Tenant Problems, Live Developments & H2 2026 Planning

The first half of the year has been a reminder that building a successful property business is never a straight line.

Some of my biggest wins have come alongside some of my biggest frustrations. 

In this episode, I take you behind the scenes of my business and share an honest mid-year review of what's been working, what's tested me the most, and where I'm focusing my time and energy for the rest of 2026.

🎯 What You'll Learn

• How AI and better systems have freed up more of my time
• Lessons from this year's student changeover
• The reality of rent arrears and landlord legal battles
• Why I'm focusing on high-yield HMOs again
• My plans for a new private investment fund

If you're building a property business of your own, this episode is a reminder that setbacks are part of the journey. Success isn't about avoiding problems. It's about staying focused on the bigger picture, making better decisions, and continuing to move forward even when things don't go to plan.

💻 Resources & Mentions

• Join my Accelerator Programme: If you’d like my direct input on your current or next project, you can watch this video or book a complimentary strategy call with me here.
• The HMO Roadmap: Feeling overwhelmed? Access 400+ tools, templates, and lessons to help you start, scale, and systemise your HMO business - all in one place. Join here.
• The HMO Community: Got questions or need support? Come and connect with 10,000+ investors inside our Free Facebook Group here.
• Social: Follow me on Instagram for daily HMO tips, advice, and behind-the-scenes updates here.

Transcript

Andy Graham (00:02.67)

Hey, I'm Andy, and you're listening to the HMO podcast. Over ten 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 have managed thousands of tenants. Join me and some very special guests to discover the tips, tricks, and hacks, the ups 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 (00:40.696)

I've just landed back after a couple of weeks in Spain where I've been on holiday with my family, and we have had a really incredible time. But halfway through the year, I like to stop and pause and just slow down for a minute to reflect on how the year today has gone. I like to think about what's been going well, what hasn't been going so well, and then think about what I need to do to make sure that I hit my targets and objectives that I set earlier in the year. 

So today is a business update. I'm gonna take you behind the scenes of my business and talk you through what's been going well, what hasn't been going well. I've got some tenant issues to share with you, stuff that's been costing me a lot of money and really frustrating me and taking a lot of time up. I'm gonna give you a bit of an update on my development projects, including my own home, which I'm super excited to say has finally started. I feel like I've been talking about it on the show for a long time now. 

I've got some stuff that's finally coming to fruition, stuff that is on the horizon, the near horizon that I'm really excited about and looking forward to sharing with you, and a whole lot more. So look, these business updates, as always, they're here to just keep it real with you, their my honest account of what running a property business is actually like. Because I'm not just here recording podcasts about property. I am actually out there doing it every single day. And hopefully you also find it interesting. Hopefully there are some ideas here. Hopefully it's inspiring, motivating, and hopefully it just reassures you that some of the stuff that you're dealing with and experiencing is perfectly normal. And hopefully in here are some solutions to help you deal with some of this stuff yourself. So if you want to know what's been going on behind the scenes in my business, don't go anywhere. Let's get into it.

Hey guys, it's Andy here. We're gonna be getting back to the podcast in just a moment. But before we do, I wanna 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.

Andy Graham (02:32.94)

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 (03:23.796)

Welcome back to the HMO podcast. Thank you as always for joining me. If you're new to the show, then welcome here. It really is great to have you here. If you're a long-term listener, then thank you so much for your continued support. You, of course, will be very familiar with the format of business updates, but like I said, it is my way of just keeping it real with you, my honest counter-reflection of what running a property business is really like: the ups, the downs, the highs, the lows, and everything in between. 

Now, today I want to touch on how the business has been performing year to date, how student changeover went at the end of June, some tenant issues that have honestly been really testing my patience, where my development projects are up to, including my own home, and a bit of what's coming next. 

