Things to LOOK for on a Property Viewing

so today's video is for you user let me inform you and wants to know about property due diligence and I thought that was a great idea for a video so behind me here is a prompting just there that we've just secured on a lease option this video applies to any property viewing it's not just for lease options is fierce for any is for anything really when you want a property viewing so let's go and have a look want to look at a roof I want to see if there's any discoloration I want to see if the tiles are all in good condition because that's one of the most expensive things you need to repair on a house I'm also looking at the guttering to check that there's nothing in the gutters which could have a water and cause leaks going inside the property doesn't look like there is for the time being I'm looking at the pointing of the bricks which is essentially the bits in between the bricks I want to see that they're all filled in I want to see that there's no gaps and if there is gaps you want to check if the property's not on a tilt and if it's a crack caused by subsidence you want to check all of that sort of stuff from door windows these are all in good condition from at face value front doors quite expensive you probably between two and six hundred pounds for a good composite front door so I want to check that's in good condition but yeah it seems fairly good let's go inside and have a look so immediately as I walked in this property I can smell a little bit of damp now you know you typically know what damp smells like it's very musty very kind of you can smell the moisture on the air and if I look around the first things I can see is a little bit of damp so if you have sort of bubbly kind of wallpaper here that it's kind of a little bit peeling off kind of thing that's that's a sign of damp now it's not terrible in here I must admit the most of all it just really needs it could do a little painting to be honest there is a little bit of damp and we can tell by using a gunk meter and this is typically what a dump me to looks like to the damp meter is just essentially a piece of equipment that will tell you how much moisture is in a wall links to all of this equipment in the description box that I use today but essentially will stick it into the wall and it will tell you how much dam is in there this was actually not too bad as you can see there's a bit more down there which you can see evidenced by this bubbling again typically when we walk into a property we want to check each corner of the room and it's fairly low it's not too bad I mean you can definitely see there's moisture in the walls here so there is evidence of some kind of not maybe not too much damp but there's moisture and that's important to remember it says typically with mid terrace houses like this one is damp and moisture is something that you can just never fully get over not at least not in my experience I own a lot of mid terraces just normally and whilst it's never been an issue and I have kind of you know paid to get rid of it there's always moisture there it's just sometimes it's something you can never really escape from but there are you know certain types of paint and sealants and obviously drilling into the wall and filling it with silicone there's all kinds of ways to try and combat this this is typically what it looks like now it's not as I say it's not terrible at the minute it's fairly fairly low I can put links to what and you know readings should be so the next thing I can see is I'm walking in is the electric box fuse box trips and everything else and looking at these ones can see that it looks fairly new there's a new kind of board here which things have been attached to it's all plastic so it looks fairly intact you can tell if something looks fairly new and if this is new typically it means the wiring in the house doesn't need sort of doing so if they've done this new it means they've checked the wiring in the house and if they haven't done anything to affect the wiring in the house then obviously for them to put that in they'll have checked it meaning it's okay so for example if that was old and it looked old and looked like it needed changing I'd be thinking right okay well that could be like 10 grand for a rewiring of a house it's not a cheap job so it's great that that single condition that's one of the first things you should go to the next thing you should really look at is the boiler and we'll go upstairs in a moment off or wherever the boiler is and we'll go off and find out and see what else we can see along the way but I'm going through now into the dining room area now this that we can see here these trails on the floor is the signs of a snail or a slug of some sort that you know so will be being inside the house there is you know there is a slug or a snail actually in here so he's probably hiding under the carpet in one of the corners it's got him through the door or something but is that's not something you want to check it's not it's not very important it's just you want to obviously get rid of whatever vermin you have in a house you don't want them hanging about but I've also spotted on the walls here evidence of moisture now I've had this checked and in this case it's actually not that bad it just needs sauce sounding away drying out and painting over but this sauce stuff is evidence of again moisture and damp as you can tell it's you know it needs sorting out that's you know a fairly easy job for a professional depending on the tradesman in the area the cost it varies but to get rid of serious down you are talking thousands of pounds so you've got to look out for that it's very important I'm walking around I can see that this central heating system is fairly new and these small sort of they look like wires but they're actually a sort of a cheap form as central heating pipes now these are not necessarily an