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My name is Cashaf and we are in Old Trafford. As you can see, Manchester United Football Stadium right behind me there. I've got a service accommodation unit just on this road here and it's making 5 or 6,000 turnover per month. So, come along with me. I'll walk down to the service accommodation unit from Old Trafford and we'll go check it out.
This is normally just full of fans everywhere. You can't even see the pavement when you when it's match day. We managed to get quite a big house. We've got four bedrooms which are quite large. You can actually accommodate up to 12 people in the house. Funnily enough, uh, I actually met Samuel Leeds the first time at Old Trafford. Came for the one-pound crash course over here at Old Trafford. So, it kind of brings it all back home.
My background is purely working class. You know, growing up, we didn't really have much. I think that's a great trait to have because when you've not got a lot, it really gives makes you hungry and you really want to succeed and you don't want to be in that position you were in beforehand.
Upstairs we've got four bedrooms. Well, two reception rooms. I was thinking of the actual the guests that we're going to be have we're going to be hosting over here. So, if you're coming down to watch a Manchester United football match or if you're coming to watch the cricket, you've got enough room upstairs for all the guests. So, instead of getting another bedroom in here, you've got the games room in here and then you've also got the TV room in there.
The service accommodation is like a hotel but with no staff. So, people will check themselves in and they'll check themselves out. The benefit of that for them is that they don't have to get involved with setting up tenancies. They don't have to sign an AST. They don't have to contact the council to get council tax sorted out or the Wi-Fi. Everything is done.
I'm from Bury, which is just north Manchester, but I've been commuting to and from Manchester for 20 years now, since I was going to university. So, before I was into property, I used to work at BMW. I was an engineer there for just over 10 years and it was working full-time for somebody else and it was for repairing vehicles that have been damaged in an accident.
So, I'll take you through to the kitchen. Brand new washing machine. You've got nice white towels in the background there. We've also got brand new appliances. It would have been a shame to not do it to such a high standard because what we were worried about was guests then not looking after the place. What we thought was if you do it high-end, it's like if you go on holiday and you go to like, say, Dubai, for instance, and everywhere it's just clean. If you've got a packet of crisps and you've just finished it, you wouldn't throw it on the floor because it's clean. That's what kind of feel I wanted for this house. He wanted people to come in, pay a premium rate, but also get a premium service for when they come here because again, you're maximizing your profits as well.
I love pressure and I love the hustle and bustle and I love knowing, uh, the technical side of things. Even going back to my very first job, uh, working at Pizza Hut, I remember even remember we used to have a blue cup to put on the small pizzas for cheese. It's a bit of a, a geek sort of nature, but I think that kind of like works well in property because when I invest in property, I make sure that I've done my due diligence correctly. I think I get it from my mom, to be honest. My mom used to work in a factory. She'd get us all up for school. We'd all get ready for school, get off to school. She'd work from like 8 till about 2 or 3:00 in the afternoon. We'd come home from school. She'd get the meals ready for us. She'd do all the cleaning, the washing, the laundry, everything. Nothing was ever too much for my mom. I think I've got that work ethic from her.
We had one bad guest. To be fair, it was only one that we've had in, I think it's been over 12 months now we've had this house. We've got really good systems in place that we've got from Samuel Leeds and I think that's really the reason why we've not got any bad experiences. We've got like a security deposit which Samuel Leeds make sure you take your security deposit. Make sure the guest signs a rental agreement. The guests really want to make sure that they get the deposit back and they know that you will you have got the right to charge them or fine them if they break any of the house rules.
When we got it, it was a blank canvas. There was no furnishings. There were no beds. There was no lighting. So, we put these this paneling in on the stairs and in the bedrooms and we painted it everywhere. We've got all the furnishings done. All in all, I think it was probably about 5 or 6 thousand that we put into it. When we actually took this on, I was still working full-time and I worked just down the road. So, I used to come here after work and sort of work on the house.
I don't like apartments. Um, the reason is because you've got head lease restrictions. You might have a block of flats and you might speak to a landlord who owns one of the flats inside the block, but he's got a head lease agreement with the freeholder. If you imagine it to be like a contract between the landlord and the the freeholder, the freeholder may state in there that you're not allowed to have any short-term lets. So, I think a lot of the apartments in Manchester City Centre have that problem. If by any chance you do find one that's not got a head lease restriction, you might still get a management company that is managing the block for the freeholder and the management company might have their contract. Again, even if you find somebody that's not got a head lease restriction and they've not got a problem with the management company, a lot of management companies do change hands in Manchester as well. So, I don't want that headache. If I'm going to be investing 5 or £6,000 into a house or an apartment, I want to be I want to make sure that I've not got any headache of somebody coming back on me. I like to have houses. As well as that, you can also charge more per night. And you've also got lot you've also got contractors that love the big houses because they can stay together.