Now, before I get into all of that, I should at least acknowledge the fact that we've got a new prime minister. Andy Burnham has, of course, made his way into number 10 whilst I've been away in Spain. He's what the seventh prime minister in nearly 10 years. The cabinet has been reshuffled yet again.

Now look, I've been doing this nearly 20 years and a lot of people have come and gone from number 10 during that period. And I don't want to get into a political debate or a longer conversation than we really need to have about any of this stuff because I feel like we'll probably be having it again and again and again and again. And that is part of the problem. As business owners, as investors in property, we really have to set our own policies and objectives and stick to them.

And some things may come along and make that difficult for us, and some things may make that a little bit easier for us. But what I can honestly say after nearly 20 years of doing this is that nothing is really going to make a material difference to you or I. You have to think long term enough, you have to think well beyond the next couple of years. If you really believe in property, stick to the fundamentals that I talk about week in, week out on the show. If you believe in real estate as a source of capital, growth and wealth creation and its ability to generate recurring income. And if you have a passion for creating property and doing good things for good people, our tenants, then this is the right game for you to be in. 

But it isn't easy. And these cronies are not likely to make it any easier for us. But please don't let all of that bog you down because trust me, it has been this way for a long, long time. Nobody's coming to save us. We have to set our own agenda, stick to it.

Andy Graham (05:48.32)

And do what we really, really believe in. If you get dragged into the political conversation, you'll find it very difficult to go anywhere. And if you make decisions based on the news, you almost certainly won't make any decisions or you will make the wrong decisions. That is all I really want to say about it. Good luck to Andy Burnham. I hope he does great things for us, but time will of course tell. And in the meanwhile, I'm going to focus on what I have already determined I am going to focus on. And I hope that you do exactly the same. 

So let's get into today's business update. I've been away in Spain for a couple of weeks. I've had a really, really, really incredible time. We just hired a villa, took Isla's grandparents, which I now realize is so important when it comes to childcare. I mean, we love being with them anyway, but like childcare now is this really important thing that I think about that we didn't used to have to think about when we went on holiday. And that meant that Gem and I got to go on some date nights and just spent some time together and we got up early and we went swimming at the beach and went for breakfast together and stuff like that. But we've had a really incredible time as a family. And it was just such a great switch off. I really just did switch off. I think I did one full day's work while I was there, just consulting. 

And then I probably did an hour, an hour and a half's work every morning, probably between five and six a.m., which I normally do anyway. And that was it. That's all I've really had to do to keep everything ticking over. And I'm really grateful for that. And I probably could have not done a lot of that work as well, but honestly, I like to and I don't like to not do it. I get a bit stressed and a bit anxious if I'm not at least keeping a hand in. I have to remind Gemma of this, but that is also my way of making sure that I enjoy my holidays. It's not necessarily the case that it has to be done. I just like to do it. And that's also okay. And I've learned that as well. 

But it's been a great holiday. We've had a wonderful time and I do feel super, super refreshed. And I'm really excited about the second half of 2026. First half of the year has been really pretty, pretty incredible, if I'm honest. It hasn't all been great, but generally speaking, now if I step back and just look at the year on paper, it has been great. I've hit a number of the goals that I set out to sort of do in January. And I think we're moving into the second half of the year as a business, as a group, with a really great foundation and a lot of potential, a lot of opportunity ahead of us. And I'm really excited about it. Certainly in combination with.

Andy Graham (08:12.926)

some of the market conditions at the minute. There's some really good deals kicking about right now. So super strong first half of the year. Two of the big objectives that I set myself in January, or rather I should say we set ourselves, were to refinance one of our big projects, multi, multi, multi-million pound scheme. And that all finalized in March. That was a big piece. So much involved in that refinance and exiting that deal. And I also wanted to launch the Accelerator Program. That was my new and improved mentorship program in January. And that has been a huge success. And the program has just been completely oversubscribed since we launched in January. And it's been hugely successful. And some of the new clients that I brought on have just been doing and achieving some incredible stuff. So I'm really proud of that. And it's gone really, really well. 

