Two records, one company
Between us we have over fifty active years in property. Individually, we started out renovating to sell, then built portfolios that we sold as life took us across borders and into raising families, long before we ever worked together.
In October 2024 those two paths met, and this company was formed. At the time of writing we’re purchasing three flats, and we currently hold over fifteen properties between us, having owned and sold a good deal more than that along the way.
We aren’t two people who started something together in our twenties. We each spent decades learning this on our own, making our own mistakes, and we still come at a problem from different directions. Two records built independently hold more between them than one record twice as long.
Our working relationship is newer than our years in property, but it isn’t new. We met through property education and spent a long time holding each other to account on the personal side before we ever looked at a building together, which is how each of us learned what the other one does when keeping a promise turns out to be inconvenient.
Below is what that looks like in practice: a deal that turned out to be worse than we had been told, and what we did next.
Sara Cromie
Head of Acquisitions
Sara spent her first career in IT, running large programmes across technology and the business change that came with them. She came to property about twenty years ago and has been buying and reshaping it ever since, in Australia, the UK and Portugal.
Her skill is shaping and solutions, and it comes straight out of the programme management: take something tangled, work out what it could become, and find the route to it. She is a connector by instinct, so most of the deals that go anywhere start with a conversation she went and had. She has also been on the wrong side of a joint venture, which is why she is exact about who she works with now.
She lives in Portugal, where the company’s Portuguese arm is in planning.
Wendy Eatough
Head of Development
Wendy came to property from IT as well, starting out in software development on defence and telecoms projects, which is where the systems habit comes from.
She bought her first house at twenty-one. She owns property in Scotland, Wales and England, most of it bought in a state nobody else wanted and brought back into use.
Her passion is walking through a property and seeing the layout it could have rather than the one it has. Which wall is in the wrong place, which room is earning nothing, how the space will really work for the people living in it. Done properly that serves both ends at once: tenants get somewhere worth staying, and the money behind the building works harder because the building does.
The useful part is where those two records differ. Sara thinks in shapes: what a deal needs to become, whether it’s worth doing at all, and who to call to make it possible. Wendy thinks in detail, the survey and the clause on page four that nobody read, which is where most deals actually come apart. We each walk the buildings in our own country, Wendy in the UK and Sara in Portugal, and then the other one asks the questions we didn’t think to ask.
A deal that turned out worse than we were told
A portfolio in a northern seaside town took months of our time, and heads of agreement were agreed. Then we went to see it. The refurbishment it actually needed was nothing like what we had been told, and we walked away the same day. Just under three million pounds, and we’d rather lose the months than buy a portfolio on a description that wasn’t true.
That’s the part worth knowing about us. Nobody could have found it in the paperwork we were given, so we went and looked, and then we acted on what we found the same day instead of talking ourselves into it. If something doesn’t add up for us we’ll tell you early, and when it does add up we see it through.
What we decline
Commercial buildings turned into flats are the clearest thing we decline. In the current market those conversions aren’t stacking up, and what stops them stacking up is the renovation cost. The people making them work tend to be developers who own the building firm doing the work. We don’t, so we don’t pretend the numbers land differently for us than they do.
On any heavy renovation we need a team in that area with capacity at the time, which isn’t the same thing as knowing people there. A team already busy on one of our own refurbishments isn’t a team available for yours, and we’d rather say so at the start than find out halfway through.
Where our training came from
We have both invested heavily in our education, separately and together. Sara’s has been in Australia and the UK, and Wendy has mostly trained under mentors in the UK. We both still work with mentors now.
We mention it because the alternative to paying to learn something is learning it on a deal, and that’s a far more expensive way round.
The company
Partners In Property is a trading name of SW Partners In Property Ltd, company number 16034150. You can look all of that up on Companies House before you speak to us, and you should. We’d rather be checked than believed.
The full registered details are in the footer of every page.
Where to read more
This page is about the two of us. What we actually do with a property sits on its own page, and so does the lending side.
- Selling your property. What we buy, how the terms get built, and the questions sellers arrive with.
- Private lending. How lending to a property company works, and what can go wrong with it.
- Why both halves exist. How the buying and the lending fit together, on the home page.
- Working with us. For builders, agents, brokers, accountants and lawyers.