How We Find Safe, Quiet, Strategic UK Investments
We are paid by you and nobody else. That single fact decides everything about how we search, what we reject, and what we are willing to tell you.
I take no commission from sellers, estate agents, developers or anyone else in the chain. You pay me a fixed fee, agreed in writing before I start. That means there’s no deal I get paid more for putting you in, and no reason to talk you into something.
Everything below follows from that. If I were paid by the seller, none of it would be true.
What “safe” means here, in practice
It doesn’t mean guaranteed. It means I’ve checked the things that most often turn a good-looking listing into a bad purchase, and I send you the workings rather than a summary.
For every property that reaches you I look at:
- Title. Freehold or leasehold, and if leasehold, the unexpired term, ground rent, service charge and any restrictions. Read freehold versus leasehold if that distinction is new to you.
- Flood risk and ground conditions. My patch sits on the old South Yorkshire and North Nottinghamshire coalfield, so a mining search isn’t optional here.
- Crime data for the specific street, not the postcode district. Two roads apart can be a different tenant and a different rent.
- EPC rating and the realistic route to improving it, with a cost, not a hope.
- Comparable sold prices, not asking prices, and realistic achievable rent based on what is actually letting nearby.
Most of what I look at fails one of these. You never hear about those, which is the point of paying someone.
I view it, in person, and I film the bad bits
Listing photographs are taken on a wide lens on the one dry day that month. So I go, I walk it, and I record a full walkthrough with honest commentary: the damp patch, the neighbour’s garden, the state of the road, what the street sounds like at the time of day I visited. You get the video and my notes the same day.
For overseas clients this is the whole service. 55 Hunt Lane in Bentley, Doncaster was bought for an investor who never set foot in the country: £61,500 against a £70,000 asking price, now let at £650 a month, a 12.7% yield.
Where the discount comes from
Negotiation, mostly, and the fact that nobody on our side of the table gets paid by the seller.
The published numbers:
| Property | Asking | Paid | Outcome |
|---|---|---|---|
| 23 Beech Grove, Carlton in Lindrick | £125,000 first listed | £90,000 | 28% below the original asking price, let at £850 a month |
| 55 Hunt Lane, Bentley | £70,000 | £61,500 | Let at £650 a month, 12.7% yield |
| 7 Ashley Terrace, Worksop | £78,000 | £65,000 | £15,000 below the reduced asking price |
| 150 Long Lane, Carlton in Lindrick | £85,000 | £78,000 | A probate sale recovered after it had already fallen through once |
Across everything I’ve sourced, 16 properties at 10 to 20% below market value. The four above are the ones written up in full, with the numbers.
Not every deal completes, and I say so deliberately. Chains collapse, surveys come back badly, vendors change their minds, nothing is binding in England until exchange, and a sourcer claiming a perfect record is either new or not telling you everything. My fastest conveyance was six weeks, which is fast, and not typical.
“Quiet” means unglamorous stock in unglamorous towns
I buy terraced and semi-detached houses in South Yorkshire and North Nottinghamshire, centred on Worksop. Not city centre apartments, not off-plan, not student blocks, not fractional anything.
The reason is boring and deliberate. Ordinary family houses in ordinary working towns have a resale market made of owner occupiers as well as investors, no service charge, no cladding exposure, no ground rent escalation, and a rent that’s set by local wages rather than by a fashion. When you want to sell, someone wants to buy it to live in it. That isn’t true of a lot of what gets marketed to overseas investors.
How you pay me, and when
A fixed fee, agreed in writing before any work starts. It’s paid in three stages: 10% on instruction, 40% at memorandum of sale, and 50% on completion. The majority of what you pay me depends on the deal actually completing.
Full detail is on what it costs, and the step by step version of the service is on how it works.
The part where I say no
I turn work away. If your budget and your target return don’t meet in the middle, if you want a yield my patch doesn’t produce, or if you want someone to agree with a plan you’ve already made, I’ll say so on the first call rather than three weeks in.
That isn’t a sales technique. Taking a fee for a search I don’t believe in is how sourcers end up with the reputation the industry has.
What to do next
Read the questions worth asking any sourcer before you speak to me or to anyone else. Check our compliance registrations: HMRC supervision for anti-money laundering, ICO registration, Property Ombudsman membership and professional insurance are the minimum, and you should verify them independently rather than take my word for it.
Then, if the fit looks right, tell me what you want the money to do and what you can deploy.