TPP318: How to research an investment in a brand new city

On today’s Property Podcast, Rob D is looking at how you research a buy-to-let property investment in a brand new city.  

Rob & Rob have talked extensively about the joys of investing in cities, but what should you do if you don’t know any of them that well and you don’t live close to them? That’s exactly what Rob D is covering today, and he’s using a real life guinea pig (and by that, we mean Dan), to explain how he approached being in this exact situation.

If you’re an avid Property Podcast listener, you’ll know that The Robs covered their 2019 property investment hotspots earlier this year, and off-air were hit with questions from Dan whilst he was doing his research.

Dan had been looking at a city that’s brand new to him, and today he shares his journey and the process he went through to understand what the city offered and whether it would help him meet his buy-to-let property investment goals.

He’s got Nottingham and Manchester boxed off already, and is happy with the steady cash flow his investments bring in. But now he’s ready to switch strategy and is looking at properties for growth… and he’s decided that Sheffield is on his hit list!

What research did Dan do? What type of properties did he look at? And what made him throw certain properties in the junk pile?

Today you’ll get to know his first impression of Sheffield as a complete outsider, what he thought of the properties he saw and the tactics he used to get to know the area and the local community.

You’ll also hear how he stayed sane, tried to avoid ‘property blur’ and built a great rapport with the agent on the 16 viewings he booked!

To paint the full picture, you can see links to a few of the properties Dan was looking at in Sheffield below:

 

• Property 1 - which has a sitting tenant
• Property 2
• Or there’s this one which is slightly more high-end
• Then there’s this one in Manchester

 

Listen as Dan and Rob D have a chat about Dan’s Manchester vs. Sheffield dilemma, and see what you can take away from Dan’s experience of investigating a brand new city to invest in buy-to-let property.

In the news this week, you’ll have noticed a huge story! No-fault evictions are to be banned in England. This is a big change and effectively an abolition of the Section 21 procedure.  

It’s not an enormous shock but it has come a bit out of the blue in terms of timing. So what should you do? It’s just a proposal right now so there’s a lot of time to adjust and plan. If you fancy a deeper delve into what Rob D thinks of this, you can hear more on this week’s Ask Rob & Rob where they covered what the Section 21 ban would mean for landlords.

And we’re back with another Hub Extra resource. This week we have Workona - a tool if you’re one of those people who have multiple browser tabs open! It’s an extension for Chrome and is completely free - it allows you to arrange your tabs into different workspaces, so you could have one for personal, one for location research and one for official work duties. If you dive into one group, it hides all the others - a seriously great piece of kit to help you stay organised.

We’d love to hear what you think of this week’s Property Podcast over on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram. You might even have a topic you’d like us to cover in the future - if so, pop us a message on social and we’ll see what we can do.

If that wasn’t enough, you can also join our friendly property community on the Property Hub forum.

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