Some properties don’t sell the conventional way

That’s most people, and it’s reason enough.

Selling up the conventional way asks a lot of somebody who is already tired of it. Serve notice, wait out the voids, put right the things you’ve been living with, then sell into a market that will find fault with all of it. Months of work at precisely the point you’ve run out of appetite for any of it.

We take it as it stands. Tenants, arrears, the licensing renewal, the boiler you’ve been nursing along, the one who rings at eleven at night. From the date responsibility passes to us, which is written into whatever we agree and isn’t always a completion date, it stops being your problem. You don’t empty it, you don’t refurbish it, you don’t market it.

Nothing has to be wrong for us to be interested. Being finished with it is a perfectly good reason to sell, and it’s the reason we hear most often.

It depends on how it’s paid, and the two move together.

Sometimes less than the open market. You’re selling a complication as well as a building, and where we take that on and pay quickly, the price reflects it.

Sometimes more than the property is worth today. Where the payment is spread over a period rather than handed over in one go, we can often pay more than anyone would put on the table in a lump sum. That matters most when the lending on a property is higher than its value, because a straight sale means the owner carries the loss personally. Paid over time, the property can realise enough that they don’t.

Which of those applies depends on what you need. If you need the money on a date, that’s one shape. If what you need is to walk away without losing money, that’s a different one. Tell us which, and we’ll tell you whether there’s a version that works for both of us.

That’s one of the situations we’re most often called about, and it has two answers.

The owner takes the hit, settles the shortfall and walks away. Straightforward, and expensive.

Or the sale is structured over a period, so the property has time to realise enough to clear what’s owed. Slower, and the owner doesn’t lose their money.

Which is right depends on how quickly you need to be out and how much of the shortfall you’d be carrying. Both are real options and we’ll say which we think fits.

Then we’d usually buy the company rather than the buildings.

Buying the shares is often the cleaner exit, and it’s the thing owners are most often told is too complicated to bother with. It isn’t, but it does need doing properly.

If the company holds several assets and you only want to part with some of them, that’s also a conversation. It’s a more involved one and the answer is less predictable.

We don’t give tax or accounting advice and we won’t. Anything structured this way gets shaped with accountants and lawyers alongside, so that the asset protection and the tax position are right for everyone at the table. That work is a cost, and it goes into the deal like any other.

Then nobody needs to.

There are no viewings, no board outside, no listing, and nobody walking through your house on a Saturday morning. We look at it once, with you, and the rest is paperwork.

People come to us for this more often than you’d think. Somebody in the household is ill and the last thing they need is strangers in the hallway. A marriage is ending and the neighbours do not need to find out from a sign. A business is in difficulty and a For Sale board would say so to everyone who drives past.

None of that’s anyone else’s business, and selling this way means it stays that way.

They stay, and that’s usually the reason a sale like this is possible at all.

We buy with people living in the building. Nobody is served notice to make the numbers work, and we don’t empty a property to sell the pieces. Tenants keep their homes and their tenancies carry over, and the relationships you have built with them are respected rather than reset.

If some of them are vulnerable, or the building houses people who would struggle to find somewhere else, say so early. It changes what we need to check, not whether we’re interested.

After completion the standard of the building is our problem, including the parts you’ve been putting off. Low EPCs, the boiler, the communal areas.

No. And you don’t have to sell it all at once either.

A portfolio isn’t a number of properties, it’s one problem. Most of the pain people have selling one is that the only exit anyone offers breaks it into pieces, and eleven separate sales means eleven sets of legals, eleven chains and eleven chances for the whole thing to stall. Taking it as one is the part other buyers won’t do.

Where it suits the seller better, we buy in stages across a period rather than in a single transaction. If the seller is older, those stages are structured so that what’s still to be paid forms part of their estate. If they die partway through, their children inherit the rest of the exit instead of losing it.

We’ve structured purchases this way. We haven’t yet had one run its full course through an estate, though we’ve seen it done.

Then the first question is whether we have a team near you.

We only take renovation-heavy projects where we can stand over the quality, which means having people we trust within reach of the building. Who’s available and where changes month to month. If we haven’t got anyone in your area we’ll ask the network, and often we find someone.

So it’s worth asking rather than assuming. The honest answer depends on the week.

No. It’s frequently the reason someone is selling.

Licensing tightening, EPC standards moving, a building nobody will lend against until work is done: these are costs, and costs go into the shape of the deal. They stop a normal sale. They don’t stop this one.

Then don’t. Tell us about them and we’ll price it in.

Longer than an estate agent will promise you and shorter than eleven separate sales. Beyond that it depends what’s in the way, and anyone giving you a number before they’ve seen the paperwork is guessing. What we’ll do is tell you the steps in advance and tell you where we’re at each one.

Costs are part of what gets agreed rather than a fixed list. Most deals of this shape need accountants and lawyers involved, and who bears what is settled as part of the terms, in writing, before anything is committed.

It can. Sales like these fall over for the same reasons as any other, and occasionally for reasons nobody could have planned for.

What we do about it is tell you early. If something changes at our end you hear it that week rather than at the end of the month. We don’t tie you into an exclusivity period that stops you talking to anybody else while we make our minds up, and we don’t charge you for the privilege of discovering we’re the wrong buyer.

The real protection is at the start rather than the end. We look properly and we say no quickly. A no on day one costs you an afternoon. A no in month three costs you the summer.