issue but you want to get them checked out make sure they've been done properly obviously replacing a central heating system is not cheap but we can see here as well I've got the same sort of piping here kind of all Oxton quite Shapley again but it does it does also mean that it's being replaced this obviously wasn't standard in the handle some of these just laid on top of the carpet and you shouldn't necessarily have a problem one of the things I do like to do as well when I'm in a property is I like to check kind of what's on to the carpet now you can do some of them back really there's some non-standard of delay here this is just form one delay but I like to check what the floor is so in this case it's concrete floor which is okay provided it's being done properly and you you know not it's just good to check and also you might find several things under there that need checking so when you're in when you're looking around a property you you're obviously thinking about the costs that are involved with actually referring the property and bringing it to scratch now I notice again on this kind of area that we've got the size of dump here we'll just crack out the old dump meter you can usually see damp here like this obviously down in this corner you can see some bubbling care which certain sub damp but here we can check the damp reading and as you can see that's massive massive dump however this doesn't sound like a structural wall obviously I need to make sure by contacting a chiral engineer to make sure that that isn't a structural load bearing wall or anything but knocking on any sounding Hollow means it probably isn't so we may be that we can check that out quite easily and the fact that the damp ratings is done reading so so high it might be that it's a stud wall or something wooden that's actually soaked up the water but you'd get a house survey you'd get somebody in you pay a few hundred pounds for house survey and all that sort stuff will come out of that anyway in the kitchen and there's a little bit of work that needs doing in here obviously and not massive amount of work now the thing with property refurbishment is people tend to overestimate the actual work that he's doing now I think that these are all salvageable all of these I mean there are obviously some shoes with some of the you know some of the things being broken I think overall these things are actually not that bad it just needs salvaging or all the bits that broke and they're all actually still here so it could be put back together maybe you could kind of paint these cupboards or something like that because typically there's what I've actually done in my own home actually I've just painted the kitchen it looks brand new change that the door handles give it a good clean and you you know it looks practically brand-new check is all the lights are working obviously all the electrics and everything else now there's no bulb in here but this is something else you want to check to make sure that obviously everything's up to scratch and you know the wirings okay I mean I know we talked about that wiring is not too bad that's a little way of checking that that's the downstairs I'm gonna check upstairs unless you're walking as well you want to check the floors now if they feel spongy or if they feel quite rickety or or something like that then you want to make sure that you take a look under the carpets because it could be that there's rotten Timbers maybe some joists need replacing or there's something going on there so as I can see over here actually some some some what seems to be rotten Timbers over here now this as you can see it's quite spongy and this is probably from the wall now this is no no problem to fix I mean you know a lot of kind of odd job investors would paint over that I probably just dig it all out put a new bit of wood in it doesn't cost anything really all the doors seem okay the door frames I mean they could do with a little bit of a gloss but there you go so we'll go upstairs now we'll take a look upstairs the stairs seem pretty stable there's nothing the matter with them they've seemed pretty good the carpets actually not in a bad condition actually you know you could get a carpet cleaned carpet cleaners you know they might cost 60 70 quid and you can you know do it yourself if you're that way inclined or you can get somebody to professionally clean them it it might work out cheaper than getting new kappas it might not it depends on the area depends on the power team that you've got up here I can see that on the ceilings there are more columns and they seem to be working because they've got sort of an LED all no I mean if you can see that but you might want to check them by pressing the button unfortunately I'm not 12 feet tall so I can't press that right now but I will check that going into the bathroom now we've got a bit of a landing here so going through into the bathroom I found the boiler it's a Vaquero now I know that it's it's an okay kind of sort of boiler this is fair the reason I know this is fairly new is because of the work that's been done here look now this is not even boxed in it need boxing in by the way so just kind of a bit of a boxing around here but I can see that the boil is working as I say I've checked all the water and I've checked at the water the hot water I mean ours may pale and confirmed does get warm after a while so it is working we can see that the bathroom is just a little bit dated and all the unit's looking fairly of condition I wouldn't change these I'd just get them cleaned up and maybe either paint the tiles you know some good tile painting you want to keep referred to a minimum so in here for example it might cost you I mean at less than hundred pounds I should imagine just to paint the thing you know labor more than anything else the pain itself is probably less than less than 15 quid but you can obviously much do