The Deal Of A Life Time

My parents weren’t in a position at the time to lend me any money: I wasn’t born with a silver spoon in my mouth and I haven’t got a trust fund I can just call upon. What I decided to do was take the income that I’d received from my properties and speak to my accountant and do a tax
return. He said, “You know, on paper, this is how much extra in addition to your wages that you’ve earned.”

I then went to my mortgage company with that information, and I said, “Is there any chance, now I’m earning a lot more money, that you could maybe give me some money from the equity of my house?” And pretty much to the penny, they gave me the exact amount of money I needed to do the renovations on this other house. So I was able to do the refurb.

I thought, “Seriously now, Adam, this needs to stop. You only got this because it was such an amazing deal.” Then, randomly, a couple of months later, two houses down my same road came up for sale and I thought, “Oh, they’re cheaper than I bought my houses for. Crap! This housing
market malarkey is for real. In a sense, I’ve lost £20,000 or £30,000 on each of those houses I’ve bought because of how the property market’s gone. God! But if I could turn back the hands of time, would I still have bought them?” And the answer was, “Yes.”

They were £30,000 cheaper than I’d paid for my house, and they were diagonally opposite. I had a look at both of them, and thought, “They’re alright, but they need quite a lot of work doing to
them.” I decided to put in an offer on one of them. It was up for £145,000, and I put in a cheeky offer for £135,000. It was all going through swimmingly, and then I had radio silence from the
estate agents.

Even that early in my career, I knew was not a good sign. As it turned out, the seller ended up having to pull out for personal reasons.
In the meantime, he’d been talking to the estate agent and found out that I wanted to convert the property into a HMO. He decided to take it off the market and turn it into a HMO himself.
I thought, “Oh my God, this is direct competition, and it’s down my own road. This is the worst thing that could have happened.” Anyway, I saw the renovation happening, and nobody moved in. A couple more months went by, and still nothing happened.

Then, I got a knock on my door
at eight o’clock on a Sunday morning. The guy said, “You don’t know me, but you were looking at buying my house four months ago. I’ve now renovated it. Are you still interested in buying it?
I’ve put new flooring in, I’ve put on new doors, I’ve done this, I’ve done that.” I thought, “Wow, brilliant. I’m definitely not going to get away with my £135,000 offer because he’s spent quite a bit of money.” I asked how much he was looking for and he said, “How about £125,000?” I’ve
never turned around and shaken somebody’s hand so quickly! I told him, “It’s a deal.”