You Don't Need to Buy Property to Make Money From Property: Explained

When I discovered that to make money from property I did not necessarily need to buy the property - it blew my mind.

People were making money from property they did'nt even own and scaling that up into a pretty hefty income! It sounds ridiculous, but when you find out how, and that the possibilities are endless that for me was a life changer!

It was this that really caught my attention years ago, when I first started looking at these 'creative property strategies that people were doing.

I'm writing this blog because of my sister and a stranger I met on a boat trip, Let me explain...

I have been in property for years and many of my friends and family members obviously know I am in property.

And they would say, 'Oh Paul does something, to do with investment property,' and that's about as far as people understand what I do.

Anyway, a few weeks ago my Sister and her partner came out to stay with me as I now live overseas and she was out here for a holiday and to have some quality time together with her little bro.

We were at home sat round the pool one day and she said - 'I know your in property, but I don't know what you do'. Then her partner said 'we need to have a serious chat about this'... and here is why...

My Sister and her partner are intelligent people and their plan is also to retire early and move abroad, but they just don't have a clue how to fast track that plan and also have enough capital to sustain a good quality of life when retired.

I'd had a couple of beers by the time this conversation took place, so I wasn't sure it would make much sense to be fair!

I explained a few different strategies revolved around the control of property and not buying and renting them out and it occurred to me that...

The majority of people assume that to make money from property, well you have to buy property and then rent it out - and that's how you do it. That to get more money you just need more money to buy more property.

I blame Monopoly for this viewpoint!

When I learned about creative strategies, I started out sourcing and packaging deals for investors.

Ultimately this lead me into other strategies such as; lease options and assisted sales and title splits and eventually joint ventures and rent to rent. All of these gave me income without buying a single property.

What's more is... that income that I earned from doing this, massively dwarfed my day job. The day my first ever deal completed I knew I would never work for somebody else ever again. I knew in my own head I could get better, fine tune what I did and scale up what I was doing.

My sister and her partner have a couple of buy to lets and have a very traditional view on how to earn money via property, purely because they don't know any different.

If you don't know, you don't know! It was an interesting chat and it's a lot to get somebody to think differently and shift that mindset, but I'm not sat in the sun everyday at my age because I think like everybody else does. I'm here because I did two things differently to most people....

I learned how and then I made it happen through dogged determination and blood, sweat and tears.

A week later after my Sister had gone home... we had more visitors staying with us, this time it was my brother in law (who is also in property). He loves doing the all day boat trips out here. So we arranged one with my friend, who has a nice boat in the local harbour.

We are on this boat all day, the sun is shining, the drinks are flowing and we are in the sea swimming in these stunning coves and getting to know the other guests on board...

A real good mixture of people from all walks of life, people who live here and people who are out here on holiday and then there was this one lovely couple from England.

We got chatting and it turns out they were looking to retire here in the not too distant future and they were over, just looking at property and checking out different areas.

Anyway, the conversation moved on to 'what they do' and they were about to retire in the UK and they had some investment properties back in the UK, just a small portfolio of a few buy to lets.

The lady told me that she had almost got the point of wanting to sell them and I asked why? Was it to fund their new life in the sun and she explained - It wasn't...

She was thinking of selling up, purely due to some bad tenants, being mis-managed by a really poor agent and causing her a headache. It turns out she had pretty much had enough of the stress and problems with this tenant and agent.

We chatted and I said as bad as the situation may feel right now, it's a temporary situation. I told her never to make a long term decision based on what is a short term, temporary problem. See it for what it is... just a problem that needs a solution.

What you need is a pro-active agent to manage the situation and either get the tenant back in line and paying by communicating or have them evicted and moved on due to the ret arrears.

Then I asked where the property was and it was prime location for serviced accommodation. I said, your other option is you take the property back and spruce it up and run it as a holiday let.

I did a quick check on occupancy rates and nightly rates and told her what she could earn and her eyes nearly popped out her head.