it yourself you've got a factor in the labor as well so we now go into the yeah the master bedroom it's pretty big there's absolutely nothing in here that scares me whatsoever other than the ceilings you can see them if you can see that that makes on the video there's some discoloration along the ceiling now this may or may not be a leak it could be that it's not an issue but we need to get that checked out again you get a survey they'll look at all that stick the damp meter up there if you want but if it is some issue it's probably some sort of leak coming from the gutter and the it's probably if the gutter has something stuck in it like a plant or something going out of it which which towards the water and then allows it to seep into the house so that's the sort of thing you need to check that's really important because it's a simple fix but if left on you know it's practically free but if left unchecked and unsorted it can turn into thousands of pounds worth of work if the ceiling comes through central heating system we've got too small our course here so the bed could go there or whatever and I checked there's no down in this room whatsoever and just needs a little paint really not see those things checking out to make sure that there's nothing too long to walk a little bit we'd go there which is strange the door is pretty good solid and they do need a bit of a gloss but that's that's by the by again you factor that into the cost of labour and then we go through into the small bedroom now we've got cupboard in here you can see it's full of rubbish but also there's a bit of mold in there so we need to get rid of that and we need to make sure that in here has been done properly because we don't want anything untoward happening so you know we can spray this and get rid of it and paint some sealant and check to see whether there's any damp in there which is causing that problem actually as I'm standing here in front of this door I can feel that the floor is dipping a little bit standing here and he's dipping down a little bit I want to pull the carpet I want to see why that is and again there's all this non-standard fall there's a floorboard here which is out of place it might be that there's a joist in there nice fixing or it might be just that the the floorboard needs kind of it needs a new floorboard there which is again nothing it less than a fiver and you can probably do that yourself this bedroom was in very very good condition it almost could get away without being painted but if you're gonna paint the whole house you may as well give it a lick of paint as well and as you can tell outside all these houses are fairly that's standard the same you want to check you want to make sure that empty houses you know do some due diligence about the street make sure you know everything about the houses around you that's important because you want to know if there's good rental demand in the area you want to know the true market value of a house in this case we've done all that work because this is a lease option that we've secured so we've done current market value rates we've also checked the rental demand and we know that we know that we do need to have a slightly lower than normal rent on this and provided we do it to good standard because as it's quite you know it's competitive from the landlord's point of view the rents are quite depressed in this area simply because there's slightly more houses than there are people so we need to do this property up to a better standard than everywhere else to ensure we get that sort of tenant that we want preferably working but you know I've got lots of DSS tenants that I do very well from and they're very happy but obviously we want to get people in they're going to look after the property and and pay the rent that we want it's important that we understand all of these things because of course it's it's not leverage to you know hammer the owner down on price but it's important for us to know why our costs are going to be going into a property this now this a property like this is very important because if there's a lot of work that needs doing then obviously we need to factor that into the purchasing price and we need to tell the owner that when it's done up there will be a ceiling value so you can't keep doing a property up and it will continue to get more and more valuable you can only add so much value because of the comparables so other properties that have sold nearby that are very similar format similar layout similar number of rooms look at what those houses have sold for look at the condition of them you can usually find that on bright moving the houses all nearby section or you can look on MOUs price calm again links to everything in the comments below so you want to check what is this house actually worth forget the purchase price because the purchase price could be any value it doesn't matter what the purchase price is because you want to know what the true market value of the house is and the only way you can kind of get a realistic view of what that is is by looking at market comparables which is properties that sold nearby recently if you're looking at properties to set up as HTML or a multi let this this property isn't particularly good for that but you want to check the room sizes and obviously each bedroom needs to be a minimum of 70 square feet to qualify to be legal as a room to be able to let out on a hedge more multi let now the way I do that very quickly is by using this piece of equipment which is essentially it's just a laser tape measure so it will measure the size of a room very very quickly and it will keep a log of all the measurements that you're taking now these are very cheap again sort of you know twenty thirty pounds something like that but the amount of time saves you is ridiculous now all you simply do is you find a wall and then you rest it up against the wall and it will