Andy Graham Gets Interviewed On The Commercial Property Investors Podcast

In this episode, I'm on the other side of the mic. I recently joined Jerry Alexander on The Commercial Property Investors Podcast, and we had a great conversation. I shared my journey, starting with HMOs, building property businesses, and progressing to buying commercial properties and undertaking bigger and better projects. We also discussed the ups and downs of buying, selling, and investing in property.

Topics covered in this episode:

• 02:23 How Andy’s Passion for Property Started
• 08:36 Experience in Building a Property Portfolio
• 12:20 Transitioning to Commercial Developments
• 25:45 Navigating the Development & Planning Process 
• 31:55 The Importance of Effective Project Management
• 39:46 Building a Strong Reputation in Real Estate
• 43:36 Balancing Multiple Ventures Successfully

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Transcript

[00:00:00] Andy Graham: Hey, I'm Andy and you're listening to the HMO podcast. Over 10 years ago, I set myself the challenge of building my own property portfolio and what began as a short term investment plan soon became a long term commitment to change the way young people live together. I've now built several successful businesses.

[00:00:20] Andy Graham: I've raised millions of pounds of investment and I've managed thousands of tenants. Join me and some very special guests to discover the tips, tricks and hacks, the ups and the downs, the best practice and everything else you need to know to star, scale and systemize your very own HMO portfolio now.

[00:00:40] Andy Graham: In today's episode, I'm on the other side of the mic. I recently joined Jerry Alexander on the commercial property investors podcast, and we had a great conversation. I shared my journey starting with HMOs, building property businesses through to buying commercial properties and doing bigger and better projects.

[00:00:56] Andy Graham: We also talked about all of the ups and downs of buying and selling and investing in property. I think you're going to find this a really interesting and very unique conversation. So without further ado, please sit back, relax and enjoy today's episode of the HMO podcast.

[00:01:13] Andy Graham: Hey guys, it's Andy here. We're going to be getting back to the podcast in just a moment, but before we do, I want to tell you very quickly about the HMO roadmap. Now, if you're serious about replacing your income, or perhaps you've already got a HMO portfolio that you want to scale up, then the HMO roadmap really is your one stop shop.

[00:01:29] Andy Graham: Inside the roadmap, you'll find a full 60 lesson course delivered by me, teaching you how to find more deals, how to fund more deals and raise private finance, how to refurbish great properties, how to fill them with great tenants that stay for longer and how to manage your properties and tenants for the future.

[00:01:44] Andy Graham: We've also got guest workshops added every single month. We've got new videos added every single week about all sorts of topics. We've got downloadable resources, cheat sheets, and swipe files to help you. We've got case studies from guests and community members who are doing incredible projects that you can learn from.

[00:01:59] Andy Graham: And we've also built an application just for you that allows you to appraise and evaluate your deals, stack them side by side, and track the key metrics that are most important to you. To find out more, head to theHMOroadmap.co.uk now, and come and join our incredible community of HMO property investors.

[00:02:23] Jerry Alexander: Welcome back to the commercial property investor podcast. And today I'm welcoming Andy. Hi, Andy. Nice to see you. Hi, Jerry. Great to be here. It's brilliant. Thank you for joining me on the commercial property investor podcast. You're well known for HMO and your experience in that market. And of course, as you know, we do CMO so kind of our niche, but we both have other things we do.

[00:02:42] Jerry Alexander: And increasingly you're doing developments, particularly commercial to resi. So I wanted to talk about that a little bit later on, but just to set the scene, maybe you could just give us some ideas. Why on earth you're in this industry and how you got here?

[00:02:57] Andy Graham: Well, that's a very good question. Why on earth am I in the industry? I suppose deep down, I've got a real passion for property. I love looking up at tall, beautiful buildings and quite romantic in that sense, and don't confuse that with most of my HMOs because they are not the most romantic looking buildings in the world, but the idea of property and the kind of the history that we have in our country, it's always fascinated me.

[00:03:19] Andy Graham: And combined with the idea of getting your hands on something, doing something quite creative with it, transforming and turning it into something pretty amazing, whatever that might be was something that always fascinated me. It took me a while actually to kind of figure out that I had an entrepreneurial side, actually, I didn't know as a younger guy that that was in me.

[00:03:41] Andy Graham: I was very academic, went to school, did quite well at school. I actually became a physio. I graduated as a physio. I'd sort of enjoyed my sports sciences and my medical kind of stuff. And I don't deny it about doing medicine, but actually I kind of landed on physio. It seemed a good balance and I worked as a physio for several years and it was a good career, but it just wasn't fulfilling me.

[00:04:00] Andy Graham: It wasn't testing me. And I just felt like my creativity was really, really limited. And actually at that time, I was probably in my early twenties, just finishing university. My sister, who's a few years younger, she just started university and I'd been a student. I'd lived in. University accommodation and then private accommodation.

[00:04:18] Andy Graham: And that was pretty clued up. I could see what my landlord was doing. I'm giving him all this money and he's giving me this back. And they know, and that certainly wasn't a beautiful building. So the idea I thought was quite interesting, maybe I could combine some of this interesting property with maybe making some money out of it.

[00:04:32] Andy Graham: And that's what I did. And I leveraged the fact that my sister was studying at university. I'd since moved right down to the far Southwest. I was actually surfing for most of my spare time, but I decided to buy a property where she was studying for you at university, she was going to be there for several years at university.

[00:04:48] Andy Graham: It seemed like a pretty safe bet. So I did that, but I honestly did it with very little instruction. I didn't have anyone to really guide me on there. So I saved a bit of money. I've been fortunate to live pretty low cost down in the Southwest in some, in some free accommodation from a friend. Saved up the rest and, and actually this was right at the bottom of the recession, 2000.

[00:05:10] Jerry Alexander: Have you got a shareholding?

[00:05:10] Andy Graham: No. , no. They shoulda have though, . And that was right at the bottom of the recession. And I didn't know at the time, but I was buying very good value. It didn't necessarily feel at, at the time. In fact, it was a lot of people were saying, God, you know, why are you buying property now?

[00:05:26] Andy Graham: Everyone's getting outta the market. I was, I was too naive to kind of really take that, but actually I'm quite glad that I was that naive at the time because I think had I have listened to people, I'm not sure you and I would be having this conversation now. So jumped in two feet first. I did the first one.

[00:05:41] Andy Graham: I bought this old wreck of a property and I converted it into a five bed HMO. I still have it today. It still earns me a lot of money every single month. It's a cracking property. I've done a little bit of periodic improvement over the years. It's by no means my best project, but it's. Absolutely fantastic on paper, tiny mortgage, and it works really well.

[00:06:01] Andy Graham: And after a couple of years, you know, I recovered a bit of cash. It was going well. And I still come back to my physio job and, and I was in a position to do it again. So I did it again and then I did it again and again. And I did that sort of through my early twenties, kind of started to build a portfolio.

