In this episode of WealthTalk, Christian Rodwell sits down with Guillaume Black, the award-winning founder and CEO of Property Filter, to unpack the strategies and mindset shifts that have fueled his journey from a 10-year property investor to Property Entrepreneur of the Year 2021.
If you’re serious about making property investment work for you in today’s market, this episode will give you a roadmap to success.
Guillaume shares valuable insights on what separates successful investors from the rest, breaking down the 4 top strategies working today—like assisted sales and buy-to-lease—that allow investors to thrive even in a fast-moving market.
They discuss the key to lead generation, why building relationships with estate agents is critical, and the power of asking “How can I?” instead of “I can’t.”
Listeners will discover how to use technology to streamline lead follow-up, keep pipelines full, and stop wasting time on ineffective tactics.
Plus, hear about Property Filter’s thriving Facebook community and how it’s empowering investors to find hidden deals.
Whether you're a new investor or a seasoned pro, tune in to learn how to leverage systems, focus on lead quality, and maximise your deal-making potential to build a sustainable property business.
Resources Mentioned In This Episode:
>> Special Offer! Property Filter: Find Great Deals Faster [Discount for WealthTalk Listeners]
>> Property Filter [Facebook Page]
>> WT192: ‘How To Find And Manage Hot BMV Property Deals In Minutes! w/ Guillaume Black’
Next Steps On Your Wealth Building Journey:
>> Join the WealthBuilders Facebook Community
>> Schedule a 1:1 call with one of our team
>> Become a member of WealthBuilders
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Christian Rodwell (00:02.018)
purpose of Wealth Talk is to educate, inform and hopefully entertain you on the subject of building your wealth. Wealth Builders recommends you should always take independent financial, tax or legal advice before making any decisions around your finances. Today's episode is brought to you by Wealth Builders Membership, a proven step-by-step process that helps you achieve financial security within two to three years. find out more, head to wealthbuilders.co.uk forward slash membership.
Welcome to this week's episode of Wealth Talk. My name is Christian Rodwell, the membership director for Wealth Builders, joined today by our founder, Mr. Kevin Whelan. Hello, Kevin. Hi, Chris. As always, good to be with you again. And a pleasure to hear from our favourite Frenchman. Indeed, yes. Returning today for his second experience on Wealth Talk is Mr. Guillaume Black. He's the CEO of Property Filter. And we know, Kevin, that we teach
seven different asset classes, seven pillars of wealth at wealth builders, but certainly one of the most popular assets is property. And one thing that property does involve is time. And anything that can help you to save time, whether that's researching, whether that's viewing, is a good thing. you know, the secret of wealth is always leverage. And anything you can do that helps that, whether it's, as you said, more people, but certainly software.
And tools, you know leverage all about tools. You remember that from your old GCSE math stage, you know, you pull a lever, you apply a small force, you move a bigger object. That's just leverage in action and using a good tool can help you. And I think what's impressed me with Guillaume is how the tool has become more sophisticated over time. And I think it's now getting to a place where
Pretty much anybody who's interested in property for reasons we'll discover would be well placed to have some tool that they would put in their armour to help them find more opportunities because everything is downstream from there. There are more skills you need than just finding property otherwise that wouldn't be much of a skill at all. But finding is a key skill, funding we know is a key skill.
Christian Rodwell (02:26.862)
But creativity and having the ability to see what other people don't see is quite critical in all of this as well. Absolutely. And of course, Guillaume has built a recurring income business. Another key area that we talk about in terms of creating financial security is having that consistency of predictable recurring income every month. Absolutely. And you can see that the numbers of subscribers
been increasing and he gives a little insight into that. what's interesting because we're in a recurring income and membership subscription business too, is how focused you must be on the end result of your client, your key person needs to get our result. And I think that's why it's always useful to talk to other businesses that focus on that.
And you can definitely see that Guillaume and his team are laser sharp on trying to find a better result for his subscribers. And if that keeps them coming back month after month and year after year, then that's a good business. But it's serving people well, because if something doesn't serve you, you stop. So in the conversation with Guillaume today, he talks about the four strategies that he's identified within his property filter community that are working now, as well as his three ways to make money in property.
Let's head on over now to our conversation with Guillaume Black. Guillaume, welcome back to Wealth Talk today. How are you? Christian, very good. Thanks so much for having me. Yeah, always great to speak with you. And it's been a while, hasn't it? Nearly 18 months since we last had you on the podcast. I remember you've just had your first child then, so how's things been going? Yeah, really good. Yeah, she's just 18 months, couple of days ago, but yeah, she's grown, right? So. yes.
Brilliant stuff. And I saw some photos all over Facebook that you've been busy doing events as well. So love to get stuck into all of that. But let me just say for anyone who didn't catch that first podcast, Guillaume, of course, you're the founder and CEO of PropertyFilter. You've been investing for over 10 years. You were the property entrepreneur.
Christian Rodwell (04:41.294)
of the year in 2021. some good credentials behind you. And we talked more about your background in the last episode and that was episode 192. So I'm going to put a link to that in the show notes for anyone who wants to go back and listen to that. But yeah, how's property filter been going over the last 18 months? What's new? Yeah, thank you. I think it should be a bit surreal. I can see myself listening to this whole episode and then listening to this, there's going to be something.
