The Five Fs of Building a UK Property Portfolio of HMOs

You won't believe how many people have said, oh, I can't find property. They were saying that to me in 20 13. It's always tough to find good properties.It's not an easy business. It's always going to be tough. It's not get rich quick and it's certainly not get rich easy.There's going to be times when there aren't many properties up for sale. When the properties that are up for sale are too expensive. When you've got a lot of properties up for sale, but none of them are suitable. It never ever, ever is easy, and it depends on what part of the economic cycle we're in as to which problem you're going to encounter. But believe you may, there will be a problem. I think it's about having the mindset of trusting and believing that if you seek, you shall receive. You shall find. But a lot of people give up too early.You're listening to expat property story. A podcast in which I share my story to smooth the way for you to have your own. Excellent. Promoting story.Hello there. That was Wendy Whittaker large, and this is episode96. A few episodes ago, I mentioned that I felt we'd been neglecting the world of multilets in recent episode after our own property story moved more towards service accommodation as we try to add diversity to our portfolio of mainly student HMOs. The last of which we acquired during the first COVID lockdown in 2020, so I felt that our knowledge was somewhat out of date. And I say this because there was no article 4in place in the areas where 4 of our 5 student HMOs are located when we acquired them, so it's kind of a different ball game now. So if HMOs are your bag, you can find details in the show notes of other episodes featuring this particular business model. Before we hear Wendy's expertise on HMOs, just want to let you know what's coming up over the next few weeks or so because the holidays are fast approaching, which is great news for us personally as it means we can take our first summer holiday in4 years. Yes. It's been 4 years since we went to Europe for an extended trip, But hopefully, nothing can stop this podcast from being released every week, so I've been busy recording and editing ahead to ensure that you get your weekly fix of the podcast and I've been working on some great shows which will be coming up soon. 1 of which will be our 1 hundredth episode, which understandably is not that amazing for you. But for me, it's hard to believe.So for the 1 hundredth episode, I'll be reflecting on the story so far,reminding you of some of the highlights and lowlights and features that have long since disappeared as I tried to keep the content fresh. And to top it off, I'm gonna play my top 10 favorite excerpts from the first 99 episodes. So that's episode100. And for 101 and a hundred and 2, we'll be releasing another compilation episode featuring the best answers we received for a signature question that I asked at the end of my interviews in season 1.The question was, what does the word risk mean to you?So this is a deep dive into a subject at the heart of property investing and features the wisdom and experience of in order of appearance. Rob Dix, Stuart Bull,Ivan Gore, Helen Godbolded, Vanessa Warwick,Steven Pardot, Peter Meek, Bromwen Wernkem,Simon Allen, Roman Acthar, Stuart Lawden,Dale Smith, Michelle Cairns, John McDermott, Mike Stenhouse, Richard Brown, Jerry Alexander, Rod Turner, Jay Howard, and Adam Lawrence. A star studded cast, I'm sure you'll agree. So if you're not a regular here and you want to make sure you don't miss out on these upcoming shows, tap follow on Spotify, or the little plus icon if you listen on Apple podcasts so that you don't miss an episode. Now if you really put your mind to something and you write it down as a goal and you look at it every day, you can make it happen. I'm sure you've heard top performing sports people talk about the power of visualizing success,but how about singing it? As a tyrant, property disc.Building on.Nothing can stop me. What's that song? I just cannot remember the lyrics at the moment. But that song sometimes kinda comes into my head when I'm driving along, and I think, no. Think and stuff me. I just think it's a great kind of refrain. I just think you gotta keep going in this business. You can't give up. Nothing must stop you. You've gotta be determined. You've gotta be focused. You've gotta find your energy, find your mojo, and stick with it. And I think with the right mindset, anybody can achieve amazing results.Wendy Whittaker Lodge is a former university lecturer from South Cheshire close to the border with Staffordshire. She loved her work but didn't like the hours or the lack of freedom, so she started to look for ways to leave her job. Although been investing in standard by Telete since 19 96. She realized that single lets would not do the trick, so she turned to HMOs. And with a handful of multi lets in Stoke and crew, she became financially free. And with the background in teaching, she has all the experience to help others do the same too. Wendy has broken down the HMO experience into 5 steps. Finding it,funding it, finishing it, filling it, and future proofing it. Love it. All the f's. All the f's.Exactly. It's simple. So somebody who's got a simple bear's brain like me, I needed something simple. And I got to the stage where I was developing HMOs. I was running