[00:06:17] Andy Graham: And it was around that point that I started to think I was a bit bored of my physio stuff. It wasn't really doing it for me. I quite liked the property stuff, but I can't really get my cash back out of these deals quickly enough. So I don't really know how else I can do it. So I felt like I was at a bit of a dead end with it all.

[00:06:34] Andy Graham: And just to top it off, I wasn't feeling particularly great at the time. And you may have heard me talk about this before, Jerry, but. If you haven't, I was surfing a lot. I was getting quite a sore neck. And anyway, it transpired that I had a lump in my neck and that lump turned out to be quite a nasty lump.

[00:06:51] Andy Graham: It was thyroid cancer. That kind of threw a real spanner in the works. I was really fit, surfing all the time. I was training all the time, but that's kind of brought everything to a bit of a halt. And just before this happened, I was starting to feel pretty stressed about stuff. I felt really frustrated that I couldn't do more of the property stuff that I wanted.

[00:07:06] Andy Graham: I didn't know how to get out of it. I haven't been told how to raise cash or maybe partner up with people. And so I'd gone and I actually decided. Spoken to my GP. I'd had some symptoms. He'd actually for a while, put it down to anxiety. I'm sure I was pretty stressed and anxious because I did actually feel like I had a lump in my throat as it transpired.

[00:07:24] Andy Graham: I did, but it actually pushed me to the point where I thought, you know what? The only thing that I'm really aware of in my life that's really stressing me out is probably that kind of just being a physio and not knowing what else to do. So I actually gave my notice in on my job. I just. Books and flights to Canada, and I went out to spend some time in the mountains, which is my, one of my biggest passions.

[00:07:42] Andy Graham: I thought I'd just have a break. This diagnosis and everything just kind of happened as I was about to fly out to Canada, quite literally. And they sent me for a scan and everything happened quite quickly. But that sort of life event really changed everything for me. I did end up going to Canada a little bit delayed, had some surgery and treatment, and I'm absolutely fine now on probably well over 10 years on now.

[00:08:05] Andy Graham: But it made me think completely differently about stuff. And that was the point I decided to put a plan in place. And I really started to think about how am I going to do this? How am I going to actually build a portfolio? What do I need to do? And I changed everything. I started to think about raising finance.

[00:08:20] Andy Graham: Partnering with people. I set up an agency when I came back from Canada, that agency grew very, very quickly. We did some quite unique things in world of finance. We crowdfunded the business at a very early stage on a pretty amazing business value actually for a startup. And I just started to. Do these things that no one had ever really taught or told me about, but I found my way a little bit and one thing led to another and just fast forward to where we are now.

[00:08:45] Andy Graham: I've actually sold that agency, that investment management agency that I started back in 2016, but I've got a mixed portfolio of HMOs, lots of flats. I still like to buy HMOs. I develop a lot with my business partners. We buy a lot of commercial buildings that we convert. And I've got a few other businesses and interests, one of which is kind of my training and education business, which is all centered around our podcasts and stuff.

[00:09:06] Andy Graham: So I've busy and got a few things going up, but my main thing has and always will be my property and buying property and doing that really creative thing to them.

[00:09:14] Jerry Alexander: Magic. Okay. A lot to unpack there. One question I have, when you did that first one, how much did you do hands on? Did you do any of the work at all or did you do all of it?

[00:09:28] Andy Graham: I did loads of the work. It's probably the worst work, but actually, interestingly, I'm moving house at the minute. And so I've been boxing a load of stuff up and I like, I'm quite sentimental and I do like to keep records of lots of things that I've done over the years and I found some Some photos of that project. And there's me and actually my uncle, who's a builder. Who's where a lot of my inspiration came from and my best mate, who would often help me on projects working. We're sitting on a wall that we've taken down inside the house there. I remember the moment and there was snow on the ground outside. And I was traveling 300 miles from Cornwall up to this property to work on it at the weekends and then go back down to work in Cornwall because at that time I was doing my physio stuff and this was very much a weekend gig. So I did what I could but honestly I never really picked up any skills. I was pretty good with a brush and that was about it.

[00:10:16] Jerry Alexander: Sometimes we find ourselves doing that, right? Cleaning up after everybody else. So where was the actual location of that five bed was that back up Midlands Midlands, right? Okay, and you're at the moment you're currently around Sheffield area, aren't you? Yeah, so you're thinking you're moving soon Now aren't you

[00:10:34] Andy Graham: I'm moving soon. So Sheffield is where I studied as a physio. So I had a good base of friends here so What have happened is after I finished university in 2009, just before I bought my first property, it was the recession. The job prospects weren't particularly good around here.

[00:10:49] Andy Graham: There was lots of graduates being churned out of university and nearby universities. So actually I decided, well, I'm going to struggle to get a job. I may as well struggle while standing by the beat. So I did that and I went down to the Southwest. That's what I did, but I knew that I was always going to come back up.

[00:11:05] Andy Graham: It was only something that I wanted to do for a period of time. I actually ended up staying down there for about six years in the end, but I knew I wanted to come back up and investing in the Midlands where my sister was, the idea was that she was pretty close. She might be able to keep an eye on a property for me, maybe even rent it.

[00:11:19] Andy Graham: And it was close enough to where I was from in Manchester and my base in Sheffield. When I'd got a few properties off the ground, then I'd had that life changing event. It was after that, that I decided not to go back to Cornwall and I came and built my base around Sheffield. And that was a good jump off point to my stuff in the Midlands to actually invest in Sheffield, a market that I still knew quite well.

[00:11:41] Andy Graham: And also over in Manchester, which where I'm from, my goals were quite broad in that sense. I didn't plan to just buy and invest in one location. Actually, I thought I could tap into these different cities, either sides of the Pennines.

[00:11:53] Jerry Alexander: Okay. And is that predominantly where you're investing now still?

[00:11:57] Andy Graham: Yes. In the Midlands, everything in all of my interest in Sheffield, I sold along with one of my businesses, like a year or the year before. So I have, as I am getting older, late thirties now, I started to consolidate. So again, that's part of a plan that has evolved. I decided it was time for my big picture to evolve a little bit.

[00:12:17] Andy Graham: And that meant that I needed to consolidate in part, that was a decision influenced by my wife in fairness, having a lot of stuff and business in lots of cities does become a tether to a certain degree. It was a good business and I built it to a point where I could sell it. And the objective was always to sell it.

[00:12:35] Andy Graham: So that's what I did, but I still have my HMOs in the Midlands and still invest there and actually my commercial to resi stuff. I can't afford to be as picky as that. So actually we invest in different locations around the city. So in the country, Southeast, South, and actually we've got a site here in the North as well at the minute.

[00:12:53] Jerry Alexander: All right. So I want to move on to that because there's two distinct disciplines there. Isn't there really running buying, developing HMOs? Certainly ones that are up to seven or eight bedrooms, whatever, but then doing developments as a completely different timescale, different financial structures, all that lovely stuff.

