Watch: Scaling property investment strategies for bigger developments

Speaker (00:06.254)

Good afternoon. First of all, thank you so much to the team at Coho for inviting me to come and speak here. Unfortunately, I picked the hottest day of the year and the hottest room to be in, but well done for being here. I really appreciate that. So as you heard, I’ve been investing in property for a good few years, 30 years now, and I’ve made lots of mistakes over that time. I want to impart a few things to you. I this is generally a pretty experienced audience here at the Coho Summit and Awards.

So what I thought I’d do was talk about really pushing the boundaries for you and getting you to think bigger. And actually to do that, I first of need to explain three traps that I’ve noticed, been investing for 30 years and helping other people do what I do for the last 22 years. There are three traps people fall into that will stop you from pushing the boundaries and thinking much bigger. So I want to cover those first of all. So the first trap is what I call the landlord trap. And most people start with this. When I started investing,

I only had a few properties obviously and I found it very easy to manage those very much part-time. I had my full-time job at Cadbury’s as a graduate trainee then a senior manager. you know managing a few properties is easy but I noticed something and that was the more properties I got the more time it would take to manage them and I spent less time actually buying properties. And the reason I was managing property myself there were three reasons really. The first one was

I didn’t really want to pay 10 % to a letting agent. Secondly, I thought I could probably do a better job than the agent. And thirdly, I thought it’d be great to get to meet all my tenants. That third one, as you know, the novelty soon wears off. And I realized that I was slowing down my acquisition because I was too much time managing because I was doing it part-time along with the job. So when I took the decision to get someone else to manage my properties for me, yes, I had slightly lower income.

but it freed up so much time, my portfolio shot up exponentially. And I’m saying this, I know there’s an experienced group here, but I reckon there’ll be some people stuck in the landlord trap. And it’s managing your own properties, that’s what you love to do. Unless if you won the lottery tomorrow, and you had 109 million drop into your bank account on Sunday, and on Monday you say, great, I’m gonna go and deal with my tenants. If you’re crazy like that, well fine, keep doing it. But for most of us, I don’t think we really wanna be.

Speaker (02:30.125)

managing tenants. For me, property is a vehicle. It’s a vehicle to give me an income to give me the time to do whatever I want to do. Does that make sense? Who’s with me on that? Yes? Good. Okay. Three of you. That’s good. That made an impact. Good. So that’s the first trap. And if you’re stuck in that trap, you’re not going to be able to grow and scale and think big. The second trap is I see a lot of people who leave the corporate world and they’re in the rat race earning money.

and they get into property and they just get onto the property hamster wheel. And what I mean by that is they never have any money because they’re always reinvesting all their money in the next project. And I’ve had a number of clients I’ve worked with who we sat down, looked at their portfolio, I said, what are you trying to achieve? I want to do this. I said, you’re already there. What are you doing this for? And they’ve got into this habit, this routine of just doing more and more and more deals. And to those people, my message is, well, maybe just need to stop. Just stop and enjoy.

the fruits of your labour. Because after all, what’s it all about? That’s what we want to do, right? We want to get this income so we can then spend our time doing whatever we want to do. And then the third trap that will stop you pushing the boundaries and thinking bigger is people get comfortable. They’ve worked hard, they’ve built up this portfolio, given them a great income coming in, fantastic, and they kind of sit back and quite rightly, they enjoy themselves, but they get a little bit lazy, a little bit complacent.

They’re probably not really looking after the properties they should. They’re probably not pushing up the rent as much and they get in this kind of lazy, shall we say, comfortable trap. And the reason I talk about these three traps, they will stop you from thinking bigger from growing. And why do you want to do that? Surely you might say, well, I’d be quite happy in that comfortable trap if I’m getting this income coming, I don’t have to do anything. Well, I believe that as humans, we need to keep growing. If we’re not growing, we’re dying.

And the world is changing so much with AI and automation. It’s a very, very different place, certainly from where I started 30 years ago and even a couple of years ago. And it’s going to change so much. If we’re not changing and adapting to the market and the environment and the economy, I think we’re going to cause problems in the future. So my message today is, I really want to encourage you to think bigger. What can you do to do bigger deals? Because…

Speaker (04:52.811)

I don’t want you to get in that second trap of just doing more and more deals. In fact, maybe it’s less deals, but more profitable deals that you are starting to do. Ones that are going to bring in much, much higher returns for the time and effort you’re putting in. Then you don’t have to be doing lots of deals, but you can make them really count and do really big ones. Now, to do this, you have to do what I’ve done. You have to get a team in to help you or delegate out to other people.

And one of my favorite authors is a guy called Dr. Benjamin Hardy. Anyone heard of Ben? Dr. Benjamin Hardy? You might want to write down some of these names of these books. They’re very powerful tools you can use. So one of his books was Who Not How? And that’s all about saying, look, you don’t need to do everything yourself. You can get other people to help you. I’ll come back to that later on when I explain what my big goal is and what I’m looking to do. So Who Not How is a great book. Another great book is The Gap and the Gain.

