Property Strategy by Jackie Tomes.

Lee Moffatt, founder of ELM Property, spent years diligently building up experience in investing in property.

In 2021, Lee has been focusing on speeding up the process to growing his company and making his BIG Vision a reality. But as the story goes, the road to success is not easy.

The year before Lee joined DMA, he was doing so many different things and was being pulled in so many different directions, but in reality not actually going anywhere. He was at a loss at what to do because he believed that the amount of effort he was putting out was not giving him the results that he was expecting.

Now just a few months after Lee joined the Deal Maker Accelerator programme, he’s managed to build a £1.6M investor pipeline, and a deal pipeline worth £2.2M this year alone! Let's find out how he's done it.

ABOUT LEE AND ELM PROPERTY

Lee, along with his wife Elaine, started investing in property around 13 years ago (2008). Early on, they were predominantly investing in their spare time whilst they both were pursuing busy and successful careers. Over the years, they had built a wealth of experience investing in property both inside and outside London across a wide range of investment strategies. And finally in 2018, they decided to take their passion for renovating their own home and property investments to a more professional level and founded ELM Property.

WHY DID THEY START INVESTING IN PROPERTY?

Whilst Lee and his wife both had well-paid jobs, they still found themselves struggling with living their dream lifestyles. They were time-poor and found themselves trapped in the corporate world exchanging their time for money. This became worse when they had their son. Lee had to travel extensively for business all over the world so he spent a lot of time away from home. Missing a few of his son's key milestones really made Lee rethink what he wanted out of life. So he decided to take a more professional approach to property investment with the view to create their own future away from the golden shackles of corporate life.

WHAT HAVE YOU HAD IN TERMS OF RECENT SUCCESSES WHEN IT COMES TO YOUR PROPERTY BUSINESS?

Lee: I think the main successes that we've had are probably building an investor pipeline. A few months ago, I wouldn't even imagine that I would have had investors. Up until this point, we've only worked with our own funds. And so the pipeline we've built out with the help of DMA is something we never would have imagined before.

I also think building a deal pipeline was really important for us. In the past, the way we've worked is we find a project, we do the project, we come out of the project. But what do we do next? We then spent ages trying to find the next deal. And so the deal pipeline kind of really helped us speed up that process. So when we come off one deal, we've got another deal to go into.

ARE THERE ANY NUMBERS BEHIND THAT THAT YOU CAN SHARE?

Well, we built an investor pipeline worth £1.6 to £1.7 million, or something like that. We haven't even gotten around to kind of asking figures of the people in the pipeline that we've spoken to, but I think it was like 1.8m of the last look.

So we've effectively got more than what we need. Obviously, there are various stages within the pipeline. Some have had heads of terms done and contract signed, others have done the ISC but they haven't committed to a project yet.

"Before having the investor pipeline, we always ourselves- where are we going to get investment? who is going to invest in us? But now, we've realised that that's not so much of an issue than it was before. And that if we work our investor pipeline, we generally will have

the funds to support our deals."

WHAT DO YOU THINK ENABLED YOU TO BUILD THAT PIPELINE?

Lee: I think first of all, it came out of necessity. Going through the DMA programme, the first thing we did was refine our model and start building a deal pipeline for that model. Once we built that pipeline, suddenly deals started coming through that we didn't have funding for.

So then we were like, okay, we've got a deal, we now have a problem to solve, we need to find funding for it. So as I talked to Dave because we were a bit worried that we got this deal and didn't have any funding in place.

He gave me a quite a few pointers in terms of how we should position ourselves, how we could perhaps bring people who are in the investor pipeline forward or commit earlier to help us with the deal that we've got.

So that it really accelerated that process for us. In a space of four weeks where we had zero funding for the deal to having 200 grand worth of funding for the deal. So that was a bit of an eye opener for us in terms of what was possible.

"We wouldn't have imagined we'd be able to do that

if we didn't join DMA."

BUILDING THE INVESTOR PIPELINE

Lee takes a rigorous approach to analysis, and is looking at between 20-30 deals a month in order to filter down to the opportunities that really work from a numbers perspective.

Once the deal pipeline was up and running it was time for Lee to focus on the Investor Pipeline… within 4 weeks he’d raised £200,000 to fund the next deal!

