What It Takes to Build a Multi-Million Pound Property Business With Jack Jiggens

In today’s episode, I’m really excited to be joined by Jack Jiggens of XP Property, a very experienced property investor and developer. Jack has learned a lot over the years, and today he’s sharing what it really takes to build a successful property business.

Jack shares tips on finding deals, working with partners, and getting funding. We also talk about the ups and downs of the journey, and why being flexible and always learning is so important in this industry.

If you’re in property—or thinking about it—this one’s packed with useful advice. 

Topics covered in this episode:

• 03:00 – Jack’s Journey into Property Development
• 10:01 – Key Insights on Building a Property Business
• 20:02 – The Importance of Strategic Partnerships
• 23:48 – Funding Strategies for Growth
• 32:14 – How to Find and Structure Profitable Deals

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Transcript

Andy Graham (00:02.67)

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. 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 start, scale and systemise your very own HMO portfolio now.

Andy Graham (00:40.61)

In today's episode, I am incredibly excited to be joined by an incredibly experienced investor and developer, Jack Jiggens. Today, we are going to tap into the years of knowledge and experience and skill that Jack has earned and established. And we're going to discuss what it takes to build a proper property business. As you're about to find out, Jack has done some really impressive stuff from investing in HMOs to building a service based business to developing some really impressive buildings on a really impressive scale. Well today we're going to find out what it really takes the pros, the cons, the ups, the downs and everything in between. Please sit back, relax and enjoy today's episode of the HMO podcast.

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. 

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. 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. 

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.

Andy Graham (02:31.7)

Hi Jack! Thanks for joining me the podcast today.

Jack Jiggens:

Thank you for having me.

Andy Graham:

Clearly a very experienced investor and developer. And I'm looking forward to this conversation today. I've been following a lot of what you and your business partner and your brother have been up to on social media. I think we've crossed paths at a few of the industry events. I'm sure I've seen you guys sort of strolling onto the stage to collect some awards as well, which I'm sure will get empty. But Jack, can you tell us and our listeners a little bit more about yourself and your property business to get started?

Jack Jiggens: Yeah, of course. So I was technically born into property. My father was a builder, then ran a plant and hire company. My grandfather on my other side ran a construction business. So every house I lived in was built by basically my father, but I never understood why they never owned any property other than their personal home. There was no buy to let, HMOs, commercial buildings, mixed use investments, developments, doing a site that's not there. So I kind of already knew how to build stuff. I was very much hands on.

When I actually first set out just after university, I was building houses from the ground up, doing everything. I never really understood why there was an income generating place and value enhancement and buying and refurbishing and then refinancing that value back out. So I started to sort of educate myself in that space quite profusely because the first, like to go back to the first deal I did, bought cash, built cash, sold. And I was like, cool, this works. But it was one project, one year.

Jack Jiggens (03:59.374)

very slow scalability. So I was like, right, how do I do more of this and grow this into more of a business rather than just a project by project case? And that's now sort of obviously led us into where we are today, where we run a development company, a measured surveying company. We run a HMO investment portfolio. We also run a social housing portfolio and we're quite corporate outfit now. I see us as five businesses in the group and we all have our own sort of linear focus, but we all feed into each other and our team of 30 now helps me deliver what we do today.

Andy Graham: So a bit of an empire. I'm sure there's a lot of people listening to this episode who are interested in how you got there because that obviously hasn't happened overnight. And I'm sure the journey to get where you are now hasn't been completely linear. I suppose I'd like to start with how you've approached property as a business. You're clearly very entrepreneurial, Jack. I certainly think there's quite a difference between just being an investor, just being a landlord and being a property business owner, but can you talk me through how you've got to where you are and what sort of things had to happen along the way to enable you or even push you to take that next step or maybe think about moving sideways into partnerships. And I know also that you've got trading businesses alongside your asset and acquisition businesses as well. And it'd be interesting to know how that whole thing now fits together, but also how you ended up getting there and building that over time.

Jack Jiggens: Yeah, but this is over 10 years really. So it didn't happen overnight. And I kind of feel like we're now a point where we're trading in certainly in our development company at a size that we feel that is a good size for us. What I would call like critical mass for a business. We've been growing it for 10 years to get to where we are today. So that's definitely been part of visionary and all of the goals change every year.