[00:13:10] Jerry Alexander: And part of the reason why I wanted to talk to you is that you'd recently posted about how those hidden things that people don't really see when they're looking at, Oh, I think I should be doing that development. I should do this. And they've been used to doing vital ads or HMOs and haven't quite recognised some of the changes you have to make.

[00:13:30] Jerry Alexander: Both in terms of the time you put in this length of time, cash flow, all that sort of thing. So maybe we could talk about some of those lessons in a minute. But just again to set the scene, you mentioned there about some of the projects you've been working on and some of these are former offices. I think one you've recently doing is a sawmill. Maybe we should just pick on two. So maybe if we could talk about the sawmill in Sheffield, is that right?

[00:13:52] Andy Graham: That’s right. We've got the sawmill in Sheffield, and we've got a few projects developing at the minute. Another one is a scheme called Albion Place. That's in Kent. Yes. That's quite a bit bigger. And it's quite a bit further away.

[00:14:03] Andy Graham: Quite a bit further away. It's coastal. And this is all with my business partners. And that scheme is a two phase scheme. Actually, the first, the first one is a two phase scheme. Phase is about 20, 000 square feet and the second phase is another 10, 000 square feet

[00:14:15] Jerry Alexander: And it's, the second part is new build. The first bit is redevelopment. Out of interest, that particular building, when I've looked at it, it looks, was it originally residential or has it always been commercial and office space?

[00:14:31] Andy Graham: We like to convert to residential, but we like to pick up office spaces that come with some benefit of PD. So actually this was an office and actually it was built as an office however, it has some interesting history and it was originally a beautiful terrace, sort of a Victorian housing with the beautiful features such as the balconies, but it was bombed in the war. And a lot of the building was kind of flattened. A little bit was left and that little bit was listed. So the site wasn't without its complications in that sense but when it was rebuilt, it was never rebuilt as residential accommodation.

[00:15:11] Jerry Alexander: More functional space, 20 odd thousand square feet. As you say, I think, is it 20, 23 units your developing that into

[00:15:19] Andy Graham: There's 23, 24 in the existing that which is the conversion phase one. And then there's another 13 in the in phase two, which is the new build. So it's 37 units in total.

[00:15:27] Jerry Alexander: It's a good size site. So just tell me how much of that's been developed under permitted development. So obviously some of it there is going to be under planning your new build for starters, but maybe you could just talk through that element of. So interestingly,

[00:15:41] Andy Graham: a lot of the scheme kind of fell under PD, but because part of it was listed, that complicates it and actually remove some of the PD, right? So what we were able to do was look through the history of the building and actually separate the entire building into different parts. We were able to treat one part of it as kind of a permitted development approach. And the other part went through full planning. Now, the other part was really just an identical sort of kind of reflection of the bit that we put that we passed through PD.

[00:16:08] Andy Graham: So it wasn't necessarily contentious, but it has to go through the rigmarole of consulting historic England, full planning application, lots more public scrutiny and so on and so forth. And yeah, I've really got to credit my business partner for this. Mark is, is the architect. So your brain's behind a lot of our planning strategy.

[00:16:25] Andy Graham: And, and this was a really well thought out plan to try and make sure that we got through planning as quickly and as efficiently as possible, which is a key part of our approach to all of these things. These projects, so we did separated a little bit within the existing building, but ultimately got the same result across the board, and the new build is a major application for planning.

[00:16:46] Andy Graham: However, the scheme that we bought, and this is an interesting part of it, whilst it was commercial, it did come with residential planning for the whole scheme. It was just a really terrible scheme that someone had applied for. Didn't really make much sense. All it really did was establish the principle of residential.

[00:17:00] Jerry Alexander: Yeah. Okay. So when you originally bought it, how many units was it potentially going to put out?

[00:17:08] Andy Graham: I think the original scheme may have been something like maybe 15 in the existing and 10 in the new.

[00:17:13] Jerry Alexander: Okay.

[00:17:14] Andy Graham: So my business partner, through some creative sort of space plannings, probably uplifted that from somewhere like 15 units to 25 ish units total to maybe 37 in total.

[00:17:25] Jerry Alexander: Yeah. Wow. Okay. That's a big change. And would you say that Part of that's down to efficiency. Was there just some inefficiencies in the way it was designed before?

[00:17:36] Andy Graham: We were privy to the process that some had gone through beforehand. It could just be a poorly thought out scheme. It could just be that they were only really concerned with actually establishing the principle of residential on there with a view to selling it.

[00:17:49] Andy Graham: I'm not too sure, but. Again, my business partner, this is what Mark is very good at. He's great at looking at schemes and he is an architect, but actually he's a developer, so he designed schemes with his developers hats on, which is great. So we're always looking for ways to maximise the footprint and what we can do internally, but also keep those costs down and try and find that sweet spot between both of those components and getting through planning as quickly and safely as possible.

[00:18:16] Jerry Alexander: Yeah, so as you say, it might well have been the original seller was just getting a scheme of some kind to get to that stage where they could actually sell it. Um, I always get tempted to ask questions, which might be slightly off piste from where I was going, but I've just heard some people screaming in my head or screaming at this interview saying, how did you meet Mark?

[00:18:35] Jerry Alexander: Where did that partnership come about?

[00:18:38] Andy Graham: That's actually a great question. I should bring Mike into the mix as well, who is our third partner in AIG, which is our development partner. I met mark mark actually approached me, uh, several years ago, it may be five, six years ago now. I'm not too sure. He was an architect working for a firm.

[00:18:54] Andy Graham: He was a great architect doing some great stuff for that firm. Mark a bit like me. He was an entrepreneur, kind of a developer at heart. You could see that he was doing this sort of stuff for other people, but wanted to do it himself. And he had been in part thinking about HMOs and maybe how he could sort of scale out and onto his own stuff.

[00:19:11] Andy Graham: And we came and did a little bit of work. I gave my, a bit of my advice for what it's worth. I'm not sure he ever really needed it, but I just thought he was a great guy. And I just thought that this was somebody that, that I wanted to kind of hang around. I wanted to see him succeed. And initially there was no prospect of a business partnership.

[00:19:29] Andy Graham: I was very much doing my thing and my other businesses and wasn't looking to develop and Mark very much had his plans, but I thought he was a great guy. And, and actually we continued to keep in contact, do a bit of work together. Mark later joined a mastermind that I was running as he'd made the transition.

[00:19:45] Andy Graham: And I had met Mike, my business partner in a very, in more or less in an identical way, but very separately, and they eventually met and. Mark and I did a project first together. Mark had found a great scheme. I was looking for something to put a bit of cash into and was maybe looking for kind of a new venture into this kind of development space.

[00:20:05] Andy Graham: And it was a great opportunity. We did that first project and it went really well. And Mike actually came in as a bit of a, an angel investor and did a bit there as well. So actually that experience doing the first project together, while it was in a different structure to how we do things now was great.

