November 2023

This month was certainly a bit all over the place for us, quite a few unfortunate events happened causing additional spend and time waste, however these are all things that happen with property.

We had a change of direction internally meaning that we are now going to be developing a property sourcing division. This should hopefully result in us being able to help other investors as well as profiting from most of the deals that come across our desk.

Capel St Mary -

We completed on the property out in Capel St. Mary. This was fully finished and ready for the market. We hit the market around the 3rd November and within the first 2 weeks we had unfortunately only received 2 viewings on the property. This was due to some recently market changes as well as there being a lot of competition at the same time.

We since decided to rent the property out using a local letting agent and have received 3 offers at £1600pcm. This will generate some nice cashflow for the company and keep us going whilst we complete on project #1 and look to purchase #3 and #4.

Unfortunately as soon as we put the property up for let, storm Ciaran decided it wanted to cause some more water damage to the property. We unfortunately had a leak in one of the end rooms days before our first viewings.

Thankfully the viewings could see past this and loved the property, hence the 3 offers in under 1 week.

Foxhall Road -

The issues this month didn’t quite stop with Capel. We are quickly approaching first fix for Foxhall Road and the property is due to be water tight by the 20th November (or so we thought). When we came to remove the chimney breast just before the roof was getting fitted, it revealed some structural issues with the property that hadn’t been visible until the chimney was removed. The structural engineer has since redesigned the steels and added additional ones in causing some further costs.

Although this is somewhat unfortunate as we could not foresee this, it does mean that the property will be safer for future tenants and trades working on the property, and for a 2/3 week push back, the safety of people is much more important.

First fix date has now been estimated at 4th December 2023 and 2nd fix is estimated around late Jan / Early Feb.

Future property purchases and market assessment -

We are eager to purchase property 3/4, however it is seeming quite hard to find deals in this market. Agents seem to be holding out for extremely high prices, whilst the market comes down slightly. This is even more apparent in the land market, where agents seemingly want double the price of what the land is likely to be worth.

We had 2 offers in on properties with large gardens, looking at title splits. However after a discussion with a local planning consultant whom was suggested to us, it appears that the viability of both plots is unlikely due to some planning refusals that don’t show on the public database. This saved us heaps of time and money by finding this out earlier rather than later.

There was / is a property up for auction at the time of this post that we were extremely interested in. Unfortunately there is an incredibly large amount of interest in the property, and it is likely to reach a price that is unachievable and unrealistic for what we would like to do with it. We will however keep tabs on the property, as if it doesn’t sell for some reason we will certainly be there to offer on it.

And thats about all the good, bad and ugly that happened this month for us.

December is a big month for Foxhall Road and hopefully for a future property!