How Much Does A HMO Refurb REALLY Cost?

How much does it actually cost to refurbish an HMO?

It’s one of the most common questions I get asked, and unfortunately, there isn’t one simple answer.

The cost depends on the scope of the project, the specification you’re aiming for, where you’re investing and, importantly, whether you’ve accounted for everything that actually sits inside a refurbishment budget.

In this episode, I break down how I think about HMO build costs and give you a practical way to put a credible number against a project before you’ve even spoken to a builder.

🎯 What You'll Learn

• The two biggest factors that drive HMO refurbishment costs
• What you need to include when building your refurb budget
• Current build-cost benchmarks for light, moderate and heavy refurbs
• What nearly 40 real HMO projects have actually cost our members
• How professional fees, VAT and contingency can affect your final budget
• How to sense-check your numbers and builders’ quotes 

Getting your refurb numbers wrong by £5,000, £10,000 or £20,000 can completely change whether a deal stacks up, and potentially how much you should be paying for the property in the first place.

The goal isn’t to predict your build cost perfectly from day one. It’s to understand your scope and spec, use the right benchmarks, account for the costs that are often missed, and get your initial estimate as close to reality as possible.

If you’re appraising an HMO conversion or planning your next refurbishment, this episode will help you approach your numbers with a lot more confidence.

💻 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 (00:40.654)

How much does it actually cost to refurbish a HMO? It is one of the most common questions that I get asked, and it's the one that almost nobody will be able to give you a straight answer to. And I understand why, because the honest answer is that it does depend. It depends on how far back you want to strip the house, it depends on what you want to put back in, and it depends on where in the country you're doing this. But it depends is no use at all if you're sat in front of a spreadsheet trying to work out whether a deal stacks up and whether you should buy it.

So today I want to give you something much more useful than that. I want to give you a way of thinking about build costs so that you can put a credible number to a project before you've even spoken to a builder. I'm going to walk you through everything that actually sits inside a refurb budget because most people are only pricing about two-thirds of it in. And I'm going to give you the published industry benchmarks, but I'm also going to give you something you won't find anywhere else.

I'm going to give you the data from 40 HMO projects done in the last year or two inside our community. And I'm going to tell you what our members have actually spent on creating over 200 rooms and nearly 15 million pounds worth in real estate. So if you want to brush up on your refurb numbers, then today's episode is definitely one to stick around for. Let's get into it.

Hey guys, it's Andy here. We're going to 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.

Andy Graham (02:36.328)

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 (03:15.598)

Okay, welcome back to the HMO podcast. Now, before we start, I want to be clear about one thing, because I don't want you taking wrong message from today's episode. Nothing I say today will replace the value in getting real quotes, quotes from builders who are experienced, who've been in your property and walked it and given you a price. That will always be your most valuable costing tool. But what I am giving you today is the thing that comes before all of this. It's the thing that sits alongside it, is the ability to know, roughly speaking.

What a project should cost you. That way, when you're stacking your deal up from your desktop, you've got the confidence in your refurb numbers. But also when you get a quote, you can tell whether it looks sensible, whether something might be missing, or whether you've got a problem. That's the real skill. It's not replacing quotes, it's being able to interrogate them and being able to predict with the highest possible degree of accuracy you can. So today, here's what we're going to cover.

First of all, we're going to talk about what actually drives costs. There are two things that are so important. I'm going to talk about how to place your own project against them. And secondly, we're going to talk about the cost stack. We're going to talk about every element of a refurbishment in the order that it happens, because this is where most people's budgets fall apart. And then finally, we're going to talk about some published benchmark figures and what our members have really spent per room across nearly 40 projects in the last 12 to 24 months. 

Now, I honestly think that this is one of the most valuable things that I could possibly give you. We are incredibly fortunate at the HMO roadmap. We work with thousands of people inside our community, and we feature hundreds of projects and have done for many, many years, all over the country, people doing all sorts of things, and that gives us an incredibly unique oversight into what you guys out there in our community are actually doing. 

And of course, there is benchmark data out there. You can extract that yourself. It's not difficult to get. Some of it you have to pay for, but even that isn't specific to HMOs. What we have is super specific to HMOs, and it's pretty recent. So I think no matter how much experience you've got investing in HMOs, developing refurbishing HMOs, today's episode is almost certainly going to sharpen the

Andy Graham (05:42.136)

Played at the very least for you. But if you are in the earlier stages of building your business, then this is going to be a critical episode for you. And you certainly will want to make sure that you save it because there's no doubt that when the time comes to do your next refurbishment, you will want to listen to this episode again. So let's get into it. I said there are primarily two things that drive costs. Now, every build cost conversation has these two X's. And people do often confuse them. The first of the two is scope. 

