Property Partner’s journey to become the ‘stock market of real estate’

“As an entrepreneur it’s my job to know where I’m an expert and when I need to speak to experts.”

This is the last thing Dan Gandesha said to me this week when I erroneously suggested that ‘all’ residential blocks were like commercial property and most people didn’t aspire to live in them.

He duly brought in his expert Robert Weaver who serves as Property Partner’s Director of Property and is responsible for all the property they buy (and don’t buy).

How Property Partner buys homes

Robert explained that beyond picking the right locations, which impact anticipated demand more than the fabric of the building, they focus on ‘nearly new’ properties being bought at a discount.

Their reasoning is that these blocks are modern and yet have been occupied for long enough that snagging issues are a thing of the past. They typically buy 8 year old properties, so there’s still some NHBC guarantee remaining.

Robert and his team try to keep service charges low and approach with scepticism the new crop of office-to-resi conversions, that almost always resemble ‘gloomy boxes’ as they weren’t built for residential occupation in a future life.

So while I maintain that people don’t aspire to live in boxes, I want to publicly apologise for the blanket aspersion cast on the desirability of residential blocks and defer to Robert Weaver’s astute goal of “buying properties I would live in myself.”

Tech and data like the new bidding system give confidence to invest

The passion and in-depth knowledge was clear to see when Robert described the reasoning behind every purchase. There was genuine due consideration toward every purchase, to back up Dan’s assertion that they want to offer investments that stand up to scrutiny.

Dan mentioned that he’ll judge the platform’s success on whether people can look back in ten years time and be glad that they invested.

My original meeting with Dan was to talk about the future of Property Partner, and how they continue to blaze a trail toward becoming the ‘(global) stock market for real estate’.

He elaborated on the recent beta launch of their bidding system – including the desire to show real time data on trade volumes and prices – and why their high standards prevent them from releasing a property price index based on their platform (which I personally would find fascinating).

They do however release a buy-to-let index which factors in costs of ownership and therefore provides a better guide of net total returns.

The next phase: becoming part of the real estate investment establishment

From inception Property Partner has been doing lots of things: everything from sourcing stock and finding tenants to operating the secondary market and ultimately selling properties for investors to fully realise their capital gain.

But Dan insists the future for Property Partner will be different.

I think it’s best that the founder elaborates on his vision himself – hopefully with a video or an article he pens himself – but I did find it fascinating when he says they’ll focus the future on the exchange and allow (trusted) third parties to ‘IPO’ properties and form investment syndicates akin to Angel List.

His analogy was the stock market doesn’t say who can and can’t IPO. It just creates the environment for everyone to trade with confidence.