I hold myself to a standard where I value growth quite a lot and I aim to embarrassed by who I was 12 months ago. So I think listening to the other episode will be quite interesting. yeah, it's been doing really, really well. only good problems to have, right? So it's grown a lot. I think the last 18 months we would have done a race with some VCs that backed us. We've grown the team. We've grown...
our members and the service to our members quite a bit and the success stories of our members, know, and how many deals they've done. And this has been really super rewarding and I've grown more and more, you know, addicted to the impact, you know, this has, and we get people in our chat, you know, our live chat every day, know, thanking us because they found another deal and, and how it's just allowed them to actually get the results in property. So it's very, very humbling to have a, you know, play a small part in sort of people joining in.
carrier in property. it's been really rewarding. Yeah. And for anyone who's not familiar with property filter just gives the very, very quick overview. Yeah. So it's an online platform that helps you find hidden deals. it's the difference between, you know, because every success in property is downstream from your ability to find deals and it solves that very problem that you need to fix, And so it's the difference between you not really going anywhere for months or you actually doing deals, actually getting
the results and the things you signed up for when you made the jump or you got interested in this beautiful industry. So you're moving from obviously being a property investor yourself, which of course you still do, but then setting up a business, right? So a whole new load of things to learn about. And how long has it been now since you actually launched? Yeah, so it's interesting because I don't have a launch date. So this whole thing is an accident, you know, because we created Props Filter for ourselves. We went through the whole thing where, you know,
Christian Rodwell (07:01.228)
You commit to property, you go to the seminar, you join the courses and things like that. And then the reality is that it's not as simple as, you you read in books, right? And, you know, you're randomly scrolling through portals, you know, right moves on the lot, you're randomly booking viewings based on the pictures, the layout. And then you turn up, turn up at viewings where no one wants to do a deal. And then you move from this uninformed optimism, your hype, you know, your high fives you were doing at the event to this informed pessimism, know, where.
actually it's not, you know, and you think to yourself, there's no deals out there, nothing stacks, you know, and you, can become really disheartened, you know, and we find ourselves in this place and because we're engineers, I had a friend of mine basically code a little bit of something that would help us qualify which viewings we would do and which we don't. And then, fast forward, you know, you know, 18 months using the tool, it's where we started to get the awards, the recognition in the property space. and then other people wanted it, you know, so.
And this would have been sort of 18 months ago. sorry. This would have been sort of five. We would have written the first line of code sort of five, six years ago. And then we did property for ourselves for a couple of years. Didn't really do much on the software. And then other people wanted, you know, in on the methodology and our first reaction was like, well, build your own, know, like, why are you asking me? Really very, very immature, right? So you've got a picture of my dad's a teacher, my mom's a social worker, you know, they're retired now, but.
And I'm from France, right? So none of my friends have parents with a corn shop. entrepreneurial is... I had to add a blood transfusion to have it in my vein, So yeah, you don't really realize when this is an opportunity. And then we gave it away to a few of our friends. They started to do quite well. And then they asked us for more things. Could you code this? Could you build that? It would really help me with this.
And then, like, well, you we've had the discussion already, like, this is, you know, you need to build your own. And then say, well, we'll pay you. And they sort of talked us into investing bit more in building it. And that would have been two and a half years ago, I think, two and a half years ago, three years ago. Then we, yeah, three years ago, then we made it a bit better. And then we never really had a launch date, right? So, because I was, never...
Christian Rodwell (09:24.91)
We build it upside down. You wouldn't build a startup like we did because we build it for ourselves to work. then later on, we started to make it pretty basically. And most startups, if you go into a startup ecosystem, the whole idea is to do a pretty MVP, see if it sticks very quickly, and then figure out how to make it work later. Can you share some of the hot tips perhaps? I know you were analyzing, looking back at data, perhaps some strategies that used to work quite well and obviously the market changes. So definitely, definitely.
So I think one of the big challenges we looked at is all strategies don't work. So there's a lot of people that come to us that somehow found themselves on courses of a strategy that maybe worked in 2012. And I'm like, guys, I don't know who told you about this, but this thing has had its time. So things come and go. And it's the same with strategies. And if you think, like, Bytulet wasn't
If you look back like 50 years ago, there wasn't even a mortgage product. Barclays balance sheet would be business loans. And it's only later on that we had mortgages to buy our own homes. And then Bytoolit is quite recent. It's only 30 years. It came out in the 90s that you could use a mortgage product to put on a house to rent out. And so all of these things came and became really popular in the 90s. And then Bytoolit didn't work.
Then we went into HMOs and then we went to rent to HMOs. And then all of these things, again, if you look, then they work for a while and then because it's no one's out there, it's kind of high risk, high reward. And then it becomes regulated. Everybody's doing it. Everybody's jumping on it. There's more competition. Margins are tighter and then it stops working. And if you look at HMOs, it's great strategy. It still works today, but licensing was introduced 18 years ago.
So it's quite mature, you so you need to really understand the areas you invest in, know, and your market, who do you let for, and then rent to HMOs, you know, was a big thing born out of HMO portfolio builders, you know, who couldn't find the right letting agents, you know, because there were no specialist letting agents for HMOs. So they then created their own systems.
Christian Rodwell (11:49.388)
And then they started to do what was the most lucrative at the time, to do rent to rent. And it became a thing. But then we all know what happened to mortgage rates and inflation and bills. And it's really hard to make stack. And then again and again, then we had the wave of essays. And I know I've got a lot of friends who have quite large, in the fourth, four digits units essay portfolios under their own names or under management.
and the occupancy are not what they used to be only a few years ago, et cetera, et cetera. So it's like, okay, when something stops working, what's the next thing? And yeah, so that's the main thing is like really looking quite hard at the strategy you're picking and trying to look at something that works right now. So from us studying the success of our members, we've got identified four strategies that work right now. One is what we call all-sailing.
