DIARY OF A PROPERTY INVESTOR – DAY 20

We are now thinking about Remortgaging. That is not fundamental to what we do but it is part of what we do. And once we have a reasonable number of properties to remortgage that is how we proceed. The remortgages are usually spread over various portfolios but are dealt with together by our Bank.  Our aim is to get the best variable interest rate deal we can and the best loan to value to allow for that. We are however content with whatever that is. It will be lower than the best loan to value available but equally going for a higher loan to value means adding extra charges and/or interest rates. We do not want to pay those and have no need to do so as we do not need the remortgage money. It is simply useful for further purchases. Also, the fact that a large part of our portfolios are equity based means that in the event of any problems with the economy we will be able to ride out any stress tests the Bank may then impose.

At the same time, we are doing accounts for a number of our Companies which are looking ok and sorting out our new Office which is now fully opened in Barrow. This has taken some time to get ready in part because we have been busy with other projects and to create it we needed to create offices out of the top floor of a building we owned which was previously essentially open plan. We have hired an Assistant Property Manager and are putting together all our systems into an online office that we can all access from anywhere.  At this stage, we are not using any complex proprietary software (although at some stage it might make sense to do so) but simple systems like One Drive a cloud storage system and Office 365.

We are also considering where exactly we want to take our business. There are many options. Until the summer we had been operating with no website, no office, no social media, no marketing and no online presence. We had not needed them because we have simply been investing in property for ourselves and our two Investors.

But as we have grown our Portfolios we have seen that we are doing something that seems to us to be of great value and pretty well unique and should we not be seeing if we can take this to the next level? But what is the next level?  We will discuss that in the next blog.