Transcription
Retiring early in property is actually possible, but the way that most people do it is completely backwards. They start by asking, "How many properties do I need?" And then they panic at the number, and they never even start.
So, in this video, I want to show you exactly how I would build a portfolio to retire, even if I was starting from scratch today. Not theory, the actual strategy that I would run step-by-step. And this is whether you've got capital behind you or if you're starting from zero.
And for those that don't know me, my name is Jamie. I've been doing this for over a decade now, transacted on over a thousand acquisitions. That's a quarter of a billion pounds worth of property, and I did it starting with 33,000 in debt. And how I did it is the exact step-by-step that I'm going to be showing you in this video.
By the way, cheeky little plug here. If you're looking to start in your property journey and you're actually ready to invest in yourself, then we've got an education company. If you want to find out more, you can put tips in the comments, and you can book in a free one-to-one strategy session with myself or my team.
So, the challenge with hitting any sort of figure through boring vanilla buy-to-lets, which is ultimately the foundation of property investment, is you're going to need a lot of them. In fact, the UK pension said it's going to be around 43,900 pounds a year. Well, even that's going to be between 13 and 14 buy-to-let properties. So, around 650,000. Have you got that in your bank? I don't think so. And the thing is, nobody has that sort of money. It is incredibly rare that anyone has that sort of money. Bear in mind, our businesses do over 10 million a year, and we might have 1 to 2 million in the bank. The average individual definitely won't be near it.
So, phase one is the capital engine. If I was starting today with little or no money, the first thing I would do is deal packaging. And it's how I started building my capital without needing a deposit of my own. Here's how it works. So, you find an investor, and this could be an accountant, a doctor, a dentist, somebody that works hard for their money. They're earning good money, but they need to get it working hard for them. Then what I'm going to do is understand their criteria. And they're going to retain my services. They're going to pay me to go and find something that matches their criteria. So, I'm going to go out. I'm going to educate myself. I'm going to do the legwork, negotiate it, package it up, and send it to the investor. And I'm going to get paid per deal. And that's going to be £5,000 upwards per deal. The easy way of thinking about yourself is kind of like a personal shopper of property. Kind of like an estate agent, but instead of working for the person selling the property, known as a vendor, I'm working for the buyer in this case, an investor. And I'm going to be a personal shopper for my investor, understanding what they're looking for, and earn money from it. And for me, if you can do 20 deals a year, that is going to be around £100,000, which is not a bad starting point. But that's just a starting point.
The other key benefit of working with investors, working with agents, working with vendors, is you're learning the ropes quite quickly. You're getting their expertise, their insights on how to deliver it. And not only are you learning how to attract and convert people, properties, and investors, you're also learning what makes an amazing deal without taking on any of the risk. Now, this is the downside of a lot of other low entry strategies, where you've got like rent-to-rents, rent service accommodation, lease options, where they can be very good money makers, but you have to be an expert in HMOs, in service accommodation, in buy-to-let, in order to take on that risk. Whereas for this strategy, you're learning everything you need to do without any of the risk, and making money as fast as possible.
Now, remember, this is not get-rich-quick. Deal packaging is not passive. It's active. It's work. You have to go all in. And I'm fed up of the out there of these gurus that act like you're going to do an hour here or there and open up your bank account and Midas has touched it and you're making gold every single day. It doesn't work like that. You have to work hard enough to not have to work hard. You're learning, calling, negotiating, building relationships. But the point of this isn't to do it forever. You're going to create systems around this, processes around it. And I don't mind talking money on this channel. I'd be a bit stupid if I didn't. I still do deal packaging today. And now we make between 300 and 500,000 every single month from deal packaging alone. Now, I'm not saying that's a brag. I'm showing you that you can scale this as well. And now I've got a team to do it for me. And so the point is to generate enough capital that can get you into the game.