And I can explain that a bit more in another challenge, but basically it's positioning yourself at the center of the deals. Do lots of deals with a high momentum and sourcing a lot is easier than sourcing a little actually. Another one is assisted sales, know, and God knows what's going to happen with the budget, you know, but it could be even a better offer, you know, as an assisted sale because Storm Duty could go up, you know.
things around like buy too late is dead, you want to buy to lease, know, so massive growth into like supported living and things like that. And again, it's the wild west, you know, so it's high risk, high reward, you know, it's, it's hard for everyone. So low competition, higher margins, you know, and then in a similar way, it's lease to lease, which is basically back to back leasing of, you know, supported living leases on it's like rent to rent that works right now. So
People look at it and say, that sounds very complicated. There is no one course about it. Exactly. Exactly right. You want to be the only one doing it. Another challenge people have is they very much lack clarity. And I've had this forever where people come to our calls and they go, I want to do rent to rent and commercial to resi. And it's like, what the hell, right?
Christian Rodwell (14:10.382)
It doesn't make sense. You cannot put these two strategies in the same sentence. So there's only three ways of making money in property. You do it for cash flow, you do it to build a pot or you do it to buy actual boring assets like a long-term portfolio, low returns, low headaches. You can't retire on a portfolio rent-to-rent basically. So rent-to-rent is your cash flow and then your profits sort of...
building your pot are your flips and sourcing fees in some ways and assisted sales, your capital events. And then the third level is very much in blocks of flats, lease to charities or lease portfolio to supported living and things like that. So the passive of commercial property is really good. So people come in there and they say, I want to build a cash flow business and I want to have this huge 18 months turnaround develop.
commercial tourism development project. just doesn't make sense. helping people with like, most people are restrained to achieve what they want to achieve because they are funnel jumping from one shiny penny to another. Everything works, but everything's not right for you. people like, all people need is spend half an hour, half a day with themselves and doing a bit of introspection into what do they actually want. And then just focus on this for...
like six months, nine months, 12 months, know, and that's it. A couple of terms you use there, which perhaps just need a little bit of expanding for anyone who's not sure, one of them being the assisted sales. So, so can you just explain exactly what that, what that means? Yeah. So it's a really good offer. So basically instead of, instead of buying a property, doing it up and flipping it, you know, and selling it back where you incur a finance cost, you would need the deposit capital.
It's it's costly as well because you've got the stamp duty. You've got lots of purchasing costs and actually it kills the deal. There's no money in it. Once you do this and refill up the bathroom, the kitchen and put carpets everywhere, you're making money, right? Because it's all gone to the stamp duty. So a really good offer is an assisted sale. So it's basically helping the vendor sell their property. So you say, look, we'll go into a contract right now.
Christian Rodwell (16:33.422)
where you're struggling to sell this property at 150. But what we'll do is let's go into a contract and agreement right now and I'll help you achieve more. And we do a deal where I take a cut of what I help you. So it could be that you, let's say you spend five grand and you say, right, anything above 150 is for me or anything above 145 is for me.
Or you split the difference. can do a deal. Doing a deal is basically listening to the other party and whatever they're happy with. And then you could sell it for 180 and then buy a 10 grand, 20 grand based on your profit share. That's really the idea. And you don't have any of the finance costs, stamp duty costs, or any purchasing and holding costs basically during that period. You could, as part of the deal, pay for the mortgages for a period of time.
whatever it is that is painful for them to help them and do the deal. so can, anyone who is doing flips, know, there's a lot of small size developers who are living a lot of money. I speak to a lot of really well established small size developer who do a lot of flips to basically put capital into the assets that are going to hold, but they're a lot of money on the table because we could do three times more projects really by positioning the two offers. Here's the flip offer, here's the assisted sale offer.
And a lot of the time the vendors can achieve more with the assisted sale offer. basically you refurbish it before you flip it. that's assisted sale is one example, but you can do JVs. You can go into JV agreements, which is quite common on land developments. So let's go into an agreement. You put the land, I put the build, we split the profit when we sell this. But you could do it with the right lawyers. You can do it on smaller projects. I think anything where you'd have a bit of a
structural work or anything a bit more involved, I would have a JV agreement rather than a lease option of some sort of agreement. Most people don't realize we can do this and that works really well right now for any stock that's sticking around. So am I right to almost say in the current market to be successful in terms of finding deals that
Christian Rodwell (18:48.334)
old phrase of Jack of all trades, master of none, you actually need to have those tools in your back pocket. You need to understand how to look at a deal and apply different strategies to that. Yeah. Nothing here is difficult. You're going to flip the property anyway, so it's just a different way of acquiring and controlling it. So I think once you've understand how does one buys a property, how does one sells a property,
The next thing to understand is how does one control the property with a different type of contract? And then it doesn't change anything other than that. I think there is a big confusion with strategies and people bag themselves into strategies. And that's one of the challenges we see actually. So it's like, I'm just an investor or I'm just a sourcer. And this is because I don't know if it's the education or the literature, but people identify as a strategy and then it's all they can do.
But really the most successful people we see on the platform, you speak to them and they go, I just do a bit of property. What do you mean? I just do a bit of this, a bit of that. So they will flip some properties. will pass on some, they will basically, they attract a lot of deals and then they will pass them on to other parties. So let's say someone comes to them, there's not enough money to do like a flip on it or an assisted sale on it. So they'll refer it to another agent. And then every lead is worth a minimum of 500 pounds, you know.
when you refer to an agent. Maybe there's something more involved where they need a quick, quick, quick sale. OK, let's stick it into an auction and you get a referral from the auction house. Or you can do all sorts of other things over there. So it's not really that complicated. And the confusion with strategy is people think HMO is a strategy. People think commercial tourism is a strategy. There's different tactics.
to acquire property, acquire and control properties. are different tech, like these are purchase, exchange and delayed completion, assisted sales. It's all like once you've done once, you can learn the next one, and you learn the next one. And it's not that complicated. So this is an acquisition strategy. And then there's how do you monetize it? So you can hold and turn it into an HMO. You can hold and do a single let. You can hold and pass it to a supported living strategy.