and tenanting HMOs. I was buying HMOs or properties to turn into HMOs. And I was all over the place. I didn't have a system. I didn't have a process, and I was constantly being pulled from pillar to post. And it was when I sat down and really worked out what I did at at each step that I then began to be able to almost bookmark where I was up to in each of those steps. And that was incredibly helpful because then it meant that I could say, ah, okay. So I'm I'm at this stage in finding it for this particular I'm at this stage of funding it for this particular property. I'm at this stage of finishing it for this particular property, and it meant that I could run multiple projects simultaneously. Which then gave me a lot more clarity about outsourcing,who I needed in my team, tracking the progress at each of those steps and it became really almost like a to do list. And I just didn't feel overwhelmed anymore and that enabled me to grow my portfolio much faster. Step number 1 is finding it. So a couple of things there. Firstly, it has become a little bit more difficult to find properties. Would you agree?For HMOs because now everyone wants to do HMOs, particularly since interest rates have increased. Single debts quite often don't stack for many investors.Would you agree that it's become harder to find properties? Well,having done this since 20 13, I've been hearing that for the last 10years. You won't believe how many people have said, oh, I can't find property. They were saying that to me in 20 13. It's always tough to find good properties. The truth is it's not an easy business. It's always going to be tough. It's not get rich quick, and it's certainly not get rich easy. It's tough. There's going to be times when there aren't many properties up for sale. There's going to be times when the properties that are up for sale are too expensive. There's gonna be times when you've got a lot of properties up for sale, but none of them are suitable. So it's a myth to think that finding properties for HMOs is easy. It never ever,ever is easy, and it depends on what part of the economic cycle we're in. As to which problem you're going to encounter. But believe you me, there will be a problem. I think it's about having the mindset of trusting and believing that if you seek, you shall receive. You shall find. But a lot of people give up too early. A lot of people don't don't if you like, sow seeds that allowed them to grow the possibility of finding properties. So what I always say people is, you know, you have to look in multiple different places. Can't just use the right move in Zoopla.That is not going to be effective. And it might be that also your investing area, you have to broaden out a little bit. You've got to be realistic about what you can achieve in terms of your budget. It might be that you've got to make some sacrifices along the way to make that happen. But I don't think it's ever been easy. You know, when I started investing, there were other reasons why it wasn't easy. It wasn't so easy to get mortgages. We were 5 years out of the global financial crisis and mortgages were hard to get. Interest rates were low, but money was not flowing as well. Now it's probably a little bit easier to get mortgages, but, yes, you're paying more of the interest rates. On the other hand, we've got huge demand, probably triple the demand that we had 10 years ago. So you've got a fantastic market. So which problem do you want to deal with first? That's always a problem.Swings and roundabouts, isn't it? So if people have boots on the ground,then that's a good place for them to start in terms of choosing their investment area. But let's say that you have a blank canvas. How do you find your area? And can you give us some specifics about how to analyze an area? Oh, well, that you'd have to come on my online course to find that out. Those are some of the insiders tricks and tips that I teach to people because I've got some very, very special insider some tips that I don't think anybody else knows.Some of the things that I would say to people when you're when you're looking for a property you need to do your due diligence is really vital that you don't just look at right move or look at the cost of buying property, you know, before you decide, right, I'm gonna launch and do an HMO. So there's things like, for example, analyzing your local plan from the council. I always recommend people, although it is,yes, a little bit of a a long winded read. It's not exactly,you know, bedtime reading. You want to find out where your local area is looking at developing in terms of housing, regeneration, shopping centers, transport networks, and so on. I also recommend that people buy an ordinance survey, Land Ranger map, and they stick that on their wall. And with that map, they can mark on it areas which are good for HMOs. You need to walk up and down the streets.You can't do this necessarily at arm's length. Although as opposed for expats, to a certain degree, you're gonna have to do this at arm's length. But I still think that some of these tools are extremely useful because you can really, really look in deep dive Google Maps is a brilliant tool as well. Again, for expat, the expat audience who may be thinking about doing this at arm's length, use Google Maps to drive up and down those streets virtually and have a look at what kind of properties