We've also been doing a lot of work, and I've talked on the show about this quite a bit this year, but a lot of work in improving our operations and systems and processes and trying to find ways of utilizing AI to drive that efficiency, but also reduce costs in the business. And that has been going very, very well. I still feel like we're really scratching the surface. And it has taken a lot of time. Some of it is very much trial and error. Some of it has been kind of implementing stuff, finding it's not quite right, and then reverting to something else or stripping it out completely. So it hasn't been a completely straight line by any means. It has actually been a lot of work investing the time and the cost into doing that to figure it out. 

And that is essentially what business is, right? It's kind of figuring out the best solutions and trying to find the most efficient and cost effective ways of doing it. But it has been a big task in itself and it's been a team effort, but that is going very, very well. It's by no means finished, but that has given me a bit of a springboard to push on and pursue some of the ideas, the ventures, the objectives that I've got for the second half of the year, which I'll come on to and talk to you about as well.

But the big priority was tightening ops. It was efficiency and it was freeing up more of my capacity. I felt after a busy year last year, I was starting to get slowly sucked back into a lot of the operational side of running my businesses. And that was reducing my ability to drive growth at the highest levels. And that was a problem. So we've been really trying to fix that in the last six months. And it's by no means completed, but it's working. And I'm really pleased with it.

Andy Graham (10:35.254)

It's something that we're going to keep doing for the next half of the year. If you're not doing this, if you're not investing time and resource into AI and your operations and systems and processes, and you do feel like you're getting dragged into a lot of detail dealing with all the finance and all the tenants stuff and all the compliance stuff and all the sourcing and all your business admin and accounts and everything else, you really need to stop and pause because more so than ever, if you're not keeping up to speed with AI and how to drive efficiency through your business, somebody else is going to beat you. It's not enough now just to sort of try and scrape through. 

You really do have to be committing time and resource to learning this stuff and to getting it into your business. And I will, in the near future, do an episode specifically on AI and how I'm using it in my businesses and how you can use it in yours as well. But the real story of the first half of the year isn't a single number. It is that capacity piece. It's the facts.

And I suppose the outcome, the result of giving myself substantially more headroom to now pursue other ideas and ventures, some of which are just about coming online. We all set financial goals at the beginning of the year, certainly we should do, and I'm no different in that respect. I get really excited about setting them. I'm really driven by them. But one of the big things I am driven by is my capacity, my ability to employ my time or invest my time into the right stuff. So part of that is key activities within my business, new deals, new partnerships. It's the overarching mission. It's managing the financial affairs at the very highest level. 

But it's also finding time to do things that I want to do, to train, to walk the dog, to go on holidays, to plan holidays, to spend time with Gem and Isla, to do nothing, to read, to do some Lego, like just mundane stuff. But if you don't design it, it won't happen. It won't just happen by accident, especially not in the business of property, because there are so many moving parts and so many people involved. 

So if you're not doing that stuff, but you do feel like you're getting dragged into your business and you feel like you're doing more work than ever before, which is probably at odds with why you started doing this in the first place, then you do need to stop and pause and think about what you should be doing and then putting a plan together to make sure that you do actually do it.

Andy Graham (12:59.244)

Now, one of the big things that's happened since my last business update is the student changeover. Of course, I talk about this every single year on the show. This is for anybody who's new to the show, this is when our student tenants move out of their houses in summer. And we turn the houses over, we get them cleaned, we get them prepared. We might go in and do any bits of maintenance. We might even do some cosmetic works. And then we check all the new tenants in. All the new tenants moving in, they're getting set up. 

And there's the finance involved, the money and deposits and everything in between, inspections, inventories, managing cleaners. It really is a super chaotic period, or at least it can be, if it's not planned very well. And every year's a little bit different, and sometimes it really depends on your tenants. Some years you can have great tenants and you have very few problems, and some years it's just not that way. And it can be really difficult and really challenging. And some years other things get in the way. Even the weather has been known to cause issues for us on changeover day. 

