This book is for those who want to-Learn from someone with 15 years of experience in property investment.-Understand how tenants can impact on your daily life.-Be prepared to deal with those who wish to profit from you as an investor.-Be informed about the little-publicised negatives of property investment. It is also suitable for those who just want to know what it is really like to be a property investor in the UK, investing in buy-to-let properties.I write this as someone who needed mortgage finance in order to invest in property. In fact, I had only GBP5,000 in the bank, which was not enough to start out in buy-to-let (BTL). However, by using mortgage money, I have been able to go on to buy over 40 properties in the last 15 years. This would have been more apart from the world financial crisis we had when mortgage lending availability, as a result, was reduced drastically for a period immediately afterwards. All the money in these properties is mortgaged money, so I have learnt to use the UK mortgage finance system in quite an advanced way to achieve this. My book All About Buy-to-Let Mortgages covers how I achieved this and what I learnt along the way.Now, in this book, I focus on the practicalities of Property Investment. If you are new to property investing, by carefully studying this book, you will soon be way ahead of those who are just going to learn by experience. In doing so, you will be much better prepared for what is awaiting you rather than just learning by experience, like I had to do. Studying the contents of this book and gaining a good understanding of the challenges involved in buy-to-let property investment will pay off financially for you in the end. Just learning by doing in anything almost always turns out to be expensive. For sure, we learn from our mistakes, however, it is much better to learn from the knowledge of others who have gone before us and made mistakes and discoveries which they can share for our benefit.It is also true to say that things have not stayed the same over the 15 years I have been investing in property, I have to say regrettably. However, in the property investment business, you have to keep adapting to the changes and keep in touch with the changes taking place. You can then adjust and adapt to the property investing climate at any particular time. In the UK, we currently have many rules and regulations that give us certain challenges which other countries may not have to face, where we are disadvantaged compared to property investors in those other countries. However, we also have some facilities in buy-to-let finance which are not available in most other countries, and this is mostly to our advantage compared to other countries (I have covered all of this in my book All About Buy-to-Let Mortgages). This book will equip you with the knowledge to work, either by yourself or with an investment partner, on getting the best property exposure to suit your personality and personal situation. This could easily save you a lot of pain compared to learning by experience alone. Be aware, as already stated, there are many books readily available on property investment that only emphasise the positives of being involved in it. This could be misleading, if you are only expecting good things to happen.There is, maybe unsurprisingly, very little information available about the challenges that property investors face. Of the information that can be found, often in the form of comments on social media, I have found these to be very selective in what they say and there are many gaps in the information.Here I reveal everything I was never told when I first went into property investment. Never told in books, never told on any courses I attended, but nevertheless I soon learned fast… I had to in order to survive!I give you here the benefit of that information in advance, at least you then won’t be as shocked as I was.
