By Trustbricks.

How we systemised our business and introduced technology to quickly and easily build residential property portfolios at scale

Residential property investments are favoured over many investment choices in the UK when it comes to getting the most out of your money. Property has historically delivered strong returns for investors in the UK and there’s an imperative need to provide a sufficient number of homes to meet the continued growth in demand. This alone can help to understand why more and more investors want to invest in this asset class.

The residential property sector is presenting consistent opportunities for investors, but the time investment that goes with it is also considerably high. It’s pivotal that large-scale investors are able to free up time to work on their business while still ensuring each small task involved in building and scaling a successful portfolio isn’t overlooked.

Manual tasks make any investment portfolio grow very, very slowly. If you’re planning to invest in hundreds of properties each year, it’s important to start reviewing your current processes and identifying tasks that can be delegated, and even better, automated.

We looked at Trust Bricks like any other business – to achieve the growth we needed to increase output and reduce input, so that’s exactly what we did. We successfully introduced technology that automated a significant amount of manual work and outsourced most of the less complex, time-consuming tasks.

Outsourcing and automation to scale a residential property investment portfolio

The first step we took was to conduct a detailed analysis of each and every step involved in residential property investment. Not just top-level tasks, but the steps and tasks involved in each of those – the macro, medium and micro tasks. 

Macro tasks, for example, ‘Find properties’, ensured that we had every single step covered. We broke these down into medium steps, such as, ‘Confirm driving times between properties’ – these gave insight into how time-consuming and complicated each task was. Finally, the micro-tasks broke down the medium tasks even further. Take the latter for example – how would we confirm the driving times? The micro-steps include ‘Open web browser computer’, ‘Search for Google maps’ c, and so on. These micro-tasks, no matter how small, were a great guide to help with outsourcing.

With a solid outline of the entire process in place, we rated each medium task based on its complexity and time consumption. The least complex and most time-consuming were the first to be outsourced. Of course, not everything could be outsourced, for example, negotiation on purchases and viewings to estimate refurbishment costs, so we left these until last.

When we were confident everything that could be outsourced was being outsourced, our minds switched to automation. What technology could we introduce to speed up the process even more? This is where True Vals comes in – the technology we created that uses over 20 years of property data to accurately tell us, within seconds, how much properties are worth and what they will rent for. Hours of manual scrolling and weighing up the value of an investment, gone – just like that. We now had the valuable time we needed back – to work on the business, not in it. 

What about smaller, personal portfolios?

Of course, not all investors will want to invest the time in building technology from scratch and organising the set-up of all outsourcing. This approach is great for individuals and companies that intend on buying hundreds of properties each year, but not everyone.

Investors looking to build a small personal portfolio, are instead able to use companies, such as Trustbricks.co.uk, which use data and technology to quickly find the best investment opportunities on the market. The opportunities are presented in an easy-to-consume document so investors can simply say yes or no. The entire process is taken care of – from sourcing, viewings, negotiations, refurbishments, tenanting, even the bookkeeping and returns – the list goes on. The investor owns the asset and capitalises from the capital appreciation and cash flow that comes with it – all for a small sourcing fee.

To learn more about our property technology journey or what Trust Bricks could do for your portfolio, visit trustbricks.co.uk.