Christian Rodwell (21:12.246)
you can flip it, maybe flipping it is people will not understand you. You can pass it to an agent, can pass it to an auction house, you can pass it to a sourcer who's got a list of investors and you sort of split the fees. There are all sorts of ways of monetizing every deal. And I think where people mistake is they think they need to control the whole thing. They need to have the compliance in place. They need to...
They need to have the whole deal progression team in place. They need to have the old investor funnel and things like that. In reality, if you just position yourself to attract a lot of deals and understand that there are channels to go and shift them, and then you work with this challenge, and it's as simple as working with your local estate agent and giving them some of the leads you've got. And when we do the sale, they give you 500 pounds and ask you for more. So it's as simple as that.
Yeah, we say the word a lot mindset, right? But it is true. And I was actually playing the Rich Dad cash flow game last night in Bournemouth, my local town. And I always quote Robert Kiyosaki, when he says about changing your language and people who say, I can't afford it is to ask yourself a different question of how can I afford it? And I imagine you're talking a similar thing here about people who just say, I can't.
find deals or I can't make it work. It's well, how can I find them? How can I make them work? And as you say, there's lots and lots of different ways. Yeah. So there's two things here I will pick up on. So one is the, I call it the reach that for that fallacy. It's my own trademark. I've not put it anywhere, right? But I've just shared this at the event the other day, because I think because of the literature we've learned or we've been taught, you know, like reach that for that, you know, it's on my shelf, right? It's all started with this for me years ago, but this teaches us that
We want to, property is great because you're going to buy it, refurbish it, tenant it, and then hold it forever for the long term. And then we are stuck in this mindset of like property means holding, but it's super slow, right? You can't, the problem is when you do this, even though you've got high cashflow, HMOs or whatever, you run out of capital really quick. And what we find people do really well and what the thing we shared, you know, with this, this whole system, which I described earlier of
Christian Rodwell (23:33.792)
you passing on a lot of deals is you make profit on every lead you've got, you know, and all of the sudden it's like, well, I can't afford it. Therefore it's not worth my time to look at it. It's like, I can monetize everything. Some I will buy, some I will make money on. And then people end up, you know, passing, passing away and monetizing two deals for every one they buy, you know, or something like that. And, and then the thing when you do this is you've got this huge momentum of doing deals all the time. So
One of the big challenges I see people do as well, you know, or have is they go on to Prop filter, they find their deals, you know, and then they sort of pause, you know, for a while. And then they come back, know, six months later or a year later. So they are either sourcing or they are either doing the project. And it's like, stop, go, stop, go, stop, go. And you've got this huge, like this huge friction to start, right? So it's like riding a bike, you know, where at the start you've got like this momentum, you know, like it's really, you're on the small gear and you go up and up and up.
And imagine every time you turn, you do one turn of the pedal, you stop your bike again. you know, it's all, you're never going to be on time for work, right? What you do is you accelerate, you gain momentum, and then it's effortless, you know, to, to get you going. And property is the same, you know, like if you position yourself in the place where you attract deals and you've got the channels to go and shift all of them, deals just come to you all the time, right? And it really changes your, your, your mindset there because you don't have to buy everything, you know, you don't have to
You don't have to afford to buy everything because you've got channels to monetize everything. So that was a huge thing we've learned looking at the success of our members. The people who do 30 deals a year, 50 deals a year on Props Filter, they don't buy all of their deals. They buy the best ones and they monetize all the other ones to finance the ones they buy. So that was really insightful. Yeah, no, that is interesting. It reminds me actually, I was listening to a podcast, Daniel Priestley.
was on the other day. And he was saying, you know, his mentor taught him way, way back that everything begins with lead generation. It all comes downstream from there. Right. So, you know, talk about that, you know, keeping your pipeline constantly filled, but there's filling it with good leads and there's filling it with bad leads. Right. And lead quality, let's just talk about that. So if you have anything to say on this. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, I think people don't, they come to property because, you know, it's very forgiving, you know,
Christian Rodwell (25:54.83)
Like quite frankly, any idiot can buy a property, any idiot with a bit of money can buy a property, put a tenant in it and it'll be all right. And we don't go into property with a lot of, we're not very clued up in business in general. We're not very clued up in marketing or operations and specifically in marketing, people don't really understand things like cost of leads, quality of leads. There's a lot of metrics around that, and the conversions you had, lifetime value and the value per lead and then your cost per lead and things like that.
And very, very early on, in the way we thought of and built property filter, we had these things where we ranked all the different channels where you can get leads. And leads are, could be a vendor calling you, it can be stuff on Rightmove, and then the quality of it. So you go on Rightmove, you've got right now, I don't know, 800,000 leads. 90 % of it is a waste of time.
