I had dinner in early 2008 with a man who was a retired builder, he told me about the way he used to do business back in the 70’s, and he told me ‘you wait and watch! It’ll be happening that way again!’, he was right, although at the time I didn’t realise that.
He said that back in the 70’s when people came to see his houses they’d say ‘how much is it?’, and he might say ‘£12,000’ to which they invariably said ‘we can’t afford that!’, and his approach was this – ‘what can you afford?’. He would then negotiate a deal with the buyer based on renting out the property with a view to buying or letting them have the property and paying him directly without having to go down the route of standard mortgages etc. and it worked, he was successful through the 70’s and 80’s and he retired in the mid-90’s before (as he said) ‘the real fun began’.
The point about this is that being able to work …