[00:20:20] Andy Graham: And we enjoyed it and we found we work really, really well together. And I think what's cool is that the three of us have very different experience when we can sit down and have conversations. We can offer a bias towards that. And the really great thing is we always come up with a solution to the problem. And I think it's just three good minds working together to solve problems, which is 99.9 percent of what commercial residential development is about.

[00:20:44] Jerry Alexander: I'm glad  ask that question because I was going to actually. Talk to you about that first development. So not the first HMO, but the first time you stepped into doing development.

[00:20:56] Jerry Alexander: And the reason I'm asking the question like this is just that I think a lot of our listeners I've done residential, they've got experience in residential, they've maybe done some SA or maybe even some HMOs and they're thinking, right, how do I take that next step? And a lot of people think as soon as they're buying a commercial building, this is like a gulf, there's a complete difference.

[00:21:14] Jerry Alexander: And as we said earlier on, there are definitely some differences. But when you did that first of all, was it the one you just spoke about? Was that your first intercommercial doing development out for Resi or for HMO with Mike? Is that the first one?

[00:21:28] Andy Graham: That's right. Yes. The first project that Mark and Mike and myself did together. Yeah. It was an old nursery, actually, with some residential above it. It was an awful, Building. It was so ugly and Mark had found this scheme. He was looking for an investor or a partner to come in on it. And I had a look at it and I said, I like this. And we think about maybe doing it together.

[00:21:47] Jerry Alexander: Okay. So what I want to ask was a little bit about the emotion around that stuff. How did you feel about it? Was it daunting? And I'm second guessing a little bit, cause it sounds like you had some people to share the load, but just talk us through how you felt about that.

[00:22:01] Andy Graham: Mark felt like a very safe pair of hands with this sort of project. He knows his numbers. He lives in Bree's property. He certainly knows planning and the architectural side of the things and development. There are still question marks. There always are with development schemes. There's always stuff that you don't know. And a lot of it is about good planning. Plus, then you've got to throw contractors into the mix and, and all sorts of stuff and values at the end.

[00:22:24] Andy Graham: And there are things that you can't always sort of. Answer determine at the front end but the big risk side I felt like I was quite comfortable with and when I look at these projects I certainly wasn't daunted by the idea for me it was very much just a business decision if I invest this sort of capital in this time what I think the results gonna be whether I think this relationship could go.

[00:22:46] Andy Graham: If it goes well, this is what it could look like. If it doesn't, this is what it could look like. I stand to lose something, but so does Mark as well. So we were very much invested in the project and just made a calculated decision on that basis. And I'm sure Mark did absolutely the same with me. And when he considered working with me, it wasn't like Mark needed me to work with him.

[00:23:04] Andy Graham: He could have asked anybody, but I think we kind of knew that we already had a good relationship by that point.

[00:23:09] Jerry Alexander: That's great. Okay. So it sounds like you're. Obviously, we haven't really discussed there, but the background you had with property really helps because you understand where you're at, but also that relationship you've been building up, which I guess.

[00:23:23] Jerry Alexander: Had that, maybe if we follow it back, come through from the podcast that you have through to Mark and Mike, maybe, did they come through to you because of that? Just out of interest.

[00:23:34] Andy Graham: I met the guys before I did the podcast. So the podcast, that's that four years ago. And I met those.

[00:23:42] Jerry Alexander: Of course. Yes. Timescales would have been different. Yeah. Timescales would have been different. So what was the size of that property? Just to give a bit of context.

[00:23:46] Andy Graham: Well, I think it was about just under 3000 square feet. And then we extended it. It's five flats now and Mark, again, kind of creative genius. We had, there was a workshop at the bottom of the garden and it was always a bit of a question mark as to what we might be able to do with it.

[00:24:04] Andy Graham: But we kind of got PD on, on the front end of the site, which was the main building, the nursery and the resi above and permission to extend it at the back. So that's exactly what we did. We got that planning commission through quite literally the day that we completed. That's how quick we can be because we've got architects internally and Mark's skilled.

[00:24:21] Andy Graham: Yeah. And then we came back when we bought the site, we split the title so that we left the workshop off the title at the back that simplified things for us. We took that on as a, as a separate planning application and we got permission for one bed studio. And actually, I mean, that is a really cool unit.

[00:24:37] Andy Graham: As I was sitting here about an hour ago, we use that one as an Airbnb booking came through for the month and it's almost a couple of grand and that little scheme was picked up by channel four, who actually came and filmed it for the great British home restoration. So that one was on TV as well, which is cool.

[00:24:53] Andy Graham: A couple of us teams have been on channel four now, but that one was, so actually we got six units out of the scheme, five flats in the main building. And kind of the detached studio, but really it's a one bed bungalow, but it's a really, really cool studio looking thing.

[00:25:06] Jerry Alexander: Did you keep the other flats?

[00:25:08] Andy Graham: Yeah, we keep everything.

[00:25:09] Jerry Alexander: You keep everything? We keep everything, yeah. Okay. So when you're developing out these flats, I'm assuming a lot of them are just sitting on buy to let then, as opposed to HMOs or, although you mentioned they're SA for some.  

[00:25:20] Andy Graham: They are, yeah, some SAs. But mostly on buy to let, and I can see where this question is going, where is it going?

[00:25:28] Andy Graham: That is the elephant in the room with developing. You've got two choices. You can either develop and you can keep it. You can develop it and you can sell it.

[00:25:35] Jerry Alexander: Some people don't have that choice though. Some people, because of the way their business operates, they have to sell it because the margin is tight.

[00:25:42] Jerry Alexander: When you build, we developed it out and you have an exit price. When you reverse engineer out the actual yield, if you're renting out as a buy to let, sometimes the opportunity cost is just too high elsewhere. But of course the challenge is, there's the tax, right?

[00:25:59] Andy Graham: Well, so I think there's a couple of things there.

[00:26:01] Andy Graham: So, the first thing is you are spot on. Sometimes you don't have the choice. So a simple way of looking at the exit, and this is what we try and do is we try and design our schemes from an economic point of view around our ability to create a capital uplift, a value uplift of 25%. Now, there are nuances to that because whether or not you can get term finance, a 75 percent loan to value really depends on the size of the building and the lender and also the stress testing.

[00:26:27] Andy Graham: So that is not an absolute given, but generally speaking, that's the absolute minimum that we'll work to. We try and get that. Uplift through both planning and development. So one of our USPs is absolutely the fact that we're very good with planning and we're very fast with planning and a lot of the risk is in that part and we don't take unnecessary risks we have bought unconditionally and we'll continue to do that, but there is a backstop on that backstop will still give us a minimum requirement.

[00:26:54] Andy Graham: There are schemes where that isn't possible and there are obviously going to be times when despite all your planning and you get punched in the face and actually you have to react and you've got to sell some units to actually be able to hold on to the rest of the scheme and that's something that is almost the contingency plan for us but we're certainly not trying or our objective is not to sell all of them.