The quality is probably the poorest it can be. So why do you say that? Let me pick that up. 90 % of the properties on sale on RightMe are a waste of time. Yeah, because people are not motivated, right? So you know, like, okay, the way you make deals is... So I've got these three success axioms. The first one in property. So the first one is all your success in property are downstream from your ability to do deals. And that's really...
echoing what you were saying before. And if you're good at that, you'd make all the money in the world. You build all the portfolio you want. And the second one is that property is a people business. Deals are bought from motivated sellers and property is numbers game. The deals are in the follow-up. so moving on from the first axiom to the second one, really, if you run them, like this is my story. When I first started years ago, randomly scrolling through the portals,
projecting your strategy on the property, you say, this would do a great HMO because of the layout. And then you turn up, no one wants to do a deal. And you're just going to waste your time. Believe me, I've been there. It's why we created the software. And then you just waste your time. And the opportunity cost of you looking at the wrong properties means you're missing out on everything else. So this is one channel. So low quality, right move leads, living into chance. And so the average
Christian Rodwell (28:15.438)
quality of leads, if you were to put a number on it, would be quite poor. Another one would be the opposite, where we go, all right, so let me go onto Google Map or some other place and let me find all the corner plots. And then let me send a letter to all the corner plots. you might buy the title, which is three quid. It's going to be seven quid at end of the year, by the way, so just so you know. And then you create your own system over here. You create a list. You might pay...
a VA or someone in the office to create this list, and you might be able to create like 10 properties a day. Then you create your campaigns and send the letters. And before you know it, you've not sent the letter yet and every lead does cost you 20 pounds. And then what's the quality of it going to be? So the only qualification you have for this is it's got a common plot. But remember, we're looking for motivated sellers, and the clue is in the name. They need to be...
willing to sell, right? And so if you do the maths on that, and I've done it a while back, so there are 33 million properties in the country, right? A million change ends every year. So if you are randomly sending out letters, you know, because we have a garden or whatnot, you've got 0.7 % chance, is, know, so sorry, 230 of these, 230,000 of these properties are bought by investors. So if I go 230,000 divided by 33 million,
I've got 0.7 % chance that my letter goes to someone that might sell their house in the next 12 months, never mind them being motivated. So you've spent 20 quid just building your list, then you need to send a thousand letters, well, let's say, let's call it 100 letters for, so that's sort of 2000 pounds cost per lead. And then amongst these, you need to filter the ones that are going to be motivated or not motivated.
So it costs you 2000 pounds to be on the phone with someone. know, like this is under quality. It might not be there because the problem with this is everyone wants a direct to run the deal, but everyone is doing direct to owner marketing, right? So you're sending letters to people who might not want to sell right now. And it's why the cost per lead is huge, right? And so, and then you need to filter through them. And the premise you'll have, you'll waste a lot of time. So
Christian Rodwell (30:36.622)
I did this years ago, right? So you send the landlord letters to the HMO register and then, yeah, yeah, I'll sell you my HMO for a million pounds. It's like, what do mean? Yeah, I 5 % yield on commercial valuation for the rent you will get after you refurbish it. okay, great. So it's like, they're not motivated, right? I'll sell you my house for 10 times what it's worth today. I'll move with my family, right? So this is not real territory, right?
And then you'll find a lot of people get disheartened by this because they spend a lot of money on these things and it doesn't really, really work. this is what we talked about the, to be a bit clued up in marketing, there's a cost per lead, there's a quality of lead and everyone should have a little table with like high level assumptions or high level tests and results of what this means for them in their area and for their strategy. And then this is
philosophy we went into when we created Prop filter and it was super unsexy at the time because what do you mean? It's like a filter thing for right move. No, thank you. But the sort of contrarian truth behind it was behind those actions. like, we're looking for motivated sellers. The clue is in the name. So amongst what's on the market, 90 % of it is a waste of time. So how can I find the needles in the A stack? So it was all about basically
creating this magnet that pulls the needles of the ace tag. And then now we've got the ability to send them letters. So you go straight to the motivated sellers and you can go direct to vendor as well. yeah, no secret. People do really well from it. And what does that look like for a user of property filter then? Is it just literally selecting different criteria and then that's just going to show you those highly motivated sales? Yeah.
So basically the idea is the system is the equivalent of having Rightmove, Supply, OnTheMarket, all these places, all in one place. It matches and merges the listings from everywhere. And then we enrich it with lot of other, anything you can think about, any data you can think about, property, it's all there. And then you'll have some criteria. And then it will just highlight amongst the, let's say you've got 100 results for your criteria in your area. It will tell you, here's the five leads to go and work on today.
Christian Rodwell (32:58.848)
is the top five motivated sellers, here's the top 10 motivated sellers in your area. And what this empowers people to do is really do 10 times fewer viewings, send 10 times fewer letters, but then they have 10 times more interesting conversations. And that's actually, that leads me into one of the learnings we've had, know, recently, is people ask themselves the wrong question. people go to me all the time, I can't find deals, know? So what do you mean? yeah, nothing stacks.
So yeah, nothing stacks at asking price, know, like what are you on about? So I think because we've been used to this and I've experienced this first time just recently. I'll tell you in a minute. So people are used to this and we build a lot of beta bits and me included because of the likes of Amazon where the price is the price, you you add to your card, you know, your basket, you check out and it's delivered to you next day. And then people think like, okay, I'm scrolling through some property listings online.
price is the price. I want to have the keys tomorrow. Yeah, nothing stacks. And it's called an asking price. For a of the things, the clue is in the name, right? So ignore the asking price. And the big haha moment we gave to our members was in this where deals are not found. Deals are made. Deals are made, not found. So what you want is identify, find the motivated sellers because they are not worth
you investing in the relationship, investing in the letter, investing in your time, because they are the best. In terms of time opportunity costs, these are the best places you want to spend your time with, the best people you want to spend your time with. Because when you're speaking to your neighbor who's got crazy expectations for their house, you're wasting your time. You're not speaking to the ones that are really motivated and will want to do a deal. deals are made not found. So you want to go and speak with these vendors that are more motivated.
