Ten Real Estate Tips from a Failed Investor: How to Avoid the Coming English Property Crash

by NB Armstrong (July 2013)

Tip No 1. Check on those little jobs that might need doing before purchase.

Tip No 2. Avoid winter repossession.

Tip No 3. Risk a little more poundage on location.

After being evicted from a tepee, my wife expressed her latest frustrations with the bewildering machinations of the property market. Jokingly, she threatened to advertise my organs on eBay. But I knew how deeply she still loved and cared for me. One night, I caught her tenderly writing my own suicide note. I told her not to despair, that I would never, ever give up on the property market. She burst into tears of joy. Long term, I reminded her, property is a guarantor of profit. That is just something it says in the bible somewhere. Otherwise, why would politicians in marginal seats always promise it so to the electorate? We must persist. This calmed her down considerably and she took to bed for the next eleven weeks. Luckily, as it turned out. For this time she missed me making what was perhaps my most embarrassing elementary investment error.

I decided to get into negative equity.

Tip No 4. Always deal with the house purchasing process in plain English.

Buy-to-letting was working for everyone. And I mean every British man, woman, and child, especially those who had emigrated. No one had ever lost money on it. Time after time, I had seen overweight bus passenger types making a repeated success of it on Homes Under the Hammer. More articulate presenters than they would ease them through the house buying auction process and sometimes even make phone calls requiring middle class negotiating skills on their behalf. So I attended my first auction, prepped for the bargain hunt. I left with a tea chest stuffed full of Victorian sex aids and vowed to be more focussed next time.

Next time, I was undefeatable. I determinedly secured my quarry by leaving a stiff hand in the air throughout the bidding. As the gavel-wielder raised his eyeglasses onto his head and looked at me inquisitorially, the multiples of 1,000 layered up. How easy the whole thing is, I thought. There was admiring laughter from the floor as, finally, a member of staff whispered congratulations of a sort. I had got myself a house without so much as the need to verify empirically that it actually existed.

Tip No. 6. Never live with or around the incontrovertibly poor.

Tip No 7. Never do business with a man whose tattoos are second hand.

There are, I believe, a lot of media-hyped prejudicial fears perpetrated against the traveler community. When I needed a place to stay, it was they who offered quiet rented solace away from it all. I felt, too, that the time was right to downsize. Country air and the balm of nature would, I hoped, afford the whole family an opportunity to recuperate.

We moved into a bouncy castle. It was permanently inflated on a brown field site handily located next to a spot popular for weekend rave events. I soon learned to sleep through the pounding bleeps and, pace my philosophical objections to teenage drug use on or around the Sabbath, not to fuddy-duddily object when sweaty individuals with dilated pupils used my home as a leisure object. In fact, I grew to quite enjoy their conversational lucidity. But I was disappointed when it transpired that my rental rate was to match the public ticket cost for continuous use of the castle and I was charged pounds eleven thousand. So, investors, I must counsel that one should

Tip No 9. Carefully examine the small print even when it is written in crayon by a man whose involuntary gurning it soon becomes clear is not a twitch but a homosexual seduction technique.

Tip No 10. Do not invest in property. Just live in it.

 

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