Now, when we're talking about scope, we're talking about how far we're going to go with the project, how far we're going to go back in the project. Now, the simplest way to subcategorize this for you is to think about breaking it down into different levels of work. So let's start with the lightest possible amount of work we can do. We'll call that a light refurb. Then there's a moderate refurb, then there's a heavy refurb. When we're into heavy refurb, we're thinking, you know, walls coming down, lots of structural work, big kind of heavy construction stuff going on. 

And then beyond heavy refurb, we've got new build, which tends to be the most expensive type of scope. So if you're doing new rear extensions or side extensions, that sort of stuff is gonna be understandably more expensive than just converting any old space, because you physically have to build it from scratch, every element of it. So scope is the first one of the two key drivers. 

The second thing is spec. This is what we put into the property or put back into the property. And again, the simplest way to subcategorize spec is to think about it in terms of the standard. So let's start at the very lowest level of standard that we can think of. Economy is probably what that is. Now that's not the sort of projects that we are typically doing. You'll have inevitably seen these sorts of things.

Probably more pertinent to social housing, very low-cost new build housing as well, but that tends to be an economy spec. Then we've got below average, then we've got an average spec, a high spec, and a very high spec. Now, I know that that makes it possibly a bit tricky to think about where you're going to be. And I can imagine that a lot of HMO investors, and I know this because I see the projects that our community members do, would probably immediately

Andy Graham (08:08.61)

Sort of think that their projects are going to be a higher or very high standard. But the truth is they're not. The truth is our projects are almost at best an average standard. And here's why. As investors, we are typically doing things like installing trade kitchens. I use Howdons, for example.

We're using trade tile suppliers. We're using standard sanitary wear. We're probably going online and using better bathrooms or Victoria Plum and these sorts of things. We're probably using pretty average joinery spec, doors, skirting boards, architraves, that kind of stuff. We're not adding the thrills of higher spec projects, for example, like maybe coving or shadow gaps. Really kind of bespoke detailing.

And if you think just for a second about the value of some properties and certainly in some locations around the country, you simply have to spend a lot of money on a property to kind of carry the value that that property will have. Look at Central London just as a really simple but extrapolated example. You'd expect a lot of properties in central London to also have a pretty high spec. I know it's not the case for everything, but those properties carry higher values as a base and they tend to therefore demand higher specs as well. 

There are very few super luxury flats outside of London, maybe some in Manchester, Birmingham, a couple of other cities in the country, but there are very few places around the country where you are finding multi-million pound flats. But you will of course in London and that is all down to almost an entirety the spec and how high that spec is. 

So we are doing average spec. And in terms of scope, well, it does very much depend, as much as I hate to use that word, on your project. So if you are going back to brick, you are into immediately a moderate refurb. But if you're then taking walls down, dropping walls, doing structural stuff as well, you're very much into a pretty heavy refurb as well. So I think most of us are going to find ourselves between

Andy Graham (10:31.714)

A moderate and heavy refurb and aiming for an average standard. Now, this is important because when we look at benchmarking figures and build costs, no build is the same. So it's useful just to have some subcategories here that we can kind of hang our hat on, so to speak. And we're going to come back to that in a little while because I'm going to pull up some benchmark data for you and tie it into that sort of stuff. So for now, let's just park that. But remember that scope and spec are your two real drivers. 

Now, within scope, there's a huge amount that we can theoretically do. But in terms of what you need to be thinking about as an investor who is doing a refurbishment on a HMO, I'm just going to give you a very quick list. I'm not going to labor this list because I could spend hours talking to you about stacking refurbishments and everything that we need to think about. And we haven't got the time to do that in today's episode. And it's not really the point of today's episode. It's to give you a kind of a high level working figure. 

But to begin with, you've got your professional fees and your pre-construction costs. So we're thinking about stuff like architectural costs and planning costs and structural engineers, fire strategy, building controls, party wall surveys, other surveyors, measured surveys. You might need asbestos surveys. You might need energy calcs, depending on what you're actually doing. If you're converting certainly a commercial building to a residential and you're changing the use, there's all sorts of stuff that can fall into the SAP category and that can be very, very complicated. 