Jack Jiggens (05:48.354)

Ben works for the Berkeley group and I grew up on site. So we knew we wanted to run the development company. That was kind of like the sort of childhood blue sky thinking development company. And then you go down into more detail about what does that look like? Where it started out is Ben wanted to be building sort of six story skyscrapers. And I was quite comfortable with like private high-end residential developments around the home counties. And we've sort of forged basically our competitive advantage, which is I've got a sales background before I moved full-time into property.

And Ben's obviously got a quite heavy design and delivery hat that he wears very well. So I was like, right, where are we best set? We're good at acquiring stuff. We're good at raising capital because the deals are quite creative and they get a good feedback in this sort of private investment space. And then Ben's good at adding value in design and sort of value engineering in the build. So we've now forged our kind of like, our skill set is kind of taking a lot of old buildings and repurposing them.

There's so many sims to yourselves because we can buy a hundred pound a square foot for a building, be in a market where we can exit at six, seven hundred a square foot. So to get there though, we've done tons of other things. We've done end of terrace, we've done cluster flats, we've done planning uplifts, we've done back to back trades, we've done mixed use developments. We've literally done everything that you can name across the tens, across the businesses, it's 86 projects, sites projects.

I feel like we've hustled and been through that hustle phase and been like, right, that didn't work. That did work. This was good. This was bad. We liked that. That was easy. Greater list of buildings take a lot longer. All of that learning and we learned by activity, which is stressful at times because things approach you and you don't really expect them. But yeah, we've forged now to where our business is today, which has basically been forward funded from the deals and the profits that we've made in the past to build a team. We've got quite an experienced team now.

And we know that we should be delivering sort of three to 10 million GDB sites because that pays dividends into our business really well because our team are working on the right size projects and we can create good value on those. And then as far as like the sister companies go, it kind of just makes sense. Like for an example, our surveying business, we're probably spending 50 grand a year across the group in measure surveys, topographical surveys, and to hire the kit and to hire a new member of team.

Jack Jiggens (08:05.624)

To bring that in house was less than what it was costing us. So it was a no brainer. And then we actually only did that because we had a business plan to grow a surveying business. I wouldn't implore anyone bringing everything in house just for the sake of that, because it's sometimes nice to not have that overhead always bolted into the machine. But we wanted to grow that business. We're like, let's try it. And that's exactly what we did. One of our surveyors moved into one of our HMOs and I said, what'd do? And he said, I've just been made redundant from surveying company. And I said, would you want to start work on Monday? And he did. And that was how we set that business up and we just did a 52 grand month last month. So folding the businesses into the group is, it's easy to see opportunity and to fix problems when you're an entrepreneur. And actually the difficulty is to say no. So we're now actually banned from new businesses and new ideas and things because there's just not enough time in the day and life gets in the way. So that's how we've grown the sister companies around the businesses. And we love service-based businesses. In a service-based business, you can win business and sell and trade business in a day. Whereas in development, you're three years in a gig that may or may not work out that fruitful. And some of it is out of your control. You might be playing over some market risks there as well. So having service-based businesses within a group of a company where you've got slower development, we think is sensible because it helps cover overheads in the short term. You can obviously feed overheads between the businesses and lean on others when you need to. And that's how we've grown the sort of the group of businesses.

Andy Graham: I completely agree with you and actually there's a huge amount of similarity I think between you and I. I feel the same about trading businesses, service-based businesses alongside a development business and actually I've said on a number of occasions that I don't think I'd want to actually develop without those other businesses now. It's so arid when you're developing for so long, you're just sort ploughing pretty much everything that you've got, time, resource, and certainly capital into deals, aren't you? And just having those predictable revenue generating businesses in the background is a great form of stability. And I think that you're a brilliant example of this, but I've seen lots of people, successful developers, and I think the most successful do have something like that on the side or in that background as well. And I think for a lot of people getting started in property, are building a portfolio and eventually moving on to bigger deals is something that they want to aspire to. And I think the realities are often quite different to the expectations. And I think that

Andy Graham (10:31.502)

how intensive these sorts of developments can be. It can be quite shocking once you get started. So for anyone listening today that would ultimately like to get there, you don't need to start there, but I would certainly recommend maybe thinking about other verticals or other things that you could potentially do to, like Jack has outlined, give you a certain degree of predictability and stability alongside developing. When you went to university, Jack, did you know that, or expect to come out of the other end of all of that and build a property business and do this? Or was that something that matured over time.

