How to Keep Ahead of the Curve With Your Property Investing

The first area is Changes in Legislation and Regulations, both on a national level and also on a local level. Local councils are always changing the requirements about things such as HMO's and planning and licensing.

The other thing we need to keep updated on to make us more money is being aware of Mortgage Rates, what loan to values are available, what rates are available and what requirements mortgage companies are now enforcing. This is really important to make sure we're always getting the most cost effective and appropriate financing for our property investing.

The third area we need to keep up to date on is Property Strategies. These are always evolving and changing. Because I run my mastermind programme, I'm learning from my students who are out there, who are innovating all the time with our strategies.

Reading my blogs are a great way to keep updated with strategies, but I have a limited amount of time each week. So we often have further learning opportunities by in depth training webinars. I encourage you to, when you read my blogs, if you're getting value, to come and click on the link and register for some of the further training sessions we have.

There are four main ways for you to keep updated on what's happening in the market. I'm going to run through some of these, some are my personal resources. You might want to listen to this again, because I think some of these are going to be really valuable for you.

So number one is reading magazines. There are lots of great magazines. The first one I started reading was one called Property Investor News. Now it's a really good magazine, probably for the more serious investor with market updates, what's happening, changes in legislation. A really good read. It's actually often referred to as PIN Magazine. It's nothing to do with the Property Investors Network. In fact, a funny story. When we first set up pin back in 2003, I was contacted by the editor of Property Investor News, as they thought I was ripping off his name. We agreed that we would always refer to pin as property investor’s network, 'pin in lowercase'. He would be PIN in uppercase just to differentiate between the two.

As time has gone on Richard's come to understand that actually we really care about our students and we're giving great value, so we're very good friends. Richard speaks at many of the Property Investor Network meetings, but PIN is a great magazine, although it's completely unrelated to what we do.

Another magazine that people often think is ours, is Your Property Network. Now this is a different type of magazine, equally good, but in a different way. It's full of inspirational case studies about people who are investing all over the country, using different strategies, a great way to learn those strategies.

There are so many of our successful students featured in that magazine, people often think it's our magazine, but it's not. It's an independent magazine, I do write a column for it, and we give subscribers a copy of my book, Property Magic. I'm going to put a link where you can actually get a copy of the magazine for free and a complimentary copy of my book when you subscribe because I think you should check out the magazine if you don't already subscribe to it.

A new magazine that's come out that I think is also different, but really good is called Blue Bricks.

The next way to keep updated is by joining one of the landlord associations. In the UK, there used to be two associations. There was the NLA, National Landlord Association, and the RLA, Residential Landlord Association. They have now merged to form the NRLA. It is an excellent organisation. For just £75 a year, you get access to all of the member facilities. This includes one of the biggest benefits, which is a legal helpline. So if you've got some difficulties and challenges, you can call them and get a really good idea of where you stand on a legal front. That saves a lot of worry and aggravation.

Once you're a member, you get invited to lots of their webinars, they have network meetings, which are very different from our network meetings but equally good to go to. They will have the latest contracts that you can use for your tenants, etc. They'll also give an update on legislation. So for £75, it's money well spent if you're becoming a landlord.

We  have a voucher code so all of my members and my listeners can actually get 20% off membership. So £15 off by just using the code when you go and subscribe to NRLA. If you use the code pin21a, that's all one word, pin lowercase, 21a. That will give you 20% off the membership, will save you £15. 

The third way of keeping up to date is of course, going to network meetings. More recently, those have all been online. However, I do hope that we will be going back to physical meetings with a number of our meetings very soon. By six months time, we hope to have all of our meetings back to physical. Virtual has worked really well because actually we've had people from all over the world be able to attend local network meetings, because they can do it virtually. Yet you don't quite get the same connection as when you're face to face, but it's a pretty close substitute. As we haven't been able to run physical meetings, they've worked very, very well.

Not only can you listen to other landlords and investors sharing what they've done and how they've done it, we can build your confidence and belief about what can be done. The ability to connect with local people in the area in which you want to invest, is really powerful, because you can understand about local trends. We always have a local letting agent who updates us on what's happening in the market. They also share some of the national changes and legislation coming through as well. We have a mortgage broker who lets us know what's happening on the local mortgage market as well. So it really is a great way to keep up to date with what's going on and also connect with other local people and build your local power team.

I can honestly say some of the best deals I've done have come from people I've met through networking at my meetings and other people's meetings. Also, I've learned some of my best strategies by finding out what other people are doing and putting the parts of the jigsaw together. So if you're not going to network meetings, I think you're missing a trick. You can check out Google to see the local network meetings near you, or you can go and check out www.pinMeeting.co.uk to get a list of all the pin Meetings around the country. We generally don't do meetings in August and December, but instead we have big national meetings, usually with 1,000 people, great guest speakers. So it's definitely worth coming and checking out the national pin meetings that we do.

If you've not been to a pin Meeting before, you can go for your very first time completely free as our guest, just to come and check it out for yourself. All you do is go to pinMeeting.co.uk, you select the local meeting you want to attend, click on that button, it will take you to the page, show you the dates and it's always the same time each month. Scroll down to the bottom and where you normally come to pay £20, if it's your first time, you can come to a very first pin Meeting for free, by using the voucher code 'BLOG'.

I'm really happy for you to give that voucher code to other people who maybe you know, who might be interested in property, but haven't been to our network meetings yet.

The final way to update your knowledge is by going to property exhibitions. There haven't been any of these during Covid. Normally there are a couple of really big ones at ExCel each year, and it looks like 2021 October, it'll probably happen again, which is great. I'll be speaking and exhibiting at those. It's a great way to come along and meet lots of different people in the property industry, hear lots of expert views and opinions at some of the seminars. So don't just come along and speak to the exhibitors. Make sure you get to the seminars.

When Covid first hit in March, 2020, there was due to be a show in early April. I really look forward to speaking at these shows and meeting lots of people. So when it happened, I called around some of my fellow property experts and we arranged a virtual property exhibition, and it was completely free of charge, online, for a day. We had thousands of people registered and everyone got massive value from this. We've done it a couple of times and actually we've got another one of these coming up very soon.

The benefit of these virtual property exhibitions is of course there are no travel costs or time incurred. We pick some of the very best speakers in the property world. It's not quite like a pin Meeting. These have a 30 minute content rich presentation, we have a little break in between and we get about 8 or 9 of these in a full day. You're getting a complete variety and updates on the mortgage market or how to finance your projects. They really are incredible days and they're completely free of charge. If you go to a virtualpropertyexhibition.co.uk, you'll be able to find out all about those.