I am often asked 'how can I find properties with considerable renovation or development potential?' The answer is that there is no simple answer! During my 17 years as an investor, builder and property developer, I have used a variety of strategies to find deals with varying degrees of success.

While I am fortunate enough to have recently employed a very experienced full-time property sourcer to help me, (and members of my Melinda Property Investors Club), to find 'interesting' properties in London and the Home Counties, I have not always had it so easy!

Over the years I have spent much time and effort when purchasing deals from agents, from auctions, from vendors responding directly to my adverts, and used leaflets, car stickers or sourced via my website (buyers4property.co.uk). I also pay a small fee to get daily email alerts from a very helpful website called www.renovatealerts.com which searches for new properties on the big portals that have words such as 'renovation, extension, modernisation, potential etc' in their listings for the counties in the UK that I have selected. I have also met investors at networking meetings who have found deals and were unsure what to do with them, or who could not raise the finance to complete on them. My name was also given by a family friend, to a neighbour who was in financial difficulty and I ended up buying their house. It's amazing how deals come to you, once you make it known what you do. Then you gain a reputation of being a reliable buyer once you have been in the market for a while.