Hey readers! Thanks for all the private messages and Likes you’ve given us for parts one and two of our interview with Swedish property entrepreneur, and all-round hard worker, Daniel Wood. Many of you may not know this but Daniel Wood was not a university graduate. He was just a very hard working family guy who hopes this interview and the previous ones will help and inspire others to do well in life.
Many of you may not know this but Daniel Wood was not a university graduate. He was just a very hard working family guy who hopes this interview and the previous ones will help and inspire others to do well in life.
Daniel’s route to financial freedom was through property, and in this final interview he reveals; further secrets from his personal life on how he was able to achieve success quickly.
To be a property millionaire, your net assets must be in the millions. The original video interview quotes the asset values and none of the liabilities, thus it’s potentially a misleading statement to say you’re a property millionaire. What’s your insight here?
I appreciate you asking Ben. We had, of course, discussed this at length before starting the interview and were both on the same page. Obviously, people viewing part one of the interview had not been privy to our conversation and therefore only heard us mention the asset value.
When measuring the value of a property portfolio, you can use many different variables; your number of properties, income, total asset value, or net asset value. In the video what I am referring to is net asset value meaning the total value of the properties less the liabilities.
I love the millionaire mark, although today “millionaire” doesn’t amount to the phenomenal amount it used to be, it is still quite an achievement. Does a £1m asset base mean £1m of property or equity?
It has been an amazing journey that has led us to meet some great people and hopefully we have helped some people along the way. To me, a one million pound asset base means equity, that might be an incorrect use of terms but that was the meaning when I said it.
As you say, it doesn’t mean that much but it is a milestone. Just like making your first 10k, 100k, 10 million, 100 million, 500 million and 1 billion are all milestones. To us, this was an important step to hit, before setting our sights on the next milestone.
What does financial freedom mean to you?
To me, the number one thing, always, is to be able to spend time with my family. I never want to be the father that doesn’t have time for his children because work is in the way and my wife is the same way. We are a team and we work together and we want to have the financial flexibility to get to know our children.
I never want to be the father that doesn’t have time for his children because work is in the way, and my wife is the same way. We are a team and we work together and we want to have the financial flexibility to get to know our children.
Naturally, we want to build our dream home, travel the world, fly first class and never have to look at a price tag when in a store but all that is secondary to spending time with each other.
A year is no time at all to experience rent arrears, voids, tenant damaging the property and general maintenance. What provisions have you made for general wear and tear and general property risks?
That is very true, we are still new to property and we still have a lot to learn. Luckily we have a great support system. Our support system consists of; our mentor Hagar Hatchard (the godfather of our son Alexander “Hagar” MacClaren Wood), David Temple who has over 50 years experience in property who helps us, and our coach Jason Gilbert who has done commercial properties and developments for over 30 years and calls us every other week.
Naturally, we have also used the Legacy Elite training education where we learned to always put away money for monthly operating expenses, for buy-to-lets we put away 12 per cent and for our HMOs we put away 25 per cent. I know this is more than Legacy teaches, but we have chosen to keep ourselves safe by putting up an extra barrier for ourselves if anything goes south.
We did not have time to discuss tenants in our part one and part two of our interview with you. Is your strategy based on flips or rental income?
Mainly we focus on rental income although we do occasionally flip, and in 2016 expect to do many developments that we will sell. In both cases, we have clients to satisfy, our mentor Hagar Hatchard of Hatchard Homes Ltd has won “UK landlord of the year” and “small UK developer of the year” multiple times because of the quality he provides tenants and home buyers.
We aspire to follow in his footsteps and always try to do up our properties to the highest possible standard.
We also do bi-annually tenant reviews so that tenants can give us direct feedback about our lettings agents and properties to make sure that we don’t miss anything and don’t miss information from our tenants.
What have you put in place to create safe and compliant homes for your tenants?
In our HMOs, we follow every HMO regulation and always make sure to get the highest quality of fire protection. We would never forgive ourselves if anything happened in one of our homes because we have chosen a cheaper option and vow to never let it happen!
As you are based in Sweden, what do you understand by the term “ethical service” and what have you put in place to ensure your business is ethically run?
Sweden it is one of the most conscious countries in the world when it comes to ethical and environmental concerns. This is where we grew up and it is with those values that we run our business.
We expect everyone on our team to treat people with respect, follow every rule in the book, and do the little extra, to make sure people are taken care of. That is a reason that we do our bi-annual rental surveys to make sure that we aren’t missing anything and that everyone is taken care of correctly.
What is your preference? Property investor, landlord or both?
Both are just terms and with different people (banks, investors, tenants, buyers) I would use different terms. Personally, I call myself a property entrepreneur.
How has your landlord journey transformed since you first started out in property?
We believed we would start slow and take it one step at a time, doing buy-to-lets before moving into HMOs, then blocks of flats and finally developments and commercial. Instead, we have grown much quicker than we anticipated. Because of our poor mortgage products we have been more creative than we expected and had to move into larger property deals quicker. It has been challenging but also very rewarding.
Is there anything else that you would like to share that you feel would be helpful to people thinking of or investing in property?
I think the only thing I could say is; believe in yourself, trust the training, and listen to your coach or mentor. If you have access to someone who has done what you are trying to do, ask them questions and listen to their replies and follow what they say.
We haven’t reinvented the wheel, we have four coaches who all give us input and we try to take the best from all of them and put it into practice as quickly as possible.
Do you have a website that people can connect to if they would like to invest or be coached by your team?
Of course, personally we do not coach (yet) but we are happy to connect anyone with our coaches and people we know who teach property.
Huge thanks to Daniel and Gisela Wood for their impromptu video interview chat with us. If you need any advice with managing your properties you can reach them at the Swedish Wealth Institute where you can learn about the events they run in Sweden for entrepreneurs and investors.
Parts 1 and 2 of this interview are shown here:-
Property millionaire in one year part 1/3 which shares an overview of Daniel and Gisela’s property journey and what they’ve achieved in just over a year.
Property millionaire in one year part 2/3 which shares the immense financial and travel challenges to Daniel and Gisela and how they overcame them.
If you got a lot out of this article, please give us a comment and share it with your friends and colleagues using the social media links. You may also enjoy the following articles.
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