There is a Latin phrase – caveat emptor – which essentially, in English, means “buyer beware”. The message intended in those two words is that anyone purchasing the item so labelled needs to be careful. The price may look like a steal, but ask yourself before you go any further”, who is doing the stealing, and who is being stolen from? You may well find that if a deal looks too good to be true, the reason for that may be that it is far too good […]

When investing in property, if your goal is to make a profit you have to take into account what kind of profit you want to make. Some people will say that it is easy to make a profit, if by profit you mean a small one. Buying a house cheap, and doing the minimum necessary to renovate it, may well see you make some money on the deal because you have taken a house in disrepair and sold it in a liveable condition. However, there is always […]

One problem that seems to arise more than almost any other when people try their hand at real estate development is a kind of tunnel vision. This happens when people buy a house with the intention of carrying out work on it, and decide that there is only one way to go with that work – they’re going to make the house irresistible to buyers. Having only their own opinion of what constitutes “irresistible” to go on, they make the mistake of designing the renovation to look […]

When someone tells you that there is good money in real estate, they are not going to be telling you anything new. We all know that there is profit to be made there, and no-one will get any medals for breaking the stunning news that it can be a lot of money. What we need to be careful with is when someone describes something as a “can’t miss” prospect. There is no such thing in real estate, and claiming that there is will show someone to be […]