Naive Questions from Landlords?

One thing in life is for certain... We NEVER stop learning. The minute you feel you know everything is the time to retire.

I also work in Interventional Cardiology and I'm lucky enough to work with the most amazing surgeons in the world... These professionals save lives everyday and guess what... They learn new procedures/ devices/ products EVERYDAY!

Bill Gates, learns every day.
Warren Buffet learns every day.
Apple are learning and developing every day.

I've learnt as much from experienced members of my teams as I have the new starters. We can all become complacent and if our routine works why change, right?! WRONG! We need new starters to inject more enthusiasm, new ways of working and FUN!

I think Property118 is an interesting & informative website & long may it continue.

Reply to the comment left by "Fred Jones" at "13/08/2014 - 09:57":

Hi Fred

The website wouldn't function if we relied on member donations alone, we also need sponsors.

We don't run those nasty (in my opinion) conventional banner adverts which clutter up the website though. Our sponsors are hand picked and as one member has already said, nobody is compelled to use them as the services they offer are not right for every reader. We do our best to help landlords to save money and/or protect their investments though when selecting our sponsors. Thankfully we are not so cash strapped to have to work with all comers.

We are very transparent in terms of how the running of Property118 is funded by sponsors, see the 4th orange box at the top of every page.

It takes around 20 man hours a day to run Property118. Needless to say, I don't do this on my own and we do have to pay other people. Moderation of comments alone takes a long time - we read every single comment posted and remove or amend those which don't comply with our objectives. This is all done by myself and Neil Patterson. We also have strict "house rules" that our sponsors must adhere to in terms of their commenting.

We have to pay for very robust servers to deal with the vast amount of visitors and emails generated by new article notifications, comment notifications and Newsletters.

Believe it or not our system send out nearly 2 million emails every month!

It costs a lot of money to prevent this number of emails being treated as spam and this is a constant battle for us.

Sometimes our servers crash due to the increasing volume of people using the website and this means we have to constantly monitor performance and upgrade our systems. We pay a lot of money to some very clever IT people to make sure the website doesn't crash all the time or take an absolute age to load.

The reality of all of this is that we are constantly reminded by our bank balance.

Remember that Property118 started as a hobby. Over one million pounds has since been invested into developing the resource and that money has to come from somewhere.

When we have any money spare we generally invest it into making the website even better. Hopefully people recognise this and that's why reader figures and comment contributors continue to grow.

We don't have a major corporate backer and we don't receive handouts from the Government or Charities to fund the running costs.

Thank you for mentioning donations by the way 🙂 The following is a shameless plug from me but if anybody would like to make a donation, no matter how large or small, the money will be very gratefully received and used wisely to continue and further our ambitions to facilitate the sharing of best practice - please see >>> http://www.property118.com/donations/43590/
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Helping people learn, passing on knowledge and being tactful and polite when asked so-called "naïve" questions is part of civilised society!
I've learned a lot from reading Property 118, and try to introduce other landlords to it. I particularly like the way the 118 community will also help tenants when they find the site and ask for advice - that is positive use of members' knowledge.
I do sometimes want to say "calm down" though - probably the age-old issue of people typing as they think, so posts sound more assertive than the author meant them to be!
Thank-you Mark and all, anyway.

Unintelligent move by this landlord.

I`ve been letting & managing property for 28 years & despite my experience I still can be wrong-footed by making assumptions that fail. People are people & their behaviour is what makes the job interesting/hideous on a weekly basis. The cliche holds..`..one is never to old to learn..`

I have learned a tremendous amount from this site and similar landlord advice sites, which, as Mark has pointed out, are all free to use, unlike those belonging to landlord bodies, where you pay a subscription and still often have to wait for someone to get back to you and chase them up.

I run a small website of my own, so I am cognizant of the amount of time, money and work it takes to set one up and maintain it, and mine is nothing approaching the size of this one! Suffice to say the subject research and coding alone for my site took me a year!

Property letting is a vast area, and no one individual is ever going to experience everything, or could possibly know everything.

Property letting also touches on many other areas, for example, as well as the obvious legal and financial issues, it helps to have negotiation skills, to know something about consumer law etc.

I do, however believe that BTL landlords have some responsibility to educate themselves about the basics of property letting, at least as far as the type of property and market they're in, even if they use an agent.

I also believe that where we don't have even the most basic knowledge, or moreover, are UNWILLING to acquire it, we are playing into the hands of those who demonise landlords and local authorities who want to introduce prohibitive and destructive selective licensing schemes.

What an unbelievable attitude! I have learned a huge amount from other people on forums, in magazines and from books they have written. Well done to those who are willing to share rather than hoard their knowledge, and especially to those who provide the platforms to do so.

The comments say more about him being naive than the persons who contribute to this forum. What an attitude. Lets hope he reads all these posts and realises what a plonker he is. Landlords outsourcing legal services. Yes I do by virtue of rent insurance guarantees and Landlord Action. Why? Because my experience of Judges is that they are on the side of the poor tenants who have trashed your property and not paid any rent. And find a legal loophole so they do not have to evict. I suppose Mr Know It All also built his own house and car, designs all his own clothes and does all his own operations.

Hahahahahahahaha

Publish his name .....

My bet is it's .... Mr Pompous Ass

R

It must be so rewarding to know you know more than anyone else and have nothing more to learn! There is a matrix used in our business to position sales people, which talks about 'conscious incompetent', 'unconscious incompetent', 'conscious competent', and 'unconscious competent'. Most are not intuitive (unconscious competent) sales people and need to work hard to achieve success. They aim for 'conscious competent' ...knowing what they do is right. I would suggest this landlord is in the 'unconscious incompetent' bracket, in that he doesn't realise there are issues and people out there beyond his level of competence which can bite him in the backside!!

Mark has put together a great website, which I find essential reading most days. It has helped me in the short time I have used it, and will help me in the future. If whatever I contribute can help others, then I consider my time well invested.

Keep it going Mark and everyone else on here.