Successful Property Letting

In my early days as a property investor, I juggled being a landlord with working as a project manager in the financial services industry, mainly in insurance. However, my love of property investment (and dislike of the insecurity and boredom of salaried work), eventually won the day and in 2002 I gave up my day job to concentrate on property full time. As a landlord I made some mistakes and although I had read quite a few books on the subject - some of which were quite good - none of them really taught me how to avoid the mistakes that I made. So I put down some ideas which eventually led to a publisher offering me a contract to write a book. Successful Property Letting came out in September 2005 and, in less than 3 months, sold out its first print run and established itself as the fastest-selling book on buy-to-let in the UK. I'm proud that the book has helped many people and showed them how to avoid the banana skins (and the few "bananas" people) that undoubtedly exist in the world of letting property. Following on from the book, I was also asked to write about buy-to-let and property letting issues for lots of newspapers and magazines including "The Independent", the "Daily Mail", the "Evening Standard" and "Property Investor News." Today, the success of buy-to-let has attracted advisors and seminar companies who say you can become a property millionaire in a very short period of time (sometimes by buying potentially over-priced property from that same company). In my view this can be dangerous advice. For whilst it is possible to become rich quickly, it cannot be done without taking, what for most people, are unacceptable risks. So, after my book came out, many people asked me if I could run seminars which would expand upon the book and which would be completely unbiased by any desire to sell property or indeed any other service 'off the back' of the seminar itself. In response to these requests I designed a one day buy-to-let seminar course which would provide unbiased information. I help people who have specific problems by giving one to one consultancy advice, and I regularly give talks to landlords' organisations and companies for the benefit of the general public and their own staff. My other interests, after my partner, son and property, are football, rugby, tsunamis and travel.