[00:27:14] Andy Graham: The trouble is that the cash flow at the back end relative to the amount of capital that you then may have left in the building that you may have made. It doesn't look as good as if, for example, you liquidated it and put it into HMOs. Now, Mark and Mike and myself, I think a really important piece of context here is that we all have our own businesses.

[00:27:36] Andy Graham: We all have income generating strategies that are outside of our development group. I think what we do works really well because we can let that business breathe. Don't get me wrong. There are continuous financial pressures because the sums of money is so substantial, but we don't rely on that business to pay our bills.

[00:27:56] Andy Graham: And I think it would be impossible if we did because it's so difficult to get cash out in the short term. And then, of course, at the back end, it's not as generous as perhaps a four or five bed HMO. Each flat generates a certain amount of income, but it's quite different. So it's a volume game that we're playing and our overarching objective is I've got a pretty big financial target.

[00:28:20] Andy Graham: So there'll be a capital base there. There'll be a certain number of units and a yield that we'll expect to return on that. So there will be a lot of volume in that portfolio. I mean, there's about a hundred ish flats in the mix at the minute that they're either done or just being finished off and developed.

[00:28:36] Andy Graham: So even though the rents are not quite as good on those small units, when there's a volume, it starts to look quite different.

[00:28:43] Jerry Alexander: Okay. You mentioned there about income coming from other different sources. This business is not about generating an income right now. It's about development. And that brings us onto the point we're just making earlier on about the fact that some of these projects take two years.

[00:28:58] Jerry Alexander: I mean, you've got some good members of your team there to keep that tight, right? Cause for me, generally it's two or three years and I don't need to go through a lot of planning. Maybe that's just user error, but basically what are some of the other differences that we could point out that investors in HMO or Resi projects might not necessarily think of when they're making that step over to more longer term development projects?

[00:29:23] Andy Graham: So planning is the first major obstacle that you've got to overcome and within the complexities of planning and all the different policies that you have to satisfy, there's also the timelines and It's very frustrating. And we talk about it quite openly as developers invest in this country, but the planning system is fundamentally broken.

[00:29:41] Andy Graham: And now if you get a good planning officer, you're really fortunate. We try and find solutions to keep our planning applications as concise and as least contentious as we possibly can, but at the end of the day, they need to be viable. And sometimes we have to push pretty hard. It can be so incredibly frustrating and you have to build those sorts of frustrations and expectations around those delays into application.

[00:30:04] Andy Graham: I can give you into your plan. I give you an example. We were expecting a decision back on something recently. The decision day, the council just wrote to us as they often do and said, we haven't been able to come to a decision on this yet for various reasons. Can we have your permission to extend it? And you can say no, but if you say no, they just reject your application.

[00:30:24] Andy Graham: They'll just basically decline your planning permission. And then if you have to go back to the square one again, resubmit. Yeah. Uh, so obviously you can't do that and they can do this again and again and again. And it's almost a loophole in the system that they can take advantage of. But it's very frustrating.

[00:30:38] Andy Graham: That then has knock on impacts and it on all sorts of things. When you can get started or get out of the ground, who you're getting your finance and when you apply for your finances, a lot of stuff that that impact. So that whole planning piece is so, so important. And there are so many people that feed into it from your architects.

[00:30:57] Andy Graham: To the planning officers, to your planning consultants, to your drainage survey, ecology survey, there's just so much and it's actually quite overwhelming. It's the big graveyard right there. And it is a pit. It is an absolute black hole of costs. You get a phase one contamination done, and then you need a phase two.

[00:31:16] Andy Graham: And sometimes you might need more and it can get really, really expensive. So you've got to be careful there and plan. The second big one is obviously, The process of actually developing the scheme out. So you've got the tendering and the contractors that you decide to work with, how you manage them and how you manage the contract, how you manage the finance associated with your development costs and making sure you get your costs right.

[00:31:36] Andy Graham: You need a lot of experience in my opinion, to make sure that you get that right. Understanding bill costs is really important on these schemes. If you're out by a few pounds per square foot, by the end of the project, you're out by, Tens if not hundreds of thousands of pounds, and actually that is the difference between a deal working or not working and kind of losing your show, keeping it on.

[00:31:55] Andy Graham: Do you guys mainly use main contractors or do you? Yeah, we only use main contractors. Yeah. So we will ask, we will tender a body of work. We will ask a main contractor to take it on and we will hand them the responsibility for all of the compliance, all of the regularization and everything like that.

[00:32:13] Jerry Alexander: Yeah. Okay. All right. There's two good ones. So I just want to quickly touch back to sawmill. Cause we mentioned it earlier on, but just to give people just a different projects in a different part of the country. When I first heard you talking about, I'm thinking in my head, a big giant industrial building, or some of the sawmills are up near where I'm from.

[00:32:30] Jerry Alexander: It might be all open air with a lot of pine logs lying around, but maybe just give a wee bit description of this one and what your plans are to develop it into.

[00:32:40] Andy Graham: Sheffield has a really interesting heritage, mostly famed for its steelworks. So there are a lot of cutlery works, and actually we're up against, and now disused, but listed cutlery works.

[00:32:50] Andy Graham: The sawmill, our building, was originally used to, I imagine, to do something with wood in it. Or actually, I think it was actually to create saws. I don't fully know, and I should probably check it out. But I think it was, they certainly did manage wood on their site, and the original building, Looks similar to the building we're buying now, although it has been extended both at the side and at the rear through the 1900s.

[00:33:11] Andy Graham: And we have proposed to reinstate the original building, which had the timber store on the side. So there was the sawmill, which is a nice big long rectangular white building, factory looking building. And then there was a timber store on the end, which I assume is where they did once upon a time store timber.

[00:33:26] Andy Graham: And so we have proposed to reinstate all of that, but it's not a listed building. It does have some local merit, but that's about the extent. We then have a plot of land on the side, which is just an ugly looking car park at minute. Now, once upon a time that had a pub on it and it had some terrorist housing, and that would've, if you imagine back in the Canadian middle of the industrial Revolution, that would've been, I imagine a very busy street corner, know with everyone working at the cutlery works, not the sawmill.

[00:33:55] Andy Graham: Probably quite a fun pub to go to, I imagine. But at some point that was flattened along with the houses. I don't quite know why, but we've got a plot of land on the side. So we're converting the sawmill to six units. We wanted to do a little bit more by going up, but that was contentious. And we always knew it was contentious and historic England basically came back and said, not a chance.

[00:34:16] Andy Graham: I wouldn't really, we're not going to support that. So we listened to them and they guided us and gave us a steer on what they would like to see on the rest of the grid, which is the car park area. Which if you imagine our site backs onto the cutlery works, that whole thing, which is a big plot of land, a lot of buildings on there, that is the grid line and they wanted to see that reinstated.

[00:34:34] Andy Graham: So we have proposed to build a new build scheme of 12 units on the new build. It's quite sympathetic. It ties into the listed building, the language that Mark and our architects have used to design it is really incredible. I think it suits the location really well. And actually that's in planning at the minute.

