Rohan's Blog

One of the most common challenges I find many of my audience and Clients appear to experience is how to raise start-up capital for the property portfolio or their new business venture. I often get asked about how we initially raised seed capital to start our portfolio. The truth is that we went looking for it wherever we could – “Ask and ye shall receive”.

I was recently mentoring a private Client and we went through this very procedure of establishing where potential funds could come from. It is amazing creative a person can become once you start to expose the various alternatives.

One area that we took advantage of that an early stage of building account portfolio and we have helped many other investors do the same, is to tap into the funds of people that you know.  This can include friends, family and even other investors who have surplus cash and are looking for a specific return on investment.  If for example your brother has £10,000 sitting in the bank account making 3% per year, you could approach him and asked him what he would consider to be a better rate than he is getting in the bank right now.  If he then said to you, a rate of 8% would be good, then assuming that you have done your calculations correctly for the properties that you are investing in and that paying him at 8% return will work for you then you can make him the following proposal.

A balloon payment strategy where he lends you the £10,000 for a given time period, let’s assume 12 months and a simple interest rate of 8%.  This means that you will borrow money and at the end of 12 month period you will pay him back the fall amount (balloon) plus the interest owed. In this case you would payback £10,000 plus an additional £800 interest.

Interest only payments work in a similar way except that instead of paying the interest back at the end of the year, you pay the interest over a period of the year as monthly installments.  In the above example this would be £800 divided by 12, which is £66.66 per month.  At the end of the 12 months you would still payback the £10,000 has agreed.

Capital and interest payments involve you paying back the interest plus the capital every month of 12 months and any outstanding balance is then pay at the end of the 12 month period.

It is vital to know where you are going to use their money. If you don’t have a purpose for borrowing it – then don’t.

Just to say that I have been away since last week on London and attending the Millionaire Mind Intensive weekend with T Harv Eker. Thoroughly enjoyed the weekend and it was great to see so many of you that I know attending too.

Something I learned from Tony Robbins years ago, you can never stop growing. CANI = constant and never ending improvement.

For those of you attending future events in any area of personal development well done. Keep growing and your income will increase with you!!

Folks, I was forwarded this just today from a member of my Fiances family in Sweden. It is inspiring to see how the human mind can first conceive an idea and then turn into a living, breathing reality. Meet the future:

I wanted to say to all of you who attended the Tigrent Learning Gala and Conference at the weekend, thanks for making it such a fantastic occasion.

At the Gala, we, as a group raised over £61,000 for Make A Wish. Many LOTS were auctioned, some going up to as much as £7000. I particularly want to thank all those that bid to attend my one day Millionaire Mindset Personal Development Workshop. We chose to cap the price at £600 per place to make it accessible to more people. We had over 30 people bid to attend and I think it raised close to £20,000. Fantastic. And we have a few seats left, so if you want to attend this amazing day email my assistant louise@rohanlive.com.

The conference was great and it was a pleasure to share the stage with three other great speakers, social entrepreneurs and wealth builders: Teresa Graham (CBE), Richard Reed (Innocent Drinks) and Kevin Green (as seen on Channel 4’s Secret Millionaire).

For those of you who are coming to the Tigrent Wealth Conference on 6th February, you will have a chance to see me speaking on the subject of business. developing a successful business in this particulary period in history requires new skills. Having personally experienced one of my previous businesses failing, I have learnt some invaluable lessons. In fact, those of you who have heard the figures that Business link quote will know that only a small percentage of businesses survive the first two years. There are many tools that can be used to ensure the success of a business. Some of these I will be sharing on the 6th. A valuable article that I came across in 2005 is still applicable today. I thought you might find it useful to read:

Click this link: Royalmedia

Its not what you say, but how you say it that gets your customers to buy

I just visited Spain this week on a non-property related business trip but could not resist the opportunity to look at what their property market is currently like. As many of you know, when asked about the Spanish market over these past few years I have issued warnings and have strongly recommended doing your due diligence. Having been down there this week – my I can confirm that my warnings were correct.

