this resonated with me because, and this is relevant to this talk actually,

I was very fortunate, I bought a couple of rental properties in London when I was quite young and they had just been sitting there in the background and covering their costs, getting good rent, the mortgages were quite high and everything and I just didn’t think about them anything other than just a long term sit there investment. I had a condensation and mold problem with one of those properties so this kind of franchise resonated with me. I bought the franchise, resigned from my job, I was away from the corporate world, not quite financial.

financial freedom at this stage because I’d taken a salary drop. But it got me into rental properties doing surveys and I soon discovered HMO, House of Multiple Occupation and I was very interested in the supercharged returns and higher rents and everything else you could get from these. And it made me think about the rental properties I had in London and I put a plan together in terms of

buying houses, converting them into HMOs. We had a model which would be well-designed HMOs, almost co-living as they call it now, but that we were going to focus on buying these properties near hospitals. And the reason we wanted to buy them near hospitals is because we didn’t just want to rely on a strong job market. We wanted a fallback position if there was a recession or anything like that. And hospitals obviously have to keep employing staff for obvious reasons. So…

We just wanted that extra level of protection. Now, what that meant is our portfolio grew quite quickly, that there’s only a finite number of suitable properties that you can convert to HMOs that happen to be near hospitals. So we started in Guildford, then we moved to our Farnborough, because that’s near a hospital in Cambly. Then we got our HMO in Portsmouth, and we soon ended up in Bristol because I was just looking where all the big hospitals were.

Grant Amos (05:06.133)

And this created quite a logistical problem for us, as you can imagine, because I had basically sacrificed a job in London when I was on the train most of the time to a job on the road where I driving backwards and forwards to all these HMOs, kind of managing them, doing the inspections, sometimes doing the viewings and those sort of things. And I’m a fan of Jeremy Vine, but not that much of a fan of Jeremy Vine. So something needed to stop and…

We needed to try and find a better system so that I could be at home Not on the road and that we could scale our business So we could of course Use an agent I could have found an agent in Bristol. I could have found one in Portsmouth. I could have found one in In Guilford as well and we could have just given everything to agents. There’s a very good reason we did not and this has been alluded to already by Caroline

and Lee, but we’ll come into it a little bit more. And I like this slide because it kind of explains the situation that if you go out for a meal or you go out to a venue, what do you remember most? Is it the actual meal or is it the people that you’re with? If it’s a great meal, be it not of great people, it’s not necessarily memorable. But if the people are great, then it does become memorable. So it’s really both. And for us, this was the crux because we quickly realized we needed to maintain the management

of our properties because our tenants are our customers so we need to be there to offer them that management and basically give them the service that they require and also we quickly understood that back to the restaurant analogy these properties are about the people that are in them so we wanted to control what people went into those properties and select them cherry pick them so that we knew that the community within those HMAs

HMOs would be akin with what we were trying to create, akin to our business model. So we wanted to do that ourselves. But of course, we had the issue of these properties all spread around the place. So our solution was local heroes. We took a view that we were going to find somebody in each of these places to take away the main logistical challenge for us. So that logistical challenge is dead time on the road. So my wife said,

Grant Amos (07:33.663)

Why don’t I go on Mum’s Net? Let’s pick Portsmouth. Why don’t I go on Mum’s Net and some local Facebook groups and see if I can find some mums. There must be an abundance of mums who want a little bit of part-time work in the evenings doing viewings or doing property inspections. They can mould it around their very busy lives looking after children and whatever else they do. So we went to try and find these people and we very surprised in a positive way. We had really good uptake and we got very capable people coming to help us.

In Bristol we’ve got a mum of four called Steph who’s been with us for three years. does all our, well our tenants do most of our viewings so I’ll come back to that but when the tenants can’t do the viewings Steph does those. She does the property inspections and she can also help us with building up the rest of our support network because she also knows people in the local community so you can get these individuals that are below the radar. Good plumbers are below the radar they’re not on chequered trade at

my builder, generally speaking. It’s the same with maintenance people. So our local hero could help us with this. So Stas has been with us a while and that works really well for us. So the other part of our support network is the other people that we use. So maintenance, maintenance people, plumbers and all of those sort of things. So again, we kind of use a lot of networking.