Jack Jiggens: Yeah. So I mean, back to the sort of entrepreneurial piece, mean, classic case of selling sweets to school, selling various different things in my sort of late teens. And I actually was very, very active from a young age on my eBay account, selling literally anything. I definitely like trader personality trait. And I knew I wanted to be in some form of business. I was actually going to throw myself into fitness, into the fitness industry first and potentially open up my own gym. And really long story short, I had it all lined up, space secured, got change of use planning, ordered all the kit, had it all laid out, had the Fit out team ready. But because I had enough cash to do the fit out, but I didn't have the cash to buy the kit and you probably wouldn't anyway. A lot of people get those on finance because then it's offset monthly against trading income. And I needed a guarantor for it because I was unemployed setting up a business. I was putting about 150 grams worth of my own cash that I'd saved up into that. I was only sort of 21 and my dad said he would guarantor me. Then it got to the point of pinch and then he sort of said, I'm not comfortable with this. I'm not comfortable guaranteeing a business that I don't really understand. And it kind of flopped. 

But when that business was going to be sort of growing, I actually met with another really successful local business owner who runs a chain of gyms, really successful, growing it from nothing. And I met with him to discuss a JV and see if we could do it together and I could sort of get rid of the old man and go independently on my own with this new JV partner. And coincidentally.

Jack Jiggens (12:30.626)

He sort of said, the space isn't big enough. You'll end up getting a good managerial wage in this gym. And I would highly recommend that if you do this, you take a space that's four times the size. And it was that someone being there done that before in those shoes, almost like mentoring exposure. And the moment he thinks, yeah, I probably did a lot too much too soon before seeking that advice or someone that's done it before. And actually my JV partner was uncomfortable because they didn't, hadn't been in walks those shoes before.

So at that point I was already doing some property stuff and I was like, do I go and find a bigger space and run a bigger thing in health and fitness, or do I just double down into property? And at this point, this is while I was almost opening the gym, I knew I'd go into real estate at some point. But in that process, I had geared the lease from, I think it was something like six pound of square foot all the way up to like 12 pound of square foot. I basically made the margin of the Delta for the new gym that came in. So just on almost like on a lease renewal basis.

I'd up the lease and I'd saw that there was a valley that was created just purely in the lease. I was like, great. So property is a cash flowing business if you can do contracts like that. It's essentially a rent to rent, but on like a different scale in an industrial building. And then I already knew how to build. And then I started going to seminars and meeting people. And I was like, I already know the bit that a lot of people don't know, which is building. I like that bit doesn't scare me. And I've got loads of family and friends and contacts that have been there, done that before. And I can call up a family friend of ours, godparent, whatever it may be, just like, can you come and check out this site with us? And that's what I did back in the day. 

And then I started learning about HMOs and income and I was like, I want to do this. So then I just went in and took the 150K that I had and just went fully into real estate. And I spent most of that on education and spending money on bettering my knowledge and myself and what I'm doing and meeting the right people and mentorship and non-exec advisory and spreading my way across different strategies.

And then I just went in full feet into property, as you can probably tell. And weirdly now I don't deal with the delivery of our diamond company. Like I thought that was a thing that I offered to the table and now that's not really my bag. I just focus on purely acquisitions and capital raising.

Andy Graham (14:41.014)

Tell us a little bit more about that then, Jack. What is your role in the development business? And I suppose I'm also interested to understand how you manage your creative approach to business and entrepreneurship and the different businesses that you now control and actually dealing with the nuance of projects, specific issues and challenges that happen on almost daily basis. Some of which are pretty big challenges.

Jack Jiggens: Yeah, sure. So yeah, as mentioned, I did a stint in sales, sort of back end of university. I was very active. I was very process driven and I believe I can sort of adapt to the people that I'm speaking to quite well and understand their requirements. A sales is basically understanding who's selling to, why you're selling to them, what they need and then being able to appease those needs. So I built up a bit of experience of engagement with people and selling, which was in a 360 sales role. 

