How to grow your property portfolio – the smart way

THE QUESTION

I have a portfolio of four houses in London with an approximate value of £550K each. I have used the remortgage strategy to finance all of them.

All the houses are rented with excellent tenants.

Now I want to extend my portfolio to be able to buy, refurbish & resell.  I simply don’t have £500k+ available to invest into this. 

Can you advise me where I could get potential investors from that are willing to take a certain % rate each month as interest.

THE ANSWER

To begin with, please note that with FCA directives such as PS 13/3 and PS20/15, you are not permitted to ask for money speculatively via social media.

What you think solves your need (other people’s money) won’t work, as I explain further down.  You need a complete re-think of how you buy investment property because you have fallen into the trap that awaits every investor: 

You run out of cash before you run out of ambition

It took you four properties to hit the wall, it may take other investors more or fewer properties, but almost no investor has enough of their own cash to fund enough deposits for the size of portfolio they want to build.

Why won’t using other investors cash work in the way you think it will?  Simply because mortgage lenders prohibit the use of borrowed money as a source of the deposit. 

They are acutely aware that people do try to borrow deposit money, so they have become very adept at drilling down to find the true source of the deposit.  When they find out you are using someone else's money for the deposit, they terminate your application - so that isn't going to work.

Interesting that you say "I have used the remortgage strategy to finance all of them." If you now have all your cash stuck in properties, then the conclusion is that you haven’t executed this very well.  If you had, most of your original cash pot would be sitting back in your bank account enabling you to have the cash to fund your next project.  The remainder you would be extracting by positive rental cash flow over mortgage payments.

The answer to that is to be more disciplined in what you buy and only buy those that can allow you to pull out most/all of your cash at the point of refinance.  Clearly that reduces the opportunities to buy, but that is a necessary part of not repeating the pattern you have already established.

There is a contradiction when you state "I want to extend my portfolio now to be able to buy, refurbish & resell" - reselling won’t extend your portfolio, every property you resell condemns your portfolio to staying the same size. So which do you actually want to do?

1. buy, refurbish and refinance
2. buy, refurbish and resell

If it is a. you cannot use borrowed money for the deposits.

If it is b. you can use borrowed money for deposits, but you cannot use a mortgage to flip property, you can only use cash and/or bridging finance.

You may find my YouTube channel a useful aid to your knowledge, as there are multiple videos on these subjects to inform you - https://www.youtube.com/c/KevinWrightProperty 

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