Is your property portfolio by accident or design?

When you start a career in property your first purchases are often more by chance than planned, but once you’ve caught the property bug it’s important to start thinking ahead.

It’s a fact that people spend more time planning their holidays (and that’s gone really well this year!) than planning their careers!  However, there’s been a long-term survey running that has proven over and over again that the top 5% most successful people in the world have one thing in common - they are driven by goals and follow their plans with dedication.

This means that if you want to be successful, you need some goals, a plan to achieve them and the right mind-set to help you to achieve more easily.

Goals don’t work!

Goals are dreams you’re prepared to take action on - but they don’t happen without a bit of effort. 

Firstly, goals need to be specific.  ‘More buy-to-let properties’ isn’t a goal, it’s not measurable and hard to pin down.  What kind of properties?  How many? By when? 

You can’t ‘do’ a goal - so it needs breaking down into a list of things to do.  So, if your goal is ‘to build a portfolio of 10 buy-to-let family homes by December 2022’ you’ll need to create a list of actions:

• Look on RightMove to see what properties are available in your chosen area.
• Chat up local estate agents so they know you’re looking.
• Explore funding options to ensure you know what you need to get your first purchase off the ground.
• Decide on your strategy - are you looking for properties that you can let right away or are you planning to do some major refurbs to improve the value and get higher rents?
• What are the general rental incomes from properties in your chosen area? What would put your properties at the top end of that scale?
• … and so on.

You could even break these down into more specific tasks - phone calls, websites to check out, people to talk to, etc.

Then how will you leverage your investment so you can get your cash out and move on to the next property? (HINT: this is what I teach on the Ninja Investor Programme).  If your cash is stuck in your first purchase, you’re not going to be able to buy another nine within the next couple of years - you need a different approach.

I think it was Peter Thomson who said that, to go from just doing OK to spectacular success, add another zero to your goal!  You can’t achieve much bigger outcomes just by doing more of what you’ve been doing.  If that 10 properties was 100 properties, what would have to change?

With a new year approaching it’s the perfect time to think about your goals - and your strategies for achieving them.  What will your massive change be to get bigger and better outcomes?