Now, if you haven't read this book, I really recommend it. It's called The Richest Man in Babylon. It's by a Clason. I want to say George Clason on there. And I'll simplify it. It says that you earn your gold, you then invest it, and then your gold produces silver. And I want you thinking about deal packaging as your way of earning your gold. So, I'm going to work really hard in my active income streams. I'm going to develop my skills where I want to be able to earn as much gold as possible. And now for me, that's in the millions on an annual basis. Touch wood. It'll hopefully be millions on a monthly basis. And believe it or not, I don't touch a penny. The strategy that I'm going to tell you is the same strategy that I do today just on a bigger scale. And I invest all of that money into property, cash-producing assets, so they're an asset, not a liability, and that gives babies, as it were, as George Clason would say, is the silver. And I live on the silver of my life. By the way, this is how I've seen people go from genuinely nothing to owning their first property in 18 months to buying a property every single month within 2 years.
So, that's phase one, getting your deposit together. Phase two is your first property. So, now that you've got your first deposit, let's say it's 40 to 50,000 pounds, here's how you're going to start to use it. You're not buying any property. You're looking for three things and I've covered this in depth in other videos, so I'm going to keep this really brief. Number one, you want to get a great price. Now, sometimes it's going to be a discount to the market, but the number one thing is actually focusing on buying a property in the right area where there's a clear opportunity to add value. And this could be through making a two-bed into a three-bed, it could be through refurbishment or a high demand rental area. So, let's say we've got a 200,000-pound property and I'm able to find something for 160. And the reason I'm able to do that is because I'm direct to vendor off market and because I'm not trying to find five, 10 a month of these, I can take my time of finding the diamonds and taking advantage of these deals. I'm then going to put in the money on that. I'm going to spend 20,000 on the refurbishment, all right? So, now we've put in a load of money. We're now going to go back to the lender and say, "Hey, look, I've bought this property at a good price. I've then put money into it to increase the value and now let's say it's worth, just for the sake of this example, 250,000. And what I want you to do is give me a new mortgage at 75% loan to value on the new value of 250. Now, there's a lot of nuance on how to do that, but as I said, this video is more of the example, not the step-by-step on doing that. We've got other videos for this.
Now, look, are you going to get all of your money out? No, that's not the way it works. But the aim that we're doing is you might put in 50, 60, 70 grand into a property and you might get 20, 30 grand back and then you're going to top that money up again with the deal packaging funds that are coming in. And by the way, this is a form of a buy-to-let and BRR. I don't believe in full BRRs, buy, refurbish, refinance, pulling all your money out. It doesn't work like that. But this is a good system. And then we move to phase three.
And this is the scaling engine. And by the way, this is how I actually scaled my portfolio. So I mentioned I've almost got a 30 million pound portfolio, which is kind of crazy. We're adding on another another 12 and a half million this year, so we'll see where that gets to. And most people go, "Well, you must have got joint ventures for that, right? You must have got somebody bringing all of the money, and you're splitting it 50/50 with them." Actually, no. I own it with my business partners 100%. The only debt that I've got on there is mortgages on there. So here's exactly how we did it, because the strategy I'm about to tell you compounds into, well, I guess what we've done today. So you don't have to choose between deal packaging for others and building your own portfolio. You do both at the same time. So here's what I started doing. First of all, I started getting real money from deal packaging. So I didn't do this straight away. I started making money, and then in my first year I did 143-grand. In my second year I did about a quarter of a million. Now this baffles people, by the way, because actually I didn't start buying properties until about two years into the property game. And then in the third year, I owned up 14 buy-to-let properties. And that actually what my family thought was crazy, you might find this crazy too, is I owned 14 buy-to-lets, but I still rented where I lived. So I didn't even own my personal house, but I owned 14 buy-to-let properties. How on earth did I do it? Well, it's the five-in-one strategy. So here's what I did. For every five properties that I packaged, I kept 100% of the money, and I invested in the SIP. So I package five, buy the SIP. Package five, buy the sit. Package five buy to sit. And I did this. And my criteria, I end up aligning it to my investors. So, still to this day, I am one of my portfolio