An old adage in property investing circles is that if you can find genuinely good deals, then the money to fund the deal will find its way to you. In many cases that may well be true, but only if you have the right connections and a good mortgage broker on your side. But in some cases getting into a project with an overly sharp funder or a flaky joint venture partner can lead inexperienced investors into making costly mistakes.

These days, compared to say 20 years ago, the advances in information technology and an increasing myriad of software applications allow us a level of market data analysis to quickly sort the ‘wheat from the chaff’.

However just as in the murky world of national security, the best intelligence is often gained by having boots on the ground. And for property projects, having time-proven local contacts who are well connected and can access those sometimes elusive ‘off-market deals’ is critical if you are want to invest successfully far away from your own local area.

Nowadays there are many investors and developers who want to do exactly that, as there are many locations where higher returns can be made in with lower property values and higher net yields. The key of course is effective delegation and ensuring the value creation on a refurbishment or development goes to plan with as few mishaps as possible. The second part for those who are holding property for long-term rentals is to ensure professional management is in place so that assets do not turn into costly liabilities.

Given the above, I was pleased to catch up again with a couple of south coast property investors in Berengere Guery and Vicky Stanley who in just six years have achieved quite a lot, and built up a successful property business model.

Berengere explained more about their respective career backgrounds and how they initially got involved in property investing. - “We both had careers in the oil and gas industry and met up when working for the same company in France. After a redundancy I retrained in the wine-making sector and worked in the UK, and we relocated from France. Vicky then continued with her career as a data analyst for a company, which is the largest in the sector and to-date has been with them for 17 years.

“Due to the lack of choices for myself at the time, we looked at property investing, having read the Rich Dad book and then went on to do some training with the company and that is how we got started in property after first attending an event with them in Paris.”