profile

Matt Brighton

26 | We're finally in the BTL Refurb 🛠️ (Progress Photos!)

Published over 2 years ago • 3 min read

Hello everyone! 👋
​​
It's been a few weeks since I've sent out a newsletter, I finally completed on the first project! I have my very first refurb buy-to-let project and have been working on the rip out over the past few weeks!

As a reminder, I bought the property for £106k and estimated that it needed about £10k spending on it to bring it up to a better standard. The estimated GDV when I did the analysis back in March (Yes! Conveyancing took a long time!), I estimated it to be worth £130k done up.

However - a few things have changed. Since ripping out the property a few bits I wanted to salvage, like the kitchen were in too poor of a condition so the refurb has become bigger than expected with a new projected budget of about £16k - £17k. Now - usually that's bad news and poor project planning, but thankfully because it's been so long in conveyancing, my bets on the area (round the corner from a good secondary school, lots of families etc) the area GDV for a 3-bed semi detatched is now looking to be a minimum of £140k... I'm seeing a few sell for £145k already which is exciting so I'm happy to do this refurb right and spend more money making it right.

That means the updated figures are roughly:

PP £106,000.00
Purchase Costs £6,600.00
Deposit £26,500.00
Refurb £16,961.97
GDV £144,000.00
Profit £14,438.03
ROCE 28.84%

​That's a return of almost 30% which would have made this a great little flip project, but as I bought this using a 2 year fixed and sinking money in myself for 2 years. I'll be locking up that money for the next 24 months and enjoying the rental income and capital growth with it. Overall it should achieve or exceed 32% ROI per year which is awesome. Of course - as things change I'll keep updating the numbers to whatever becomes the final truth!

🏡 Refurb BTL 1 Progress

So - we're now fully ripped out, I was hoping to salvage the kitchen but after looking closely, it needed completely ripping out, I also spotted a leak on the main pipework so better to completely rip it out and start again.

I was going to order my kitchen from DIY-Kitchens.com and even did a video about it here but when it came to ordering, I spotted that they wouldn't deliver until 2022! That's almost a 3 month lead time.

So I had to re-think my plan and opened up a trade account with Howdens. A lady came round to verify my ID the same day, she then sent a free planner round to visualise and put together a kitchen for me, and he sent that over by the end of the day. Delivery was arranged within 48 hours and I'm having it all delivered today!

The original cost with DIY-Kitchens including sink, tap, built in oven etc was about £1500, Howdens came in at £1800 but for the sake of speed, convenience and saving me time with the property being empty, £300 extra isn't too bad.

This is the kitchen - we fully ripped it out ready to re-do the walls and fit the new Howdens kitchen in, hopefully in about 2 - 3 weeks time!

​The bathroom also was really worse for wear and I knew for a long time it needed ripping out, after taking everything out I've found 3 leaking pipes which explains water damage on the ceiling downstairs in the kitchen so my hunch was 100% correct.

Damp and water problems often look scary but if you think logically it's easy to troubleshoot and find the main problem. The plumber will be coming in to re-do all the pipes here ready to fit the new bathroom.

This is the bathroom - ready to finish the rip out and install a brand new suite, pipes, plastering and tiling!

We also ripped out a lot downstairs, including some old pine units built and nailed straight into the brick so taking those out naturally destroyed the walls! This will be fully boarded over and re-plastered

The old cupboard units are removed, ready to be plastered

And here's a plan for the new kitchen, note that there's an awkward space with a small slither of the kitchen worktop - I was going to keep it the same as before and allow a small gap but kudos to Howdens for coming up with a better solution to make the corner of the kitchen way better and fill in the awkward gap with a filler panel.

I probably won't be going with the purple / pink wall but the kitchen will be their Charcoal Greenwich kitchen with grey oak worktop (laminate).

Howden's sent me this within hours of visiting the property! All for free

📦 Property Deal Analyser

I built and released my own Property Deal Analyser, which allows you to track, analyse and manage your property deals like a pro and visually manage your property pipeline while quickly calculating ROI, Yield, Profit and many more figures in seconds!

I used this to analyse the property above and had all the key figures before viewing the property which helped me make the right offer on the property.

Check Out The Property Deal Analyser

Everything is customisable which makes this so unique - every business is different so you can tailor it exactly to your needs. Notion is super easy to use and free to download.

📽️ YouTube this week

I've been posting a few videos of walkthroughs of the property so feel free to get a proper view of what's going on as I go through the refurb process!


As always - any questions, feel free to reach out!

Matt Brighton

Hey, I'm Matt. I've worked for several years in financial services & banking for one of the UK's largest banks in London and now work as a senior product manager in a global startup. On the side, I'm building a property development group utilising all my leadership, project management and financial experience. I'm helping share my knowledge of working in these roles mixed with the world of property.

Read more from Matt Brighton

Hey friends, It's been a few months. I don't tend to spam your inbox with lots of these emails for those who have been subscribed for a long time to my updates. As usual, if this newsletter isn't for you - there's a link at the bottom to remove yourself from the list. What's going on in the property market? My latest YouTube video explores the latest figures and provides a balanced view of what's happening in the property market. Rishi is celebrating halved inflation, which doesn't mean...

3 months ago • 2 min read

👋 Hey Reader It's been a busy few months, so I've been a little quiet on emails. We finally moved into the big renovation project outside of London after a stressful 8 month conveyancing process and the house almost falling through (classic). Planning permission has been submitted and we're starting to rip out the house, however living in a project that you're doing up is always tricky with logistics! After we bought the house, a house 4 doors down the road sold for £1.5m in cash to a famous...

12 months ago • 2 min read

👋 Hey friends Premier Property Lawyers are still being the biggest pain in the bum in our property sale. My buyers mortgage expires in 3 weeks and they keep raising endless menial enquiries at the last minute that keeps holding us back. I repeat my advice from the last newsletter - never ever use any of the conveyancing brands under the Simplify group. They're awful. In other news - the property market has took an incredible flip over the past few weeks, we really did not expect interest...

over 1 year ago • 2 min read
Share this post