In the main, achieving success in property is about overcoming the daily challenges with a firm focus on the long-term goals. Having interviewed hundreds of property investors, developers and landlords over the years, those who have survived and thrived are the ones who have been able to adapt as their marketplace evolves.
Recently, I met up again with Stuart Scott and his business partner Carly Houston at an aparthotel scheme in Brighton that I first saw some five or so years ago and since they have gone on to launch another similar local property using the same strategy. As we all know, the pandemic period of 2020-2022 posed a lot of problems for many businesses and particularly in the first year many hospitality businesses had to close their operations. As such I was firstly interested to hear more from Stuart about how they had weathered the Covid period.
“The concept of aparthotels based on short lets income is one half of my property investing,” said Stuart, “where I have partnered with Carly on two Aparthotels here in Brighton and the other is my own portfolio of high-end co-living HMOs. Both strategies are about having strong cash-flow and net yields.
“Over the last five six years, the main priority has been diversifying across both short stay and long stay. Initially it started for me with a foundation of the HMOs for cashflow and previously I had also done furnished holiday lets. Given that experience, we then saw there was an opportunity to transfer a very customer focused design model into aparthotels.”
As some readers will be aware the HMO sector has also had its fair share of challenges in recent years with Covid and borrowing costs regularly quoted by portfolio landlords alongside increasing build costs as the main negative factors.
Stuart commented on his own experiences within the sector and where he had previously seen opportunity with co-living at an early stage. – “On the HMO side of things, obviously, with COVID, some people lost their jobs. And obviously, we saw a trend with many people working from home. However, with what we create fortunately our units had a lot of workspaces in them. So that was great, because we were one of the only operators then with co-working built into our HMOs.
