In my most recent podcast I was by myself. I was actually thinking when I sat here, my Gosh, uh, it’s quite daunting being on your own again, but obviously this is where I started the podcast from and I wanted to do a bit of an update of everything that’s been going.
If you want to watch/ listen to the podcast you can do so here:
As you will know, if you’ve been listening to this for a little while, my life never stands still. There’s always the things I’ve got going on.
To start, I’m actually going to do a little bit of property investing in the US. I will soon have a property portfolio, both sides of the Atlantic’s. Very exciting!
I’ve also been doing a teaching qualification, which has actually been driving me a little bit mad because I tried to forget about it and tried to sync, do you know what is being nothing, you know, it’s not worth my time really worrying about it.
I’ve got other things going on. I’ve got and see real estate and every things I do over here, which I absolutely love. I still teach for the University College for State Management and doing a teaching degree was one step too far until the deadlines for the assignments started creeping up. So I kind of been clearing little patches of space in my diary and actually having to focus on getting those reports and those assignments done. That will be out of the way, thank goodness by the 3rd of June, in which case I should be a qualified teacher of higher education.
Once that is done I can formally lecture, even though I’ve been doing it for the past two years. This week actually has been my two year anniversary of being a university lecturer, which is completely flown by.
The other thing is, uh, one of my flats in London is causing me some, I wouldn’t say headache more like, uh, it’s constantly coming up. So the first thing is, is that the head lease holders have decided they’re doing an externals project, which I’m not particularly that worried about because they always collect the money in the sinking fund. Um, and at the moment they’ve got about 85,000 pounds worth in there.
So that’s actually fine. The estimates for works keep changing. When I first got the works, it was 188,000 pounds for the whole building’s externals and with the externals, they were going to get an a scaffolding up, do the gutters and drainage, change all of the windows and put a new roof on. Absolutely fine. Uh, I have no problem with them doing that. We’re kind of at the end of the lifecycle of that for this building anyway.
So we definitely need to be doing it. It was just the fact that they’d managed to miscalculate by 46,000 pounds.
If you ever get something through and there’s a schedule where it says is the pounds of how much it costs, go through it with a fine tooth comb and add it all together. Do it three times.
I know that it’s some sort of a battle because these managing agents are the, and the head lease holder or charities, they don’t necessarily fall under the racs or all or regulation, which is frustrating. So you have to go above them if you have a need to.
So it’s every single day I’m being bombarded by this email chain of 15 different people who have 15 different ideas, rather than actually all of them reading the leases, understanding what’s being set out and commenting accordingly.
If you don’t have all of the information, you can’t argue your case accordingly. And also it makes it very difficult when this huge amount of what’s come around and you need to, she basically needs to know where you stand.
You need to be able to read all of the emails and respond accordingly. Now I also want to say something about this that I learned the hard way over years of being in the property industry. If someone sent me an email that I hated, I’d send them back an email furiously. I don’t do that anymore.
Usually what I do is I read the email and I think, how has this made me feel? Am I angry about what they’re saying right now? Um, okay, fine. I’m angry about it. I’m just going to park it for the next however long. Usually I will sleep on it and then go for a dog walk and think about it, mull it over.
What is the key thing that you need to say? Can you recall anything that’s happened from years of this head lease holder, acting incompetently. Then from that point of view, then I’d come up with an answer. I can respond you, unless somebody is dying, you do not need to respond for 24 hours.
Honestly, I will repeat this. Unless somebody is dying or is in danger of dying because you’re not going to act, you do not need to respond immediately.
So that’s the same with if you’ve got tenants who get in contact with you and they’re mad or they’re livid about something and you just need to take a second to think about what you do and how you handle it. Unless that tenant is in physical danger.
So those are my tips of advice based upon what’s going on with this.
So, that’s a little bit of an update on my, um, my property world. If you want to hear more about what’s going on in my life at the moment make sure to click the link to listen to my podcast!
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Natasha