So professional fees and pre-construction costs themselves can be pretty substantial. Then we've got enabling work. So that's things like scaffolding, welfare, skips, site setup, site security, that kind of stuff. Then we've got strip out and demolition. So depending of course on how much stripping out needs to be done, but you've got the removal of wallpaper, fixtures and fittings, maybe removing walls, chimney breasts, taking out the old services, all of that sort of stuff. 

And we've got structural elements. So the things that we need to start putting back into the property to build the new structure that is ultimately gonna give us the floor plan that we've designed. So we're talking about things like steels, padstones that maybe load bearing walls or structures need to sit on, new openings, underpinning, floor, roof strengthening extensions.

Andy Graham (12:55.35)

loft conversions. There's all sorts of elements involved in those sorts of things that we might do to a property. Now then you've got the envelope and the weather tightness at roofs, windows, external doors, rendering pointing, damproofing, that kind of stuff. Then we've got drainage and incoming services, below ground drainage, which we're probably as HMO investors not doing too much of, but if you're putting new ground floor toilets in place, you might have to dig some new drainage.

From the back of a toilet or an ensuite or a bathroom to it some existing drainage. Utility upgrades, certainly not uncommon, depending on the number of rooms, depending on the age of the property or the location. You might need to upgrade the electricity supply or the mains water feed. You might need to do stuff with the gas. There's all sorts of things that we might need to do with utilities. And in part, again, that'll be influenced by exactly what you're doing with the project and the type of project that it is. If it's something that's gone through planning and has needed a change of use.

There's a higher likelihood that you might need certain things like tests in terms of the amount of water runoff and how much capacity the existing drains have. And you may need to upgrade those sorts of things. So there can be a lot to think about, but on the most part, we're probably not doing that sort of stuff. And then thinking more internally about the property, we've got first fix, electrics, and plumbing, and joinery.

So that's things like laying cables and pipework and putting stud walls up. It might be some acoustic insulation, parts of what we call a wall build-up. And then we've got plastering and screeds. So that finished wall surface, depending on exactly what it is that you want. But most of us will probably opt for a neat finished plaster. On top of that, you've got your second fixed joinery, so skirting boards, architraves, doors, door casings, all of that sort of stuff.

And then beyond there, we've got decorative and floor finishes. So you're thinking about your door I am on gri and your hard flooring, maybe even carpets, but there's some sensible ordering to do any of this in because then of course you've got the actual decorating of the property. Generally speaking, you don't want your finished floor surfaces down before you do your decorating. So there's a bit of sequencing to think about. And then

Andy Graham (15:17.262)

Usually it's the case that we work from inside out and as we exit the property we'll start thinking about external work. So for us it might be stuff like gardens, landscaping, parking, bin stores, boundary treatments, that kind of stuff. And then finally, when everybody's out of the property and it's all kind of snagged and looking great, our furnishings and fixings, things that you put on the walls, your white goods, although your white goods might have been put in earlier, soft furnishings.

That kind of stuff. Now that is by no means an exhaustive list, but there is quite a bit to think about there. So if you're not familiar with thinking about refurbishments, head to the HMO Roadmap and we've got a few templates inside there. And we've certainly got some template schedule of works documents that you can get your hands on. And that's a good prompt to think about all of the actual nitty-gritty stuff that you possibly need to think about on your own projects. So as you can imagine, depending on the scope of works there, that cost could be quite variable. 

So how do we put a number to this at the very beginning of the project? Even at a point where you haven't even got all that stuff planned out. Maybe you don't know exactly what the finished floor plan is likely to be. I haven't got as far as getting a measure survey in and speaking with an architect. That's perfectly fair. When you're desktopping a deal, you don't have all of that plan at hand. We are, and we have to accept that we're doing it with very limited information, and we have to give it the best possible guess that we can. 

So, a couple of things that I use, and you should do the same to in some ways just steer my thoughts and decisions on what I think a project is likely to cost. And well, the first of the two is the benchmark figures. So you can get benchmark figures from different places, as I mentioned. I am a big fan of property data. It's if you haven't used an online platform with lots of really great functionality that you can extract information from on postcode and location specific stuff. 

So sales prices and lettings and rental data, but also build cost data and stuff like that as well. I'm a subscriber of property data and I like to use it regularly. But they have some interesting information. You can actually put your postcode in, but in this case I've just used Nottingham as a pretty sort of central national reference point. And what you'll see is that when you put your postcode in,

Andy Graham (17:43.736)

You will get some weighted costs per square foot, depending on A your spec, and B the scope. So at an average spec in Nottingham, as an example, a light refurb is going to cost about 30 pounds a square foot. So remember the two variables, spec and scope, an average spec on a light refurb scope, 30 pounds a square foot. That is pretty much the lowest that most of us will ever be refurbishing for. 

