Buying an Investment Property From a Distance
55 Hunt Lane in Bentley was bought for a client who has never set foot in England. This is what had to be true for that to be a sensible thing to do.
You can buy an investment property remotely, and the legal and financial machinery handles it without complaint. What doesn’t handle it automatically is the part where somebody stands on the street, looks at the back of the house, and forms a judgement. That has to be replaced deliberately, by someone whose only financial interest is in you being right.
Bullseye Properties Ltd is a buyer-only sourcing business in South Yorkshire and North Nottinghamshire. 55 Hunt Lane in Bentley, Doncaster was bought at £61,500 against a £70,000 asking price, letting at £650 a month, for a buyer who has never been to England. That deal is the proof of concept for everything below, and I’d rather explain what made it work than claim distance doesn’t matter.
Why buy 170 miles away at all?
Because the arithmetic in the South East doesn’t work for a buy to let and the arithmetic here does. That’s the entire reason, and it’s worth seeing side by side.
| A £450,000 property in the South East | 55 Hunt Lane, Bentley, Doncaster | |
|---|---|---|
| Purchase price | £450,000 | £61,500 |
| Monthly rent | £1,800 | £650 |
| Gross yield | 4.8% | 12.7% |
| Stamp duty at higher rates | £35,000 | £3,075 |
| 25% deposit | £112,500 | £15,375 |
| Deposit plus stamp duty | £147,500 | £18,450 |
The stamp duty alone on the southern property is more than half the purchase price of the northern one. Put another way, the deposit and stamp duty on one £450,000 property is £147,500, which would buy two properties like Hunt Lane outright in cash with change for the legals.
That’s the trade. You accept that the asset is a long way from your house, in exchange for a return that actually works. The distance is the price of the yield.
What you actually lose by not being there
Five things, and they’re all things a listing photograph is structurally incapable of showing you.
The street. Not the road name, the street. Whether the cars parked on it are taxed. Whether four houses in a row have blankets in the upstairs windows. Whether the end of the terrace is boarded. This is where the difference between a good street and a bad one lives, and in Doncaster in particular it changes over about 200 metres.
The back. Every listing has eight photos of the lounge and none of the rear elevation. The back is where the failed pointing, the bowed gutter, the illegal flat roof extension and the neighbour’s garden live.
The smell. Damp has a smell before it has a stain. You cannot photograph it and no vendor will mention it.
The neighbours. Not who they are. What state their property is in, because you’ll share a party wall, a gutter and often a roofline with it.
The roofline from across the road. You can see a dipped ridge, a slipped slate and a leaning chimney stack from the pavement opposite in about fifteen seconds. From inside the house you can see none of them. A re-covering runs £6,000 to £9,000 on a small terrace, which on a £61,500 purchase is 10 to 15% of the price.
How to replace each one without getting on a train
The naive answer is to go yourself. Work out what that costs first.
London to Doncaster is roughly an hour and three quarters each way by train, so a round trip with one viewing is most of a working day. To find one property worth buying I’d typically expect to view around ten. That’s ten days, and it assumes the agent can fit you in on days you’re free, which they can’t, and that nothing goes under offer while you’re arranging it, which it does.
So the realistic options are these.
| Approach | What it costs you | What it gets you |
|---|---|---|
| Travel to every viewing | Around 10 working days plus fares | Everything, at a price most people can’t pay |
| Rely on the agent’s photos and description | Nothing | A marketing document written for the seller |
| Send a friend or family member | Goodwill | An untrained opinion on a £61,500 decision |
| A buyer-only agent on the ground | A fee, agreed in writing up front | The judgement, with no seller-side commission pulling the other way |
| A RICS survey after you’ve offered | £500 to £1,200 | Excellent structural detail, arriving three weeks after you committed |
The survey point is worth sitting with. A survey is a good thing and you should have one, but it happens after you’ve agreed a price and started spending money. It isn’t a filter. It’s a confirmation, and by then the negotiating position has already been set.