We go on things like Nextdoor to find these people. We go on local buy and sell groups to find these people. And it’s quite, if you put a lot of work into it and you kind of just use all the avenues available, you can find these people. But here’s the thing, it’s about value. In order to attain these people, we found that it’s really important to value them. And you’ll find your own way in terms of how you might value people, but it’s removing the commoditisation.

and valuing them. So Mark, who’s one of our maintenance people, who helps in Farnborough, just after I found him actually, he was due to do a job and he called me up and said, mate, the van’s broken, I can’t get there. So I kind of called his bluff a bit and I said, Mark, I’ve got a spare van. Why don’t you come, you can take my spare van. What I didn’t realise is his van actually had broken. And he took me up on it and he came round and I lent him my van. But in my own way, I had helped him. I didn’t need that van. know, Mark and me are…

Grant Amos (09:59.327)

practically mates now, he’s been helping me for many years and I know that if I have a problem with one of my properties, whatever Mark is doing, he will drop everything to come and help me, know, provided I’m going to ask him every day and if it’s a real need, he’ll do that. So it’s really important for us to value our support network and that way we keep them. The other thing is always have backup. So it’s a really simple thing, but if we come across a trades person that we meet somewhere,

We just put it in our phone and we label it Bristol Plumber, Bristol Maintenance, Bristol Housekeeper. then we’ve basically, we’ve got those individuals details there. So if we are away, I don’t know, if we’re away on a summer holiday and there’s a plumbing problem, we can just search Bristol Plumber and they’ll come up on our phone and we will go to the people that we most regularly use. But if they can’t do it, we’ve got a dropdown list. So it’s very important to have that top down.

Just on value, our cleaning staff, does anyone have HMOs currently in the room? How much of their headache is it finding cleaners? Very, very difficult. So, and this doesn’t always work because some cleaners just, they will come and they will go, but we try to retain them by referring to them as housekeepers. And we try and give them a wider role so that they feel more important and they feel that they’re integrating with our philosophy more.

It doesn’t always work, but it helps. We’ve had some cleaning teams on our books for a couple of years. I think best case scenario has been three years. And had we not valued them and cared about them and paid them straight away and treated them well, that wouldn’t have happened. yeah, value is the key for that one. The other most important part of our support network is our tenants. They are the ones in the house. And if you look after them, value them.

treat them like clients as alluded to earlier, that will have no end in rewarding us as landlords, helping us to look after the properties because they report things and helping us more importantly than anything maintaining the community in that property because we will engage with our tenants and we will let them select the people that they live with. So if a room becomes available, they may know someone, most of the time they don’t, but sometimes they do and that’s a very easy job.

Grant Amos (12:26.386)

If they don’t know anyone, we will vet people on spare room. And our philosophy is very simple. If someone looks as if, if we feel we might have them as a lodger in our own home from the way they’ve written in their picture and having conversations on the phone, we will put them through to the existing tenants, for the tenants to meet. If we have any doubts about whether we would have them in a lodger in our own home, we don’t do that. So we kind of walk away from them. So it’s just caring about who we’re going to put forward.

then the tenants do the interviews or the viewings. The tenants happy and the existing tenants are happy. We put it all together and happy days. So again, it comes down to value. You’ve got to value them and give them the support they need so they carry on living in a great household. I’ve just got a couple of minutes left, so I was just going to quickly talk about systems. So…

We’ve got our local heroes, which gives us time back, which we can stay in our office, which might be in the kitchen or might be anywhere else in the house, but we can stay where we are. And that is invaluable in helping us scale our business. If someone came to me tomorrow with a really good property in somewhere like Manchester or somewhere else quite far away, I would not have a problem in thinking, I can’t take it because it’s too far away, because we could replicate that philosophy of finding a local hero.

and building a team around that person and managing that property remotely. So what else do we use? use, so what systems do we have here? We use virtual tours. If you’re doing up an HMO, always do a virtual tour at the beginning before any tenants move in because that way you can keep it forever. And if a tenant’s abroad and can’t do a physical viewing, you can send them the virtual tour. Great system, cuts down a lot of wasted viewings where there’s something obvious that might not work.

and had that person seeing the video, they wouldn’t have taken the room. So that’s one of the systems we use. We are very phone orientated, so we’ve got lots of templates saved on notes. So we can onboard a tenant literally from anywhere. So if John Smith goes and meets the tenants in our property in Guildford, Lyme Grove, say, and they both come back and say they want to move forward, we can send a message to John Smith. He WhatsApps the information to us. We check it. We then send him an agreement on signable. He signs the tenancy agreement.

Grant Amos (14:50.899)

We then arrange for cleaning staff to go and clean the room and the tenant moves out. And then possibly, not always, but possibly, our local hero will go meet that person to check them in and check out the old tenant, or they do it themselves without anyone meeting them. And that depends how much faith or confidence we’ve got in the cleaning staff. And I think that’s about it. And just probably a lot of people use this anyway, but I’m to have to mention it. With utility bills the way they are, does anyone use Inspire in the room? Yeah.

If anyone’s not using Inspire, get it in. It really helps us just control all the thermostats remotely. We can have all up on our screen and just every day we just quickly check that the right things are happening, the heating’s not on when it’s meant to be and those sort of things. I think I’m out of time, but yeah, that’s it for me.