So I had to find the business, find the solution and place the business. So it was a very, very exposed in that capacity. But I didn't necessarily think I was like Terry Tibbs, Mr. Salesman until I met Ben and I was like, yeah, I'm definitely better than Ben at selling. And he's obviously better than me at lot of things. And that's where we sort of carved our roles in the business. So to kick off the business, Ben and I, we already had found the deal and we sort of did the first few projects. We kind of did both, did everything together, everything, like end to end, understood all of it. 

So debt raising package, investment package, legal, conveyancing, agreements, structure, organisation structure, tax structure, the delivery planning. We literally did everything side by side, which I think was very inefficient to actually do it that way. And that's not how we do it at all now. But back then it was really good for both of us to understand how each other work, both of us to understand every single ailment of property and property development and how it works end to end. A lot of people go to me, I'm a project manager. I can go and do a property development. I'm like, 90 % of the work is not project management. It's everything out that's running a business. 

So the way that we foster our sort of roles is we break up projects into six categories and business into five categories. Projects is acquisitions, funding, structure, design, delivery, and sales. I do the first three, does the final three. So I do acquisitions, funding, and structure. The acquisitions is kind of like my trader mentality, process driven.

Jack Jiggens (16:56.238)

I love negotiating. I love being creative around negotiating. I love understanding what the seller actually wants. And often if they say, I'm not budgeting on that price, I go, cool. Well, I want 24 months to get planning and then buy it. And then it actually works out cheaper for us, even though that sounds counterintuitive. The funding side, I feel like Ben and I are both quite good with numbers. Ben's probably a little bit better, but we're both very sharp on numbers. That's where we overlap pretty well. And I feel that's completely one of the most fundamentals of property. I feel like sometimes. I'm more in a finance business because it's just so convoluted. 

We've got a group of over 20 companies now with hundreds of payments going out every day. And there's a lot of management there. And even tax advisor and council companies look at our structure and go, yeah, that's a lot. Because normally when you see that structure, like for an example, our tax advisor said, you have the same group that I used to manage, which was an offshore wind solar farm company that are worldwide, but they were turning over 300 billion. We're turning over 30 million.

So it's like, you can't really throw the same professional team into managing your finances. So we overlap on the finance side of things. I tend to head up arranging the debt finance for the acquisition and also the development and the sort of investor relationship and dealing with that to close. So basically we, I deal to the point where we own the keys and then they get handed to Ben and then Ben takes it through design, delivery, planning, and also sales or retention, whatever we do at Tellhend. If we keep it, I'll do the refi.

If we don't keep it here, we'll do all the sales is essentially how we handle it. So that's our sort of roles. And in mind of my brother's business, I'm in a really similar role. So I deal with all the acquisitions. I do all the finance and I do most of the delivery. My brother's now transitioning more into delivery because any director doesn't want to be in lettings forever. But he set up the business side of things on the letting side and he's now transitioning over a bit. Very needed to as well, because we've got seven live projects in that company.

And yeah, so he's coming into the delivery. So yeah, very much leaning into our skills, which I think is absolutely imperative to business and profiting. Like we said before the call, sometimes there's silos of roles that don't actually need your skills and you just need a process and a person to run with it. And then that then it's good.

Andy Graham (19:08.686)

I think entrepreneurs, particularly entrepreneurs in property are very guilty of trying to cover off everything, trying to do a bit of everything. And the reality is there's an awful lot to do, especially as you start to ramp up both the volume of projects and the scale of projects. And it can just be too much add on top of that family, potentially work or the life commitments. And it can be incredibly difficult. And it sounds like you guys have really leveraged your own strengths and weaknesses. It sounds like you hold one another to account. You've got clearly defined roles and responsibilities. And I'm highlighting this because I think, it surprises me, and I'm sure that you'll have come across this before Jack, but I've seen in a number of examples, people in partnerships that don't have that, they are overlapping. They continue to overlap. They spread themselves a little bit too thin and there's not enough accountability and often sort of look at the business and wonder why it isn't quite working. 