have a laser which essentially shines to the other side as you can see over there and you click the button like so and it will tell you in meters the length of what you just measured so three point two eight four meters from this wall to is here so obviously you'd want to measure from there to there and from there to there of the room and that's important because you want to check that each one is 70 square feet and you want to check obviously if you want to do a flop I'm yourself or if you can't find one you want to measure every room anyway and check that there's enough sort of spacing and another thing with HMOs is there's got to be a certain amount of worktop space so obviously you can measure that by getting your measure and holding at the end of the work space and then checking to the very end and it will give you that obviously the length of that work space there's lots of guys online about how much work space you actually need per person it's that's important to look at and also I'm in the kitchen now and I'm looking at the towels I'm thinking is they tiled over damp you know you've got to check everything really you've got to make sure that the whole property is in fairly good condition and in terms of costs of doing certain projects this is something you learn over time you need to befriend a builder you need to befriend a handyman maintenance again I get a Power Team in your area of where you want to invest in property and take them around with you for example I've got a guy called Bendita he's you know he's been on one of my other videos and he is a property saucer and but he's also an ex boiler technician so I'm able to take him around with me and he's able to tell me what's wrong with the boiler and if you know and if there's anything I've perhaps not spotted and and you know how much it might be to fix or how long he's got left you know that sort of thing so you need to know people who understand these things you don't need to understand everything you need to know people that do but also want to look for things that could potentially make the property and mortgageable now sometimes agents don't see everything that makes a property or marketable and obviously simple things like not having a kitchen I'm not having a bathroom or you know there's a hole in the roof that comes right into the house then obviously those are things that make properties are marketable so you've got to be a cash fire or a bridge your only link above how to bridge properties without you know stop needing a mortgage good look at the carp it's think okay a room solved this size for example you know I know that this the account being here is gonna be under Andra quit so I can therefore think about right that room needs capping this room that's a similar size and he's counting the upstairs bedroom which is slightly smaller than this room these carpeting that's 300 pounds right so it's understanding these costs which you only get from experience and doing things all the time the major things to look out for is obviously the roof the boiler electric box things like that really it's beeping at me so make sure you look at these things make sure you note them down take pictures take a notebook with you and jot things down it's really really important that you tell you take a look at absolutely everything if in doubt with anything obviously you can speak to your solicitor they'll get surveys you can pay for all sorts of surveys flood warnings sewer you know even that I've even seen landmine type surveys in the past but you can get a normal house survey for a couple hundred quid to three hundred quid and that will usually bring up any sort of existing problems that are already known and obviously if you do a survey where somebody comes around the property then any any new problems that crop up will also come up on there so get a good properties list they'll do a lot of the work and even if even if you're good at spotting things in properties you still need to have a good solicitor I'll never buy anything that must list hasn't checked first again it's about people it's about relationships have a good Power Team in the area that you want to invest make sure that these guys know what they're looking at make sure they can come round on the property viewings with you if needs be booked a second viewing so I hope that's helped you it's very much in a nutshell kind of quick quick round brief view of what I look for in properties obviously with this particular property we've looked at things that were obvious so there might be other things that crop up I will do a follow-up video on this on surveys and sort of market analysis because I think that's important there's links to all of this stuff in the comments below if you want to buy them for yourself probably I'm holding less than 50 quids worth of equipment in hand right now so you know it's affordable but yeah I'll I'll do a follow-up video thanks for watching and I hope to see you next time hey guys thanks for watching today's video if you liked it please give it a massive thumbs up comment and subscribe it really really helps if you want to watch some of my other videos I put some links beside me and I hope see you on the next video in a week's time until then thank you and goodbye [Music] you

Channel: Nathan J Winch

Views: 40,035

Keywords: property investment, nathan winch, lease options, property viewing, what to look for viewing property, property finance, damp meter, laser measure, property due diligence, due diligence, property, real estate, property check, property investor, buying property, property viewings, damp, subsidence, brickwork, pointing, roof, property purchase, boiler, fuse board, gas meter, property checklist, check list, builder, power team, property solicitor, house survey, property surveys

Id: bUloYSpqjs8

Length: 24min 44sec (1484 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 17 2019