Remember:overseas property investments require due diligence and a clear evaluation of the Market.

Alicante – Benidorm

These two cities are still a popular spot for the British, and it would appear that to combat the recession, the hotels and restaurants have dropped prices in an attempt to attract the masses. It seems to have worked. However, the property prices for investors have been hit hard. Whilst the restaurants and hotels may benefit by reducing prices, the property investors are struggling. Talking to locals and investors in the area, it was clear that prices in Alicante (in specific areas) had dropped by up to 60%. In the areas where there are less tourists and more owner occupiers, the drop was less radical, around 30%+. In Benidorm the figures were similar, maybe more in the region of 40% drops. Speaking to locals, they felt it would be a long long time before the prices get back to what many of the new-builds were sold at.
For investors that have bought, if you do not sell, then you simply have to take it on the chin and rent out. One penthouse (three bedroom) apartment I saw had been purchased by an investors for around 600,000 EUROS and it was being rented for 800 EUROS per month. If you do the numbers you will know that would be a NO NO back home!
If you were to take a long term view and accept that your occupancy rates are going to be lower, there might be some opportunities to pick up heavily discounted properties from severely distressed sellers. Even then, you need to do some serious due diligence to make sure that you are happy with the numbers.
South of Benidorm – Costa Del Sol
I did not get that far south, but from what I could see, they have suffered worse drops in price. Remember that this whole length of Spanish coast line experienced excessive over building, and developers & investors getting greedy. Prices were inflated, buyers overstretched, interest rates rose…and hey presto – the bubble burst.
In a word – my message remains essentially the same. Get to know your market. Ensure the occupancy rates are there. Check the real value. Get good management. And then offer a silly price for the property!!!!

Here is another message for those of you wanting to be Professional Speakers, Public Speakers, Motivational Speakers, Teachers, Educators or simply wanting to develop a greater confidence in from on your audiences… PASSION.

As you look ahead into 2010, I would like you to consider what TOOLS you need to have in place in order to create more passive income and to be able to buy more houses without using your own money.

So, after an amazing last night at The Berkshire Property Meet, I am BLOGGING here from Spain and wanted to clarify the details of some exciting Webinars I will be running next week:

Monday February 1st @ 8pm

How to make a high yeild hands off return from the Money Markets – totally passive. This is very exciting folks. For many of you who have some funds or access to money, this could be an excellent way to add a very strong passive income to your lifestyle.

Click here to register: Hands Off Income Webinar

Tuesday February 2nd & Thursday 18th Feb @ 7.30pm

Following some great feedback from our recent webinars on Sourcing & Bridging we are running two more webinars in February. Learn essential tools for Sourcing properties yourself and others from Raj Deb. In addition, the second half off this webinar will be a breaksdown of how you can use Bridging Finance to do no money down property deals. This is one to to see!

Click Here: Sourcing & Bridging Webinar 2nd Feb

Click Here: Sourcing & Bridging Webinar 18th Feb

In what has been called one of our coldest winters in the last 100 years, I thought I would take the opportunity for all those of you wanting do more Public Speaking or wanting develop your professional speaking skills to film a few short live videos. Each of these include a few key tips on how to present and I thought doing it in the cold and snow would help you see that this is a skill you can use anywhere!!

For those of you who attended my recent presentations at the Berkshire Property Meet and Financial Independence Day, I know many of you were asking about the  Income-Expenses-Assets & Liabilities spreadsheet that I was showing.  You will pleased to know that anyone who has registered on my website – will be receiving the spreadsheet shortly.

This a simple template for you to experiment with – for those of you who really want to work on this area of your life and feel that it is a block then I would recommend keeping an eye on my BLOG as I will posting on this over the coming months. If you require coaching on this area you can contact me through the Contacts page to see how I can help.