I happened to check my profile again today for the first time in ages and noticed there have been around 5,500 "viewings".... presumably a lot of people reading my raving, ranting but (I hope) factually and technically coherent posts were curious to know a little about me?

Thanks for reading all this, and I wish you luck whether you are a Landlord or Agent because either way you (and all of us) are going to need it in these strange and worrying times!

All the best,
Barry
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I first became a landlord in 1996, while still working in IT (which I'd been doing since the start of the 80s and was by then a senior freelance manager).

Within 5 years of being both a part-time, but already very 'hands-on', landlord and full time IT professional I made the decision to abandon my IT career - even though it was going well and quite lucrative - to concentrate full-time on slowly growing and closely managing the properties. I did that because by then (at the turn of the century) I'd become totally disillusioned with the corporate politics you have to deal with more and more as you become more senior... I prefer to be genuinely my own boss rather than just notionally my own boss.

In the early days I did absolutely everything myself - from finding tenants (using things like faxed-in "voucher ads" in Loot back then, long before emails or web-based advertising in this sector), managing all of my lettings, doing most of the property maintenance myself (luckily I have a lot of practical skills, but as the number of properties increased we used contractors more and more, and for about 3 years we employed 2 full time maintenance/handymen working to work with us too) and of course all aspects of the business side, plus I got into some increasing complicated hands-on architecture and planning as we lovingly carried out several small scale development projects to create a few new flats and a couple of offices (and even two shops) locally.

I say "we" and "us" because after a while my wonderful wife got fully involved too - she's much better at dealing with tenants than I am, plus good at making decisions about refurbishment specifications and so on.

As the world changed around us, and also because we got busier, we started working increasingly with agents - initially for "finders only" but now 'fully managed' on several properties and one day - if we bother to keep going at all in this increasingly dire political and over regulated climate - they can look after the lot!

One of the main problems for us (more for me, not so much my wife) has been that over the years I've carefully developed and refined our own tenancy agreements, as well as some simple but useful processes and paperwork - but the agents seem unable to use any of that if they do full management. Unfortunately all of their tenancy agreements look poor quality to me and not as good for our business by comparison!

Until recent years I had no regrets about that decision to switch from IT to property, but now I increasingly wonder if we'd have been better off if I'd concentrated on software and/or consultancy and perhaps built a solid business in that instead while keeping property as a useful side-line. There were so many great opportunities and I turned my back on all of them, but hey-ho.

A real regret I certainly have is in not exiting from property in the UK, selling everything and reinvesting in something new abroad while still young and healthy and equally importantly before tax laws affecting tax residency and CGT changed fundamentally and very significantly in what I see as a greedy and ill-judged attempt by the government to gain votes at our expense (while not benefiting the fools who are deceived in voting for them as a result) and to take money from us (and anyone like us) but in practice just inhibiting and discouraging business and flexibility (if we'd sold CGT free - by carefully using a change in tax residency status while that was still possible - for the properties in our own names then our buyers would still have paid what used to be stamp tax, and our company would have paid a lot of corporation tax for its sales, so instead of the government benefiting everyone it lost out and we're all stuck with it).

As the years have passed since then we've seen spectacular sustained growth abroad in the sectors of interest to us in those counties and cities in the Far East we liked and would have opted for. Meanwhile here in the UK performance has (at least in my opinion, and by comparison, and after carefully taking exchange rates etc into account, and not helped by years of 'quantitative easing' and all the rest) - been very lack-lustre.

The PRS has also been increasingly hampered by EXTREMELY detrimental legislative and taxation changes coupled with rapidly changing social and cultural factors making a landlord's - or agents - life increasingly (and I think unfairly and uncomfortably) difficult.

Over those nearly two and a half decades since moving from IT to full-time property I've developed quite in depth knowledge of relevant landlord-tenant law, both for "let" properties and also freeholder/leaseholder legislation - something I'm extremely involved with these days for various reasons. (In my IT days, particularly during the 90s as a project and later program manager and at times IT director/CTO or whatever, I got very much interested in contract law as well as to an extent intellectual property Law or IP, but not bricks and mortar property law back then).

Also perhaps of interest; I was diagnosed with "terminal cancer" in 2014 and was thought at the time to have only a few months to a year to live at best... then, despite major surgery, followed by almost continuous chemotherapy most years, some radiotherapy now and then and a bit more surgery from time to time... plus nearly dying once or twice most years since, for example including again for a particularly horrible couple of weeks last June - 2022 - when I was hospitalised again, but that time in a much more fragile state than for quite a while and no less than three different consultants each thought and told my wife and I that, for different reasons, I probably had around 48 hours to live at best we were also told there would be no attempt at resuscitation if/when, as expected, things deteriorated to that stage... but luckily to everyone's surprise I once again survived it and was able to leave the hospital alive and be driven home by my wonderful wife and gradually recuperate and more or less recover to about 60% - 70% of where I'd deteriorated to before that specific nasty episode...

...all of which put the world nicely into perspective for me and whilst I'm extremely unimpressed with the current Government (who are "Not my Tories" - but I wish they were REAL Tories then they might be), but glad we don't (currently) have anyone even worse - and often (as you've probably seen) willing to spend a bit of time saying what I think (and not caring whether anyone agrees or not) - I also see how short life is and how pointless it is to expect any better of any of our politicians, council employees and officials and any of the other many people messing us around and screwing up our industry.

However, as Yogi Berra (probably) wisely pointed out, and how I've so far proven for the last 9 years or so (but for how much longer we of course don't know) "It ain't over till it's over"!

Another thing Berra may or may not have said is "It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future"! ...but it seems just as hard sometimes to make "predictions" about the past because nobody is really sure who actually said this first!!