I recently met up with Rachel Knight, a portfolio landlord and property entrepreneur based in the Midlands. She is also the founder of TitleSplit.com and in our discussion she explained about how she first got into property investing and then discovered how to benefit from doing title splits as a niche property strategy.

Before we started talking about property investing Rachel was refreshingly open about her personal background as she explained what occurred in her teenage years. - “I was lucky enough to have a beautiful daughter when I was just 17 years old,” she said, “my first daughter, yes. Back then I was still a child myself, but I had to quickly become an adult. And so I was a single mum by the time I was just 20. As a result of that, I now have three amazing grandchildren and my daughter has grown up to become a great mum herself.

Having my daughter young didn’t mean I was on the scrap heap of life. Although some people around me back then might have thought that, I was determined to have a career.”In fact that motivated me more to provide for my famiy by building a corporate career. I studied and got a management diploma and worked as a sales director with Experian and Equifax, both major players in customer data.”

So when did you start buying investment property? - “Back in 2005 , almost 20 years ago, I purchased my first buy to let ,,” said Rachel, “To be clear, I was completely uneducated in property terms.”. I used to take my bonus and started buying property instead of saving, I put down a deposit and then got a mortgage on a buy to let investment property. “I didn’t need income from it, so my focus was on capital growth.” At that time, I was earning a high salary, so my mindset was focused on building a pension pot. I collected a few of these buy to let investment properties, obviously in my personal name because we all did that back then.

“I would rent out each property and then get another one, continuing the cycle.”