So if you have a thousand square foot property, which is a pretty good example of a five-bed HMO, 200 square feet-ish per room, five rooms, thousand square foot property. If that's costing you 30 pounds a square foot, you can see that that project's going to cost you 30 grand. I haven't seen many projects in recent years that have cost any less than about that. Now let's split stick to our average spec, because that is what we're typically aiming for. A moderate refurb in Nottingham would be about 85 pounds a square foot. Okay, so a real jump there. 

So remember that's not a heavy refurb. That's not when we're smashing and knocking everything down and going completely back to brick. But that is certainly going to be doing some elements of that possibly. Certainly full cosmetic works.

You're going to be upgrading the elements of the plumbing and the electrical system, but probably not complete rewiring. You're going to try and use some of what's there. That way you don't have to chip into every single wall. But a moderate refurb, 85 pound a square foot. And then we jump up to heavy refurb. So heavy refurbs are priced at about 130 pounds a square foot. Now, so if you've got a property that is a thousand square feet and you know you're doing a heavy refurb because you are going to smash it to bits, back to brick everywhere, some structural walls, work, sorry, new openings, all of that jazz, then it's fair to assume that your price could certainly be in the region of about a hundred and thirty thousand. Okay, that makes sense, doesn't it? 

And then you've got new build, which in Nottingham is priced at about 200 pounds a square foot right now. So think about new extension. And of course you've got a lot of underground work to do, digging, preparation, and then you've got masonry stuff, DPCs, you've

Andy Graham (20:08.312)

potentially got insulation and all that sort of stuff that you aren't necessarily doing on a heavy refurb. Now, what you need to think about is if you're doing heavy refurb with an element of new build, you've got a bit of a blend. So you might find that your average cost across that whole project is somewhere between 130 and 200 pounds a square foot. Now, your extension is only going to be a small portion of that project. So fortunately, that shouldn't inflate your average price too much.

But it is still an important feature. So hopefully that helps. It gives you some sort of a benchmark at least. Let me just recap. Again, we're talking about average specs here because that is almost certainly what we're all aiming for in our HMOs. Light refurb, not much to do at all. 30 pounds a square foot. Moderate refurb, we're really kind of doing some stuff, but we're not taking the property back to brick. 85 pounds a square foot. Heavy refurb, we're back to brick. We're opening walls up, we're doing all of that jazz.

Structural stuff going on, 130 pounds a square foot. Any new build elements, 200 pound a square foot. Now, if you wanted to do those same jobs, but on an economy spec, we'd be looking at about 20 pounds a square foot for a light refurb, 55 pound a square foot for a moderate refurb, 85 pound a square foot for a heavy refurb, and about 125 pounds for a new build. But very few people are actually going to be aiming for an economy spec, if I'm honest. 

You are very much there looking at social housing strategies, not student or not professional strategies. And that cost difference is largely determined by the choice of materials. That's really what a big part of that comes down to. Materials is a big chunk of our budget. I won't bother telling you what high spec is and above that. You can go and do this exercise for yourself.

But as you can imagine, it just gets increasingly expensive, more expensive the higher and the higher spec you aim for. Now, that figure and those figures that I've just mentioned to you don't include professional fees. You'll need to top your refurb budget up for professional fees. So if you do need, let's say, a contract administrator or building control or an architect to overseas sort of stuff, or structural engineer costs, all of that stuff is going to cost a little bit more.

Andy Graham (22:29.472)

And then it would also be sensible to have a contingency on top of that work. Now, I would say if you're relatively new to doing refurbishments, you should certainly have a 10% contingency on your entire budget. If you're experienced, a 5% budget will probably suffice. But you need to make sure that you don't come up short. And if you do come up short, you can still figure it out. That's essentially what a contingency is, right? But it's pretty disastrous if you run out of money on a project. 

So hopefully those benchmark figures have helped. If you go and look at other providers of this sort of information, for example, you can go to get it from Rick's, you might find this information is a little bit different. It is different depending on where the data comes from and the types of projects and the parts of the country. But at least you've got something there to work to. 

Now, I think more valuable than that is what I can give you next. And this is what our members have asked actually spent because like I said earlier in today's episode, HMOs are not the same as buy to let projects. They are more complicated. We tend to need more in terms of electrical and plumbing runs. We need more potentially from a compliance perspective, maybe acoustic treatment and maybe sound treatment. All of that sort of stuff costs more money and you don't necessarily need that in a standard owner-occupier refurbishment. 