are there, what kind of houses are already present. There's lots of things you can do in terms of crunching numbers, You can, of course, look at spare room and see what kind of rents rooms are achieving. You can analyze the market that way. You can have a look and see what demand there is, of course, also on spare room.And I do quite a lot of in-depth work on spare room to really analyze the market so that if I'm helping a client, I can help them to really analyze their area carefully and see where the gaps are in the market as well. So I think those are all very important tools to use. What I would recommend is that you you create a spreadsheet and you capture all that data on the spreadsheet, and you maybe do 2 or 3 different areas, but you do not want to do too many because otherwise, it can feel very overwhelming. I've had clients based in Hong Kong and Singapore Spain, Norway,and none of them have been able to come to the UK on a regular basis, maybe once or twice a year. And 1 couple I worked with in Singapore, they came across to the UK, I think, once during their time. And they built a very nice portfolio and a particular part of the world.I won't tell you where it was because they wouldn't like me to share. But we did all the work literally as desk based research and found a hotspot for them, and it's worked extremely well for them. So I do believe that you can do this virtually.It does, though, help if you can also find people in your location who are willing to do some of the sort of groundwork, the footwork, and certainly getting a good letting agent is gonna be probably 1 of your key people that you want in your power team.And sometimes your letting agent will also be willing to find properties for you and do the viewings, which is something that, you know, again, it's harder to do virtually. There are services that you can buy to do that.But, again, a good letting agency is worth their weight in gold. So I was going to ask you about the couple that you were talking about there. Did they have boots on the ground in the area that they chose to invest in. Not initially. Initially, they just did it based on what I had taught them. They followed my process. They followed my systems. They used my tools. So I have a sourcing spreadsheet that gives you a kind of guide to finding the right property. They followed all of that. And following that, they discovered this particular gold mine area, and they invested in that gold mine area. But once their first HMO was nearly ready, of course,they realized they would have to find a letting agent to help them let it out. And then that letting agent at she became a really core part of their team. So for a long time, no, they didn't have somebody on the ground, but after probably 7 months, 6 or 7 months, I think they found this particular lady. And she not only gave them advice about their HMO, how to finish it, how to get it ready for for letting, but also she was able to help them with other properties in that locale to look at as their next development. And was it an article 4 area? No. I don't think it was an article for area, so they didn't have to get planning.When an expat is thinking about, you know, investing in an area, where do they think about starting? Which area of the country? What's their first port of call if you like? So that's a very good question because,of course, if you are not familiar with certain parts of the UK. You might be just drawn to, for example, where you maybe grew up or where you lived as a young person. Depends, I suppose, how long you've been out the UK as well as to how familiar you'll be with it, how it is currently, and the changes that inevitably happened to a country over 10 years, particularly with the levels of immigration that we've had. So I think you have to, first of all, be realistic about what you can afford in terms of if you're going to buy your HMO. If you've got 50000 pounds to invest,you're probably not gonna be able to buy somewhere in Central London. You might be able to buy somewhere in Manchester, you're probably gonna be able to afford somewhere just about maybe in Birmingham. So you've got to think about what your budget is, first of all. If I was living abroad, if I was an ex I was looking to invest in the UK, I would probably go for a city just because I know that you have a high proportion of people in cities who are living in HMOs. You're more likely to get builders. You're more likely to get your power team based around the city. It's not impossible not to invest in a city. I don't well, I suppose Stoke on Trent is a city, but her crew is not a city. But I know many people, and I work with many people who invest in smaller conurbations across the UK and have fantastic property portfolios. But then, of course, in those areas, because they're local, they can visit them. A chat that I worked with who was based in Hong Kong, he invested in Birmingham. Again,because it gave him more scope to look at lots of different types of property when they came up for sale. And I think that he he just felt that he had the kind of support and security that investing in Birmingham gave him a huge opportunity. There were lots of strategies that he could employ if, for example, the HMO didn't go well. He would be able to turn it into a single bite to let. There was a strong market for that, etcetera.Whereas I think