Property investment isn’t just for the super wealthy.
When I left university after graduating with a commercial property degree, I (along with most people) thought that the only way to be a property investor or a property developer was to already have a lot of money. It turns out that this is a complete myth.
Spoiler Alert: It is possible to buy and develop property with no money.
Six years after graduating with a commercial property degree, I found myself running an online tech publication. I had left the property industry entirely just 3 years after graduating having become utterly miserable.
Ben, one of the investors in the company I was working for at the time, had started coming in regularly to offer advice, and to challenge my thinking to help grow the tech publication.
Knowing that I had a background in property, he started talking to me about “all money out property deals” and “no money down property deals” – something that I’d never heard of before even after working as a letting agent, estate agent and most recently as a commercial surveyor.
The thing that blew my mind and went against everything I knew was:
You don’t need lots of money to buy property. You just need to know people with money.
Fast forward 6 years, and Ben is one of my 3 glorious business partners in our company Propertunities.
Since its inception, we have bought (and continue to buy) properties with none of our own money. Granted, we are profitable and so recycle our profits back into the company, but we have millions of pounds in both private investor lending and bank lending, helping us to continue to grow our portfolio.
So how do we buy properties with other people’s money?
At Propertunities we work with private investors (it started out as friends and ex colleagues and has since moved on to friends of friends).
They loan money to our company, and in return, they earn interest on that money. The interest we pay them is more than what they would get if that money was just sitting in a bank account which it is for a surprising number of people.
We use this money to buy and refurbish or convert a property, then refinance at the now higher value. The proceeds from the refinance go to paying our investors back, and if the refinance doesn’t make quite enough to pay the investors back in full, the profit rent from our tenants builds up and eventually pays them off. After that point, we own a property that pays us an income having put no money into the deal. This is justified because we spend a very long time doing our research, finding the property and then all the relevant people / builders / solicitors / accountants / tax advisors etc required to complete the build work.
As a basic worked example:
| Property Purchase Price | £60,000 |
| Cost of Build Works | £20,000 |
| Total Project Costs | £80,000 |
| New Value after works: | £120,000 |
| Mortgage @ 75% Loan to Value | £90,000 |
Meaning we raise £80k from our investors to do the project. Then receive £90k from the mortgage company after the works are complete. We pay the investors back £80k + the interest on their loan (Let’s say £5k). We then have £5k left over and a property in our name that generates a monthly income from the tenants. The investor is happy because they have just made £5k interest. Woohoo!
This is a simplified version of events but gives you the basic premise of how to buy a property with none of your own money.
There are other strategies which include:
- Joint Ventures
- Assisted Sales
- Lease Options
- Exchange with a delayed completion
- Vendor financing
- Bridging
I’ll go into more detail on each of these in other articles. In the meantime, if this all sounds like too much work and you have some cash that you just want to earn interest on without doing the work, do get in touch via the contact form on our website: www.propertunities.co
