One of Mark’s biggest property deals, a conversion of an old M&S building into residential apartments and a supermarket is almost complete and in this episode he talks about the many lessons he learnt. He also talks about planning decisions, the impact of new building regulations and the many new environmental policies such as heat pumps, new EPC thresholds and electric charging points.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• The key with any big project is to have enough profit to make it work. Costs and challenges are inevitable so you need to have that margin of error to deal with these things.
• There’s been massive change in the construction of residential blocks since Mark first embarked on this project. There’s a lot of new legislation around wall buildups, cladding and building regulations are being properly enforced that were previously ignored by unscrupulous developers. 
• Heat pumps are really ineffective for many types of houses. It makes them worse for the environment if they don’t work efficiently. They are a high cost and are unlikely to bring bills down.
• A new product on the mortgage market is a 40 year mortgage with no early repayment fee. Mark states that essentially it is ‘insurance’ as fixed mortgages are and people will end up paying a lot more for this product.
• Local councils are under huge pressure from central government to build and consent more residential schemes. Once areas run out of brownfield sites there are only greenfield sites or previously declined sites: this is probably why there are more instances of new builds etc flooding. Part of the difficulty with these things is that planning decisions are made by individual/regional offices that all make different subjective decisions.
  
  

BEST MOMENTS

“Electric vehicle charging points won’t have any value at all”

“They’re getting a heating system that I don’t think is very good”

“It some ways it’s quite good as those sort of landlords that aren’t compliant they are weeding them out one by one”

“It’s a virtual guarantee that they will spend more in the long term with a product like that”

“The whole planning system in this country is a big web of individual offices making arbitrary subjective decisions made on whims and what they feel”

VALUABLE RESOURCES

https://www.youtube.com/user/progressiveproperty https://www.progressiveproperty.co.uk/the-progressive-co-founders/

ABOUT THE HOST

Mark has bought, sold or has managed around 1,000 property units for himself, Rob, his family and his investors since 2003. He is a system and spreadsheet geek and has developed a complex, confidential deal analyser system of buying residential, commercial and multi-let properties.

CONTACT METHOD

Email: Markhomer@progressiveproperty.co.uk

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markhomer1

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/markprogressive

Twitter: https://twitter.com/markprogressive