that if you're not investing in a city and you're an ex pat, there's just a bit more of a risk that maybe it's gonna take longer to fill it. You might not find a great letting agent. There might not be many letting agents around. You might find you haven't got much choice of of tradespeople, etcetera, etcetera. Fantastic stuff.So I heard you mentioned spare room there. Do you have some spare room tip Spare room is the best tool for understanding the HMO market, the live HMO market. It's not perfect. There are weaknesses in spare room. I'd actually did a video on spare room on my YouTube channel,and it's been 1 of my most watched videos because a lot of people don't know the kind of layers of information that you can pull out of spare room. You can see which tenants are looking for rooms. You can see what their budget is. You can see what their preferences are. You can discover where your competitors are. Or your neighbors, as you might want to call them, in the HMO industry. Who else has got rooms in that specific location?How close are those HMOs in city center. You can look at the map view. You know, there's loads of things about spare room that you can explore, and it gives you a very good insight into the kind of live dynamics of what's the happening in the HMO industry. As I said, it's not perfect. Sometimes people put adverts up there, and they they keep them up there for a long time, and make it look like they've got a room available. And in fact, the room has already been let, but they are putting it up there to capture leads for future marketing purposes. Tenants will sometimes put profiles up, and they don't take them down when they found accommodation. So it makes it look like there's more tenants who are looking for a room than maybe they really are. As I say, there are imperfections in the in the portal, but it gives you much greater insight, first of all, into your market, which I think is vital. You're when you're starting to decide whether to invest in HMOs or not, and also gives you an idea about what other HMOs are available again so that you can differentiate yourself or maybe try and offer something that's for higher quality, higher standard than is currently being offered in your in your neighborhood. How can expert source properties from abroad? Do they have to use a sourcer? Are there any other strategies they could use? You don't have to use a sourcer.Sources can be good if they've got a good track record and a good history of finding properties that you can turn into good HMOs. But as long as you understand what the basic requirements are so 1 of the things I'd recommend is that if you're if you chose in your area, the next thing you want do is to understand the amenity standards that the local authority will be applying because they're not all identical across the UK. For example, in Salford,the minimum room has to be 10 meter squared. Even though the standard minimum room size, the legislative room size is 6.52 meter squared. But in Salford, they have increased their amenity standards. Understand the immunity standards is really important because otherwise, you might think you've sourced a great HMO and then find that you can't turn it into an HMO. You won't get a license because it doesn't mean your local authority immunity standard So those are the kind of areas I think that, again, knowing some of this before you get going is very helpful. You need to do your research. You need to do your due diligence and your homework. This is where my my idea about using an alternate survey map comes in. With that map on your wall, you can look and see how far that house is from the town center. How far is it from the bus station? The supermarket, the train station, the hospital, Yes. You can do this on Google Maps as well, but Google Maps doesn't always have those kind of landmarks, which the ordinance survey map has marked on it.Audience survey gives you much more detail about the terrain, for example, and about the different types of roads that are there. If you're investing from abroad and you have got the ability to go and visit your chosen location. This will give you that kind of three-dimensional knowledge along with Google Street View. You can do both. But, yeah,you've got to make sure that the property you're buying is going to meet immunity standards unless you're prepared to a lot of work to it and that you understand what the requirements are, what the legal requirements are terms of the size of kitchen, the number of bathrooms that you need. You might, of course,do 1 suites. And any of the other implications that might occur? For example, if you need planning permission, as you mentioned earlier, on article 4, is this an article 4 area? In which case are you prepared to wait to get planning permission before you start to develop you know, these are all the things that you need to be looking for. Ultimately,you're trying to create a home for your tenants somewhere where they feel safe, they feel well looked after, they feel happy,where the amenities are good enough and obviously meet minimum housing standards, but also to give them an enjoyable and a peaceful way of life And I think if you have that as your aim and your goal, you'll make money out of that because you're providing not only living accommodation, but you're also providing a service I think there's 2sides of the