Join us for this episode in which Lorraine Gannon & Sam Lawson discuss all things related to property investment! In this episode they discuss the continued increase in rents, how to reduce the chances of having your property trashed & share a fantastic resource to start to help you work with colour palettes in your interior design!

The news story that we're discussing this week suggests that;

• The average Property Mark agent had 142 applicants registered on their books as of February 2022
• But only 5 properties available
• 12 months prior to this the average agent had 82 applicants per branch

The full report can be found from the Property Mark website here.

Alternatively, there's a great summary of this available on Landlord Today's website here.

As we move into the next section of the podcast we discuss How To Get Your Property Trashed!...... Hopefully you can learn the opposite from this section!

Deposits - both Lorraine & Sam have previously offered property, primarily HMO rooms, with no deposits. In reflecting on this experience the advantages hinge around making a low barrier for entry for the tenant - landlords fundamentally want to help people. That being said, due to having no easy financial recourse (and a couple of bad experiences) Sam explains that they're no longer offering this option within their portfolio - taking £200 deposits on existing rooms and £400 deposits on high-end rooms that are recently refurbished. Lorraine makes the point that HMO's have a high visibility from cleaners/maintenance/inspections than a standard BTL - also HMO damages tend to be limited to just a single room.

Referencing - no surprise that referencing came up in this conversation. The importance of taking a previous landlord reference, employers reference and a credit check.

The attitude test - now you won't find a form for tenants to complete an "attitude test" but this brings together all of the intangible elements that we get from meeting the prospective tenant at the viewing! How's their attitude? Manners? How do they ask questions? How do they respond to questions being asked? Is this someone that you could work with if things went wrong? All important stuff!

Finally as we round of the podcast we share a resource with you that we've found useful! For this episode’s resource, we’re going to have a bit of a gear change and look at a tool that I find really useful for interior design! Particularly colour palettes.

I’ll quite happily admit that developing a colour palette to work from isn’t a natural skill for me, I can spend ages trying to piece together a palette that I’m passionate about – by contrast my wife seems to be able to come up with seemingly endless colour ideas! All of which are cohesive and appealing!

Now the resource is completely free and you can find it at color.adobe.com – here on Adobe’s site there are loads of fantastic tools to help you develop colour palettes to work from easily but I wanted to share one feature which is the ability to upload an image (or collection of images) and have it automatically suggest colour palettes based upon this!

If you’re on mobile you select “image” or if you’re on desktop you select “extract theme” – here you can upload an image and Adobe’s tool will extract & suggest a range of colour palettes helpfully broken down into 5 or 6 categories – for example bright, muted, deep etc.

So you could upload images of interiors you like, celebrity brands, album artwork, natural features – pretty much anything you could think of - and have Adobe come up with a range of viable colour palettes for you to work from!

I’ll pop the link in the description – have an explore as there’s loads more features available on the site, plus it’s FREE!

That’s a wrap for this episode! We hope you’ve enjoyed it and remember to like, subscribe and share it with a friend! We’ll catch you next week when we dive into more property mishaps, tips and ideas! Until then, remember to have some fun!