But this year I'm pleased to say that it went really, really, really well. Months of planning near perfect execution. That is, without any shadow of a doubt, a team effort. It's impossible to do that independently. That's lots of people and lots of moving parts working harmoniously together. And I was really, really pleased. On the whole, the houses were left in a really good condition. We were aware of sort of I would say ninety-five, ninety-six percent of issues that needed dealing with. 

And one of the things that I think is more important now than ever, and I've talked about this on the show a lot, is making sure that when new tenants move into either their room or their new house, we are delighting them. Heard this concept spoken about by people like Daniel Priestley and other areas of business. And it's no different in the private rental sector. But since the new legislation came in, and let's be honest, it's much more favorable for tenants.

We have to make sure that we're delighting them, that when they move into our properties, they're happy, they're pleased, they are excited to be there and they're not turning up to problems and we're not beginning the relationship from the wrong place. If they move in and there are issues, it's not as they expect, it's not clean, that's going to be a problem. And that problem could actually be a pretty significant problem. If they're so frustrated or disappointed, they might actually just hand their notice in and within a couple of months they could be gone.

Andy Graham (15:22.136)

That's what the new law lets them do. That would be disastrous for a student landlord now, because of course we can't just find a new group to replace them and move them in. And we can't just let our house on a single let basis because we probably have article four to consider and we have to maintain the continuous use, but also we won't be able to get the new tenants out without a reasonable excuse. So it's so important to do this and get it well. So I think that the planning and the execution of changeovers now is more important than ever. You have to go out of your way to make sure that everything's right.

To please and delight your tenants from day one. And that really is the only way to make sure that your tenants want to stay and continue to pay. It's really, really, really that simple, but it's a huge priority. So that's all out of the way. It's a big effort. It is honestly months of planning, but certainly about three weeks before changeover, and then there's the changeover week itself, and then there's a couple of weeks after where we're dealing with deposits and all of that jazz. You know, it really is sort of a five, six week pretty full on period. 

And it can, if we're not careful, dominate everything else. With lots of systems and processes and operations that are well practiced now, I feel like it went really well. It went honestly as well as it ever has done. So super pleased that that's out of the way. And this is one of the reasons why I love the student model, because I don't have to think about that for another year now. With professional lets, of course, we can get empty rooms at any period. 

Because professional tenants are quite transient and they're not letting the houses as groups. Student tenants, that is quite different. Yes, I can hear all of the listeners now sort of screaming about the Renters' Rights Act to me, but I still think the risk is very low that groups of students will actually hand their notice in and move out. If you have to really get it wrong for them to want to do that, or their circumstances are gonna have to go pretty sideways, like they've all completely fallen out as a group, or someone is no longer going to university. But that stuff has always happened, but it doesn't happen very often. 

So that's another bit of good news, just to update you on the student changeover has gone well. Big body of work, all out of the way. Really pleased. Looking forward to not having to deal with it for another year. Now, I mentioned in the intro that I've been dealing with some tenant issues recently. And this is probably the one thing that really stands out in the last few months as being probably the most painful thing, almost on a personal level. I'm borderline emotional about it. It's so frustrating.

Andy Graham (17:46.882)

So in essence, a couple of tenants have stopped paying their rent. Okay, that's not super unusual in its own right. But what's now more apparent than ever is that the councils are telling these tenants to stay put until the bailiffs are instructed to act. So until there is enforcement action, until there's a notice for possession granted by the courts. So if you're not familiar with the process, what happens is you serve a tenant's notice to leave the property because they haven't been paying the rent or for whatever other reason.