[00:34:50] Andy Graham: It's had a really good. Initial response from the planners, the principle of residential is absolutely out there. There's no doubt that it will be residential, whether or not we get what we want. We'll just boil down to maybe some of the kind of design, I think.

[00:35:04] Jerry Alexander: Okay. I'm really interested to know the previous one you mentioned, there was previous planning permission and there was some PD that you knew that was underlying it, right? On this one, was there anything in place? No,

[00:35:15] Andy Graham: there was no planning at all. And we just bought this unconditionally and we bought it quickly because it was a good site at a good price. I was actually out of the country when it all happened. I was honeymooning for three months in somewhere on the West coast of Central America, but.

[00:35:29] Andy Graham: We thought it was a great site, great location, and the principle of development is quite established there with some really cool schemes going on just around the corner. So actually, we've been able to get a lot of confidence from that, which is really important because there was obviously a risk that we wouldn't get planning, but we were able to mitigate that so far.

[00:35:48] Andy Graham: We just couldn't see any scenario where we wouldn't get it. And really, it's kind of spelt out in the planning policy and the framework. That's what a good planning consultant can be used for though, to really spell that stuff out to you.

[00:35:55] Jerry Alexander: Uh, that's, I mean, what's so interesting about that, that just totally feeds into what I believe for people that are buying commercial and stuff is that if you really understand the neighborhood.

[00:36:07] Jerry Alexander: When something does come up, you know, it's right. But the only way you do that is you have to be continually making offers, doing smaller developments. So when something like that comes along and maybe there's a pain point and you can quickly act without having to go through all the many, many different.

[00:36:23] Jerry Alexander: Analysis you might normally go through because you've already done all that groundwork. You can act really fast. It's so important.  

[00:36:29] Andy Graham: And I think to add to that, a lot of it is about relationships with people as well. We'd actually been trying to buy a couple of other sites in Sheffield shortly before that, but they hadn't quite stacked for us.

[00:36:41] Andy Graham: And we put our offer in, but I had said along with our office, look, I know that that's not what your client wants. And I've got some good contacts with the agents now because I've done a lot of business here and I knew we were likely to get those sites. But actually. We knew why I got offered one of them again recently.

[00:36:55] Andy Graham: So that did sell and has now been offered back to us. So I think we were probably right with our pricing, but actually that relationship went a huge way in actually helping us secure the deal that we were able to be presented as probably a favorable buyer, a good buyer to the sellers as well. And that was incredibly important on this deal because the guy selling the deal still owned the building immediately opposite us and the sites that kind of wraps around us, so it was really quite important to us that they sold to the right person.

[00:37:21] Jerry Alexander: Cause that's going to have a value add to his other site if it's done well. And was that through commercial agent that was on the market?

[00:37:29] Andy Graham: Yeah, it was a commercial agent.

[00:37:30] Jerry Alexander: How’d you get on with the commercial agents now?

[00:37:32] Andy Graham: Really good. I mean, I think working with commercial agents for me is a lot easier than residential agents because they're not as pinnaculty, nothing's ever quite as contentious or has to happen as quickly.

[00:37:44] Andy Graham: Sometimes that means you have to give things a bit of a boot, but I find that they do actually, as you might expect, have. A much more commercial approach to the way that business needs to be done timelines when you're offering subject to planning, or you're talking about options, maybe overages or other sort of creative facets.

[00:38:03] Andy Graham: This is all second nature to them, but I find it a lot easier to deal and have those conversations with commercial agents than residential agents.

[00:38:11] Jerry Alexander: Okay. And I guess one of the key things you've managed to do is you've got a track record. So sometimes when you're first knocking on that door, the agents, they.

[00:38:20] Jerry Alexander: Don't necessarily want to warm to you straight away because they don't want a tire kicker. They want somebody who's going to be able to act and as you just said there, the fact that they know that you've got that credibility and that when somebody needs to sell something quickly that you're actually going to act on it is really important.

[00:38:36] Andy Graham: Absolutely. I mean, Paul who we bought this site from, I tried to buy several sites from him and we just, we just haven't quite got there. I think I bought all the stuff from him previously. I knew I did know him, but. He certainly, he definitely had all the buyers that he could have sold this to or put forward.

[00:38:49] Andy Graham: So I think it's really, really important. And I think there's a lot of different ways as well to get that experience through. It never ceases to surprise me how much research people actually do on you and just maybe from an email signature, have a quick look at your business. And then the CEO and X, Y, and Z, and then you've got these hosts, yeah, all of that stuff.

[00:39:08] Andy Graham: So I do think it's really important and reputationally. I mean, as far as I'm aware, correct me if I'm wrong, Jerry, but I've got a pretty immaculate reputation, you know, as far as from a professional point of view. And naturally, I think that that's really, really important. There are occasions where we've done things and we've kind of just taken out on the chin because it's just the right thing to do.

[00:39:28] Andy Graham: It's maintained a really good relationship. It's been easier for everybody, perhaps not ourselves. But I think sometimes you've got to see over, you know, a few pounds and pennies to kind of preserve good relationships with people and a good reputation.

[00:39:41] Jerry Alexander: And you can see when it unravels when you see other people doing it the other way around.

[00:39:46] Jerry Alexander: Because you're involved in those conversations, maybe they don't hear it, but you're Other conversations that happen, networking events or whatever. And these things are, this is a small world, right?

[00:39:58] Andy Graham: It is a very small world. I mean, it's interesting. I, I've been tendering for a project recently, meeting lots of builders.

[00:40:02] Andy Graham: I mean, people love to gossip, don't they? But wow. I mean, the, the gossip that it comes spilled about some of the people and I never want to be that person. I'm not afraid to say no. And we as a business are not afraid to put our foot down when we are right. And when we need to be doing the way that we need it to be done, but I don't think that that is a conflict with reputation.

[00:40:20] Andy Graham: I actually think sometimes just going along with things is, it's kind of the worst thing you could do, but doing business in the right way, I think is so important. I'm a bit old school in that sense, but I do think so much of what I've been able to achieve and what we're doing is because we've built great relationships with great people.

[00:40:36] Jerry Alexander: Longevity. Okay. Andy, just before I ask you a little bit about some of the plates that you're spinning, just before we came online to have this discussion, you were just mentioned about commercial and well, Jerry, I'm not necessarily buying commercial right now. And of course, my view. Answer back as well.

[00:40:53] Jerry Alexander: You certainly are buying commercial right now. It's just the use that you're using for it is fairly niche, right? But have you thought about any longer term aspects of commercial for commercial? What's your thoughts on that?

[00:41:04] Andy Graham: I have, and this is probably the next chapter for me. I think I'm a fairly. Good few years away from it, maybe three to five years away from really kind of stepping into it quite seriously, just because of my other commitments and some of the development projects, as you know, a couple of years at a time, and we're trying to buy something else.