I think business partnerships need to work just like you've outlined where somebody's doing something, somebody's doing anything else. And you're always able to sit down and have a conversation about the stuff that maybe falls through the cracks or maybe you don't completely agree. And there's an interesting question there, which is, you, guys run a lot of stuff and developing throws up so many challenges from financing to stuff on site to planning, which way to go. There's so many decisions. I assume that you guys don't always share the same opinions at the outset, but it's important that you don't get stuck in things and you have to come to a decision. How do you manage that as business partners? What sort of process do you guys go through?

Jack Jiggens (20:44.174)

Yeah, it's a super interesting question. Actually, I was sat down with two of our employees yesterday morning talking about disagreements and you don't have to agree on everything. That's, you get at every level of a business and that is exactly what they were going through. So yeah, I completely agree with you. see a lot of people with the industry that like kind of shadow each other and, and all do the same things. Whereas we definitely divide and conquer when we set out the business, we're on the phone every hour, texting, messaging, WhatsApping, sending through documents. Now we're, we're a larger team.

I'd probably speak to Ben the least in the company. We check in once a week, if not less than that. And there are elements where there's a decision to be made and Ben and I have ultimately trust each other to make our own decisions. We will always check in with each other if we feel like a third opinion needs to be held or even voiced before making that decision. If that decision is wrong, we have to back it as a company. If it's wrong, right or indifferent, someone's made the decision. We've now got to deal with the aftermath.

And as a company, we have no blame policy. It is what it is. And we deal with it because it's no benefit from speaking about it. If we would have granted lessons learned, that's a different matter, but we don't sort of cry over spilt milk if someone knows that they've made a mistake. And quite frequently, if Ben and I have a disagreement, we will put a fun wager on it. So we will go in and if it's normally in his area of the business, I'll go, cool, run with that. I disagree, but run with it. 20 quid's on it.

And if the same is vice versa, at least in the acquisitions process, then we'll have a wage on it. And that is literally it. Someone backs the decision and we have to go with that decision. Sometimes now, because we've got quite a bigger team, we'll have a vote. And we had a vote on something the other day that I said, if the answer comes up as the opposite of my choice, I'll leave the company. And it came up as the opposite of my choice. So yeah, you've got to kind of have a bit of fun with it and you're not going to agree on everything and who cares? All of this stuff is vehicles for, you do have to be proud about your projects, but what I was actually talking about disagreeing with was the name of one of our sites. And like at the end of the day, yeah, it did annoy me that it's going to be called that, I'm too busy to even worry about that. And every time I hear the name, I cringe a little bit.

Andy Graham (22:50.84)

I think the far more important thing is that you can make a decision and you don't lock horns and there are mechanisms in place to have that trust. And I think even in property, we know that so much in property moves at a snail's pace, but actually on a micro level, sitting and laboring on decisions while you've got guys on site waiting around or waiting for a refinance or a important decision you're on a purchase, actually those can be incredibly expensive decisions. And exactly as you've outlined.

You have to be able to make a decision, make it quickly and stick whatever the result is and be prepared to deal with that. And there's so few things I think in this game, certainly I've learned over the last 20 years, that are black and white. So much of it is gray. And I could give you, share lots of examples of problems that have occurred, decisions that have been made where not everybody has agreed on. And then the outcome of the decision has been the wrong decision, but inadvertently created a more positive outcome somewhere else along the line because there are other facets that are sometimes still difficult to see and they can be a chain of events and it can often be very predictable. 

But I do think building property businesses and building partnerships, it's so, so important. I actually think that the success of a partnership really hinges on the ability to do everything that you just outlined, Jack. Yes, we need good deals. Yes, we need the skill to deliver the sites and the project. But I think unless you've got those bits working in the way that you've outlined, it doesn't matter how good your deal is. It's just not going to work and it's going to be very difficult to build a business and a profitable business from it nonetheless. 

Jack Jiggens: I completely agree.

Let's talk about funding then. This is obviously a really big part of your role and your business. And I think that no matter what stage somebody's out, either just starting, maybe kind of get a few deals in, maybe they've done several multimillion pound deals, finance is always something that runs out and you need more of. And I always try and encourage people to be thinking about it well before they need it.