So I looked at he last 40 projects done by some of the guests who've done community case studies for us. These are their projects all over the country that they've done, converting properties, most of them residential properties, but some of them commercial properties, into HMOs. And they spend about collectively six and a half million doing nearly 240 bedrooms. So to be fair, this is a pretty good set of data, right? This is quite a lot of information that we've got here. And what I found was that the average cost per room spent on those 40 projects was about 27,000 pounds. So if you think about that for a second, times that by four gives you a rough indication of what your price could be for a four-bed times by five, it'll give you that. So

Andy Graham (24:52.93)

That figure 27,300. But better than that, I looked at a selection of our more recent projects, the 18 most recent projects, because as we all know, costs have gone up recently. And that figure has risen to 31,300 pounds per room. 

Now, had I have more time to plan this episode, I probably could have actually gone into every single case study, extracted the gross internal area of the property and taken a derivative of that and the bill cost and given you a pound per square foot figure. And that is something I will do, but I'll share it on my social channels when I've done it. But for now, what I've got for you is an average cost per room, which to be honest is a very, very, very good way to benchmark the cost of your projects from the outset. 

Now, this is average. This is the average deal, but our members have been doing projects with an average spec. Don't get me wrong, these look incredible, but they're not using the most expensive granite bathroom worktops. They are using trade tiles. They are using trade kitchens. They are using carpet that's probably costing 10, 12 pounds a square meter. Hard flooring that's probably costing £20 a square meter. It's this sort of stuff. 

And by the way, the full breakdown of all of these projects is inside the HMO roadmap. So if you want to see all of these projects in their flesh, you can go and look at them. Just join up to theHMOroadmap.co.uk right now, but it's all there. But the 18 most recent projects cost 31,300 per room. So let's take that figure and let's say you're doing a six-bed HMO, 31,289 pounds times six.

That gets you to 187,000 pounds. And I know there's a lot of people listening right now that will be kind of flabbergasted at that because that is higher than I think most people expect. Even though we're doing average spec properties, we are not spending an average amount because we are doing more to the property. We need more from the property to service the number of tenants that we have. Now, this is not to say at all that if you're doing a six bed,

Andy Graham (27:12.812)

That's what it's gonna cost. I'm just telling you that that's the average of the last 18 projects that members of our community have done. And the average of the last 40 is 27,000 pounds. Some of these people will have done commercial to residential conversions, some of these people will have done very, very heavy refurbs, some these people will have done large amounts of extension work. So you haven't got that data at hand. That's why I would suggest you go and look at a lot of these projects and get a better gauge but gives you a pretty good idea, I think, doesn't it? 

Because that's some way above the benchmark, the industry standards. Certainly I would say it is. Now the range, if it's helpful, was from about seven thousand to fifty-seven thousand pounds per room. So a potential eightfold difference there. So that is the spread. That's also useful to know. That does tell you how different some of these projects are. I won't go into all the details, but I think an incredible project that Emma still did, probably carried one of the highest costs per room, but her project is absolutely mind-blowingly incredible for so many reasons, but also quite a complicated project. So nothing is wrong here. It's just different scopes, different specs. And this is the bit that you have to be really good at. You've got to have your investor cap on, and you've got to understand what your scope of works actually is.

And that way you can start applying some of this useful information to your cost and make a best guess from the outset. So, how do you build your own estimate? Well, you've got to place your project, quite honestly, on scope and spec. That's what it is. Spec, I think, is the easy one. It's probably an average spec or maybe a bit less. But what I would recommend you do is you take your floor area and you multiply it by the pound per square foot rate from the information that I've just given you. 

Or if you want to go and get your own version based on your own postcode, you can go and get that. But I would suggest that you get those two key things. Please don't just go to ChatGPT or Claude and ask Claude what the average cost is because Claude can only scrape the internet unless you've got it plugged into something that's actually using the raw data. You'll almost certainly find that the information that you get back is either too broadly spread or just unfortunately

Andy Graham (29:38.868)

Not accurate. Remember to cross-check against the cost per room. And I've given you some information about our members' figures today. Remember to add your professional fees and your five to ten percent contingency. Make sure that you've got considerations for utility upgrades, which might need VAT. If you're doing a resi to HMO conversion, you'll qualify for 5% VAT. But if it's not, if it's just a HMO you're refurbishing, it'll be subject to the full 20% rate. If it's a commercial to residential property, you'll probably qualify for the 5% rate as well. 