And then invest in this relationship, the rapport building, the negotiation, follow some of the frameworks of negotiation you can learn to make them drop the price and drop the price and drop the price and drop the price. And before you know it, you've got these incredible deals. So for anyone listening now who perhaps is thinking, well, hang on, if everyone's using that software and everyone's filtering to get very best motivated sellers, surely then everyone's going to be contacting them. Is that the case?
Christian Rodwell (35:24.706)
Yeah, so there's a million properties changing around every year. We're still below 2000 members just yet. And the reality, if I look at the size of our market, how many active investors are there, there's plenty of properties to go and buy. And it doesn't matter which market, it's great right now because vendors are really more motivated. And I think we're seeing the bottom of that.
the budget, there is a lot of uncertainty and it's just like deals territory. Right now people are filling their boots on Prop filter, which is really great to see. And then who knows, know, next year there might be a lot more certainty in terms of what does tax and fiscal policies look like so people know what's going to happen. And interest rates might go down. I can see interest rates going down quite drastically in the next year. And then everyone and their dog will go back into property again, you know.
So there really is a really good window of opportunities. And I think it's why we've grown really fast, especially in the recent few months, because people need the best tool to go and do the deal. Because you're not really competing among members, because you think it's everywhere in the country. So everywhere in the country, there are people on probes filter. You're competing with every other idiot, following the right move alerts and queuing up at viewings where no one wants to do a deal. So that's really the...
advantage. So, okay, it's always a pleasure. Your brain is just always working hard. can, I can, can hear it. And, know, I think that's the beauty of, of why the property filter community has grown because it's, not just getting access to piece of software, it's getting access to you and your brains and your experience and your team. Obviously, you know, we love recurring income property is good for recurring income, but you've got a recurring income business model now as well, which is great.
You talked about how much that's grown in the last 12 to 18 months. So are you growing your team? Are you growing your systems and putting leverage into play? Yeah, we investing hugely in the team. usually in the team, the system, every year we rebuild it. People don't really realize, but one is for scalability for to cope with the amount of people on it all the time. And another one is just to be always the forefront, the latest of what's available in terms of technology.
Christian Rodwell (37:47.062)
And this is built to last, right? There's very much a big enterprise solution behind the code. we're not some dude in some garage. A few years ago, there was a company called Boomin who was set up by the guys who created Purple Bricks. And they were going out to take on Rightmove. And obviously, it's very challenging. They raised, I think, like $35 million and they burned through it in a few years.
And then sadly, everyone was laid off, right? So I've got some very senior team from these, some senior guys who came straight out of this. So we're really, really pleased with the team, especially the dev and product team. And I think it doesn't really matter how good is your team if you don't listen to your members, your customers. And because of the live chat, because we are out and about on every event all the time, and our members, just, they love it. They feel like they're part of it because we've...
We've built so much of the things they suggested. They really feel involved. And then we just created a really cool culture around that. And I want to continue with it. So we get huge, huge insights for our members, the day to day how they use it. And then I can't build it fast enough. So we've got quite a big team now to deliver on the vision, but also on the things people need to help them find more hidden deals. it's really great.
If I look at the very, very short term, so one of the big highlights before the end of the year, so we're going to beta launch the mobile app, which I've got on my phone now. And we're going to launch it to some of our yearly members. And I some of the wealth builder members will have access to it as well as part of that. Just to try it out and test. And then this is going to become a product on its own. like your...
your little, I know your little assistant on viewings and deals and for all things, know, conversations with vendors. There's lots of things that are going to come in the mobile app and it's really going to even more form part of what the day to day of what property investors use as a tool. So it's really cool. And yeah, we're just investing in, know, all the time. So going to make it a lot simpler. said at the start, you know,
Christian Rodwell (40:02.734)
We focused on making it work to start with. never thought this was going to be a product. And then we're making it pretty later. So it's just making it simpler as well. So as much as we're adding to it all the time, we're also simplifying it because we understand that it's like the people who sleep in tents outside the Apple store to get the latest iPhone, but it's not the same type of people that you come later on when you go to the mass market.
So now we have all the early adopters, they love it and we're just making it a lot simpler every day, just simplifying it so that it's a bit more inclusive for the people who are not as tech savvy. So anyone who's tried it out before, they might want to try it again and et cetera. yeah, it's just very, very exciting and very exciting to see the results of members have with it. yeah. Yeah. You very kindly offered and provided a discount for WealthBuilder members and anyone listening in fact.
who can get access to that, a special offer on the annual plan. And I'm going to put the link in the show notes for that. And there's a trial as well. So you can try that out completely for free, can't you? And I know you and Kevin are often speaking on the same platform. We love working with you guys and it's really good. Thanks so much for sharing with us today, Guillaume. If anyone wants to check you out, follow you on the socials. You've always got some good insights. Where's the best place for them to head? Yeah, I'm an old school Facebook.
is probably the best. Facebook LinkedIn is probably the best. I really suck at Instagram. All right, Guillaume. Thanks so much for sharing today. Thanks so much.
Christian Rodwell (41:38.802)
Thanks to Guillaume for sharing all of those insights. We'll pull out some of those wealth lessons in just a second, Kevin. Before we do that, let's head to Trustpilot where we have been running more events. I've got a review from Ben who attended recently in London. I saw Ben there and he said, I've been to a few meetups now for wealth builders and I have personally known Christian who helps run the events for many years now. I love going to these events that are well run in lovely surroundings, plus you get to meet like-minded people.