coin. I think some landlords provide fantastic service,but maybe their idea about design and living standards and quality of housing provision is not so good. Others provide great housing accommodation, but maybe their service side is not quite so good. And I think you need to have both because you're providing a long term valuable asset for your tenants. And they are your customers. Ultimately, they're buying from you each and every month. You know, they're long term customers, and you want to try and keep them as long as possible. So I would say, when you're looking for a property, there's huge amounts of variety. You know, I've seen bungalows turned into HMOs. I've seen flats turned into HMOs. I've seen 3 story properties turned into HMOs. There's a huge amount of variety that you can utilize for HMOs. So in terms of the style and the shape and the design, there's masses of variety.The key is to make sure if you're concerned about finance, that you're not buying somewhere that's so expensive that to turn it into an HMO is also going to cost you a huge amount of money, and then you don't get a return. Because ultimately, we're investors, and what we want to try and do is make a return on our finance because this is the best way to make sure that you can scale. People who often stop investing is because they're actually not making much money, and so therefore, they can't scale. Perhaps not everybody wants to scale, but I do think that if you have got a goal in mind, maybe it's financial freedom, maybe it's another3000 pounds income per month to secure that you've gotta make sure that you're also sensible about the maths behind the project.Just a couple of things there. You talked about the ordnance survey map and working out distances to transport links, for example, in supermarkets, do you have any particular rules about how close they should be? Well, in an ideal world, you probably would have a bus stop maybe 10 to 15 minutes walk from the property. You don't necessarily want the bus stop right outside the property. For obvious reasons. But certainly, within a sort of short walk is great.Equally with supermarkets and shops, 1 of the things that I say in my book my 101 Essential Tips book is try and look for a corner shop. Because in the UK, you know, we we have a lot of corner shops, and Corner shops are great for HMO tenants because they sell, you know, pints of milk. Not 4 liters of milk like we buy for our family, but just a pint of milk because it's a single person. You don't want 4 liters of milk. Maybe 2 liters is is what you want. They sell cigarettes. They sell newspapers. They sell sweets. Corner shops are great for HMO tenants because you can buy little things in there, small quantities of things, which often in supermarkets you can't buy these days. So I always like to buy properties with a corner shop nearby. And it's just a little kind of rule of thumb, but I think that is, you know, adds quality of life to the for the tenant. If I could go back, I'm gonna be cheeky here because you've mentioned some great points there, but how can experts source properties if they're not going to use a sourcing agent? What other strategies? I think making sure you've got your alert set up on all the portals 1 of the portals I really like is a home dot co dot u k, which not many people know about. But home dot co dot u k is if you like a portal for all portals, It gathers information from all the local estate agents, independence as well as big estate agents. So some estate agents don't advertise on Rightmove and Zoopla. Which many people might be surprised to hear, but,actually, it's quite expensive. And if you're a small estate agent, just perhaps with a handful of properties, you may be a part time estate agent. It's just you in the office, maybe with an admin straighter to help you. You perhaps realized that having a shop window with just a few properties in is is all that you need. So those kind of estate agents don't necessarily advertise them right it's too expensive. But on home dot co dot u k, you can find all the estate agents letting agents in your preferred location.You can contact them directly. You can then ask them not only to alert you when they find the kind of property you're looking to buy, but also you can ask them to look for the right kind of property. And generally, because these are not sources, they will simply ask the person who sells the property to pay their fees. And for you, you you're not paying a fee because They're not a sourceer, although they are actually acting as a sourceer for you. So that would be something that I would do. I would also just make sure that I'm on on the market dot com because sometimes on the market dot com can get some deals that you don't see on Rightmove and Zoopla. I would keep an eye on sole subject contract. Properties. So again, on right move, you can tick the box that says sole subject to contract. And to follow-up, 1 of the ways in which I've seen many people be successful in property is keeping an eye on a property that you might think you've been unlucky because you just missed it.But 6 months down the line, you suddenly discover, hold on a minute. It's come back onto the market because 2 out of 3 property deals falls through. In fact, yesterday, I was speaking to somebody, and she said that her mother had had her property on the market, and it