But like I said, at the very beginning of today's episode, none of this should be done in lieu of getting some quotes from builders. That is still a part of the process that has to happen. It might not happen till a little bit later, until you've got your floor plans and your, you know, maybe even a tender pack from your architect or whomever you're working with. 

But ultimately, that is what is going to determine your build cost. And I won't labor it today because I've discussed this in detail on a previous episode. But when you are getting quotes from builders, please don't just go and get one quote from one builder who's the guy that you know from down at the pub. Please take a professional approach. Please get several quotes from several builders and make sure that they are pricing you from the same pack of information. That means you really do need a full tender pack. Without that, you're not gonna get comparable quotes. That will make your job very, very difficult. And it'll almost certainly cost you in the long run. 

So there we go, guys. I hope today's episode has been helpful. Like I said, it isn't a silver bullet solution. It is not the exact number that you want or need, but hopefully it does give you a little bit more context as to how to conclude on your best guess at that appraisal stage. 

Now, if you're costing a HMO conversion today, 30,000 pounds a room is probably the number to start from. And then try and engineer that down. We call it value engineering. Try and look for things in potentially some of these projects that have been done inside the HMO roadmap that you don't need to do. Maybe you don't need to do the driveway. Maybe you don't need to re-roof it. Maybe you don't need to do all of these structural openings that some of these members have done. Try and reverse engineer that figure. Once you've done that work.

Andy Graham (32:03.234)

You can put your project into a deal stacker with a fair degree of confidence. And you should make sure behind that you've done the full stack of costing. You should really be thinking about the items in there, but you can make a better decision about whether or not to buy it. And if you are going to buy it, what price you're going to buy that property at. If you get your refurbishment wrong by five, ten, fifteen, twenty thousand pounds, theoretically, that's all money that you should have tried to negotiate off the deal.

To ensure that your numbers still work where you want them to. So this is incredibly important to do. So please, please, please spend the time laboring this to make sure that you get it right. And one final word. This is a notoriously difficult part of the investment process for people who don't have the experience. My best possible advice would be to work with somebody, a mentor, a coach, somebody with a vast amount of experience that can help do this with you and for you in these earlier stages. 

I say to people who join my program that whilst we don't have the exact figure, because it's hard to actually know, but what we do know is that our clients get between a five to ten times return on the investment onto our mentorship programs. And a big chunk of that is often in costs saved on refurbishments. If you think, if your project, it's potentially 130,000 pounds or more. 10% on that alone is 13,000 pounds. And I can't tell you how many times I have looked at refurb budgets with clients of mine and saved five, 10, 15, 20, 25,000 pounds. Sometimes double that with things that they don't know about VAT and tax. There's all sorts of stuff that you probably don't know. And it's okay not to know it, but just remember that.

Your deal will be super sensitive to your refurb costs. And if you're too pessimistic from the outset, unfortunately, what will happen is that you will engineer all your deals to a position where they just don't work. And it's not necessarily going to be the case that your build costs will be that high. You unfortunately just don't necessarily know what that build cost is likely to be. So that would honestly be my final piece of advice on this. If you don't have the experience,

Andy Graham (34:26.744)

Doing refurbishments yourself. Work with somebody who has got that, that can help you, that can guide you, that can sense check all of your numbers. It'll save you so much money in the long run. 

That's it for today's episode, guys. I hope it's been helpful. And please let me know if you've got any questions at all about this, head on over to the HMO community. That is, of course, our free group on Facebook. Over 10,000 members now. And it's just a great place to have conversations about anything but not least, bill cost refurbishments.

What is it costing us? And certain things that might be specific to your project that you're just unsure about, come and ask those questions in the community. Of course, if you want to go and get your hands on those 40 case studies plus another 60, 70, just head to the HMOroadmap.co.uk and get yourself joined up as a member. You'll also get to take advantage of everything else that we've got inside the platform, including the deal stacker, dozens and dozens of video lessons.

Masterclasses from experts from all sorts of industries and all of my downloadable templates and resources. And finally, if today's episode has prompted you to think about getting some support in your business, if a coach and a mentor is something that you think would help you, then just head to the show notes right now. There's a link at the top of there, and you can watch a video. And that video is about my mentorship program. It's all about the Accelerator program. You can find out a little bit more about what the program involves.

And whether or not it might be suitable for you. And if you want, you can book yourself a free strategy call with me and we can talk about what's going on, where you want to be, and whether or not I think I can help you. That's it for today's episode, guys. Thank you again 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 instalment of the HMO podcast.