{"id":96,"date":"2020-10-01T13:56:51","date_gmt":"2020-10-01T13:56:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/adammccord.co.uk\/?p=96"},"modified":"2020-10-01T13:56:51","modified_gmt":"2020-10-01T13:56:51","slug":"the-first-house","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/adammccord.co.uk\/index.php\/2020\/10\/01\/the-first-house\/","title":{"rendered":"The First House"},"content":{"rendered":"As soon as I finished university, I got a job with a multi-national blue-chip organisation. Even<br \/>though I had a computing degree, I went into their finance department. I didn\u2019t like the job, it<br \/>was a means to an end. My parents were living in Switzerland, but they had a house just outside<br \/>Portsmouth, and I would live there all the time. Every now and again, they would come back, but<br \/>I always yearned to have my own foot on the property ladder. I started looking around even<br \/>though there wasn\u2019t any urgency. They weren\u2019t kicking me out or anything like that, it was just<br \/>more of a desire. Even as a kid, one of my favourite games was Monopoly, and I used to build<br \/>Lego houses.<br \/><br \/>4<br \/><br \/>So, I started looking around two-bedroom apartments in nice areas just outside Portsmouth, and<br \/>very quickly realised that with a flat\u2019s leasehold, I had to pay management and service charges.<br \/>However, if I went a bit further into town, I could buy a three-bedroom house that was freehold.<br \/>It would be a bigger house, and I wouldn\u2019t have all these monthly bills to pay: brilliant.<br \/>I ended up making an offer on a house, and it got accepted. You could say that I started off as an<br \/>accidental landlord, because the first house I bought was a three-bedroom townhouse in<br \/>Portsmouth. Before I moved in, I completely ripped the whole house apart. I ripped out the<br \/>kitchen, I ripped out the bathroom, I moved walls, I put in rooms, I converted the garage. At the<br \/>end of it, I had a very high spec\u2019 four-bedroom house. We had ceiling-mounted speakers<br \/>everywhere, filtered water on tap, an 11-foot-wide projection TV, and so on. It was my first<br \/>house, and I wanted to make it as good as it could be, so that\u2019s what I did. The next week or so, I<br \/>was walking around thinking, \u201cWow, this is amazing.\u201d Then, as the weeks went on, I thought,<br \/>\u201cActually, I\u2019m quite lonely.\u201d When I was at university, I was living with other people in a house<br \/>share. Now, I was clattering around in this big house on my own. I didn\u2019t have a girlfriend, kids,<br \/>or anybody to look after, so it was just me.<br \/>As it was a three-storey townhouse, I decided to have the master bedroom upstairs with its own<br \/>en suite, and then the rest of the top floor would be my office as well. The whole middle floor,<br \/>with a bathroom and two bedrooms, was completely empty. I had bills and they were actually<br \/>quite expensive. I thought, \u201cWouldn\u2019t it be great if I could replicate a sort of house share, but<br \/>with only people I like in it?\u201d That was my goal: to put people that I liked into the house to help<br \/>with paying the mortgage.<br \/>There were no courses on HMOs \u2013 people weren\u2019t doing it as a strategy. I started to rent out two<br \/>of the rooms to lodgers. As soon as the first rent payment came in, I thought, \u201cWow, I\u2019ve just<br \/>earned the equivalent of 50% of monthly wages after tax from working full-time with my<br \/>employer. This is really good.\u201d A few months later, the house next door but one came up for sale<br \/>on Rightmove. It was a re-possession. On the first viewing, I thought, \u201cGreat, I\u2019ll have this,<br \/>thank you very much.\u201d I bought it. I thought, \u201cI\u2019m going to do what I\u2019ve already done as that<br \/>seemed to work. But instead of only renting out two rooms, I\u2019ll be able to rent four because I\u2019m<br \/>not going to be there. This is going to be even better.\u201d So, I did that.<br \/>Then I thought, \u201cWow, hang on, this is turning into a career. You never intended being a<br \/>landlord or a developer. Your plan was to go to college, get a job and work up the corporate<br \/>ladder. If you continue with that plan, you will get a tiny little pay raise each year, maybe a<br \/>couple of per cent if you\u2019re lucky. If you kiss some real big butts in the company, you might<br \/>move up a bit quicker. But you\u2019re not going to be able to double your salary every year or<br \/>anything like that.\u201d It was this revelation that made me think, \u201cI can do this again and replicate<br \/>the results I got on the first property. In fact, I can probably even do it better because the first<br \/>house was such a high spec that I spent loads of money on extra tech and gear that was<br \/>unnecessary for a rented property.\u201d","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>As soon as I finished university, I got a job with a multi-national blue-chip organisation. Eventhough I had a computing degree, I went into their finance department. I didn\u2019t like the job, itwas a means to an end. My parents were living in Switzerland, but they had a house just outsidePortsmouth, and I would live&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-96","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/adammccord.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/adammccord.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/adammccord.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adammccord.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adammccord.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=96"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/adammccord.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":97,"href":"https:\/\/adammccord.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96\/revisions\/97"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/adammccord.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=96"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adammccord.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=96"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adammccord.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=96"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}