I have a friend who’s been investing in property for about twenty years. He’s not particularly sophisticated about it. He doesn’t attend networking events or talk about his portfolio at dinner parties. He doesn’t use complex financing structures or spend his weekends trawling through auction catalogues. What he does is buy a reasonably priced rental property every year or two, look after his tenants properly, and get on with his life.
He now owns eight properties. His mortgage debt is manageable, his rental income is solid, and the equity he’s built up over two decades is, frankly, substantial. I don’t mean this unkindly when I say this, but he’s what I’d call a property plodder. And in my experience, plodders – given enough time – do extremely well.
The appeal of the complicated
There’s a tendency in property circles to make things complicated. You’ll hear people talk about sophisticated multi-layered acquisition strategies, creative financing structures, and complex lease arrangements with the enthusiasm of someone who’s just discovered they can juggle. And sometimes, to be fair, complex strategies are genuinely the right tool. HMOs require more setup but can generate significantly better yields. BRR done well can recycle capital efficiently. There are investors for whom a high-energy, high-volume approach is both appropriate and rewarding.
But there’s also a lot of chatter that makes newer investors feel as if they’re doing it wrong if they’re not doing something clever. As if buying a straightforward two-bed terrace, getting a decent tenant in, and holding it for ten years is somehow beneath the standard required. It isn’t. It’s how a huge number of people have built genuine wealth from property – quietly, without much fanfare, one property at a time.
The thing nobody warns you about: stopping too early
The pattern I see repeated more than almost any other is this. Someone buys their first property, it goes well, they buy a second. A few years pass, they’ve got three or four, the income is ticking over nicely, and then – they stop. Not for any compelling reason. The bank hasn’t said no. The market hasn’t crashed. They’ve just reached a point where things feel fine, and somehow fine starts to feel like enough.
I call it premature contentment. And it’s the enemy of a really good portfolio. Because the difference between three properties and eight properties, compounded over twenty years, is not a small thing. It’s the difference between a useful side income and genuine financial independence. The people who stop at three usually did so at exactly the point where momentum was on their side.
Now, I’m not saying you should always want more, or that three properties isn’t a perfectly reasonable outcome if that’s genuinely what you set out to achieve. But too often the stopping isn’t a conscious decision – it’s just inertia dressed up as contentment. The urgency fades, life gets busy, and the portfolio just sits there rather than growing.
More properties, less risk – not more
Here’s something that surprises people when they first hear it: in my opinion, owning more properties is generally less risky than owning fewer, not more. The way I see it is that when you own one property, everything depends on that one property. If the tenant moves out or stops paying, your rental income drops to zero. If the boiler goes, the repair bill comes out of your pocket with nothing to offset it. You have no cushion.
When you own six or eight properties (or more), a void period on one of them is a nuisance, not a crisis. A repair bill gets absorbed across a portfolio that’s generating income from multiple sources. One difficult tenant doesn’t ruin your month. The portfolio has its own resilience that a single property simply can’t provide – and that resilience grows the more properties you add to it. This isn’t an argument for reckless expansion, but it is an argument for not necessarily treating the first two or three as the final destination.
What ‘simple’ actually looks like
My friend’s approach is simpler than most people imagine. He buys in areas he knows, where he understands the rental demand and the kind of tenants his properties attract. He doesn’t try to buy at the absolute bottom of the market or hold out for some perfect deal that may never materialise. He buys sensible properties at reasonable prices, keeps them well maintained, and holds them. His negotiation is straightforward. His financing is conventional. His management is either done himself (not something I’d fancy) or by a local agent he trusts.
There’s nothing in there that requires particular skills or specialist knowledge. What it requires is patience, consistency, and the discipline not to stop when things are going well just because things are going well.
The lesson I keep coming back to
After more than thirty years in property – as an ex-Chartered Surveyor, as an investor, and as someone who’s worked with a lot of other investors over that time – the lesson I keep coming back to is this: the strategy matters less than the execution, and the execution matters less than the persistence. The investors who’ve done best aren’t always the ones with the most creative strategies or the most sophisticated structures. They’re often just the ones who kept going, kept their costs under control, kept their tenants happy, and didn’t stop before the compounding had a chance to do its work.
Property rewards the patient in a way that very few other asset classes do. You don’t need to ‘rush it’. You need to be consistent, careful with your numbers, and prepared to play a long enough game for it to make a real difference. Most people who do those three things end up very glad they did.
Here’s to successful property investing.
Peter Jones
Author, property investor and ex-Chartered Surveyor
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