Where Should I Invest?

Location, Location, Location, how to spot the best place to invest

I’ve been a property investor for over 40 years. One of the most frequent questions I get asked is about location.  Where’s best to buy an investment property? In all honesty, I struggle to answer the question as it’s fundamentally flawed.

The answer is…

There is no ideal place to buy just as there isn’t any ideal time to start – so you may as well just get on with it and NOW.

The concept that there is a geographical place and a specific address like 27 Acacia Avenue which is the perfect investment is clearly an unsafe assumption. This is quite scary as it illustrates hugely worrying thought patterns for a potential investor.

I have heard many silly stories over the years including comments like a buy to let doesn’t work in London. A place as big as London has widely different properties and property prices and very specific and localised demand and supply.

So, for me it’s crazy to say that any investing does or doesn’t work in any geographical area. Overall because frankly as long as you can find one property that works for you somewhere then it works!

But what we can say is that investing works in some places. So for instance every time I send a letter off to the DVLC in Swansea I think about where all the workers at the DVLC live. There must be thousands of them mustn’t there and they all need to live somewhere. My guess is that the part of Swansea near the DVLC must be a good investing environment.

Furthermore, if you can find a good property in the road next to a university campus that must work. Likewise, how about a nice house next to a teaching hospital where there might be young medical students and nurses, that could work.

As you can hear it’s not so much a physical geographical location that works more a situation that works.

For me its all about maximising the chances of getting a tenant or a buyer. I want to get the financial return for the property and we can only do that if we have volume and lots of options. So, the more you can buy properties that will appeal to the masses the better.