This is the bathroom upstairs. Even though it looks really nice, the house, I think the people that did the refurbishment, they cut quite a lot of corners. So, we had like a water leak coming down from underneath this bath into the living room downstairs. I got a plumber out in an emergency. He took it all apart, took the screen off, took everything out, and underneath it, it was just all shabby. Like, you were just like just bare, like just wood and just plaster wood. It wasn't even, um, plastered. So, we got him to waterproof everything underneath there. The landlord funded it because it was poor refurbishment, to be honest. To be fair, contractors, the normal yacht, right, if there's an issue, they kind of understand. They still left a 10 out of 10 review. Um, and the reason for it is because I never duck or dive or I never bury my head in the sand. If there's an issue, I hit it straight on.
I've never really told anybody this, but, um, after about 3-4 weeks of joining the academy, I'd lost complete faith in Samuel Leeds and I just thought I'd been I'd bought into a scam. In my mind, it was like, "Yeah, I can do this. I'm going to get rent-to-rent. I'm going to leave my job. I'm going to quit and I'm going to work on property full-time." After about a month of really trying hard and I thought I'd bought into a scam and then I went to the training course and I was just full of negativity and I thought this guy's a scam artist and I don't know what I'm doing here. I don't know why I'm here. To be honest, what really d brought me out of that was I was looking at Samuel and every single move that he was making and I thought he's a scammer. But then the more I was watching him, the more I was buying into him and what Samuel was saying and what he was telling on stage about all the strategies that he's got. I was calculating everything and I was putting it all together and everything that he said was making sense and I'd seen him on stage and within a space of like 6 minutes he'd sold three deals for like £3,000 each. Once you've seen that and then you're going back to your 9-to-5 job, you can't unsee it and you can't go back to your job. It just completely changes your mindset.
In hindsight, yeah, I would definitely I I wish I had three, four more of these to be honest with you, 'cause it's just so easy. The cleaners are great. You've got a nice You've got a cellar downstairs. So, the cellar stores all the the the mop, the brush, the Hoover, the chemicals for cleaning up everywhere. They just come in, they get into the cellar, they get the stuff out, they clean it. They're my eyes and ears of the place, to be honest with you. And I would definitely my piece of advice would be make sure you've got some very good cleaners that are reliable that do a good job.
If it wasn't for my wife, I don't think I would have joined the academy this quickly. I don't think I would have been this passionate. She's been really the force behind me that says, "You can do it." We've both kind of invested in each other. She was passionate for cakes and she's done a lot of courses before and she wanted to do it over here in Manchester. So, I invested in her. We bought all the machinery, all the equipment, all the tools 'cause I had sort of give her the confidence and boost in that. It was great to have that comeback round on me. So, I met my wife through, um, family. My dad kind of knew her dad and I'd never thought about getting married in Pakistan before. Anyway, we went over to Pakistan. We met her in a family. Funny story is when we first met, we went on this like, um, tourist area in Pakistan. It's like North Pakistan in a place called Murree. Her dad had said to us, "Go to a restaurant at the end of the road, you know, um, have a bit of a chat." We'd gone for this walk. We non-stop talking about life and everything. Gone to this restaurant and it was a terrible restaurant. It was like nobody was in there and it's one of them ones where you've got like tablecloths on the table and then you've got like diagonal tablecloths on top of it. And we sat down facing each other and none of us felt the vibe. And this is the first time we've ever really sort of spoke. And we looked at each other and I give her that look and I was like, "Should we go?" And she just laughed and she just like put the big smile on her face. And since there when we left and we ran out of the restaurant, we just sort of like connected from there. We just kind of knew we're soulmates.
I've just pulled up to the first service accommodation that I took on. It's in a place called Gorton in Manchester. If you know Manchester, it's not the most luxurious place. Let's let's put it that way. So, this one is a four-bedroomed house. Great thing about it is you've got free on-street parking unlimited. There's no restrictions. This is a downstairs reception. We've converted it into a bedroom. It was very difficult because to convert it to a bedroom, what we had to do was put a bed in it. [laughter] So, that's what Samuel says. Just put a bed in it. You convert a reception room into a bedroom. Easy as that. You can now charge more per night because you've got another bedroom.
I put all this paneling in myself. That was the first challenge for getting that right because I had an idea in my head of how I wanted this to look. But I didn't want to just go for the typical, uh, paneling that you get from like B&Q. So, funny story with this place is I've been on the academy about 2 months, just over 2 months, and I was really desperate for a deal because I was working full-time. Every time a deal sourcer would set me a deal for a rent-to-rent, within like an hour it's gone. With this house, what happened is a deal sourcer sent me the details over and I was just like, "Right, I want it." I sent him over the payment for the for the rent-to-rent contract, for the deal sourcing contract without even viewing the house. When I came here, it was terrible. If you could just imagine like the smell of dog infested with cigarette smoke, it was just really infused in everything. I think it took about 6 weeks for that smell to actually die out of us open the windows. We spoke to the landlord, told him that about the horrific smell, and he paid for new carpets to be put in. We cleaned the walls, cleaned the ceilings, and now it smells really nice and it's it's a great SA. It does really well. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone. Make sure you always view your SAs or view any of your houses, if anything, before you invest in anything. This one's generated between 3 to 5,000 a month in revenue. So, the rent here is £1,350. The profit on this one, uh, generally speaking, each month is probably around £1,000 to 2,000 a month.