sold 4 times.And each of those sales fell through. And after the 4 sale that fell through. She said, I just want somebody to buy this property. So the sales that fall through, they're the ones you want to be looking up as well. And I think if you're looking for somebody who could do some viewings for you, this is where, yes, having some kind of network on the ground and you can you can you can build your networks through social media. Facebook is great for local networks that you can get involved in. And as long as you're adding value to those groups. Quite often, you'll find there'll be people there who might be willing to go and do a viewing for you. And there is actually a service that you can use that will do I think it's called VUBA. Yeah. We actually interviewed the founder of VUBA on the podcast. So yes. Brilliant. So,again, from what I remember, it's is about a year ago, but I think the couple I was referring to earlier from Singapore, I think they used a Viewber viewing agent a couple of times. I've used Viewber Fantastic service,isn't it? You don't have to be in the UK. Yeah. Somebody does a full report on your property with photos, etcetera, etcetera, so you can do this hands free. And what about leafletting from abroad? Have you come across anyone doing that from abroad? Because I think it's a little bit more tricky. Right? It is more tricky. Again, there's no reason why it couldn't be done. You simply need to be organized. You need to find a reliable leaflet deliverer. And those leaflet deliverers need to have GPS trackers so that when they are delivering your leaflets, you can get a GPS download after finished their delivery so that you can see if they haven't just sort of sat around and then dumped all the leaflets in a local bin. That's not going to get you anywhere. You can get it designed. You can get printed. There's lots of places that you can you can actually source the leaflets from, but the harder piece is getting those leaflets delivered. So get a good reliable delivery service. And I think the second thing would be then make sure that whatever you're using as the contact details on the leaflet are not going to put people off Mostly, I would recommend you have a landline UK number, and what you might do then is divert it to your foreign mobile phone number so that the calls come through to you, but whoever's phoning doesn't think they're calling abroad because I think for a lot of people who are looking to sell their property,if they respond to a leaflet, if they hear that, you know, dialing tone, they might immediately be put off and not want to carry on with the call. I think getting your contact details right is gonna be critical for that, and whoever picks up the phone at the other end. Can you recommend a company for a good virtual landline? We use answer for you, although there are other companies out there. PA All Day is another 1. If you search Google for answering service, you can generally find 15 of them these days. Their fees will slightly differ, but even compare1 to another for their fees. Some of them offer discount if you're doing a certain volume of calls every month. Some of them charge extra if you want them to email you once a call has been handled or if you're going to be texted or, you know, however they forward the details of that call to you. I know that you are very involved with the campaign against council tax spending, and I did have a guest on recently who wanted to differentiate his HMOs from others because there was a lot of oversupply in his area. So he's got a ratio of 1 bathroom to 1 bedroom. Do you see problems for that going forward in terms of council tax spending? Well,unfortunately, council tax spending can apply even if you haven't got on sweets. I've seen it applied to student HMOs where there are no on suites at all. I've seen it applied to non licensed HMOs. It's being applied indiscriminately.So the way that the valuation office agency are applying their policy, they're just picking winners. It's simply the luck of the draw. It's totally wrong, isn't it? I mean, that's corruption at government highest level that they're picking winners. You know, the government is not here to choose between landlords as to who has to pay council tax and who doesn't,which rooms get banned for council tax and which don't. I asked Wendy to explain how council tax spending works. The local council will say to the BOA, The valuation office agency, if you have a new house that's built, could you give us a band? So they will evaluate the value of that property using different metrics and they will say, we think this is a band b property or a band c property. It's a band a to h, I think, is the the top band. And then that band is translated by the local council into the council tax bill. So let's say band b might cost you a hundred and 50 pounds a month. For example,band aid, a hundred and 10 pounds a month, and there's a sliding scale.Now, generally, what we're seeing is that when the BOA re band an HMO, let's say it's a 5 bed HMO, that house might have been a band b, as an individual property. So,you know, a hundred and 40 pounds a month council tax bill. Now each of those rooms is being rebounded usually as a band a because that's the smallest unit of accommodation that you can have. Then each of those rooms now has a bill of a hundred and 10 pounds a month. And some