There is a particular kind of stubbornness that masquerades as persistence.
It tells you to keep going. That the next viewing will be different. That the next auction will be the one where the numbers finally work. That nine months of evidence pointing in the same direction is not a pattern but a run of bad luck that is surely about to turn.
We spent most of 2017 in that stubbornness. This is the story of how we eventually talked ourselves out of it.
A Strategy That Made Sense on Paper
At the beginning of 2017 we were looking for flip opportunities on the North West coast, specifically bungalows. The strategy was straightforward. Find undervalued bungalows, refurbish them, and sell for a profit.
The area had plenty to offer. Bungalows came to market regularly, the local demand was clear, and we had spent considerable time building relationships with every agent in the area. We visited each office at least once a week, to the point where the staff knew exactly how we took our tea and coffee.
That kind of relationship takes time and genuine effort to build. It also, we believed, gave us a real advantage when properties came to market.
What it could not do was solve the problems that were quietly stacking up against us.
Three Problems Nobody Warned Us About
The first was pricing. Many of the bungalows that came to market were overpriced, often significantly, and the owners or their families had no interest in negotiating. Bungalows of a certain type, in certain locations, carry an emotional premium that has very little to do with what the open market will actually bear.
Telling a seller that their late parent's beloved home is worth considerably less than they believe is a conversation that rarely ends with an accepted offer.
The second was competition, and it was not the competition we had expected. We were repeatedly outbid, not by other investors who had done the sums differently, but by buyers purchasing to live in the property.
When someone is buying their forever home, the numbers work differently. A few thousand pounds over market value is irrelevant when the alternative is continuing to look. We could not compete with that kind of buyer and make the strategy work.
The third was something we had not anticipated at all. Several of the locations where bungalows had been built decades earlier had no proper foundations. Walking into some properties, the floor listed so noticeably that the sensation was closer to being on a boat than inspecting a potential investment.
It was, in a dark way, quite entertaining. It was also an immediate deal-killer on properties that had otherwise looked promising.
Nine months of searching, filtering, viewing, and making offers. Very little to show for any of it.
Surely Auction Would Be Different
By mid-2017 we had started attending property auctions, convinced that this was where the opportunity had been hiding all along.
It was not.
We knew exactly what we needed to pay to make a flip work. We had done the sums carefully and understood our ceiling. The problem was that the ceiling we had calculated was consistently and sometimes dramatically below where the hammer fell.
We watched properties sell for figures that made no sense to us from an investment perspective. The numbers did not work at those prices. They simply did not.
So who was buying them?
Our conclusion, after watching the pattern repeat itself across multiple auctions, was that two types of buyer were driving the prices beyond what any investor should rationally pay.
The first was inexperienced investors who had not done the sums correctly, or had done them optimistically, and would discover the gap between expectation and reality when the refurbishment was complete.
The second was buyers purchasing to live in the property, for whom paying above investment value was entirely rational because they were not investing.
Neither type of buyer was going away. And we could not outbid either of them and still make the strategy work.
Accepting the Evidence
In September 2017, nine months after we had started, we stopped.
Not paused. Not scaled back. Stopped.
The bungalow flipping strategy on the North West coast was not working for us, had not worked for us across an extended and genuinely committed period of trying, and there was no particular reason to believe the next month would be different from the previous nine.
We turned our attention to commercial properties instead. Less competition, a different pool of buyers, and a market where the relationships and knowledge we had built over years gave us a more meaningful edge.
It turned out to be the right call. But it took nine months of stubbornness to get there.
The Lesson That Took Nine Months to Learn
Persistence is a genuine virtue in property sourcing. Most things worth doing require sustained effort over a longer period than feels comfortable, and giving up too early is a real and common mistake.
But persistence and stubbornness are not the same thing.
Persistence means continuing to apply effort in a direction that the evidence supports. Stubbornness means continuing in a direction the evidence has already clearly contradicted, because stopping feels like failure.
We knew, probably earlier than September, that the bungalow strategy was not working. The three problems we had identified were structural, not situational. They were not going to resolve themselves with more viewings or a better auction.
What took time was accepting that walking away from a strategy is not the same as failing at it. It is simply recognising that your time and resource are better deployed elsewhere, and having the discipline to act on that recognition rather than waiting for one more month to prove you wrong.
Not everything works out. The sooner you can recognise that honestly, the sooner you can find what does.
Whether you are just starting out in property sourcing or looking to sharpen how you operate, NAPSA exists to support you. Find out more about our membership, training, and resources at www.education.napsa.org.uk
