What is the Future for UK Property Investment?

When I was 24 (back in 1981)! I joined the Imperial Life of Canada as a development manager and two years later I had relocated my family to Birmingham where I took over their moribund sales office. What Imperial Life were good at was teaching about need selling, about helping people achieve their goals through intangible products they neither wanted or understood.

As the business of financial services became more regulated, despite having myself become a prolific pension salesman and having recruited and trained a large team of salespeople, I decided it was time to leave the business. However I didn't jump ship hastily, I relocated back to the south east and started my current business Choices in 1989, our first office was in Crawley, I'm proud to say it's still there, although the original premises has long since been demolished.

The early 90s were a hard proving ground and as financial services became ever more regulated, the Home sales market remained depressed. Despite my selling and a few creative ideas it was all looking dicey until in 1995 the market started to recover and I managed to latch onto the beginnings of the Lettings boom. Since 1995 Choices has expanded, today we manage over 2000 properties for clients, most using our unique Primary Tenancy business model.

Last year and again this year we won the AllAgents best UK estate agent award, an achievement of which I am very proud and grateful. However, this history is a mere anecdote, the point of this post is that in 2000 I founded Choices Investment division on the premiss that most people can't achieve financial security and freedom through work alone, would be better off investing in property than stocks and shares and would bet more likely to achieve their goals with our help than going it alone.

This led into auction information and advice, below market value property, off plan and even international investments. During the last 14 years the concept has evolved and simplified into a hands free end to end service where we find property and manage it all over the country on behalf of our retained clients.

We are in essence a buyers agency specialising in buy go let, a market that has grown in size much faster tan it has developed the services to support the people in it. My vision of the future includes working in a two way relationship with estate agents and introducers, we already have the start of a nationwide network. To some we are seen as a clearing house for properties they want to sell fast, for others as another string to their bow when local clients want access to nationwide property Investment.

What I see is that like in the old days of the Imperial life, the future of the industry is teaching advisors need selling and how to build a loyal client bank who stick with them through life's journey. This is very different  from just finding and selling cheap property, a much more satisfying business and one that with the right people involved could be scaleable into something very substantial and worthwhile.

I'm interested in at least putting in the initial foundation stones of such a project I think we already have, at least to some extent. I would be interested in other people's views and in hearing from anyone who wants to explore the future in more depth, either as an agent, partner, or through a more ambitious joint venture.