Now, hopefully that tenant acknowledges that and they move out within the statutory period that they are granted. If they don't, you have to forcibly remove them. And the only way to do that is to get a court order to do it. As we all know, that can take quite some time. In one case that I recently discussed on the show, that took about six months just to get to court. And all the while this particular tenant in a single let is not paying their rent to the tune of about twelve hundred pounds a month, so quite a lot of money. And then you have to think about the legal fees to take them to court, just to get them to court and ultimately to a judgment that cost four, four and a half thousand pounds in legal fees, which I had to incur. 

Now that took from the first hearing, three or four hearings until it was finally decided. It was then decided by a judge and then the tenant made an application to set it aside. So it went back to court and another month went by and that application set aside to remove the CCJ, the counter court judgment, and the court order was declined by the court, but still a complete faff. I've still got to turn up to all of these court appearances and deal with all of this stuff. And anyway, months and months and months and months of involvement, four, four and a half thousand pounds worth of legal fees, and just a very distasteful experience. 

Simultaneously, and it's not completely unusual. And I think that everybody needs to be increasingly aware of this, and it is going to happen more and more. Tenants are making fairly spurious, no-win, no fee claims of disrepair to properties as an attempt to frustrate legal proceedings, but also find some sort of way of getting an amount of the rent that they owe offset. And if you haven't dealt with these sorts of no-win, no fee legal companies before, they're an absolute pain in the backside. They're pretty awful people to work with.

Andy Graham (20:07.106)

And essentially all they really want is for you to pay their legal fees. But just to respond to a disrepair claim, and by the way, the disrepair claim is pretty much like a template that they will send with a few bits and pieces that are maybe more specific to the particular tenancy and the property thrown in. I mean, the preaction protocol, and I won't get into all of the detail, but the pre-action protocol that we put together for a couple of these recently was like five hundred pages. That's five hundred pages. 

Mostly that is evidence disputing whatever the claim is, but you still have to go through all of your records and speak to your agent and get everything put together in some sort of a presentable format. And you can only imagine how much time that takes. And again, very distasteful, very frustrating. And you can understand why. You can get quite emotional because it gets very, very, very frustrating. It really makes me quite angry because this is a complete failure of the system. And the reason that I think that this is such a failure is because there is so little implication to the tenant who doesn't pay their rent yet. I still have to incur the lost rent. Okay, that's obvious, but also all the legal fees to just get them out of the property. And yes, I can make a claim to recover those legal fees, but in reality, by the time it gets to court, you're probably never going to see any of the rent or any of the legal fees that you spent.

But you will be able to enforce removing them from the property. You can physically send someone to remove them from the property. But in one particular case, recently spent fourteen, nearly fifteen thousand pounds on the whole thing. I will probably never see a penny of that in reality. In another case that's ongoing at the minute, it'll be a similar amount. And I suspect the outcome may well be similar, presuming that they don't have the money to pay for it. That doesn't mean we won't actually continue to enforce action to collect it. 

And there's various ways of doing that, which I won't go into in today's episode, but I'll spend a lot of money doing that and then probably have to think about defending this disrepair claim, which will cost me a lot of money, but on principle probably should be done. And it's just very, very frustrating. And just two cases like that can take up a huge amount of your headspace and time. And it's not the sort of thing you can very easily just hand off to somebody who really doesn't understand your business and how the system and the process all needs to work.

Andy Graham (22:34.41)

And it can, as you can see, costs an awful lot of money. So this is a bit of a moan today, a bit of a rant, really. But I'm just being honest with you, this is some of the stuff that I've been dealing with recently. And it has largely sort of clouded some of the good stuff that's been happening because I find it so frustrating that I provide good accommodation and a good landlord service and don't profess to be perfect, never have done, but on the whole, I think we're up there with some of the best accommodation providers in the country.

Yeah, this sort of stuff can still happen and is allowed to happen. The system is completely broken until it's fixed. This is just not going to change. Now, this is a word of warning, it's a caution, because more and more people are going to experience this sort of thing. No in no fee, companies doing this sort of thing, and frustrated tenants who are taking advantage of the system and councils telling tenants to stay put. All our cost, this is gonna happen more and more and more. It's gonna become very, very commonplace. So just be aware.

