Gung Hei Fat Choi - San Lien Fai Lok !!

Happy new year! Chinese people all over the world will be celebrating the coming of the new year. The festival which traditionally lasts 15 days begins on the first day of the new lunar month.

There are 12 animals in the chinese zodiac, each year is attributed to one animal. 2008 is the year of the Rat. Google China is celebrating with this festive image which replaces their normal Google logo.

Google is China’s second most used search engine falling behind the much more established Baidu. Baidu have also a festive Chinese New Year image.

Which image do you prefer?

I’m off now to hang my red lantern and eat some lotus seeds. Gong Hei Fat choi!!

I’ve been contacted by ITN News regarding current repossessions rates and a survey that they are currently doing for a news item. I’ve sent a reply back to them with as much information that I can give, I hope it will be helpful to them.

They will probably want Sell and Rent back information soon too (The HM Treasury did).

Here’s the email they sent me:

My name is G… B… and I work on the consumer desk for ITV news. We are conducting a survey to do a story on repossessions - here are the details. I hope you can help - we wanted a new angle and who better than the people who help others in this situation. Here are the details…

We are putting together a survey on repossessions by calling the advice websites and centres and asking these generic questions. We feel it important to show that this is a current situation affecting many peoples lives. Can you let me know if you are able to take part. We will be pulling together all the data hopefully exclusively for the Ten O’clock news. Here are the key generic questions.

1.) How many people have contacted you concerned about being repossessed over the last year?

2.) How many of your clients have actually been repossessed in the last twelve months?

3.) What is the minimum amount of months in which a consumer has been taken to court?

4.) What type of mortgage is getting the majority of your clients into financial difficulty?

5.) What is the most common age range of people that contact you about repossession concerns?

6.) In a typical arrears case, how many extra charges are added by the lender when going through the process? For example some lenders have monthly arrears charges and litigation costs.

Do you have any case studies of people that we could film with?

Please contact me if you have any further questions. Let me know if there are other questions that you feel beneficial to add to the survey.

Thanks
GB

I’ll contact some of my clients soon and see if they want to appear on the news. I can just imagine Trevor McDonald reading the news reporting about increased repossessions with all the interest rate rises, followed by an interview with one of my tenants about their whole experience. That will be strange to watch especially if they mention me or my company!

Why do I like property investment so much? In my eyes Property Investment seems like an easy lazy mans way to make some money and provide passive income. Why do I think this?

I can only speak with my own experience and this is my experience of property investment:

In February of 2002 I bought my first house, this was against advice from my work colleagues and friends who were telling me houseprices which averaged £92,256 (Halifax data) were too expensive and will drop any time soon. Against all the advice I recieved I decided to take the plunge as I needed somewhere to live and I didn’t want to rent forever.

My first house was a 2 year old 3 bed semi-detached property on a fairly new estate. The house had been repossessed by the bank and the estate agent had it on the market for a few months with little interest. The house was on the market for £80k so I put an offer in for £78k It was a price that I could comfortably afford. To my disappointment the agents already had a higher offer and were going to proceed with that one. I was quite dissappointed and carried on my search for a house.

About 3 weeks later the same agents called me back to ask me if I was still interested in the property as their buyer had pulled out. Of course I was still interested, she then proceeeded to ask me if I would like to pay any more for the house? Well of course not! I asked her if I needed to pay any more to secure the house and she said NO. I think she was a little inexperienced as an agent, but a very nice lady. And bingo that was my first purchase.

Boom, Boom, Boom!!

I lived in that house for a couple of years, doing some small home improvements to the garden, bedrooms etc. By mid 2003 the UK had experienced a boom in house prices, the average UK house price then was £132,589 (Halifax data). The house that I bought was now worth about £110k estimated by comparing average sales of similar properties in the area. I was more than delighted with this as I could sell the house and make a cool £30k in profit. The profit was on paper but I’d never made so much money without doing too much before. I was hooked I wanted more, more, more!

I wanted to repeat this sucess and went about looking for books that could teach me, I was hungry for more information and quickly put together a small library of property investment books. Check my recommended book list. After reading these books I put together a plan to buy more houses. I bought my second and third property in 2004. In 2004 I bought four properties. In 2005, 2006 and 2007 I kept buying and buying going on and on.

Today average UK house prices are at £197,039 (Halifax data for December 2007) my first house is now worth about £145k again estimated by comparing to other sales in the area. That is very healthy growth in value and I think we are safe in thinking that this growth is in line with the belief that UK house prices double every seven years. I now have over 40 proprties in my portfolio which is worth nearly £4million on paper. Business is good, except for some problem tenants, but tenant problems are just part of the job of being a landlord.