What a viewing should actually produce
If someone views on your behalf, this is what should come back the same day, and it’s what I send.
- A continuous walkthrough video, not a set of stills. Continuous, because you can see what the camera walked past.
- The rear elevation, the roofline from the opposite pavement, and the street in both directions.
- Meter readings, meter type, and where the consumer unit is with a photo of it. A modern unit with RCDs tells you a lot about whether a rewire is coming.
- Photographs of the ceiling in every room, which is where you find the historic leaks nobody mentions.
- Under the sink, behind the toilet, and the corner of every external wall at skirting level. That’s where damp shows first.
- An honest note on the neighbours’ properties either side.
- What’s wrong with it. Written down, before any discussion of price.
If a viewing report contains no negatives, it isn’t a viewing report. Hunt Lane came in at £61,500 rather than the £70,000 asking price because the things that were wrong with it were identified, priced, and used. That’s what the viewing is for.
Does the legal and mortgage side work remotely?
Yes, and this is the part people worry about that turns out to be routine. Conveyancing in England and Wales is done by post and email as standard. Identity verification is done electronically or through a certified copy. Mortgage applications are handled by brokers remotely as a matter of course. Money moves by bank transfer.
The fastest conveyance Bullseye has completed is six weeks, and the client was not in the country for any of it. Nothing about being elsewhere slowed it down. What slows conveyancing down is missing documents, an unresponsive seller’s solicitor, and a chain, none of which care where you are.
The one thing distance genuinely does change is that you can’t drop into the estate agent’s office to apply pressure, which is a real lever. Somebody local needs to be doing the chasing.
What happens after completion?
This is where remote buying actually gets tested, and it’s more mundane than the buying part.
You need a letting agent, and you need to have chosen them before completion rather than after. Management runs at roughly 10% of gross rent plus VAT, and you should budget a further 10% for maintenance, which on £650 a month is £780 a year each. If you don’t set aside the maintenance figure, the first boiler replacement at £3,500 to £4,500 comes out of your own pocket and the deal’s numbers were never real.
You also need someone who will go and look when the letting agent says something is fine and you’re not sure. That’s the gap remote landlords fall into most often. What happens after you buy goes into what management actually covers and what it doesn’t.
How do I know the person on the ground is on my side?
Ask who pays them, and ask whether anyone else is paying them on the same transaction.
An estate agent is paid by the seller as a percentage of what you pay. That’s not a scandal, it’s their job, and it means their view of a property is not neutral. Some sourcers take a fee from you and a commission from the agent or vendor on the same purchase. That’s a different thing and it should be volunteered, not extracted.
The second question is whether their fee is fixed or a percentage of the purchase price. A percentage fee means every pound they negotiate off comes out of their own income. On Hunt Lane, £8,500 was negotiated off the asking price. On a percentage model that negotiation would have cost the sourcer money.
Mine is fixed, agreed in writing before any work starts, and staged so that half of it only falls due on completion. What it costs sets it out in full.
Should I visit at least once?
If you can, yes, but not for the property. Come and look at the town before you decide to buy in it, so you understand what you’re committing capital to. Then let someone else do the ten viewings.
Plenty of people never come, and it works. Do you need to visit the UK in person to buy covers the overseas version of the same question, where the answer is the same and the paperwork is slightly longer.
What I would do next
Pick the area before you pick the property. Distance only works if you’ve decided what you’re buying into, because the thing you can’t do from 170 miles away is form an impression by accident.
Then decide who is going to stand in the room for you, and settle the payment question before you settle anything else. If the answer to “who else pays you” isn’t immediate and specific, keep looking.
If you want the ten viewings done for you, that’s the job. How it works is the process from first call to keys, 55 Hunt Lane is the full write up of the one bought sight unseen, and the other three case studies have their real numbers on them too.
Connor, Bullseye Properties Ltd