And in time I'll probably do a separate episode on some of this stuff. But I just wanted to update you that's some of stuff that's been going on recently. So it certainly isn't all roses. Very, very frustrating. And it's cost me a huge amount of money. So anyway, I don't want to dwell on that today. Let me talk to you about some of the more positive stuff. Let's talk about development. So first and foremost, and I am super excited to talk to you about this today. Our personal primary residence, our own home that Gem and I have owned for about 18 months now. 

But first agreed to buy it a long time before that, then went into probate. Regular listeners at the show will kind of know the story. But that project is finally underway. So we essentially bought a three, four-bed detached property up here in Harrogate, where we moved to a little while ago. And it's a pretty it's awful. It's so ugly. It's a 70s built kind of grey-looking brick built thing. And it's just awful. And it's squat and it's totally out of keeping on the streets.

It's a classic example of one of the worst properties on a really, really good street. So anyway, we got the planning to significantly extend it at the side and then up to turn it into like our family home. And for a period of time, we then worked with various contractors to tender and get the right price for it. And then for a couple of reasons, we paused briefly and then we picked it up again. And then we appointed a contractor and something happened in their business which delayed them. And anyway.

Andy Graham (24:58.848)

It's meant that it's been about 12 months since we've been ready to start but we finally started. And I went away to Spain recently, as you know. And whilst I've been there, our contractors have quite literally torn the house down. It is roofs off, I would say 50% of the house is is close to being torn down to the ground. So it's a pretty full-on project. And it's always that it's that really daunting period, right? Where you buy something that you know has got a lot of value.

And then you know what the plan is, but then you strip out all of that value that it has remaining, and you're looking at something that you have in essence completely overpaid for at that point. That's where your biggest sort of point of exposure is when you go back to the ground or you tear it all apart, it's worth even less than you paid for it. But that's underway and I'm really excited because what that means is over the next nine months, our family home should all start to come to fruition.

And I am much more emotionally attached to this project, but in a good way, because Gemma and I obviously are very invested in it. We want to choose the bathrooms and the kitchen. It's not a commercial project. My commercial brain is still very much switched on in terms of the budget. And that's something that Gem's gonna have to really get on board with. But we're really excited about it. And I'm gonna keep you updated on socials and our emails every week just to let you know what's been going on. But this is a different kind of project for me. And it's quite a pivotal point for me because I suppose I feel like for a long, long time I've been working on building the business and growing and accumulating. 

And more and more so, as I've got older and started a family, I've been asking myself the question, when's enough? Or when do I take something off the table and do something that really is for myself? When do we do our own home or something like that? And this is it. This is that kind of first big, big moment. And we're doing something that I never thought I would be able to do.

So I'm really excited about it. I'm really excited about sharing that project with you. No doubt there's going to be quite a lot of work involved. I'm not managing the project myself, but still the decision making and the budget management and everything else involved. And there will inevitably be challenges and problems. I know that. But I'm really excited about the project. And yeah, this is a big one for me on a really personal level. So I'll keep you updated on this one. Separately from a development perspective, just the one project Albeon place.

Andy Graham (27:18.656)

Ongoing now. It's phase two. That's our 13 unit new build. Now, you'll remember that last time I gave you a business update, I shared with you some of the challenges that we'd had on that site earlier in the year. Our contractor, our main contracts, went into liquidation. And ultimately, what I meant was that we had to step in and figure out how to manage the site and bring in all the subcontractors directly and keep things moving forward. Now, in all honesty, that whole process delayed us by at least three months. 

But we're moving on now, we're kind of moving at a good pace. We're broadly on budget. And because of the way that the project was managed up to that point, from a contractual perspective, from a payment perspective, we weren't really out of pocket. That is one of the biggest risks as a developer with contracts going under. If you don't manage your contract well, you can very easily find yourself tens or hundreds of thousands of pounds out of pocket. Now, this is a project, and again, it's worth several million pounds. And of course, we're talking pretty big sums of money. 