Andy Graham (24:47.522)

This is obviously something that you guys spend a lot of time on. So can you talk us through where you get your finance from? Not obviously the specifics, Jack, but the type of lenders that you go to, how you approach that sort of stuff, maybe even how you structure the deals and the way that you stack the capital in your deals and how you make decisions based on the risk involved in taking finance.

Jack Jiggens: Yeah, of course. The fundamentals are it has been an imperative part of our business growth to sort of grow our business to where we are. We wouldn't have been able to do it without private investment. And that started out of certain time in our journey and it feels like it's very different and very much more matured and process driven. Everyone starts out in the same place. So I think we've raised over 18 million pounds worth of private investment now to date. And it started with family and friends, school loans, the first deal we did. We actually crowdfunded.

All of the costs, I think it was about 300K and we had something like 350 investors, some with 50 quid and some with five grand. And that was actually a really good place to start for anyone out there. Crowdfunding is getting a little bit more difficult with compliance, but it means that you borrow a lot from a little amount from a lot of people, which is a really good place to start. Cause if you borrow 300,000 pounds from one person, you then might not be able to carry that person all the way through all of your projects. Especially if you have that good wide exposure.

Some of those 5,000 pound investors might come in again for a little bit more, but obviously you've got to be careful of syndication, not in a compliant platform. But anyway, so we started out with family and friends and we did start small and grow our portfolio and size of investments that we deal with. You kind of start with people that you know, a lot of people that we've mentored people before and we've now got a list of about 160 high net worth investors that we can call upon to send them projects, but it didn't start there. It started with two and then those two, we asked them to refer three people and then we might have met someone at an event and they recommended three people and then we met an actual investor at another event and got added to the list. 

So over the last decade, we've been building up that list. And every time we go to fund a deal, I go top to bottom on the list and I contact the ones that, so the way my is in an Excel sheet and it ranks them on the number of investments or value of investments that they've invested before. So the most likely person to lend is always categorizing towards the top.

Jack Jiggens (27:02.668)

And I start at the top of the list and I go down until I fund the project. But when that was only three, I then had to figure out how do I grow this list? And that was all down to always capital raising, like you said, always be going to events and telling people what you do. And when you do meet people that are likely to have capital, but they're not liquid at the moment, ask them to recommend three people. A referral goes way stronger than a cold start. And also speak to people at events and go to the places that you will hopefully meet. One thing that we did.

I think quite badly in hindsight, but I think it was naivety, is we attended a ton of property events. And the problem with property events is 99% of the people in the room are borrowers and 1% of the people in the room are lenders. So I now try and put myself in rooms where 99% of the room is lenders and I'm the one borrower. That's now I've started that shift. It becomes a lot easier. Obviously we've got reputation that we've built and that also really helps.

I would say to anyone out there listening, if you're in the earlier stages of capital raising, the first few deals are the hardest because you've got to build confidence in the project and your deliverability, but you don't have any proof of it. So stick with it. It does get easier. And every time you do want it, it does get easier as confidence builds and it becomes an easier process. But the way we've always structured our investments is we either do a straight loan, one investor per project.

So they get a loan against that particular project. They get a second charge against that particular project and then we have an agreed return or we do an equity share. So they still have a second charge. There's no interest accruing on the loan, but we split the profits 50-50. We have one limited company per project. We have one investor per project, so it's super clean. That's all we've done today. That's all we probably will ever do. We have looked at institutional funding and we looked at sort of grouping it all together. You know, we've got

I think about 10 million live at the moment. And we thought to ourselves, surely it's easier to go to a bigger outfit, borrow 10 under one facility and not have to have all of these independent conversations, independent monitoring. But actually when we got offered those terms of what that looks like, we realised as a company, we'd have to six times our gross development value delivery. We'd have to six times our team to get the same net returns as a company. It's very favored in the institutional's favour.

Jack Jiggens (29:21.486)

So our typical investors are successful people, typically middle-aged, but I wouldn't necessarily say stereotype at just that amount. They're people that have maybe sold their business or had a very successful career or maybe inherited some capital from a family and above. And the main thing that's common about all of them, other than the fact that definition of an investor is capital that they're investing, other than that, because otherwise they wouldn't be an investor, is they're kind of just like us. They kind of back us. They go, you guys know what you're doing.

