A few weeks ago, I was asked to speak at Property & Poppadoms about our journey in property and how Asset Collective started.

I spent a bit of time beforehand thinking about the last three years and realised just how much the plan has changed along the way.

We’ve tried different strategies, made plenty of mistakes, tied up more money than we expected, rebuilt the front of a house and eventually, figured out what actually works for us.

A lot of people reading these newsletters have joined our journey fairly recently, so rather than the usual project update, I thought I’d share the story I told that night.

This is the story behind Asset Collective.

This is my office, in mine and Emma’s first home that we bought together to live in.

And this is where I thought I’d figured everything out.

I’d spent about two weeks reading a book called Rich Dad Poor Dad.

And I stood in that exact room and said:

“Emma, I’ve figured it out.”

“We just need to sell our house, sell our cars, move into rented accommodation and get as much capital together as possible.

Then we use that capital to buy an investment property, refurb it, refinance it, pull our money back out and go again.”

So..

just to put that into perspective..

After reading one book, I was asking Emma to give up our house, her car and pretty much everything we owned because I thought I’d cracked property investing.

And somehow… she said yes.

(She said yes to marrying me in February too… but that’s a story for another time.)

So that’s exactly what we did.

In my head, within three to five years we’d have enough cash flow that neither of us would ever have to work again.

Unfortunately…

It didn’t quite work out like that.

Basically… FIGURING IT OUT.

And this is what figuring it out looks like…

Our first project:

Our first property was a single-let BRR.

We bought it for £85,000, spent £42,000 on the refurb and got it revalued at £155,000.

We left around £11,000 in the deal, so it felt like a good deal.

The problem?

It only made us around £350 a month.

And we quickly realised that wasn’t going to get us out of work anytime soon.

So we thought:

WE NEED MORE CASH FLOW:

Next, we moved into HMOs.

We bought a three bed terrace in Sheffield for £135,000 and converted it into a four bed, four ensuite HMO.

It was revalued at £240,000 and makes us around £1,250 a month.

Cashflow wise?

Brilliant.

But we ended up leaving around £50,000 in the deal.

So now we knew how to create cash flow…

but we were running out of capital.

So we then thought:

WE NEED MORE ACTIVE INCOME TO CREATE CAPITAL:

We tried project management.

We made money, but it felt like we’d just created ourselves another job.

We tried property sourcing.

Again, we made money. Our clients made money.

But it still wasn’t creating the momentum we wanted.

At this point, we had around £60,000 left.

So we decided to try something different..

We bought a property at auction for £83,000.

When we viewed it, there was a small crack in the render.

We thought:

No problem. Take the render off, re render it, job done.

It wasn't job done.

Once the render came off, we realised we had to rebuild the entire front elevation of the property.

We propped up the house, removed the front elevation, dug down six feet, laid new foundations and rebuilt it from the ground up.

Not exactly what we'd planned.

But despite everything that went wrong…

We sold the property for £210,000.

And walked away with £51,000 profit.

That was when something finally clicked.

After three years of trying different things, we realised:

BRRs work.

HMOs work.

Project management works.

Property sourcing works.

Flipping works.

Our problem was capital.

The simplest way I can explain what we learned is this:

Holding property traps capital but creates cash flow.

Flipping property creates capital.

And for us to build the business we wanted to build and achieve the goals we wanted to achieve.

We needed both working together.

And

This is where Rebecca came in (Our mentor)

I started working with Rebecca in February this year.

She helped us take everything we'd learned over the previous three years and turn it into what we now call our:

TWO POT STRATEGY

Pot One: Flipping

Pot Two: Holding

The flipping pot has three jobs:

Rather than constantly running our capital down…

we've got another side of the business building it back up.

At the start of this year, we had enough capital to do one flip.

Then Rebecca asked us one simple question:

“Why buy one?”

“Buy two and raise the capital to refurb them.”

So that's exactly what we did.

We used our capital to buy two properties.

Which meant we suddenly had… Two houses and no money to refurb them.

That probably sounds like a terrible idea.

But weirdly, it felt quite familiar.

Three years earlier, Emma and I had sold our house, sold our cars and risked pretty much everything to get started.

This time, we were doing the same thing… but to scale.

And..

It forced us to learn one of the most important skills we've developed so far:

How to raise private capital.

When I originally gave this talk, we had two flips running simultaneously, had raised just under £100,000 in private capital and were looking for project number three.

A few weeks later, things have already moved on.

Project One: Camm Street is complete and going to market tomorrow.

Project Two: Industry Street is now fully funded and moving through the refurb.

Project Three: Loxley Road is secured and in conveyancing.

Three projects.

Something at the beginning of this year I knew we wanted to achieve…

but genuinely wasn't sure how we'd get there.

And for the first time since we started in property, I feel like we've got a business model we can actually scale.

Three years later, I’m still working full-time while building Asset Collective alongside my job.

So the immediate goal is simple:

Leave my full time job and go all in on Asset Collective.

From there, the goal is to keep growing the flipping side of the business, build our capital base and use that to properly start building the long-term holding side.

Clearly…

the original three to five year retirement plan was slightly optimistic.

But I'm so glad we said yes.

I'm so glad we took the risk.

And I'm so glad we went all in.

Because if there's one thing the last three years has taught us, it's this:

You don't need to have everything figured out before you start.

Sometimes you've just got to say yes and figure it out later.

If you're interested in following the journey or you'd like to learn more about investing alongside us, just reply to this email.

Till next time,