And very often when people set themselves a big target, they’re moving towards that and they sometimes get frustrated that they’re not getting to that target and they get despondent and then start to lose momentum. That’s because they’re looking at the gap from where they are now to where they want to go. In fact, we should look back over our shoulder and look at the gain, all the progress we’ve made. Because if you’re in a negative state, beating yourself up because you haven’t achieved your goal, you’re not going to achieve as much as if you’re feeling really good about the progress you’ve made. So the gap of the gain, another great book.

And finally, his third book I recommend is called 10X is easier than 2X. 10X is easier than 2X. And what that’s about is most would say, well, I want to grow my portfolio. I want to do more. And what they do, they just do the same thing, but work harder. They put more time and effort in to growing that portfolio. The challenge is you’re only ever going to, you might one and a half or maybe 2X if you just work harder, but you’re going to get exhausted. And again, what’s the point of that?

The whole principle of this book is actually to go 10x, you need to stop doing a lot of the things you’re currently doing. Probably about 80 % of what, I know we’ve got some high achievers in the room, right? But probably 80 % of what you’re actually doing is not really contributing that much to your progress. It’s the 20 % that’s really making a difference. That’s what you should focus in. So in fact, scaling to 10x is not about doing more, it’s about doing less. But it’s about doing the right things.

Speaker (07:13.749)

And that’s sometimes hard because we get into habits, we get into the routines, keep doing the same thing. So my question for you, and I want you to think about this, is what would your stretch goal be? And Ben talks about having the impossible goal. What would be, and you might want think about it right now, what would be an impossible goal? And it’s impossible because you don’t know how to do it at the moment. It’s a real stretch goal. Something you don’t know how to do, but would be

really excited for you and make a massive difference for you and your family. And so if you have that stretch goal and you don’t know how to do it, it forces you to do things in a different way. Because as Tony Robbins says, if you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got. If you keep doing the same thing, you’ll just get the same results. So to really scale, push our boundaries, we need to think, okay, what do I really want to achieve? Why do I want to get crystal clear on that goal? And then think, okay,

What’s the really big goal, the impossible goal? Tony Robbins also has another saying which is, what would you do if you could not fail? That’s a great question to ask yourself. What would you do if you could not fail? Because very often, we’re all self-conscious. We’re worried about, you know, we want to do well, we want to succeed. We’re sometimes worried about other people think about us, family, friends, etc. But really, if you just could not fail,

What would you do? And that’s a really powerful question to ask yourself to really work out what you’re really excited about. My really big goal is I met someone through networking, probably about a year ago, who is an expert in specialized supported housing. Now, have you noticed how many experts there are about supported housing popped up in last couple of years? Well, this is a guy who for last 10 years, his name’s Charles Hallett, for last 10 years, he’s been building

projects putting long-term tenants in there and I really love the way he does this because I rather than putting refugees or asylum seekers or Ex-offenders into properties which you get for normal sport and housing nothing wrong with that by the way and also I think the idea of giving your house to a charity organization for five or seven years completely hands-off You know living off the steam as my friend Dan Hill would say it’s a great idea But you’ve to be very very careful if you look at the contracts of some of the big suppliers

Speaker (09:37.195)

actually they’re not full repairing leases at all and I think there’s going to be a real scandal in a couple of years where people have got properties back and they’ve got big refer bills thinking the provider was going to pay for it and that’s not the case. So please be very very careful. What Charles does instead is we look for very specialist type of clients, someone who might have severe learning difficulties and they’re in a might be a big lovely house like this, a stately home.

that might look impressive, but really it’s kind of an institution. It’s not really much of a life for these people. And what we want to do is give them their own small, I’m sorry, small, good size, 45 meter square, one bed apartment in a small block of eight to 10, where they get their own independent living. They get heavy amounts of care, all provided by a care provider. And because we put a 20 to 25 year lease in, that is then seen as a commercial property. So it’s great for the clients. They get to live this.

a little bit more independent life with care. It’s great for the taxpayer because it costs a huge amount of money to have people in properties like this, the care, the maintenance, et cetera. So they save a lot of money, but also it’s very profitable for us as the investors. You get a much higher rent than would normally. So I think it’s a real win, win, win. And whenever I work in property, I’m always looking for that win scenario. So my big goal is to acquire these properties, building some, buying existing properties, convert and make sure they’re suitable.

And my big stretch goal is I want to build a £100 million portfolio in the next two years and we’re going to flip that onto a pension company. there might be some people in the room who already have £100 million property. I don’t. That’s a big stretch goal. And first I think, how on do I do this? Thinking back to Ben’s book, who not how? Well, I don’t need to learn everything about SSH because I’ve got someone else who I partner with who can do that.

So one of the key points about you growing and pushing your boundaries, please don’t think you need to do everything on your own. You’ve got to get the right team to come and help you, the right experts. And I would much rather give up a big proportion of the pie, because it’s a big pie by the way, to someone who’s going to help me. The other thing is I also recognise I can’t do it on my own. So we have a lot of our, I run a year long Mastermind programme, some of our students are in the room.