landlords pay the bill, some pass it onto their tenants. If the tenant pay it, they can generally claim single person discount so they get 25percent off that bill. But it causes a whole lot of other problems. There's a whole lot of unforeseen consequences if you're property gets banded for council tax. It's wrong, and we have to change it.Are there certain areas of the country that investors might want to avoid because of this this It's block of the draw. So you mean you could be an HMO investor in 1, I guess, ward of a council,and you're gonna get picked, and others are not gonna get picked in the same Ward. Is that what you're saying? Yeah. Next door. Wow. I've seen this happen with 6 beds where number 32 gets rebounded. Number34 is already an HMO. Isn't touched. And do you think that your campaign will be successful, or are you worried?I know we will be successful. If you know anything about me, I don't give up. I'm a dog with a bone, and I'm absolutely determined if it takes me to the dying day when I am breathing my last breath. We are going to change this.Whether it takes 2 years, 1 year,20 years, I don't care. So Wendy has given lots of tips and tricks for those who are confident enough to get started on their own with HMOs. But she also provides mentorship for those who need more guidance. Well, I run a variety of different services. Top level is a 12 month mentoring program. So somebody who wants to join the mentoring program, they work with me on a 1to 1 basis over the whole year, but I have a mastermind group So when you join the mentoring program, you're part of a really great focused results driven group.And I have lots of different tools that I give you. So I have an online program which you access and it has all the 5steps broken down. You can download a short, short hold tenancy,shopping lists for your HMO. You can download a specification so you know what to give to your builder, etcetera, etcetera. I run a monthly webinar with outside speakers, exclusively for the mentoring group,and I run regular support sessions. My goal is to get you results because if you get results on my mentoring group, program. I've got a great testimonial, and I've got great evidence to show that I can help you build a profitable HMO portfolio. Fantastic. And if anyone wants to contact you, Wendy, what should they do? You can either email me at wendy at wendy w l dot u k Or you can look at my website, which is HM0 success dot co dot u k, and you could book in a free consultation call. I do half an hour calls. So that if you want to just explore the options with me, very happy to do that with you.3 highlights from this week's show. Number 1, Wendy said that if she was an expat looking to invest in HMOs in the UK, she would probably target cities rather than towns for several reasons. Such as having more options when assembling your power team and more options for the property itself should you want to repurpose it. And also, investing in towns might be a little riskier as an expat. Highlight number 2, and this 1 is probably applicable not just to HMOs, but other stress juice too, Wendy has a rule of thumb to try and look for properties near a corner shop, which helps add to Tennant's quality of life. As does living near but not too close to a bus stop. These are the kinds of small details that can make a big difference to an investment.And highlight number 3 is the wealth of useful resources Wendy mentioned, from spare room dot com, which, it, delved into in detail is a source of lots of useful information to home dot co dot u k, which is a great source of properties. To answer for you, a UK based call answering service. But my favorite resource from Wendy's toolbox is the good old Ordnance Survey Map. If you're serious about learning all about your chosen investment area, then stick 1 up on your wall.This week's exotic listener location is Istanbul in Turkey, which I'm happy to say I have managed to visit and can highly recommend. And if it's you that lives in Istanbul, I'd love to hear the 1 thing that you're struggling with in your expat property story as it would help me go looking for the answers which would not only help you, but others too. Next week's show features a man originally from a location so exotic that I'd never heard of it until I started to research the man himself. His name is Valta Pontez, and he's from the island of Sao Tome and Principe which is a Portuguese speaking island country in the Gulf of Guinea off the western equatorial coast of Central Africa. Thank you Wikipedia. Despite his humble beginnings, Valter has been so successful in property that he's even been interviewed by Forbes. He attributes much of his success to books.Indeed, if you want to work for Walter, he will ask you to read120 books before you even start. So to find out more, come back next week. And in case you forget, as I said at the top of the show, tap the little plus icon if you listen on Apple Podcasts or follow on Spotify to make sure you don't miss out. Thanks to Wendy for appearing. And if you'd like to hear more of Wendy's wisdom on HMOs, I almost forgot to mention she also has a podcast. Called the HMO Success Podcast,which is linked in the show notes. And thanks to you for listening. And if you wouldn't mind helping us out, Share the show to spread the word. You've been listening to -- Expert.Property. Story.