Hi, Peter Jones, author, property investor and ex-chartered surveyor.
Today is a really special day for me because today is the 25th anniversary of when I was made redundant all those years ago and when I decided to go into property investing in my own right. And I was just reflecting over what’s happened over the last 25 years and I thought I’d just share a few of my key learnings from that.
So the first thing which I think I learned is that if you are committed, if you have a reason why you must succeed, if you are persistent, and if you keep on going there’s absolutely no reason why anybody shouldn’t be successful in property.
Now sometimes somebody will say to me “But it’s easy for you to say that because you’re a chartered surveyor so that must have been a real advantage for you when you started” but actually it wasn’t for two reasons.
Firstly I’ve been a partner in a firm in the West End of London and it was very corporate, and I came out of that situation with a very corporate mindset, and it took me a long time to actually get the right sort of mindset, a more entrepreneurial open-minded creative mindset and so that was a big disadvantage.
The other disadvantage was that I think everybody assumes that because I was a chartered surveyor I knew everything there is to know about property and of course, that’s not true. My particular expertise in property, and one of the reasons why I was made redundant is because of the recession of the 1990s my expertise was no longer required, was in commercial property. And at that time the commercial property market took a very big hit but I had to change my skill set and my knowledge from the commercial property to residential property which is completely different. So I had no particular advantages, I don’t think, in being a chartered surveyor, very limited advantages if any at all. So commitment, and belief, and having the reason why you need to succeed I think is absolutely key.
The second thing which I’ve learned is that the money is always out there and if you believe in yourself and if you’re persistent and if you’re creative and if you’re prepared to go out of your comfort zone and talk to people maybe, maybe people you wouldn’t normally talk to but if you want to finance a deal you will be able to finance the deal, I have no doubts about that. When people say to me they can’t raise money it’s not that the money isn’t there it’s just that they’re not going about it in the right kind of way.
Third thing which I’ve learned over the last 25 years is that the deals are always out there. One thing which always baffles me is when somebody will come to me and say something like well in the current market there are no deals to be had. Or in the location in which I’m looking there are no deals to be had. Now it all depends on how you define a deal. I absolutely understand that if you’re pursuing a particular strategy which doesn’t work in a particular area then you’re not going to find deals but if you’re looking for deals then the deals are out there. It may be that you have to tweak the strategy or it may be more likely you have to tweak the way that you’re actually looking for the properties but the deals are out there. I know that I’ve been through this myself, I’ve been disappointed when a deal has slipped through my fingers and I’ve felt ‘oh no, you know, that was such a good deal I’m never going to find a deal like that ever again’ but of course the reality is that there are so many deals out there when you know how to look for them that the deals as good as the deal that just slipped through your fingers will come along sooner rather than later usually.
What else have I learned over the last 25 years?
That when an opportunity is needed an opportunity invariably comes along. But I do think that there is an argument that when your mind is receptive you start seeing things which you wouldn’t see otherwise and one of the things I think which happened when I decided that I was never going to go back into full-time employment is that I began looking at the world, at business, at my activities, in a different way and that opened the doors for me to get involved in opportunities which I may not even have spotted if I’d still been in a full-time job and I probably wouldn’t have had time to even think about them, let alone spot them.
And then the last thought to leave you with which I realised over the last 25 years and it’s this: to be really, really successful at anything I think that you need to commit to doing it for the long haul. I mean I’m talking about being here for 25 years and I’ve realised that as time progresses more and more good stuff happens. It’s a snowball effect and I’ve been doing deals over the last few years which I would never have imagined myself doing when I first started. When I first started I just wanted to do a handful of deals because I thought that could be life-changing. When I first started on my very first day I just wanted to do one deal but within a relatively short time, and by that I mean for like four or five years, I actually found that I wasn’t just buying individual properties I was buying and selling whole portfolios.
And I would never have imagined that I would have been doing that on day one. And as you stick with it, as you stay in the game as it were, then the snowball effect begins to present itself and you start doing more and more stuff, you get to know more and more people your network grows, your opportunity to do deals grows, and it just snowballs on and on and on. So although it can seem very daunting on day one when you’re just trying to do your first deal and you’re thinking well you know ‘am I just wasting my time? Am i just deluding myself?’ stick with it and if you’re still doing property in 25 years like I am then you’ll probably be astounded at what you’re actually doing.
And until next time, here’s to successful property investing.
Peter
Peter Jones
(ex) Chartered Surveyor, author and property investor
https://thepropertyteacher.co.uk
PS. By the way, I’ve rewritten and updated my best-selling e-book, The Successful Property Investor’s Strategy Workshop, which is an account of how I put together my multi-property portfolio, starting from scratch and with no money of my own, and how you can do the same.
For more details please go to:
https://thepropertyteacher.co.uk/the-successful-property-investors-strategy-workshop