Oh BTW I’m not too worried about the property prices dipping this year as I’m in it for the long term.

This week I have released a new Real Estate website titled Sell Quickly Rent Back Fast. The site will be an information based site to appeal to UK homeowners wishing to sell their homes quickly and those interested in Rent Back schemes.

Presently there is not much information on the web for people in the UK trying to sell their property quickly or for those intereseted in Rent Back schemes. I aim to make this site a resource for people that wish to know more or are in a situation that requires a quick property sale. They can read more about how sell and rent back schemes work and the potential pitfalls they may face with unscrupulous landlords. Selling ones home is peotentially one of the biggest financial transactions you can make, therefore it is important to seek advice and do much research before entering into any agreements.

The site is powered by wordpress blogging software with a free theme downloaded from the wordpress site. As you can see the site is still in its VERY early stages, but hopefully this post will help google index the site. I’ll then leave it alone for a few weeks whilst I get the content for the site written and compiled. I’m not really sure what to do with the traffic for the site. I may use it to gather leads for my property business or try other methods of money making from it.

One of my favourite, favourite actresses from my teen years has to be Jennifer Love Hewitt. That gorgeous smile, nice long brown hair, perk perfectly formed, ahem assets just kept me mesmorized in her films such as “I know what you did last summer”, “I Still Know What You Did Last Summer” and “Heartbreakers” to name a few.

Recent pictures I’ve seen seem to show that her age (soon to be 28) and maybe her hormones seem to be catching up with her once perfect figure.

From the front she looks perfect as ever:

From the rear however she’s starting to show some celulite in that cute bum of hers.

Big bum or not, Jennifer Love Hewitt is still one of my favourite actresses. Thumbs up to her for not being afraid to show that lovely bum off. Women don’t have to be stick thin and ill looking just to seem attractive, Jennys got it all !!

Current market predictions are varying widely but it seems that industry leaders such as Nationwide, Experian and Intermediary Mortgage Lenders Association are all predicting negative growth in 2008, with the latest report from Capital Economics assuming a 5 percent downturn. House prices in the UK could be falling as fast today as they did during the property crash of the early 1990s, according to the report.

According to the The Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (Rics) the number of estate agents reporting falling prices is now at its highest level since 1992, when Britain was in the midst of its worst-ever house price crash. Last months interest rate cut which was intended to ease the strain on mortgage borrowers, but didn’t have much effect. Rics spokesman Ian Perry warned: “The Bank of England may have to cut rates further if the market is to remain stable.”

I’m not too worried about a property crash

If these media headlines are to be believed I need to sell up my portfolio now before its too late. Or maybe its already too late!
I would be silly to sell up my assets that are continually generating passive income, month after month. As long as people will rent my houses at a price that still makes me a profit then I should be more then happy.

Demand for rented accomodation is higher than ever in one of the areas I invest in. One of my houses will become empty at the beginning of February, so I’ve placed an advert in the local paper. On the first day of the advert going in my phone rang 12 times with people wanting to view the house. I would say that is pretty high demand. So as long as people are willing to rent my houses and interest rates do not go up (not likely now) my cashflow and passive income is safe.

Even if house prices DID drop more than 5% it wouldn’t effect me as I’m not selling. But as a keen hunter for bargains knowing that the house prices are falling may tempt me to buy many more houses this year!

Something strange is happening at the Google datacentres. The Google search seems to be returning some strange results on some of my targeted keywords. This usually indicates that a Pagerank (PR) update is in process.

I’ve just checked the Pagerank for my sites and can confirm that this blog (www.daveso.com) has reached PR3, Yipee!! But what exactly is Pagerank?

An Explaination of Pagerank

The Pagerank of a website is greater the more incoming links the site has, it is a measure of a websites link popularity. Sites rank from 0 to 10 for Pagerank. New sites are ranked 0 whereas very popular sites (Google.com) can rank as high as 10. The number given is a measure of a websites popularity.

In a nutshell, google considers each link to be a vote for that site, the more links a site has the more popular it must be. Links from more popular sites are considered as more important than others. Google uses Pagerank along with other factors to determine where to place a website in its search results.

What wikipedia says:

PageRank is a link analysis algorithm that assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents, such as the World Wide Web, with the purpose of “measuring” its relative importance within the set. The algorithm may be applied to any collection of entities with reciprocal quotations and references. The numerical weight that it assigns to any given element E is also called the PageRank of E and denoted by PR(E).