So I think if the worst outcome of this was that it's delayed us a few months. And yes, there's a direct cost to that delay. And yes, there's a lot of work and resource had to go in from our team, and especially one of my business partners who's doing a truly incredible job. Mark is just doing such an amazing job of managing that project now. But there's a lot of work involved in that. But if that's the worst outcome of it, I think that that speaks volumes about us as a team, because it's very difficult to avoid these sorts of things. And the key to good development is actually to see these things before they happen and make sure you've got everything set up in the right way. You've got to protect yourself. 

And on small projects, you should still be doing this, making sure that you use the right types of contracts, you manage those contracts with builders in the right way. It's very, very important you know and understand how to do that because any contract can go bust. Anybody could just run off with your money. And it happens far more often than you might think. But the good news is that the second phase of Albion Place should be finished around late September, maybe early October. 

We're completely watertight now. We're actually installing kitchens on the third floor. We've got kitchen on the ground floor, on the first floor, second floor. And think we're now delivering and starting to install kitchen on the third floor. So we're really flying through. It's five floors. And it's starting to look really, really incredible. Still a long way to go, but it's great to know that we are where we are because a few months ago we were a long way from this position.

Andy Graham (29:42.806)

And it looked like a big mountain to climb. So that's about it from a development perspective. I'm I'm currently looking at several of the projects. I've talked about this quite a bit in my email broadcast and on the show. I've been negotiating a lot of deals. I'm actually not in a huge rush to buy anything because the market conditions are so good and I'm actually putting offers in and having a lot of conversations and waiting for things to come back to me. And that is exactly what is happening.

Somebody once told me, if you want a good deal, you have to be prepared to walk away. And I'm really utilizing that at the minute, looking for stuff that I think has good potential, that represents relatively good value, but trying to buy it at the best possible value I can, and being prepared to leave an offer on the table and wait for somebody to come back to me. And if it doesn't come back to me, fine. I'm not overly disappointed. But if they do, I know I'm probably gonna get a very good deal. And I've got a number of those conversations and offers on different projects at the minute. Nothing to report back yet.

But I'm feeling pretty, pretty confident. And actually, in terms of everything else I'm doing at the minute, I'm okay with that because I've got plenty to be doing. But strategically, this is all part of the second half of the year, my goals for 2026. So I said that a few things have finally started to come to fruition. And one of those is a new investment fund that I've been planning. It's been in the works for quite a while. Hinted at it in my recent emails. And that is finally now sort of getting underway.

When I was younger, when I was building my agency, I also set up a private investment fund with a high net worth investor. And it was an incredible model, very scalable. And really what it meant was I had the firepower to go and buy a lot of property and do a lot of work to it and had a very interesting fee structure. And as it was a joint venture, there was an equity share and all sorts of things like that. It was going very, very, very well. We were buying lots of prime student property and bolting all that to our management business.

But it ended very abruptly because unfortunately one of my business partners at the time died in really quite tragic circumstances. But I learned a huge amount from it. And after that I continued doing my own thing, investing in my own portfolio, building the agency, which I later sold. And then I've since gone on to set up AIG with my business partners Mike and Mark. And we've developed some really, really incredible buildings together. But for quite some time I've wanted to set up another fund. And that's been simmering away in the background and

Andy Graham (32:05.164)

This year I said to myself, I was going to get it off the ground and we were going to do it, and that's exactly what's happening. So we're still early stages, but we're in legals now, and that's being built. And I'm looking forward to hopefully later this year starting to get the first tranche of that funding for the fun actually deployed. And yeah, I'm really excited to go back to some basics in a way. I'm definitely looking at buying HMOs and small development projects. So stuff that's not as big as the development projects I've been doing more recently, some of them have been in the region of 20,000 square feet. 