Speaker (11:56.051)

Pretty successful people, many of them have actually won awards here and up for awards, which is great to see. So well done guys. And some of those people are working with some partnering and I’m here and I believe you should tell everyone what you do, right? So one of the reasons I’m here is to say, I’m looking for people who want to work with me and Charles, who want to come in and bring some of their properties in or go and find some properties. And we’ve got about 20 million we’ve allocated to our partners, one about 20 people. So they kind of get about a million each. So if you want to achieve a big goal,

You need to tell people about it. Please write that down, so important. Sometimes people have a big goal and they think, well, I’m not gonna tell anyone just in case it doesn’t work. And that’s the worst thing you can do. You need to tell everybody what you’re doing. Let me rephrase that. You need to tell the right people what you’re doing because some of your family and friends, if you put stuff on Facebook, be a bit cynical. But what you need to understand about that is if you’re…

telling people what you’re doing, you’re sharing your journey, you’re not boasting, you’re just telling people what you’re doing. You might have some people who are a little bit cautious, a little bit skeptical, they might put some negative things. What you need to understand is it’s not you. It’s not you they’re talking about. It’s their own insecurities and it’s their lack of determination or guts or gall to actually go and do something themselves. if you write about other people, remember it’s none of your business what other people think about you.

Let them have their own life, get on with what they’re doing. And this is why Facebook has this amazing function called unfriend. So you’ve got to get around the right kind of people. The kind of people you meet to someone like this, who are all success driven, who understand that we are providing much needed accommodation because you know what? Landlords get a tough time, right? The press, tenants, groups, know, lot of negativity. The government seems to be persecuting landlords, but we are providing a much needed service. And I’m sure if you’re in this room,

You’re one of the better landlords, as most landlords are by the way, providing good quality accommodation for people who can’t afford to buy their own or don’t want to buy their own accommodation. If we didn’t have a private rental sector, this country would be an even worse state than it’s in right now and it… I won’t get political but it doesn’t look good, does it? But we are here. And you know what I said about thinking bigger and coping? Change comes, the Renters’ Rights Bill, what does it mean? So many landlords are selling up and getting out. Which is interesting.

Speaker (14:20.669)

But you know what? That’s an opportunity, isn’t it? You can either look at things, and if you want to really push the boundaries, you’ve got to have this positive outlook. You can either look at the negative things happening, and there are lots of bad things happening, or are they? Is it as good now to be a landlord as it was 20 years ago? No, of course not. But you know what? We are where we are now. And the good investors, we adapt. We learn. change to the environment, the circumstances, and we always look for the opportunity.

And I believe the opportunity is massive right now with more and more people wanting to get out of the market. And it being a bit of a buyer’s market right now, in some areas it’s picking up, but generally it’s still a buyer’s market. I believe we are in an incredible, if you’re in the position to grow your portfolio, this is a great time to be doing that. But set yourself a goal, set yourself that impossible goal. Remember, you don’t have to do it all. Think about who.

Not how, who can help you to do that? And keep on pushing the boundaries. Avoid those three mistakes. The landlord trap. You might be very happy managing your properties. I suggest you should get out more. There’s more to do than that. You might be in that rat race, that hamster wheel doing lots of property deals. Trap number two. Actually, maybe it’s time to stop. And you might be in a position you want to be if you just take stock. And if you are gonna do deals, why not do fewer but much bigger deals? And finally, you might be in that

Trap, which doesn’t sound like a trap, that’s why it’s a trap. You get very comfortable, you start to get lazy, you stagnate, and before long, five, 10 years, you’re gonna realise you’ll be left behind. So seize the opportunity, ladies and gentlemen, it’s a great time to invest. Particularly these next two months. These next two months, July and August 2025, when because of the lovely weather, everyone’s taking time off, they’re not doing the normal activity, guess what? There are sellers who still need to sell their property.

There are agents who’ve got time to sit down and talk to you and they need us. So if anything, if you want to grow your portfolio, now is the time to double down your activity, secure some amazing deals during the next couple of months while everyone else is taking time off and enjoying the life. Because I believe if you want to be truly successful, you need to put some time and effort in upfront and have some delayed gratification.

Speaker (16:40.553)

And the time and effort we all know you put into your property is going to be the best rewarded effort you’ve ever had. So think big, stretch your potential, set those massive goals. And if you want to connect to me, LinkedIn’s a great way to connect. So I’m going to be around later on. Come and say hi. And if you want to grow your portfolio or if you want to sell, let me know. I’ve got loads of people who want to buy properties. So come and see me and I’ll give you a QR code to connect. And hopefully we can see if we can help each other. So that’s pretty much it from me.

I was told I had five hours initially, then I was told it was 17 minutes. So that’s pretty much on time. Thank you so much and enjoy the rest of day. I’m to get some fresh air. Thank you.