What more could you ask for? If you haven't already and are thinking about it, then do come along to one of the meetups so you can experience it and see for yourself. If I play to you, Chris, I think the I think both you and Gior mention Robert Kiyosaki in your tale there and both of you have been inspired in some way. So while we don't want to take every lesson as if it's absolutely nailed for sure because things change and I think.
not just the implementation of Kiyosaki's ideas through his game, but also I think property strategies change. And it isn't that they change, it's that what's working is always going to change. Now, we know that Guillaume spoke about that. And by the way, sometimes you might need to play it at a slower speed because that man can talk, can't he? But talk with enthusiasm and purpose. I say that in a very...
a genuine way and I mean I'm always amazed that he could talk so fast in a language which isn't his own you know it's just like you know I pride myself on my French but I definitely could not do that absolutely not absolutely not no anyway the fact that the lesson that I picked from that was yes economic circumstances will change and what will work specifically will depend on
a number of those circumstances, including interest rates, the mood of the industry. And we can see at the moment there's a genuine exodus of landlords, know, leaving, being a landlord who made good money historically when they bought at lower prices. So the real skill for me that I'm seeing, Chris, is instead of picking a strategy,
Christian Rodwell (44:00.928)
and being pigeon-holed in a box that says, you know, I do this strategy or that strategy. I would, if I was getting into property now for the first time, I'd get an overview of all the strategies. In other words, in the same ways you look at wealth, you've seen them with wealth builders talk about wealth. We don't say the way to build wealth is use this pillar. We say the way to build wealth is to understand all of the seven ways that you can...
implement to start to build your wealth but underneath every pillow there's a series of strategies and series of tactics and that is good to get a grounding in them first so that you can make an intelligent decision about how you want to build your wealth that's unique to you that reflects what you love to do that reflects your own personal DNA. So it is with property and I Gion makes a point which is I think all too often
that property educators, no disrespect intended to any of them, often will choose a strategy and teach a strategy and say this is the strategy of the month, this is the strategy that's going to work right now. And while that may be true, it's still better, I think, to get principles established and to know how most of the strategies work so that you can apply creativity.
So that as you then make the decision, which is always the first decision beyond education, we know that from the Wheel of Wealth, Chris, once you start to take action, then at least you've got enough knowledge to say every time I find something, what's the filter, my own filter that I can put this through, decide could this make me some money, could this make somebody else some money? And you start to see...
every property through multiple lenses like a kaleidoscope rather than does this stack this strategy right now? You know what saying? So that you could find somebody else who would want that strategy. And if you do that, then and you become focused on the value for others, not just yourself, then as Guillaume quite rightly says, you become a magnet that attracts other people. And I think most of our best wealth builders have a magnetism
Christian Rodwell (46:23.424)
about their personality because yes, they want to build their own wealth, but they're very keen to ensure that other people are profiting and gaining along the way. it interesting as well, they say success leaves clues. We recently had Aaron Curry, very successful property investor and educator on the podcast and he was saying how he's right slap bang in the middle of what he sees as a like a
golden 18-month buying period in property and Guillaume saying a similar thing that he feels now is just such a golden time, you know, before things change and interest rates perhaps drop again and then everyone starts flooding back into the market. So, you know, just something to perhaps bear in mind if you're listening now. Well, yeah, I mean, I think it's always right to listen to what other people think the best opportunities are. But remember, wealth is a lifetime purpose so that being sensitive
to what's going on around you always, know, with budget changes, government changes, everything changes. So you have to be fleet of foot financially. You have to be able to respond quickly. And you can only do that if you almost begin your wealth journey knowing that you need to be well-rounded in a whole range of different things and not just one thing, because the problem with one thing, Chris, as we know, is it's dangerous.
You know, one strategy can make you lazy. One strategy can catch you out. If you were in service accommodation strategy when COVID struck, you were in trouble. You were in big trouble. You know, if you do everything to max out your leverage, for example, you know, if you somebody will teach a strategy saying you need to max out and if you can get 75, 80 % leverage on your property, do it every time. Okay. But what happens when interest rates go up?
You know, so there's always a balance to play, which is why I quite like the idea of finding opportunities and selling those opportunities, either selling them to somebody else, selling them for a flip so you can make a profit. Because as you bank more money along the way to building your cash flow, you can use that banking, that extra profit to serve you in other ways. You could use it to produce your debt.
Christian Rodwell (48:39.362)
So your debt exposure starts to reduce over time. So you become less concerned when interest rates change. You could use it to build another pillar. You could use it to get more education. There's a whole raft of things that if you apply your brain and see yourself as an ethical opportunist, always looking to ethically solve somebody else's problem, which is the heart of entrepreneurship after all, solving other people's problems out of profit. And if you could do that.
then I think you're on a path to accelerate your wealth because then every property opportunity you look at is potentially the source of some revenue for you or for somebody else along the way. Yeah, yeah, that word diversification, isn't it? Not just across different assets, but within an asset class, can diversify. Certainly property gives you that ability. And Guillaume talked about the three ways that people tend to make money in property and they're not exclusive necessarily, but either cash flow for that monthly recurring income.
building your cash pot, as you just mentioned there, Kevin, or building that long term asset base for that capital appreciation and just having the different skill sets, really different ways to purchase and control the property, different ways to fund the property and different ways to monetize the property. So multi skills, which you need in this day and age, this fast moving world that we live in today. Yeah, and I think it comes down to one word, Kristen's creativity.
I think wealth is about being creative and the problem with the old style of building wealth, know, which is have a house, put money in your pension and save some money in cash in an ice area, there's no creativity there. It's a place where in the end you become a creature of default and I suppose delegating money to third parties doesn't sharpen your own saw. So you never really learn anything. And as a result, when you get to
The average level of income for people in the UK when they retirement age, around 15,000 pounds a year, they suddenly get a shock. You got a shock, didn't you? I spoke recently about how most people's pensions are worth about 4 % from a continued income point of view. The average pension pot in the UK says 100 grand. That's 4 grand. You can't live on 4 grand. I'm sure somebody could live on 4 grand.