Lee is smart, hardworking, and analytical. But by his own admission this can sometimes mean he gets stuck in the detail and becomes a perfectionist! In the past he’s found this particularly hard as property can be a lonely journey with only yourself to talk to! DMA has been the mechanism to build relationships where he's been able to have deeper conversations around the challenges, get alternative perspectives, and find better solutions. That means he doesn’t get his head stuck in a spreadsheet anymore… and can instead crack on with the next deal!

We want to make sure that the deals that we've got work out and that we can pay all our investors back before we push forward again. So we're very conscious of capacity at the moment - not necessarily the ability to raise the funds for the deals, but making sure that we have enough capacity within ourselves to support all the projects. And also, if any tweaks that need to be made to the model, we all do that before we secure any more deals. So we've kind of taken the foot off the gas a little bit on the deal sourcing side of things.

ARE THERE ANY OTHER SUCCESSES THAT YOU CAN THINK OF?

Lee: Any others? I think a lot of it has been about direction - being sure in terms of the direction that we're going. Before we joined DMA we were trying everything, all different business models. Jackie really helped us focus where we need to put our energies by looking at what we've done in the past, what has worked for us., where our strengths lie, and also what we're interested in doing, and making sure that we focus purely on that one thing that we focus on, rather than trying to look at everything and just being exhausted by all the different opportunities.

"Having that focus has really given us a North Star

to where we're heading towards."

So we know that whatever we're doing, we're progressing towards that goal, rather than moving in all sorts of different directions and not going anywhere. That was the experience that we had before we joined DMA. We were doing so many different things, and being pulled in so many different directions. But in reality, we weren't actually going anywhere. So in the first three months of DMA, it's been such a huge step change in terms of what's happened with our business.

Having not just the DMA team but also the wider community to talk to was amazing. Like when I had this issue around yield, I had conversations with fellow DMA delegates around that. I've been talking to everyone about various topics - one example is that I've been talking with someone about working with my SSAS. There's wealth of knowledge within the community because they all got different strategies as well. So they come at things from different perspectives. Being able to all come together and share our experiences has been quite valuable.

WHAT WOULD YOU SAY TO SOMEONE WHO IS CONSIDERING DMA BUT NOT SURE IF NOW IS THE RIGHT TIME FOR THEM?

George: I would say get on a call. Have a chat with one of the team. The array of knowledge and the different ways they can help is unbelievable, even down to Dom’s side of things with the mental health. Many people throw away the mental health side of property, but it really is needed.

So I would say have a chat and see how you can work with the guys at DMA because I think you'll be blown away on that call, how that call goes and how you can see where your business can go from then onwards.

"Just do it. You have no idea how much it will help."

Hannah: Most are saying: you don't know what you don't know. So if you don't know the answer, you don't actually know what you need. This programme is it. DMA is it.

George: Definitely. In property, it is tough sometimes. And a lot of people don't think that they're actually stressed and they don't think that they're going through a bad place until they start making some changes. And then they think Bloody hell, I wasn't in a great place there. I think they are the changes that the DMA helps you make.

ANY OTHER FINAL THOUGHTS?

George: Just a massive thank you. Do you remember the first call when Hannah got onto the call? Think it must have been April. We were at a stage where we were actually very, very close to quitting. We were just like, is the sourcing company worth it anymore? It's just not worth it. All the stress and stuff.

And it wasn't the fact that it was sourcing, it wasn't the company and the way of doing things that was stressing us out, it was 100% the changes that we needed to make.

"So yeah, I just want to say a massive thank you to you and the guys at DMA for changing our life. "

THE FUTURE OF DUGARD PROPERTY

For Dugard Property, this is just the beginning. This year, Hannah and George's goal is to grow their sourcing company. They want to bring in new deals to the table and raise more finance from their investors.

"We will be focusing on sourcing and getting that to a systemised business that will run itself. We will also put more effort into supporting our team and sorting the gaps that we have at the moment. It will always be about continuous improvement... this year will be all about implementing effective processes, strengthening our service to make it the best it can be. So that come next year, we can really ramp up the building of our own portfolio (which we have intentionally put on pause for now) so we can increase the passive income side of things.”

IF YOU'RE INTERESTED TO WATCH OUR FULL INTERVIEW WITH HANNAH & GEORGE, CHECK THE VIDEO BELOW! 👇👇👇