[00:41:21] Andy Graham: It's quite large at the minute, but I think it's a really attractive asset class. So I listened to your podcasts. I know a lot of people who own commercial stuff. And it's interesting because a lot of people do know me for the HMO stuff. And largely that is because of the podcasts and my other businesses.

[00:41:35] Andy Graham: And because a lot of my heritage is in that space. But actually, HMOs are a great asset for me and they produce a lot of income and where I invest, I think they'll continue to do it for a long time. But at the same time, I'm not trying to build a rod for my own back. I'm 38 now and 12 years time, I'll be 50.

[00:41:53] Andy Graham: Do I want to be managing hundreds and thousands of tenants? No, I've done all that before and I sold that business. So I'm not trying to build the biggest HMO portfolio in the world. That's actually not aligned with my goals and expectations. What I really want to do like most people is get and preserve my time.

[00:42:13] Andy Graham: I want to be able to do things that I want. I want that choice and that flexibility. So a bit of residential stuff for diversification. Absolutely. I want to consolidate a lot of my residential stuff into a smaller number of locations and a smaller number of buildings. If you took relatively speaking to number of units within those buildings.

[00:42:32] Andy Graham: I want to continue expanding my income base, but without adding to the workload and the managerial stresses. So commercial is a nice kind of fit alongside all of my residential stuff. So I just need a little bit more capital and a bit more time. And I think that in a few years time, I'll absolutely be doing that.

[00:42:48] Jerry Alexander: I'll be calling you and looking for some deals, Jerry. That's it. Time. That's the thing. Well, that leads me on to my, my question here. And you do strike me. Somebody spends a lot of plates and you've talked about HMOs developments. You have a community for HMO investors. Um, something similar we have with our consultancy business and commercial.

[00:43:07] Jerry Alexander: You've got consultancy, a podcast, and even a baby on the way, right? But your plates seem to be spinning in an orderly fashion, certainly from the outside looking in. Do you have some tips for people who are finding some of their plates are maybe dropping? What are some of the things you do to keep that consistency and also that clarity of thought to be able to do that?

[00:43:28] Andy Graham: I think that this is a really interesting question and I've been asked this a number of times before and I actually find it quite surprising when people are surprised to see people spinning so many plates and wonder how it can be done. Because actually when you do it and you know how to do it, actually you realise it's quite easy to do.

[00:43:45] Andy Graham: It just, it boils down to a matter of prioritising what you do with your time. I have an incredible mentor, JP, who's been on my show a number of times, and we don't work closely together now that I sold my business, but we're really good pals and I've got all the time in the world for him and he taught me so much about building good businesses.

[00:44:05] Andy Graham: I brought JP into my business and I asked him to mentor me back in 2016. When I decided that I want to go a health ladder at this, I want to build my own business. And I started to build the investment and management agency. John at the time was running a multi branch agency, managing thousands of homes and tenants have a big operation.

[00:44:24] Andy Graham: And he taught me a huge amount. And one of the things he really drilled into me was the importance of systems and processes and building a team. And I've continued to do that since I learned the value of that, building that first business. And I've continued to do that now. So, every time I build a product or add an asset into the business, whatever it might be, I'm thinking about how that's going to be managed, what sort of process is going to take care of that.

[00:44:51] Andy Graham: So having those processes and those people. ensures that everything can be taken care of. And I like to make sure that I'm not in the detail. Don't get me wrong. There are times when I am in the detail. There's some stuff that just does need a decision from me or for me to step in and say, look, this is what I want to happen.

[00:45:09] Andy Graham: Can we do this, please? But generally speaking, I'm a business owner. I'm a business, I'm an investor, I'm an entrepreneur. I'm not the business operator. I have people who do that for me and I just sort of steer the ship and kind of sit on the front of it, but make sure that we're still heading in the right direction.

[00:45:25] Andy Graham: I'm not a particularly detailed orientated person. I'm pretty forgetful. I'm not super organised and I need a lot of help with all of that stuff. My skills are in strategy and vision in building relationships and in solving problems in a weird way, I quite like getting my hands dirty when the proverbial hits the fan.

[00:45:44] Andy Graham: I think that a lot of good businesses about what you do when things aren't going well, but you need that time to be able to do that. So I preserve my time to do that sort of stuff and all of the detail and the day to day running and the operations that's handled by my teams.

[00:45:57] Jerry Alexander: Very interesting. Okay. So something close to my heart, podcasting, we're both kind of on the same timeframe.

[00:46:08] Jerry Alexander: I can't remember if I'm four years. I think I'm four and a bit years in now, we just had our fourth, I think last Wednesday was our fourth anniversary. We're very similar. And I think when we started out, I was thinking maybe 50 episodes. I don't know. That's probably what I'll get to, right? Sure. I might get some more interviews, but you know, in terms of topics, that's probably about it, right?

[00:46:26] Jerry Alexander: I was wondering who would listen to, I wasn't even sure I'd get to five episodes. Well, you see, if you choose to ignore that, then it's not a problem, right? So you just don't worry about who's going to listen. It's just, have I got 50 topics here? Okay. But it's all the other things it's brought, but equally it is a discipline, right?

[00:46:42] Jerry Alexander: So you're talking there about not being involved in the detail, but I guess podcasting bring, I mean, there's so many benefits, right? We can't talk about them all here, but, but it is part of that networking thing. It is part of the bringing opportunities, thinking time. And one of the things that's really helped with me and to a certain extent, our team has just forcing you to think about what you do on a day to day basis and then articulate it.

[00:47:04] Jerry Alexander: So to think how you actually do things and maybe make improvements. And while having this conversation with you, I'm thinking, right, I really should be thinking about that. And we haven't been doing that. Maybe we need to do that. And it's all that kind of stuff. So it's really valuable, but it is every week, right?

[00:47:19] Jerry Alexander: So where's podcasting for you at the moment? Is it a chore? Is it still as valuable as ever? What's your thoughts on where you are in podcasting?

[00:47:28] Andy Graham: I think it's more valuable than ever. Yeah. I think it's more valuable than ever at the minute. And it has done so many things for me and my business and my relationships with people.

[00:47:38] Andy Graham: When I've built businesses and when I've added different products or other assets to my sort of group, if you like, I've always tried to find a ways that. To be as efficient as possible and a big part of that is leveraging the resources and experience that I have. So like you getting on a podcast and talking about something that you can live and breathe is actually pretty easy.

[00:47:57] Andy Graham: I mean, to call it a job, I think would just be an insult to having a job because it's so easy. It's just about talking about what you've been doing today. It's almost that easy. Now, that's not to say that all the work. To develop that experience has been easy because that hasn't been, as we know, there's years of experience just to be able to talk about things in the right way.

[00:48:16] Andy Graham: And, but I enjoy it and I find it is both an outlet, but also a great source of inbound opportunities, both in terms of. People deals finance products that we sell i saw my business to someone from my network about business partners from my network so there's so many things and then of course is the authority and the credibility in the space I’ve been asked to do things, I’ve been on mainstream tv and I’ve written in the times and it's pretty mad you know when i get like this is not what I thought would happen when I started because it's crazy and actually.