Christian Rodwell (51:03.63)
But you can't live on teeny tiny sums of money, It takes too long and you're just out of control to try and build a pension fund and hope for the best. When the stock market could take it away from you once you built it. You have to build other income streams and you have to build more creativity in your life, build more relationships in your life and build more resilience in your life. And these are skills that we're so proud that
We've identified these and we teach them at the very heart of what we do in wealth builders. And if you're listening to this and you're thinking, I like the idea of property, but I like the idea of how to create your own ventures, how to build other strategies. know, where would people go to find out a bit more about what we're saying about these things? Because we're very passionate about this, Sure. Well, head to wealthbuilders.co.uk forward slash membership. That will tell you about the different offerings that we
provide to help you wherever you are in your wealth building journey, whether you're right at the beginning, whether you're a business owner, whether you're an employee, you know, we've got a path that's proven where we're helping our members every week to move from financial insecurity to financial security and then beyond that, financial independence. And by the way, you don't have to have property. You know, the fact that Guillaume was talking about property, many people do. Property is so easy to focus on. I'm not going to repeat what Guillaume said that any idiot can buy property. Well,
Probably any idiot can. But the point about property is we love it, don't we? Because it's tangible. We love it because when you learn a strategy, you can replicate it. So many easy ways to teach it. So property is a great asset, but it's certainly not the only way you can use to build wealth. And we would encourage you to understand all of the different ways to build wealth so that you can choose and match the right overall pillars, as we refer to them, to who you are.
and not worry about anything else. But if you listen to what Guillaume says, he's saying he's giving wealth building principles, but he's just applying them to property because that's what he does. But those lessons you could apply to business, you could apply them to investing, you can apply them everywhere. just touching again on what we've said there about the membership.
Christian Rodwell (53:22.742)
And, you know, sometimes people are overwhelmed, Kevin, because there's just so much choice out there. They don't know which strategies they should be doing or whether they should even be doing property. And that's the heart of how we approach helping our members is to get to know you first and foremost, get to know what your profile, your personality, your interests are. And then we map that out and we can clearly see then which path is the right one for you. And as I said, if you want to find out more about that, head to WealthBuilders.co.
dot UK forward slash membership. And we also have a wealth hub. So our members get access to exclusive discounts from our partners and great people like Guillaume. And Guillaume has actually extended that offer to anyone listening now to this episode, where you can get a really special discount on, on property filter and try it out for free. So make sure you hit the link in today's show notes, if you want to go and take advantage of that offer.
And just finally, Guillaume said something towards the end. said, you know, property is a numbers business, but property is also a people business. And just coming back to the importance of relationships and understanding that it's not all about just trying to get the best deal, understanding what the other person needs and wants is a good place to come from, to get a win-win for both sides. Yeah, it's an interesting one. And, you know, if you you to listen to some of the sort of seminal books on
you know, on how to do things really, really well, like Stephen Covey, seven habits of highly effective is always think, win. I mean, there's obviously a danger where in every economic circumstances change and people start to exit and there will be exits. There are exits from business, there are exits from property, know, landlords, as we said earlier on. The key is always to listen to what their needs are and help them solve their needs.
And you can't second guess their needs, you have to understand people. And you can only understand people by spending time and building relationships. And whether that's in person or on Zoom, you do need to build those skills and flex those muscles. And I would say, go out if you haven't done and go with somebody else if you're not naturally the kind of outgoing, gregarious, blazey type of person on the wealth dynamic scale.
Christian Rodwell (55:45.346)
But you still have to build relationships. You might be creative, but somebody else can work with you to meet the people while you are the creative person solving the problem. So you can be in joint ventures doing joint ventures, you know? So I think the real skill is to recognize that in a culture of who, not how, there's always a how and normally somebody's discovered it. And in wealth builders, in our community, and of course, other communities like Guillaume's, there are many people who share that. So I would say get involved.
in some communities and you'll see their creativity. Creativity is an interesting skill Chris because know the creativity is kind of taught to us when we're a child and then it goes, it? The school stops getting involved in the creativity side of things and everything starts to go down as sort of a more funnelled approach to a curriculum and I think when people build wealth that creativity needs to come back and that's why we love to share it, we love to teach it.
And by working with other people, go, wow, I didn't know you could do that. And then that opens the door for you to step right in and copy if that's the right strategy for you. Call modeling. Always model somebody else who's done it. And I think employed people often, Chris, get a bit kind of, they didn't realize people shared as much. It's almost like why aren't they protecting themselves, like protecting their homework when they were a kid, you know?
And what I'm thrilled by is our community in particular is a very sharing community. In fact, it's one of the values we asked them to sign up to on the Declaration of Independence, which is, you you're willingly share with others and be humble to accept help from others if you need it. that sort of extend your hand forward and extended backwards to both ask and receive help is a very important value, I think.
that we believe is important and I hope that resonates with our listeners. Okay, we hope you enjoyed listening to today's episode. Thanks once again to Guillaume. And if you did enjoy today's show, then hit the share button, send it to a friend and we would very much appreciate you helping us to spread the word. Kevin, we'll be back same time, same place next week. We will indeed, my friend. And until then, see ya.
Christian Rodwell (58:09.72)
We hope you enjoy today's episode. Don't forget that we are constantly updating our resources inside the WealthBuilders membership site to help you create, build and protect your wealth. Head over to wealthbuilders.co.uk slash membership right now for free access. That's wealthbuilders.co.uk slash membership.