Hi, Peter Jones, property investor, author, and ex-chartered surveyor.
In this short series of videos, I’m looking at lessons which I learned in 2008 in which we can extrapolate forward into 2020.
This is one of the big lessons for me. The big lesson is lesson number five: ‘it’ whatever ‘it’ is will happen again, and it will usually happen when you least expect it.
Now the reality is that ‘it’ is probably never going to be the same as the last ‘it’ so the last ‘it’, if you like, in 2008 was a banking crisis, a financial crisis, which led to a recession and a downturn and that particularly affected the property market.
‘It’ this time is obviously a health crisis which has impacted the economy which is causing a financial crisis which will probably impact the property market.
They are very, very different but to all intents and purposes, the repercussions are probably very, very similar. But it will be different.
This is the thing, there will be an ‘it’ there will be another ‘it’ in the future. As I say it will probably come when you least expect it.
So in 2008, there’d been some rumblings and I remember I’d been reading on the internet that people who are obviously far cleverer than I knew that there was a subprime crisis developing in the states and they were predicting that it would come across the Atlantic and it would hit us at some time. So in fairness maybe that was slightly more predictable but because I didn’t really understand what it was all about I didn’t take an awful lot of notice, if I’m to be honest. Then when Lehman Brothers fell it all happened very, very quickly, the financial crisis hit and the banks needed bailing out, the banks stopped lending, the property market took a dive, all this kind of stuff. So once it happened it happened quickly but they’re kind of like warning signs.
This ‘it’ with Coronavirus, with Covid 19 came very quickly, because I’m recording this in the middle of April and four months ago probably none of us had even head of Covid 19 or Coronavirus and yet the impact has been swift and the impact has been profound and we’ve now had our whole lives turned upside down. We’re living, most of us, in a very strange way which we could never even have predicted perhaps even in January once the news started breaking that there was this virus out there. I don’t think many of us really understood what the implications were going to be and how it’s going to affect our lives.
And it’s not just now but this is going to affect how we live for years and years to come because even when we come out of lockdown even once the virus is under control the way that we live and the way that we do a society and the way that we do politics and the way that we do economy and the way that we pay tax and the amount of tax, our prioritise in life, and all that kind of stuff is going to change. So in a very, very short time ‘it’ has had a very, very profound effect
But be aware that whatever ‘it’ is there is another ‘it’ lurking out there.
Now I don’t know when it’s going to hit, I don’t what’s going to cause it but at some point in the future once we get through this, assuming we do get through this and let’s be positive and optimistic we will get through this and there will be some kind of normality at the end of it all albeit a new more normality, at some point in the future in five years, ten years, fifteen years whenever it happens to be there’s gonna be another recession which is going to affect us as property investors but the cause of that is going to be something different again and we may not know when it’s going to happen.
So the big lesson from 2008 is basically to be prepared, to assume that something is going to happen and in the next few videos i’m going to do i’m going to slightly switch the title because i’m going to actually talk about lessons from 2008 and 2020 which we can carry forward and these are going to be getting into some of the nitty gritty of what we can do as property investors to make sure that when the next thing happens that we are better prepared than perhaps we were for this thing because I get the impression looking at Facebook, and I understand it entirely because nobody knew it was coming, that a few people have been caught out by the speed and the surprise.
So one thing we can be sure of ‘it’ is coming so let’s not be surprised let’s be prepared for ‘it’ but we just don’t know what ‘it’ is and we don’t know when ‘it’ is but if ‘it’ follows the usual trends ‘it’ is going to affect the economy and ‘it’ is going to affect our finances particularly as property investors so we’re getting some of the nitty gritty of that in the next few videos.
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