building companies biggest investors. But, we have the same criteria as every single investor. So, you're not working harder, you're working the same amount, but for every fifth deal that I've done and I get paid fees, I use the money to buy the sit. And as you can imagine, this starts compounding year on year. So, in my third year I bought 14. Fast forward to today, we own over 100 buy to let properties, which is so insane saying that. But, all that happened is it compounded again and again and again. And here's the magic, by the way. You get to year five, and this is where it gets really crazy. Why year five? Because you're starting to refinance the properties that you bought five years ago. And so, now that's happening is I'm still buying one or two a month, but now I'm refinancing and each property this year, the average that we're pulling out in new cash is over 30,000 pounds. And so, we're refinancing, give or take, one or two a month now. This is at the year five rate. Now, we're at year 10, we're refinancing between three and five a month, getting 30 grand. And our deal package income, and do we touch a penny? No. We invest and we invest and we invest. And so, we live off the cash flow, which is way too much money than what we need, by the way, being open. Um but, we keep on building this way. And so, The Richest Man in Babylon, George Clason, we followed the model to a T. But, instead of thinking about our job being the gold, we thought of deal packaging being the gold. And we started generating that gold more and more, faster and faster. And we reinvested in the business, infrastructure, team, systems, etc. And bear in mind, we started 33,000 in debt. That was a personal loan and a credit card. Fast forward to It was around 8 years later, we did our first eight-figure year. So, around 2 years ago now, we did our first 10 million year, and still we didn't touch a penny. So, this is all about delayed gratification. Is this get get rich quick? No. Is it an overnight success? No, absolutely not. But, it's a real plan with real numbers that I've seen real people execute again and again.
The one thing we haven't touched on, by the way, really, is the capital growth and how big it ends up going because of the leverage and capital growth. It's absolutely crazy. You would have heard terms like property on average doubles every 10 years. Now, that's not quite true. It's every 10 to 15 years. But, the big thing to get is because of inflation, the value of that debt is going down, even though it's interest only, the value of the property is going up. And so, every 5 years you're able to use this money to reinvest again and again and fund the next deposit. And this is where the game gets unfair. The rich do get richer. It accelerates faster and faster. If you look at my net worth curve, it's like that, and it's exponential growth now. But, you can either be a victim to that or the victor of your success, and you need to start taking control. You need a strategy, and you need enough time to run it.
Now, I want to be straight with you here cuz this is the point where most property videos where somebody tells you it's all going to be easy, it's going to be passive. It's not. It takes time. Deal packaging, it takes effort. You're It's a real exchange of value. Refurbishments are stressful. Voids, boiler breaks, tenant leaves. And the math doesn't always work out as cleanly as it does on a whiteboard. And look, I've been doing this for a decade now. And the people that I've watched actually get there, the ones who retire on property income, traveling the world, living our life on their terms, life by design, not by default, they've had the same thing in common. They started. They were consistent and they stayed boring. No crazy strategies, no gambling on short-term plays, boring vanilla buy-to-let properties built over time, financed properties, and accelerated and fueled by deal packaging. And if you're ready to go all in on this, and you really want to learn the nuanced details of how you can get from where you're at to 100 k a year or beyond, then put tips in the comments, t i p s. I'm going to send you a link and you can book in a free one-to-one strategy session, and we can decide how we're going to help you achieve that together.
So, to pull this together, 13 properties for a comfortable retirement. You don't need capital up front. You build it through deal packaging and you reinvest that gold into a cash-producing asset that's going to produce the silver, and you compound it through time, building on that business, refinancing, and capital growth, and you stay consistent. The people who retire on property income, they're not special. They're really not. I am not one of these people sat here going, I am smarter than you. The reality is, I got some information and I took massive action and I've just been doing it for a decade. And now it's time to stop waiting for the perfect moment and start building. You now know the strategy. The only question is if you're going to run it. And that's it for this one. If you're new to the channel, by the way, make sure to hit subscribe and the notification bell, and I'll see you in the next video.