Nine months after joining PPP and Liam has settled the last of his tenants into his first HMO - all while he continues to refurbish another property and purchase another two.
"I’m delighted to announce that as of December, we had our first HMO fully tenanted.
Despite experiencing a few teething problems at the outset with the refurb, everything has since gone generally smoothly.
Claire was all over the property refurbishment and this was very much her domain. She happily picked out the colour schemes, carpets, furniture, fixtures and fittings, electrical appliances etc and really enjoyed the experience (I think!). Compared to the building work, it was a piece of cake – everything turned up when it was supposed to turn up, and indeed was the right stuff.
We used all of the information and resources on the PPP intranet (FranConnect) to start marketing the rooms, all of which were advertised on SpareRoom. Three of the six rooms were taken during refurbishment, with the remaining three being taken within three weeks of refurbishment being completed. The tenanting process was very straightforward and, supported by the PPP intranet, it has been mostly ‘DIO’ or ‘Do it Ourselves’. That said, it was certainly good know that we would not be short of support from the network if needed.
As both Claire and I have always been in commercial and customer-facing roles, dealing with tenants has arguably been the easiest aspect of our journey thus far. The biggest surprise to us on the tenanting process was people’s ability to visualise the finished article and take rooms when they were far from complete, as we started advertising and conducting viewings prior to the refurbishment being complete.
As such, we used some images of existing PPP properties for our advertisement and made it very clear that the house was still in refurbishment and that the images were “representative of the standard and finish”. Looking back, the house really was a building site for the very first few viewings – in fact, the first room taken had a cement mixer ‘feature’!
We even checked in one tenant before the final touches were made, as he had relocated with very little notice and had been let down by another landlord.
While we didn’t really have any preconceived ideas in terms of what we wanted in a group of tenants, we did feel that we wanted a mix of males and females and a reasonable age spread. It just so happened to turn out exactly this way. So, we have three gents and three ladies ranging from 23 to 47. There is a police officer, care worker, area sales manager, chemical engineer, delivery driver and bus driver.
Claire decorated the communal areas for Christmas – decorations, tinsel and mini Christmas trees. Everyone got a card and a bottle of wine, which was certainly appreciated. In fact, our seasoned house share tenants had never had anything like that and thought we were buttering them up for bad news!
All in all, the tenanting has been relatively easy and we are yet to encounter any midnight calls!"
Read the last entry in Liam's blog series, 'Dealing with difficult vendors'
