I bought another house in London

Hello again readers!

True to the millennial style, I forgot about my blog for god knows who long. You know that time you started learning the guitar and after 3 songs it just gathers dust in the corner of your room? Or the time you decided to take up French then realised lessons were just too expensive and Duolingo was teaching you too much weird shit like “Je suis un dauphin” (I am a dolphin — true story). Oh..wait that’s me. I did that all last year!

But in my defense, I did also buy my second London property. Incidentally next door to my first one. Well 15 steps across the estate. Same shit different smell.

I didn’t get to blog about my first property in London but it was a lovely 3 bedroom flat in Dalston. It’s in the council estate on Crossway next to that kebab shop Umut. I love it because it doesn’t actually look like a council estate especially from that side of the road. The flat I bought also has the back wooden fence which led onto Crossway so you never had to see the other side either. It was fully renovated already when I moved in and it was just so nice, I remember that day so vividly and I made an offer on the spot and sent the offer email to the agent in front of him. Offer was accepted and that was July 2014 when I moved in with 2 friends. It was £430k and I borrowed £130k off my mum and the mortgage repayments were £1087/month which was basically paid by my 2 friends (thanks guys!). The estate was also ex council so many of the flats were now owned privately. There were the occasional weed smoking cursing estate tenants wondering around the “back” front door but actually when sober they were lovely. One kept my packages sometimes and our next door neighbour also kept 115 rolls of toilet paper for me when I thought it was a good idea to buy in bulk off Groupon in the winter of 2014. Ha ha ha. #moneytip987

Then in early 2016, I saw another one come up basically next door. Only this time it was £475k, slightly bigger but BOY..was it horrible. The previous owners were estate owners and they lived like rats. It was one of the most disgusting things I’ve seen. In fact let me show you here:

Yep – not a joke. This was their house. This was after all their shit was thrown out too. I have never seen carpet that colour or walls that dirty. I feel like camping at a festival would be better living conditions than this dump. But this dump I knew I had to have. The potential was so clear. It was a 3 bedroom but because of the layout, I could easily turn the living room into another room and the kitchen into a kitchen/dining. Again, I was planning to rent it out so it didn’t matter to me if there was no living room and to be honest, neither do a lot of tenants if the room is a good price in London these days!

So I found a builder on myBuilder.com — lovely guy named Michael and he helped me do this:

Yep — I’m damn proud. Thanks :)

It cost me just over £22k for renovations and everything was completed in 2 months — taking into account fees etc, my cost base for this property was approx. £500k. My mother lent me my deposit again (thanks mum) and my mortgage is just £1038/month. The rental I receive on this beauty is £3150 a month but I do cover all the bills. Minus bills, it’s probably £2700/month. I get this much rent because I rent out one room at a time on Spareroom and the extra cash income is a whopper of a difference when it comes saving for my next house!

It wasn’t easy though. For real here are some blocks in the road I encountered which are clear reasons why I stopped writing for awhile (yes excuses excuses..!)

• Dirty rat previous owners couldn’t move out of the house even though we settled on 31 Mar. I had to let them continue festering in MY flat for 2 extra months as I didn’t want them to change their mind about the sale beforehand so had to cut them a deal prior to completion.
• Once they finally left, I’m pretty sure the guy kept the keys and would randomly go into the empty house to do what I don’t know — but creepy and ILLEGAL. One day he came and took his mail, another day he just scoped the place and told me he thought the new white paint was nice. I then promptly got my builder to change the door locks ASAP.
• My builders minion would sometimes be high from smokin’ weed — yes I did have to employ some el cheapos but they were mostly alright. Except the time he was putting up some floating shelves and put a massive hole the size of my head through the wall…lovely. Hole are massively in these days in interior design instas — didn’t you know?
• Wind the clock 6 months down the track, over the last 2 days as I write this, 3 doors have been broken, 1 shower screen is leaking and we found a gas leak over the weekend which included the dirty culprit stove now also needing to be replaced. My tenants are sending me passive aggressive … messages on whatsapp “we have no hot water…” “we are cold…” — I know this dumbdumbs cmon. But related note, I’m actually an amazing landlord — they told me yesterday at 5pm. An engineer came at 7pm. Today builders came to take apart kitchen to give engineer access. Another engineer came today. I went to the house to let these dudes in — their bitch basically whilst they were all at work — least they must be warm at work…

C’est la vie! (I know my French is great)

P.S. Airbnb is a great source for free property photography. I created a listing for my flat and they send someone to take pics for freeee! #moneytip988

Great things are never easy. I’ve learnt so much in the last year not just from buying another flat but life really crept up on me in 2016. It was a crazy year personally in all aspects from love, friends to finances. (Work a bit also but I don’t really care about that) But what I took away from the year was mostly to just NOT chill. Always constantly going, doing and being the very best (that no one ever was…to catch Pokemon…oh oops).

My 2 properties are both now worth almost if not £600k on the selling market so my capital gains are already there. I refinanced the first one last month and took out £60k of equity and my repayments went down to £680 interest only where my rent for first property is now approx. £1800/month after taking into acc bills. Now I have a 5 digit savings amount which is ridiculously exciting so much so now I take Ubers to airports now – fuck it right? You make money to spend money! Because of these properties, I’m basically earning another small salary (or large for some given the average wage in the UK) so if I have to occasionally deal with high builders or naggy tenants, that’s fine by me!

I can’t buy another house — well I can but I want to buy it under a Limited company and to do this, I need to get a green card from Mother England first. 3 years to go! But meanwhile, I’ll just be slowly saving up for that next deposit — or try to pay my mum back…!

Let’s keep swimming, let’s keep swimming, let’s keep swimming.

W