Happy Father’s Day to all you Dads in the community.
The freedom and flexibility that a property business can facilitate was greatly felt this week as my wife had to fly back to Northern Ireland at short notice for three days, leaving me in charge of our three young boys. From Tuesday to Friday I juggled ‘hands on daddying’ with an all round fairly productive week (and the house was still in a pretty tidy state when my wife arrived home). I was able to attend two kid’s sports days, move the ball forwards with some guest house things and view a potential development site with Chris.
The only thing I couldn’t do was attend our monthly Development Discovery Mastermind in Sheffield, but thanks to live webinar technology and skype I was able to join in on most of the day.
Here’s a quick summary from the week:
Our Development Project
This week we dissected and discussed revised drawings to optimise our development site. It’s proving to be a phenomenal learning process as we liaise with a new architect on how to increase size and volume of units. We are currently looking at the potential of adding three additional apartments, adding garages and increasing the internal area of each flat. The potential is super exciting and well worth the wait. We just have the small matter of going through a new planning process. As we’ve learned, your existing planning can’t be retracted so we are in a good position to look at optimising the site.
As we were talking through options it hit us that this could be a lucrative little strategy, in itself, to apply to other plots- i.e. secure a site with detailed planning, work closely with a good architect to optimise the site further i.e. more/better units, thus adding significant value to the site. Once you’ve added value to the site you then have more options i.e. build out for greater profit or sell the site on for a profit without having to build. With the greater value of the land, you will also be in a better position from a lending perspective. Our intention for ours is still very much to experience building out and selling.
Our Guest House progress
- appliances ordered and due to arrive on Tuesday
- full list of maintenance jobs outlined and Chris has already started to smash through those
- deep clean and linen hire scheduled for mid-week
- enquiries out for gardener services to clear out a small overgrown back garden (in fact, does anyone have a recommendation for a good value garden service for Midlothian and East Lothian?)
- should be ready to roll by Thursday
That half year mark is fast approaching but we’re feeling grateful about what we’ve accomplished, and ambitious about the months to come.
Today has been one of the best Father’s Day’s I can remember and it also coincided with my middle son’s birthday.
Have a great Sunday evening and a productive start to the week ahead