You put in the effort, you're honest. You're not going to hide something if something goes wrong. You're real. Yeah, it's not really, really serious. You kind of, have a bit of a laugh and if you cock up, you get it right, correct the problem, but you're honest about it. And that's kind of it. I feel like when you set out on your journey and you haven't got that confidence and you believe it's all very sort of sticky in suits and very serious. And most of the people that we mess with are people. The way I think about it is we're helping them build value for their family.

And if we can't resonate with their family, then it is the wrong sort of relationship. So that's how we've, we're now double downing on that. And we've looked at institutional stuff and we're actually like, you know what, I'd rather work with five independent investors on five sites a year. that I'm sort of, I like the fact that it's just going directly to someone and something in that family and you can see that benefit. So that's now how we've just kind of niched our capital raising.

Andy Graham: I think that you shared some fantastic advice there and your final point around people investing in people, I think is so true. We've seen it so often. We're regularly sitting down, having meals and dinner or a few drinks, or even going out of the country to spend a bit of time with our investors because yes, we do some business together, but also they have a genuine interest in us as a company and vice versa. And I think that that's incredibly valuable. I think a lot of people do undervalue just how important that can be for investors, as well as the fact that

What you have is an opportunity for somebody else. There are a lot of people with lots of money that are looking to do something interesting with it. And the types of projects that you and our listeners have are potentially those. And I think the other cool thing about working with private finance that certainly that I've found over the years is that there's almost something for everybody. I've met people and we've not been the right fit, our projects, our style, the timings, the amount of money, whatever it might be. And then out of nowhere, somebody or something that

Andy Graham (31:44.64)

you know, I just never would have expected happens and turns out to be an incredible fit. I think that I learned very early on when I was raising finance, never to judge your book by its cover, just see where the conversation goes. Because you just never quite know what is under the bonnet. But I think starting, this is advice for our listeners, think starting to think about this now, like plant that seed now and let it grow into a tree because you will absolutely need finance. It is the fuel to the property business. So without it, yeah, you're not going to go anywhere. 

So start thinking about that as early as you possibly can. Alongside finance, then Jack, there's the other big component, which is the deals. And you guys are obviously pretty good at pulling deals together and finding deals. Can you talk to us about how you identify deals? What sort of process you go through? Is it a lot of word of mouth or people coming to you with stuff? Are you just really good at kind of turning stones over? Are you knocking on doors? How are you finding the sites that you are?

Jack Jiggens: Yeah, really good question. actually felt that the two are maybe biased and men might disagree, but I think the two hardest things in property development is finding the deal and finding the money. Yeah, so deals wise, I used to go to events where it was on market deals don't work and the fundamentals are the person that's saying that is not creative enough in creating that value. So I do believe on market deals work and the majority of our projects were on market or are on market and it's down to us to create that deal.

And you go to an event and someone say, you know, I've stacked 60 deals in the last month and I can't get any to work. And I say, what categorizes something working for you? And they say 20% on GDV. And I saw a guy, well, of course you're not going to find something. And what is already consented or what was already in place on that particular site is going to meet the criteria. Otherwise a hundred other people would have bought this before you. And so we try and add value at any stage. So our competitive advantage is finding quite a creative deal. for an example, I'll run you through our largest deal at the moment as an example, is 17,000 square foot office space that was part occupied with office tenants, some were there in the act, but they're kind of like sporadically set around the building. So you can't develop it to resi because they're all over the shop. It's getting a terrible income for commercial and that brings the value of the building down. So we decided to go in, up the rents of the commercial tenants and convince them to condense down to one wing of this 17,000 square foot building.

Jack Jiggens (34:09.217)

We upped their rents from 14 pounds a square foot to 18 pounds a square foot. We lost one of the tenants who didn't want that up their rent. And then the other two that were in the act condensed and did like basically created their new HQ down one end of the building. We then got planning on what had been vacated, which was now linearly split. So one side was commercial, one side was resi to 20 apartments. 

We also agreed an overage on the purchase price. So we got the existing building a lot more cost effectively than the other bidders were coming in at subject to getting new build planning in the car park, which would have made planning gain even on top of the overage. We're now in planning for new build houses in the car park. So all of this sort of creativity on the offer, but also we phased the site in four parts. So phase one was deliver nine of the 20 flats. Phase two is the commercial fit out to move the tenants. Phase three is to convert the remaining part of the commercial tenants, which is now vacated and phase four is the new build houses. 