When we first went live with this house, I had advertised it on Airbnb before we'd gone before with the house ready. And that's what they teach what Samuel Leeds teaches you in the academy. Anyway, we're about 3 weeks left before we finish. And we've got a booking. When we got the booking through, we were kind of like panicking because we didn't think we'd get it done in time, but I didn't want to cancel the booking. I said, "Let's just do it." So, we just kind of like rolled our sleeves up, got everything ready. The guest came, the guests really enjoyed the house and they left a great review and I think for the first sort of two, three months we were cleaning the house. That's me, my mom, my wife. It's a bit of a challenge, but it was it was a good time because, uh, we all kind of went together.
Yeah, family is huge for me because, um, I mean, thank God I've got, you know, I've got two kids. They're the reason why I'm doing what I'm doing. I mean, I'm sacrificing a lot of time with my kids right now. Samuel mentioned it last night on on the mastermind as well, actually. Spend time on your business now and then spend time with your kids later. Life is difficult no matter what you do. You can either choose a difficult now and face the difficult times and make your sacrifices now or further down the line you've got to make your sacrifices because you can't afford that PS5 that your kid wants. You can't afford to go on that holiday that your kids want to go on where your wife wants and you want to spend that time with your family. Once you know what works for you and you've invested in yourself, the sky's the limit.
So, as I said before, when I had bought the deal, I basically paid the deal sourcer for this house for rent-to-rent. And before I viewed it, um, I just went on to Google Maps and on the street view and I found this the house. I found the door and I thought, "Oh, it looks all right." It looked at the street, looked at the area, there's free parking. I spun the camera around on the Google map street view and there was a lad. And if you know Gorton, you'll understand, but there was a lad across the road. He was like that just staring at the the Google [laughter] at the at the Google car going past. I've just checked they've actually they've actually changed that picture now. It used to be over there but there's a guy stood right across the road and he was like that. I thought, "Oh my god, what kind of house have I bought?"
So, we head over to the next SA. So, that's the third one. Uh, that's the latest one that I've got. The plan was to list it on Airbnb and on Booking.com and block the diary so nobody can book until I think it was Monday the 3rd of November. What happened is I'd blocked the diary for Airbnb. I've listed it on there. We've gone live, but then on Booking.com, I've listed it on there and I was about to block the calendar, but my wife walked in the room. I left the laptop and the computer open and just went to the house. We started cleaning up. As we're cleaning up, it was I think it was on a Friday. We'd got a booking for the Saturday night and I was I was in panic mode because the house isn't ready. The boiler's not working. We had to go ahead with it. And we literally got a cleaner in. I got Fabio, one of the lads from the academy. Great thing about the academy is again, you know, you've got so many people that were willing to help. Everything was done by 2:57 p.m. So, the guest checked in at 3:00. They noticed that the boiler wasn't working. I'd already called the insurance company. So, the engineer came out to the house and met us there. And luckily, he managed to fix the boiler temporarily while they stayed for the night.
So, even though it's not technically live, um, we still had we've had one night stay over there as well. So, this is the third service accommodation unit. This was by and large the probably the worst condition one that I've took on before. The tenant had left in a horrible mess. I think the previous tenant is actually in jail now. You can imagine what kind of state the house was in. We've got a couple of board games here and we've got Samuel Leeds's Property Millionaire. So, you definitely need one of this in every single SA. So, I'm going to just get the serial number off the boiler because I think that's playing up at the minute, which is a nightmare because without a boiler, you can't do anything. An engineer has been out to it and looked at it. He said, he thinks it's the fan, but like he said, if you replace the fan, you'll have loads of other issues. So, that's something we got to get a chop off straight away, get the boiler replaced, um, and then we can take on more bookings. If anyone knows anything about Bettercom 324C Glowworm boilers, drop me a message through.
This one is a smaller unit. It's only a two-bedroom one. We've got a single bedroom just through here. In terms of figures, um, we're aiming to be generating around 2 to 2,500 a month in revenue. Biggest mistake with this one definitely was doing a lot of the work myself. And this is when I was speaking to Samuel and he was having a he had a pop at me. He wasn't happy with me doing a lot of the work myself 'cause it took me 10 weeks to finish it. And it's it's silly to do that. Biggest lesson I've learned definitely is a mindset shift. I'm quite selfish and naive, um, and thinking that I'm the only person that can do a good job when it's not the case. You can invest in other people to do that for you. I've got to learn to not be a control freak. If you look at anyone that's successful, focus is huge and you've got to make sure that you're focusing your time and energy, uh, and the resources onto something that's going to give you the most potential and the most return on your investment.
So, this is a nice treat for the guests. We got financially free in 7 days with Samuel Leeds's book. So, this will inspire the guests to start their own service accommodation units. They can get some powerful wisdom from the main man, Samuel Leeds himself. If Sam was watching this, a massive thing I'd say to him is, "Thanks, bro." Honestly, thank you so much from the bottom of my heart. What I've learned from from sort of following Samuel for a number of years now is he's always looked at how he can make things valuable and add value to people's lives. Just a huge, huge thank you to Samuel for allowing me to quit my job to focus on my family and to have some aspirations for the future.