One Saturday morning, I visited a nice four bedroom detached house in Darlington. The owner moved to America and asked me to look at his property. He tried to sell it a few times with agents but had no success. It’s in a beautiful village location, overlooking the village green. Given its ideal location, I found it suitable for a rent to buy or serviced accommodation solution.
It is near the industrial estate which is one of the best places to do serviced accommodation.
Sadly, the residential sales are struggling a little bit with the way the market is at the moment. Some estate agents are still not back, believe it or not. This has caused a bit of mayhem and uncertainty. Progress has been very slow in the UK property industry because of the present conditions.
Knowing better, I called the owner who lives in California, America about their property and gave him some options.
For me, putting it on the open market like Zoopla would result in a waste of time. Unless it’s listed at an extremely low price which might attract some attention.
One of the best alternatives we could explore would be to sign an option agreement on it and offer it as a rent to buy. This way, somebody could put a deposit down and agree to buy it within four to five years.
However, I think the owner is slightly concern with approach. He had rented it in the past, dreaded the hustle that came along with it, and doesn’t want to experience it again.
This is where the other solution comes in
Which is to get it on a lease option and market it as a serviced accommodation. I’ve seen photographs of the property on sites where it’s previously been put on sale; but to properly explore this option, I need to have a proper look at the property myself. It is essential that I know its real condition. Nonetheless, the second approach is a very nice option for this property.
The only trouble we’ve got at the moment is that we’re doing a big refurbishment on one property at Browney near Meadowfield, Durham. The painting started this week. There are still all sorts of fiddly little jobs needed to be done, but hopefully, it’ll be finished at the beginning of July.
The property can house up to 24 occupants and we expect that smart TVs along with mobile phones will certainly be used. This is why we’ve bought a broadband server. We weren’t going to just install wifi considering the number of people that’ll be using it. It’ll definitely be going to pull a lot of the bandwidth out of it.
Our plan is to wire each room’s television separately accompanied by another ethernet socket. This way, people can plug up the computers in and that will give a much stabler connection than wifi. In case that’s not enough, we will get BT to put ethernet directly in boosters of 120 megabytes! I hear it’ll go up to even 1,000.1 gigabytes.
Heslop Street and Bishop Auckland
There’s also this another property in Heslop Street and Bishop Auckland which we sold on Monday. It was a two-bedroom that needed a fair amount of work to it. We agreed to sell it at £17,000 plus our fees. It didn’t need a lot of work to find a buyer and we sold it in a few days. How nice was that?
George Street in Sheldon
Just a little near this property, we have another project. It is on George Street in Sheldon. It is a rather nice two-bedroom property. There are tenants actually going in on Monday and it’s having a new boiler fitted.
Another project
We had an investor inquire on Monday and just said, “I want to buy a property this week.”
Our stuff really doesn’t sit around long. I figured that’ll be ideal for them to take a nice property on a mortgage purchase.
Believe it or not, that Monday was his first inquiry. After our discussion, he just said right up that he will get the mortgage application going. Then I said, “Look, I’ve got a good broker to help you,” which we have and does a tremendous job in his field. Then just that Friday, he signed the reservation fee, paid the deposit, and the property was sold just within a week.
We also have another three-bedroom property that we’ve been negotiating for quite a while with a gentleman. It just needs a little bit of work on the kitchen floor. Recently, we needed to fast track the repair because he has to move away with his work to Manchester. He wants the property sold fast.
York
The previous week, I went and viewed five properties in York. All really high end – two blocks of flats and three pairs of flats. The owners are currently doing videos and still photos for me. The best part about the properties is that they are in a really prime area.
Its not going to give massive yields nor going to have a massive discount, because, for this area, there’s going to be really good growth in the future. York is very, very stable. So if somebody wants this for a long term investment, it’s going to give them a 7% return with a good, stable, long-term tenant. A pretty good deal for the right buyer.
So, that’s all we’ve got for this week. Let’s see how things go next week.
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