Estate agency Keller Williams has set up a specialist team to help military personnel with mortgages and property investment.
"The needs of military personnel are distinct for a number of reasons, notably the amount of disruption they can go through as they move between postings, operational tours and training, and how to decide where to buy, indeed whether to buy” explains Joel Waller.
He is an ex-Army officer who trained at Sandhurst, served in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, and who has joined Keller Williams with a focus on helping military personnel.
“Add to this the fact that they might be outside of the UK and difficult to communicate with on deployments - the whole process can seem a step too far" says Waller.
The Keller Williams team, based in London, looks at a range of facilities for current and past service personnel including Forces Help to Buy - the rules and regulations, timelines, right to use it for rental property - and the Right to Invest, under which servicemen and women stationed overseas will soon be able to purchase buy to let property in the UK. Keller Williams says is a major opportunity for those earning additional benefits for being based in Cyprus, Germany, Brunei and other locations.
“We provide initial consultation to establish investment goals, collect as much identification information as possible at the start of the process to minimize the involvement of the client – allowing them to continue with life as normal, whilst we search for properties which fit the criteria” says Waller.
“Once they’ve decided to make an offer we carry out thorough market appraisal of the property and negotiate price on our client’s behalf, before then seeing the transaction through to completion and finding tenants to occupy the property.“
The team is currently focussing on providing buyer and seller services to south west London, specifically Putney, Barnes, Mortlake and East Sheen. It services military clients across the world.
Last week Estate Agent Today reported that Agents Giving was asking individual agents to give up 30 minutes of their time to a mentoring scheme for ex-services personnel interested in a possible future in estate agency work.
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The team will need to look close what with buy to let and second home heavily changing tax wise, ie SDT increases. Plus MORT interest set to change and the wraith of other legislation to in and coming.
They'd be sensible to set up a crowd buying platform to offset some changes collectively and look at bulk buying from on the many likely to portfolio exit in the coming couple of years
Top advice Trevor, thank you! We're actively seeking opportunities to acquire portfolios for exactly this purpose - any leads then please don't hesitate to get in touch (0207 9938808).
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