Aiming to build your property portfolio can be a daunting prospect at first. Recognizing positive trends in the housing market and understanding the potential in different property investments will stand you in good stead to make lucrative decisions that will lead to a positive, prosperous, long term investment. With the private rented sector outperforming most other assets available, the record rates of growth found in property highlights that this as a highly valuable financial decision. Here are some tips to help you on your way to building a successful career in property investment.

Write down your goals

Ask yourself a range of questions to identify what exactly it is you want from property investment. Are you looking for a passive income? Are you driven by rental yields or capital appreciation? Who is your target tenant? Answering these questions will help you make the right decisions and aim to determine which type of investment suits you best. Using a property investment company like RW Invest can often help you make the hardest decisions, right from the best type of investment to suit you, to which location performs best for rental yields. Trusting in established companies like RW is a great way to ensure you are making well-informed choices while building your property portfolio.

Think Small

Don’t get ahead of yourself before you have even started. Starting smaller is a safer way to start a property investment venture, as this always has the potential to be built upon in the future if you feel prepared and confident enough. Building your property portfolio is a skill, but also a great way to ensure your assets are safer and the risk can be spread across multiple assets. Investing in the likes of student property, residential property and studio apartments all adhere to different tenants’ desires. Therefore, ensuring your portfolio covers a range of assets means that if one of your investments isn’t producing the rental income you predicted, another investment in your portfolio that is producing high returns will balance out the loss.

Cashflow is King

As you start out on your property investment journey, make sure you monitor a number of metrics closely. This would range from your income, mortgage costs, and amount of return amongst others like any maintenance costs etc. Some businesses would refer to these as key performance indicators, as they are used as the best way to measure the success of your investment.

Does your rental income cover your mortgage? Are you still gaining a reasonable return that is worth your while? Are you becoming affected financially during periods where your property may not be let?
Tracking all these helps to grow your portfolio in the future as you can use the data you have gathered from one investment to work out the probability of the success of the next.

Exit Strategy

Entering the property investment game and doing well can be tricky, therefore devising an exit strategy should you need it can sometimes be of equal importance, depending on the situation of an individual. An exit strategy refers to a point in which you are no longer an active investor and start to look towards retirement. Ask yourself what your ultimate end goal is, once you have highlighted this you can ensure each investment decision you make throughout your life is sensible, well thought out and calculated towards your future.