https://youtu.be/ZZTxz-tNyKw
I’ve done well over 150 renovation projects over the past thirty-odd years, and looking back at my first one — which was a terraced house in Surrey, three bedrooms, early 1930s, needed everything — what strikes me most is not how different I was, but how much I simply didn’t know. I knew the obvious things: it needed a new bathroom, a new kitchen, fresh decoration throughout. I understood in a general way that older properties throw up surprises. But there was a whole layer of practical knowledge — about how these projects actually run, what’s important and what isn’t, where the real risks are — that I simply didn’t have, and that nobody really sat down and told me.
This is my attempt at that conversation.
Get the sequence right
This sounds almost too simple when you say it, but it gets a surprising number of people in trouble: getting the sequence of works right makes a big difference, and getting it wrong is expensive. I learned this properly on my first project, when I had a plasterer skim a wall that an electrician then had to cut into the following week to run cable behind it. Which meant the plasterer had to come back. Which meant paying twice for the same surface, and losing time while both trades waited on each other. It was a silly mistake I didn’t need to make, and it basically came down to impatience on my part.
The basic sequence isn’t complicated — strip out, structural work, first fix trades, plaster, second fix, decoration, floor coverings — but it isn’t instinctive if you haven’t done it before. The temptation on a first project is to let trades get started in whatever order they’re available rather than the order that makes sense. Getting it wrong means paying twice and losing time, and on a project with a tight timeline that can be the thing that turns a profitable deal into a marginal one.
It will take longer than you think
Your first project, and in fact most of your projects, will take longer than you think. That’s not because you’ve planned badly, and not necessarily because anything goes catastrophically wrong, but because most older properties have things you didn’t know were there — and they only reveal them once you’ve started. The pipe in an unexpected location. The floor that’s not quite as level as it looked. The structural element that someone’s removed without properly dealing with the consequences. These aren’t rare events — they’re normal when working on older property — and if your timeline has no flexibility and your budget has no contingency, you could find yourself in a difficult situation.
What this means practically: if you think the refurb will take four months, allow for six. Rushing the finish to hit a date you shouldn’t have set introduces its own problems that you’ll be dealing with for months afterward.
Spec to match the market, not your taste
This one took me a while to fully take on board rather than just intellectually accept: your spec should match the rental market you’re preparing the property for, not your own taste. You need to research what tenants for that type of property in your area actually want and expect. Every pound you spend above rental-grade spec is a pound that doesn’t increase the rent you can charge, doesn’t improve the yield calculation, and doesn’t come back to you if you sell. I’ve seen this catch investors out repeatedly — they spend significantly more than they needed to on their first projects because they’re making them nicer than they need to be, and then they get frustrated that the numbers don’t really work.
You don’t need to be practical
This genuinely surprises people: you don’t need to be practical or hands-on to do this profitably. I’m an ex-Chartered Surveyor by training, not a builder. I’ve done well over 150 renovation projects with only rarely picking up a tool, and that was mainly on my first project when I knew no better. I’d actively discourage most investors from doing significant amounts of the work themselves, because the economics rarely stack up the way people expect. Your time has value, and if you’re on site doing things yourself that a competent tradesperson could do in less time and to a higher standard, you’re not saving money — you’re spending your time at a lower rate than it’s worth, and often introducing delays that cost more than you’ve saved.
The skills that are important are finding suitable properties, assessing them properly before you buy, and raising the finance. After that — pricing the works accurately, finding reliable trades, managing them through a programme, making clear decisions when problems come up — that’s all a learnable process, and none of it requires a tool bag.
Finding good trades
This is, in my experience, one of the hardest parts when you start doing refurbs, and it’s the part that takes the longest to sort out. On your first project you probably won’t have a network of contractors you trust yet, and building that takes time and a certain amount of trial and error. The best approach I’ve found: talk to other investors who are already active in your area, ask your letting agent who they use for maintenance work and who they’d recommend, and pay attention when you’re driving around to tradespeople’s vans and make a note of their numbers. You can sort the good ones from the bad ones when you get them round for your three quotes.
The buy price is everything
The single most important thing I’ve learned — and this sits above all the others — is that the price you pay determines whether a project will work more than almost anything else about the renovation. A beautifully executed refurb on a property you’ve overpaid for is still a poor deal. An imperfect renovation on a property you’ve bought at the right price is almost always fine. The money in a renovation project is made at the point of purchase, in the gap between what you pay and what the property is genuinely worth once it’s been brought up to a decent standard. If that gap isn’t there when you buy, no amount of good project management or careful specification will create it afterward.
What changed most for me between my first project and my fiftieth wasn’t specifically my renovation knowledge, though that improved considerably. It was my confidence in the numbers — my ability to look at a property, work out what it needed, cost it accurately, understand what the finished product would be worth in that market, and make a quick, clean decision about whether the purchase price left enough room. On my first project I was learning the renovation process and the financial model simultaneously, which is a lot to do at once. By the fifth or sixth, the financial model was becoming more second nature, and I could put all my attention into what the project actually needed.
One piece of advice
If I could go back and give myself one piece of advice before I started that first terraced house in Surrey, it would be this: plan the numbers more carefully and more conservatively than you think you need to, build in more contingency than you think you’ll need, and be ready to wait longer to find the right property at the right price rather than rushing into something unsuitable because it’s harder than you thought. The property will find ways to use your contingency — that’s just what older properties do. The question is whether you’ve allowed enough of it to absorb whatever it finds.
The investors I’ve seen get into trouble on renovation projects have almost always got into trouble because the plan was too tight from the beginning, not because they made bad decisions on site. Give yourself the room to cope with what you can’t predict, and the project becomes considerably more manageable.
Here’s to successful property renovating.
Peter Jones
Author, property investor and ex-Chartered Surveyor
P.S If you’d like to go deeper on this, my course The Successful Property Renovator’s Workshop covers the full process — from finding the right property to managing the project and understanding the numbers — based on more than 150 real renovation projects.
thepropertyteacher.co.uk/the-successful-property-renovators-workshop
