Mid week, mixed blessings

Good news on the money refund from Serliana turned up in our account this morning. I had thought that this would be a sticking point but it came through about a week early so I was very pleasantly suprised.

Still a bit concerned about the lack of tenants at the Park Central property! Feedback from Suzanna at Serliana was that Arkade Lettings have reported a lot of interest but no offers yet. She has told them to push harder and taken out additional advertising so I guess they are doing as much as possible but it is the end of the month and the first mortgage payments are due and I don't have a tenant yet, guess this is the start of the sleepless nights!

Got an email from Mike from Amateur investor (see links section), a US Property investment site. He suggested getting my blog added to pfblogs which aggregates feeds from personal financial webloggers, I sent them an email and I've now been added to http://blogsonrei.com/. Have to wait and see if it results in significantly more traffic.

Mortgage on where???

Still no news about letting at Park Central yet although the mortgage company rang me to explain the inital mortgage payment would be for January and February together. One thing that threw me a bit was that the address that they quoted was not one I recognised! I assumed that the address I was used too was the plot address from the builder and not the actual mail address of the property, either that or I've got a mortgage on the wrong place!! Probably need to follow up this up with the Solicitor.

I've had really nice comments about the blog recently. Brett Woods from "your property club" emailed me to say it was a "fantastic idea for a blog" and I've had similar comments from people who have been thinking about starting property investment but were confused about how to go about it. All I can say is keep reading and let me screw it up first! If anyone has any questions or comments then please use the comments facility at the bottom of each post, I promise not to censor any relevent posts.

Show Me Da Money

One of the reasons we went with the Serliana property investment club was that by taking on a large number of properties from the developer they are able to negotiate a considerable discount which they pass on to their clients (i.e. us!). In order to get the mortgage they arranged for a RICS surveyor to value the property to confirm that their discount was “real”.

Now we have brought the property at Park Central we now need to get the Serliana discount paid to us. So far, this is a lot simpler than I initially thought it would be, we just had to pass a copy of the mortgage broker and solicitors invoices to Susanna at Serlinana and to present them with our invoice (Fortunately they also provided us with a template document to use for the invoice). I passed her the invoice on Thursday, and received an email saying that it was all in hand but they needed to wait for the developer to pay them the agreed fees before they could it back to us. The original agreement said it would be paid within 30 days so I guess worse case is 30 days on from 5th of Jan so anytime before 4th/5th Feb is good.

I also spoke to Susanna and Lucy about how the letting was going. She said the feedback from the letting agency was they had had several people round but no takers yet. She said the fact that there wasn’t a parking space with the apartment may be putting some people off. Actually this cheesed me off a bit because when I was initially looking at the place I talked to Serliana about the lack of a parking space and they said that it wouldn’t matter as there was plenty of parking space around the development. I'm going to have to have a chat with the letting agency myself.

The Waiting begins

After the purchase of my first property investment at Park Central, Birmingham went through last Friday it all went a little quiet, I suppose I was waiting to hear from either Serliana or Breytenbach as to who had the keys. Heard nothing by Wednesday so I emailed Suzanna at Serliana and she told me that Letting agents had been given the keys, the furniture had been delivered, the blinds would be fitted Saturday, and viewings had been scheduled by the letting agent for Thursday and Saturday!

So, seems like everyone is on the ball but I can't help worrying about a long void especially with mortgage rates going up yesterday, not that it effects me too much as this property is on a fixed rate mortgage in fact I suppose it could be argued that the more "un-affordable" property is to buy the more people will be looking to rent?

Still hope we get someone before too long.

D-Day on Park Central!

Well I'm finally a "real" amateur property investor in that I've now got an actual buy to let property! I took the day off work in case anyone needed to get hold of me quickly but in the end it was a very quiet day. The furniture providers (David Philips) rang to say they needed a deposit and they would be delivering next Tuesday, then the solicitors (Breytenbachs) rang me around 4.00PM to say it had all gone through alright. Thank you Serliana, thank you Breytenbachs, thank you Savills Private Finance!

To tell the absolute truth it was a bit of an anti climax, when you buy a house your going to live in it is a time of high excitement, theres the last minute tranfer of funds, the move itself, the packing and unpacking, meeting the new neighbours etc, etc. In contrast, this was a bit like opening a savings account, your broadly optimistic that your going to make some money (or you wouldn't be doing it) but its not like its going to change anything significant, at least not immediately.

Crucial bit now is to get someone in to let it, so over to the letting agency Arkade Properties.