I don't think the market conditions are as favorable at the minute for that sort of project if you want to hold everything, which is definitely what I'm doing, build to rent. And it's because the yield just isn't there with the high interest rates and exiting if you can't refinance everything, selling stuff is a bit tricky because of the market conditions. So actually, I'm going back to basics a little bit more. High yielding, well-performing, well-located HMOs.

And smaller development projects with good value add potential, but simple and straightforward from a planning perspective and from a development perspective. And the idea is projects that we get in to quickly, move on quickly, develop out quickly, stabilize quickly, and generate income from quickly. That's the plan. So I'm hoping over the next sort of six to twelve months I can really start to roll that out and share a lot of the deals that I'm doing for the fund with you guys. 

But yeah, I'm really excited about it. Wanted to talk to you about it today. And yeah, hopefully you can watch from the sidelines as I kind of build this new venture out. It's not something I'm advertising, it's not something it's not an invitation. There's no way to invest in it. It's a private venture with a joint venture partner. But I'm really, really, really excited about it. So there we go. I think that's probably about everything today. So just a quick recap.

Bit of review on the first half of the year on the whole, it's gone really well. I think we're up about 15% year on year in terms of overall revenues. Got a big project refinanced, launched the accelerator, which has gone incredibly well and has been oversubscribed since. And then worked really hard and had some good success with driving efficiencies and creating more capacity for myself. The student changeover went really well in the summer. Couple of development projects underway. My own home and a hub in place in AIG, both of which

Andy Graham (34:26.434)

So far are going well, even though they've had their own challenges. The new fund, we're underway. We're not there yet, but we're underway and hoping to start spending money later in the year. And then just the tenant issues, the big one, the really frustrating one. That's where most of the problems have been with tenants not paying their rent. And just to give you some sort of context, it's probably cost me 30 grand this year in non-paid, rent not paid, and legal fees. So pretty, pretty substantial problems to be having really. Are very frustrating. But look, I'm not gonna let that overshadow everything. 

As I step back and look at the business, which I did do while I was away in Spain, the first half of the year it's gone really well. We've hit a lot of the things and the targets that we said we wanted to do and hit. And I'm really looking forward to kind of continuing our mission for the remainder of the year. And I feel like we're on a very good trajectory because of the work that we've done in the first half of the year. So there we go. That's what's been going on in my business, guys. I hope that was interesting. I hope it's given you some food for thought.

If you haven't stopped to pause to look at what you've done year to date so far and where you are in terms of your own goals and objectives, please make sure you do stop and do that. It's so important that we're checking in on our goals. If we're not just tweaking the bearings ever so slightly throughout the course of the year, we're not likely to hit that target. So if you want to make sure you do hit your goals, make sure you're stopping and pausing and reflecting periodically and making those refinements and improvements and changing behavior.

Whatever it is that you need to be doing to make sure that you do hit your goals and objectives. That's about it for today's episode, guys. Like I said, I hope you've enjoyed it. I hope you found it useful. I hope you found some value in there. Hope you found it insightful. And hope it's giving you some reassurance that it doesn't all have to be going well to mean that it is going well. If you've listened to today's episode and it's given you, I suppose, a bit of a kick to take things more seriously, then head to theHMOroadmap.co.uk.

First of all, go and get yourself signed up as a member. Just take advantage of everything we've got to offer inside the HMO Roadmap. It's an absolute no-brainer if you're at the early stages of your journey. But if you want to take things a bit more seriously and if you want to work with me directly, if you want me in your business, then just head to the show notes. There's a link to a video. Watch the video and you can find out what working with me is all about. And you can book yourself a strategy call. It's a free strategy call and we can talk about where you're at now, where you want to be, and how I can help.

Andy Graham (36:49.816)

That is it, guys. Thank you again for tuning in as always. It's been a huge pleasure. 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.