So your finance costs are reduced, your delivery obviously does straddle a period of time, but that because your finance costs are reduced significantly, you're not carrying all of that debt just for the last house to be built or whatever it may be. And that's kind of how we look at things. We look at something and go, what needs to happen to this to get the best thing out of it? How do we squeeze this every step of the way? And I haven't even gone into detail about, you know, like improving floor plan, gross areas, even other areas of creativity around that. But we look at every deal and we go.

What is the most creative structures, efficient, logical, low risk, effective, in demand. Obviously you don't create something that's not in demand because it's not going have a value to it way. And we sort of sweat it and pull it around. And some of our team hate us for that. That's really where we make our markup. And the way I see it is if you gave a project to person A and if you gave a project to us, I would love to think we've seen a lot of things that we can do that other people haven't.

And that's kind how we fostered our whole sort of mantra of our business. So, and all of our team loved that. We're very sort of creative in that respect. And that's how we find deals, on market stuff, but we try and see it in a different way to others, if that makes sense.

Andy Graham (36:13.622)

I think the education piece that you talked about earlier, and you obviously still spend a lot of time learning Jack, as I do, I think the ability to see that those creative opportunities in deals, that's certainly where I found a lot of that and learned from others. And it's funny, you've almost just described the exact deal that we're working on at the minute. It's almost the exact same size. We're building our phase two of the car park now. We didn't have any tenants in it actually when we bought it, but when we did buy it, it came with the planning.

And the planning was a knockdown of an 18,000 square feet building to put a certain number of apartments in there. And actually we recognise, well, you don't need to knock this down. You can probably get a hell of a lot more inside it. And that's exactly what we did through planning. So I think there's some great advice shared that you can actually apply to smaller deal, to deals of any size. In fact, I often see people looking at HMO deals. There's lots of different ways to add value. And I think looking for ways to add that value rather than hoping to find something that just looks like really good market or under market value on them on the market. I think that's the way to do it. It's a very difficult gig if you are just looking for undervalued assets, distressed stock or stock that maybe somebody hasn't priced appropriately. Wanting a blue moon? They come along. But what are the chances that you're the one person that happens to see it be in the exact position at the moment they want to sell it? Very, very likely, in my opinion.

Andy Graham (37:36.418)

Just not possible to build a business off. So look and search those opportunities to add that creative value like Jack has outlined. Jack, it's been a fascinating conversation with you. You guys are obviously doing some wonderful stuff. I mean, I love watching you guys anyway. You do some really cool and really, really nice projects and you're doing a lot of different stuff as well. We didn't even get to talk about HMOs today, but maybe there's a part two in there somewhere. For anyone who's listened today and would like to find out a little bit more about yourself, or maybe is even interested in investing with you, where is the best point to direct them to.

Jack Jiggens: Just anywhere on social media, Jack Jiggens, J-I-WGG-E-N-S. My Instagram handle is @jiggensproperty. Sorry in advance, we do quite a lot online. if you do come and click a photo, we like to think it's good value like yours that you put out there, Andy. But yeah, it's been amazing to be on it and chat through some stuff and you'll have to come and return the favour on our channel.

Andy Graham: Well, I absolutely think it's great value and I would encourage everyone to go and check it out. But Jack, thank you. It's been an absolute pleasure. I'm looking forward to watching more of these projects come to life and I'm looking forward to keeping up with your journey.

Jack Jiggens: Thanks Andy.

Andy Graham (38:45.358)

That is it for today's episode guys. Thank you for tuning in. I hope you enjoyed that conversation with myself and Jack. I know I certainly did. What a guy. What a huge amount of experience he's got. It goes without saying what an incredibly impressive business Jack has built. And I hope if you needed it, today's episode gave you that dose of inspiration and motivation, bit of encouragement. Perhaps if you found yourself in a bit of despair recently building and running a property business. I hope today's episode was just that dose of realism that you needed, that reminder that it is tough, but that's okay. Whatever it is that you need right now in your property business. Today's episode gave you that. 

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