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Hi guys! Nice to meet you all - I'm new here and have a question if you could be so kind to help me out! My partner and I are looking to furnish a 4-bed 'professional' HMO. We've trawled the IKEA website etc. but have heard great things about furnishing companies who assemble/install and deliver packages. Can anyone recommend me any good companies like this, or any advice RE furnishing a property? