My Journey in Property Part 1

Like many people during lockdown, I’ve been reflecting on how I’ve got to where I am and planning how to go forward, using the recovery period to give momentum to my property journey. I turn sixty at the end of this year, so there’s a lot to reflect on, and a lot to carry forward, so I’ve decided to write a series of posts about it. This is My Journey in Property Part I.

My experience of adding value to property began in 1963, right on the tail end of the baby boom, when I was two and my brother was minus six months. Both sets of grandparents lived in council houses, but our soon-to-be parents-of-two bought their own three-bedroom terraced house in Briton Ferry, near Neath in South Wales.  My dad was an apprentice toolmaker. My mother had given up work as a clerk typist to have babies. There were holes in the roof. There was no bathroom, and the toilet was outside and shared with spiders. Central heating was a distant luxury.   I don’t think we ever had double glazing in that house. My mother washed clothes in the sink and crushed the water out of them with a mangle.  

We lived there until I was eleven. In that time, my parents repaired the roof, knocked through the ground floor, got a grant from the council and built a bathroom extension, put in central heating, redecorated and furnished nicely with what they could afford (I remember making our own carpet at one stage, with the hessian backing laid down on the floor, all of us sticking on patches of dyed lambswool with a pot of glue – it took days!) knocked down the old outhouses, planted roses in the front and back gardens (my brother and I had a little flowerbed each), and rented out the garage at the end to a neighbour. We got a dog, a cat, a tortoise and a tank full of tropical fish. My dad qualified and progressed in his trade, my mother went back to work, my brother and I went to the school at the end of our street. My mother became the proud owner of a twin tub with spin dryer, and we had holidays around the coast of Britain and bikes for Christmas and all the normal things. My parents had built a decent South Wales working class family life for us, buying and doing up their own home with very modest means. 

By 1972, the value of our house had almost doubled, thanks to my parents’ efforts and a rising market. My parents got another property opportunity. My great-grandfather, in his eighties, had rented a house in Port Talbot all his life. His landlady (in her nineties) had died and the house was in probate. My great-grandfather’s health meant he really needed someone to look after him. By selling the Briton Ferry house, my parents were able to buy the Port Talbot house cash. They never had a mortgage after that. They were 32. 

This one was a four-bedroomed terraced house, with a front door opening onto the street and a long back garden with trains running at the end. The street still had working gas lamps. The house still had working gas wall lights, with mantles that crumbled if you poked the match into them (it did have electric ceiling lights as well). There was one cold tap in the kitchen, not hot water, no central heating, no bathroom. The back door was more like a gate, with a latch and bolts to secure it, and an old mortice lock. We were bathing in an old tin bath in the kitchen, with a clothes horse and blankets round us for modesty, braving the spiders in the outside loo again. 

My parents gutted that house top to bottom, my dad working shifts and coming home to do a lot of the labouring himself. At least we kids were big enough to strip wallpaper! They knocked the plaster off the walls, ripped out old gas piping and crumbling cables, packed all the furniture, an older relative, two kids, the dog and cat into the upstairs (the tortoise went in the garden and the fish tank had gone) and knocked down walls and tore up all the floors downstairs to lay new sewage pipes and build another bathroom extension. The only running water came through an outside tap.  I balanced on planks to cross the wet concrete floor to wash under the cold tap in the yard – bracing! – before school. Around me, Port Talbot itself was being gutted, the old town streets being demolished to build a covered shopping centre. I walked to school and home again through building sites, and bedded down on a sofa surrounded by piled-up furniture and boxes at night. It’s the story of a short and formative period in my life, not my whole life, so I am not telling this against a backdrop of violins!

What do I carry forward from Part I of My Journey in Property? 

Well, I grew up in South Wales terraces and have lived in them as they’ve been stripped back and rebuilt. They don’t hold many mysteries for me! They still make decent family homes, and decent family homes help make good communities. It’s harder to get on the property ladder now than it was in the 60s and 70s, but as property sourcers and deal packagers we have a variety of strategies to help people to rent and buy homes they love, where they can bring up their own families. Surely one thing we’ve learned from the pandemic is the importance of community. As ethical and responsible investors, we have an important part to play in that.

I admire the hard work my parents put in to renovating those two houses, both working full time, bringing up a family and looking after a frail older person, and still grafting away in the dust and noise and chaos, deferring gratification and looking ahead to better things to come and the end result of all their hard work. I also give my eleven/twelve-year old self a pat on the back for slogging away at the day job (school) in difficult circumstances, and working hard enough to become the first member of my family to go to university. It motivates me now to think of my 70-year-old self thanking my almost 60-year-old self for putting in the work to transform my later life into the kind I wanted and aspired to deserve.

Buying the right property and adding value can change your life. My parents had no intention of becoming property investors. They just wanted their own home and to be mortgage-free. Later, they would go on to invest in other properties, always for family reasons – to help my aunt buy her own home when her marriage broke up; to help my brother have a home while he was a student. They did it to help people. They made good profits on both those investments and appreciated them, but they did it by accident. What returns could they have achieved if they’d gone about helping people and generating good returns deliberately, using all the knowledge and techniques and support networks property sourcers have today?

I lived in a house under renovation, in a town that was being demolished and rebuilt. Between the renovating of a house and the rebuilding of a town, a whole spectrum of projects is possible. People have imagined all of those projects, and people have made them happen. There’s no reason why I or any investor shouldn’t imagine great transformations and make them happen either. 

If you’re still reading at this point, thank you so much for staying with me and my story for so long. If you think you might like to work with me, or if you think I could add value to your own journey, please message me, and let’s connect.

Part 2 of My Journey in Property to follow.