Are you new to the buy-to-let game? Or looking to take your first steps to become a property investor?
While the journey is exciting, there are some easy mistakes to avoid especially when just starting out. To ensure you don’t make the same mistakes I and 1,000’s of other landlords have made we’ve put together our top tips.
Before looking at properties, you need to work out what type of investor you want to be.
- Do you need partners?
- How will you finance your investment?
- What type of investors will you be?
Some big questions to start us off but they will form the core of how you will shape your investment journey and the steps you need to take over the next few months.
Researching and Finding properties
Making sure you choose both the best area and also the best property is key to being successful in the property industry. Property prices and rents fluctuate across the UK all the time and being able to find areas with high yields can be challenging. PropertyMarketIntel.com is an online platform that helps with exactly that.
Property Market Intel will give you key investment statistics for any UK urban or suburban area and give you the insight you need to find high yield areas. You can also get rental or HMO valuations for properties so you can estimate what rent you will receive.
The platform will also help you source your investment properties with AI based sourcing tool that filters or properties for sale and identifies properties based on pre-defined investment strategies. You can then set email alerts so you never miss a property that meets your exact strategy.
If you prefer to scroll Rightmove, Zoopla & OnTheMarket they also have a chrome browser that injects their data onto each property listing page. Check them out
Managing your portfolio
Depending on your availability you can either manage your property/portfolio yourself or you can pay a letting agent to take care of the day to day management for you. Letting agents will take a fixed % of your monthly rental normally around 12-15% in return for managing your portfolio. However, we suggest that you utilise a free property management platform like Octo where you can utilise free software to increase your bottom line.
The cheapest and most cost-effective way to manage your portfolio is to use Octo Property’s free management platform where you can manage your portfolio completely free of cost and track all of your income and expenses and keep an eye on your regulatory compliance. Octo also has its own tenant app which can be downloaded to ios and Android for your tenants where you can share documents and communicate completely free.