PageRank was developed at Stanford University by Larry Page (hence the name Page-Rank[1]) and later Sergey Brin as part of a research project about a new kind of search engine. The project started in 1995 and led to a functional prototype, named Google, in 1998. Shortly after, Page and Brin founded Google Inc., the company behind the Google search engine. While just one of many factors which determine the ranking of Google search results, PageRank continues to provide the basis for all of Google’s web search tools.[2]

The name PageRank is a trademark of Google. The PageRank process has been patented (U.S. Patent 6,285,999 ). The patent is not assigned to Google but to Stanford University.

read the rest

So there you go. I’ll soon write a post on how to check your websites Pagerank. At the moment whilst the update is happening a lot of the tools available to check PR seem to be down.

Possession Court Hearing

The possession court hearing for my first eviction was scheduled for today at 12pm. I put my suit on and took the following evidence:
Tennancy agreement
Rent received statement
Section 8 notice
Court Possession Hearing letters

I ended up being 8mins late due to traffic and I thought I was going to miss my appointment so whilst driving was cursing all the slow drivers on the way! I even had to park my car on double yellows outside the County Court as I didn’t want to miss my appointment. Luckily the hearing was late as the judge was still in session so I got to move my car into a nearby carpark.

Bad Tenant

When I sat down in the waiting room I could see my tenant but did not make eye contact with them. I felt quite bad as this is finally the day a judge will hopefully ask them to leave. I had to tell myself again, its the tenent that has done me over by not paying me money that they owe me, they owe me money a lot of money. They owe me money and have made no effort to repay any of it. They have been living in MY HOUSE for free, whilst i am paying the mortgage.

After 35min in the waiting room me and my tenent where finally called to see the judge. The court room was surprisingly simple, clean and slightly clinical in feeling. The judge was very friendly and reminded me somewhat of a primary school teacher with big smiles and a very warm personality. He didn’t strike me as a judge dread type of character at all. I felt very comfortable in the courtroom.

My tenant was being represented by the duty solicitor who was very inpersonal and to the point, but i guess that is her job. The judge had not actually had a chance to look over the case files and mentioned that he didn’t have them with him. He asked the duty solicitor to explain the situation which she did. The tenant hadn’t paid rent since May 2007 and had no payment proposal to pay the rent of the arrears. the tenant had been to see the council housing and will go back later today. The judge told us that he had no choice then but to grant possession to me in 14 days. With this information on paper the tenant then would stand a good chance of getting alternative accomodation with the council. The judge also told me that the tenant now has a judgement against them for the arrears (£3600+) but I would need to make seperate arrangements to recover that debt. I doubt I’ll see any of that money again.

I had a little word with my tenant outside of the courtroom and they were still adamant that they would pay me back my money. I arranged to meet them at the property in 14 days to see them out and told them that we can then take it from there. I’m slightly doubious that they will leave that easily.

I’ll report here what happens.

You can read my earlier posts on my first eviction here and here

How often should I put my rents up?

In a perfect world for my tenants rents would stay the same or come down every year. If I could do this and still earn a decent living then I would keep rents the same just to keep the tenants happy. Unfortunately in the world we live in the price of everything goes up. Petrol, food, cigarettes, clothes all go up with inflation thats a fact of life in the UK. In real affordabilty terms I therefore have to put my rents up to just to be making the same amount of money each year. It is only fair that I put my rents up in line with inflation each year. Most landlords/agents do this every 6 months.

How much of a rent increase is too much?

On an average monthly rent of £450 per month I will be puting the rent up by £10 per month. This is not much really, it works out to an increase of 33pence per day or £2.30 per week. Hopefully i wont be upsetting too many people by doing this.

Recent anecdotal news suggests that rents in the east midlands have been rising sharply in the last 12 months, maybe this is an effect of the interest rate rises over the last 2 years. I can’t really say the same thing about property prices though as they have been pretty stagnent for the last 12 months.

According to my letting agent in Chesterfield I must issue a section 13 notice to increase the rent. This is more commonly reffered to as a Section 13 form 4b. I love legal jargon!

Affiliate marketing is the art of promoting a product for a merchant and making a small commission on each sale. This is no new thing at all people have had affiliate sites for ages, some more much more successful then others. To give you a few examples nearly all shopping and insurance comparison sites are infact affiliate sites. So when you go to compareplasmaTVprices.com and search for the cheapest 50inch plasma TV and buy, the comparison site is actually earning a nice little commission from you. Most sites disguise this fact by offering something useful, like price/model comparison.

The following is a video from a guy called Andrew from Fly LLC. Andrew tells us about his online store The Friendly Hippo and how he made $11k Dollars in 1 month as an Amazon affiliate. Pretty impressive!

What happened to Froogle?

Well done to Andrew he seems to be making money online. I think he should spend some of it on a new microphone, the one he has buzzes a bit.