[00:48:51] Andy Graham: I kind of look back at a lot of the stuff that I've done when I've been younger, and I'm sure I'll continue to do this as I get older, but I'm really glad that I just gave things a go and I had the balls to sort of do it, even though I know I knew that it could go wrong. I could see that actually if it went right, it'd probably be worthwhile doing.

[00:49:10] Andy Graham: And that's not to say that everything I've done has gone right. Cause it, it certainly hasn't. I mean, we haven't even talked about the very first business I started. Yeah, that one didn't last long at all, but I think just giving yourself permission to try it, not worrying about what your friends or your family might say.

[00:49:23] Andy Graham: I don't have any friends and family in my industry. I certainly didn't at the time of when I was getting started. Sometimes you just got to give it a go to find out whether or not you can do it. And actually you'll surprise yourself most of the time.

[00:49:32] Jerry Alexander: Yeah. That's great advice. Just keep experimenting, trying different things. One of the things that I remember Rob Moore saying was about experimenting, and that he pretty much treats everything like an experiment, and it just takes the weight off.

[00:49:47] Andy Graham: It does. We do the same in, so the roadmap, which is one of our businesses, That was a bit of a lockdown project for me when everything kind of shut down my investment and management business and my portfolio, my team, everything was just taken care of.

[00:50:02] Andy Graham: And I was really, really quite bored. I couldn't even walk the dog. In fact, so I was so incredibly bored and I cannot sit down and do nothing. So I built the roadmap and it took me about a year in the end. And had I have known it would have required so much, I probably wouldn't have done it when I got started.

[00:50:15] Andy Graham: But again, retrospectively, I'm so glad I did, but over the years we've tried and tested so many different things and we use it so often as a testing ground to see what our members One, um, whether or not, if we do it this way, it works better than doing it that way. And I really enjoy that process. And I guess as a business owner, that's one of the things that I really try and push my team to do and look, don't worry if it doesn't work, we'll get the data and we'll figure it out.

[00:50:42] Andy Graham: We'll do it differently next time. So I'm continuously looking for ways to do that so long as we don't break it on the way and you've got to be careful with the big commercial projects and buying assets. Yeah. Big properties. You've got to be cautious and you can't take the risk. Cavalier risk with the amount of money that you're investing, but the same principle does to an extent go.

[00:51:01] Jerry Alexander: Yeah. Okay. All right. We mentioned a couple of different things there. Podcast roadmap. Maybe this is time, Andy, for you just to tell us a little bit more about some of that consultancy side, what the name of your podcast is and some of the things that you guys offer.

[00:51:13] Andy Graham: The podcast is believe it or not, the HMO podcast.

[00:51:17] Andy Graham: Yeah. Super simple. I think we're sort of heading towards 300 episodes now, which is crazy. It's a great place for anybody interested in maybe learning more about HMOs, just getting started or anyone who's already got an established portfolio. I try and cover all bases for people of all levels, so to speak.

[00:51:35] Andy Graham: And we get loads of guests on, and I think there's just a huge amount of information that I really wish existed when I was just getting started. It would have helped me so, so much. We have a community, which is a free community, the HMO community on Facebook. We have about 10,000 members now. It's an incredible place to find guidance and support and advice to ask questions.

[00:51:52] Andy Graham: Anything to do with HMOs. It really is a superb place. And I'm continuously chipping in and adding my two pence worth on stuff like that and sharing bits and pieces. And it's a great place to see examples from our community members and see what people are doing. We have a few pieces of educational content and training that are a level up.

[00:52:10] Andy Graham: So for people taking it a bit more seriously, I built the roadmap. It's for people who want to really level things up. And again, for people who are established, maybe we want to really fine tune things, sharpen the blade. But it is a huge, as far as I'm aware, it is by far the biggest vault of educational content in the HMO space that exists, and I think it'd be hard for anyone to kind of catch up with us now because we have content every single week.

[00:52:33] Andy Graham: We, we have a great relationship with our community. We've got 70, 80 incredible case study examples from our community members. We've got a vault of hours and hours and hours of videos broken down into really sort of simple, easy to follow bite sized lessons, covering everything from how to find deals, how to fund them, how to refurbish them, how to manage tenants.

[00:52:53] Andy Graham: We've got masterclasses from experts like planning consultants and architects, interior designers, mortgage brokers. And we've got a library of all of the resources that I developed and acquired over the years of running my businesses, including rent to rent agreements and stuff like that, that would typically cost thousands of pounds to generate and hours and hours and hours of work to build yourself.

[00:53:15] Andy Graham: It's all there and can all be accessed. It's super simple to join and it's super simple to leave if it's not for you. And that's a really important value of ours. We make it really accessible and really, really flexible.

[00:53:26] Jerry Alexander: So Andy, tell me what's the name of the Facebook groups. People can search that out.

[00:53:29] Andy Graham: The Facebook group is the HMO community. Okay. And the HMO Roadmap is where your listeners can find all of our training and educational information. We've got a couple of different subscriptions. You can pay annually, you can just pay by the month, but everything that I just mentioned is inside. Right.

[00:53:46] Andy Graham: I'll put it in the show notes, but what's the website they need to go for that Andy? thehmoroadmap.co.uk

[00:53:51] Jerry Alexander: Perfect. Okay. This has been awesome. It's been so super to catch up with you. We've spoken a few times before, but not actually face to face had a discussion like this. It's been really interesting.

[00:54:01] Jerry Alexander: Thanks so much for being honest, open, sharing. And there's been a, certainly a number of nuggets in there that I'm going to take away. So really appreciate your time. Thanks, Andy.

[00:54:10] Andy Graham: No, Jerry. It’s been an absolute pleasure. Thank you for having me on the show. And look, I'll give you a call as soon as I'm ready to start buying some commercial property. How about you do that, sir? Thanks, Andy.

[00:54:24] Andy Graham: That's it for today's episode, guys. Thank you for tuning in. I hope you enjoyed that slightly different episode today. It was a real pleasure to join Jerry on his podcast. Thank you, Jerry, for inviting me. Thank you also for letting us share it on our podcast as well. It was a real pleasure. If you guys are investing in HMOs, then make sure you head on over to thehmoroadmap.co.uk because that is where you'll find everything that you need to start, scale, and systemise your own HMO property business. If you want to build a portfolio like yourself, like I did, and if you want to scale up to bigger and better projects, everything you need to get going and build that HMO portfolio to generate that cash, it's all waiting for you inside the HMO roadmap.

[00:55:00] Andy Graham: Trust me, if I'd have had that when I was just getting started, that conversation with Jerry today would have been very. different. I'd have done a lot more in a much shorter space of time. But that is it for today's episode, guys. Thank you for tuning in. And don't forget that I'll be right back here in the very same place next week.So please join me then for another installment of the HMO podcast.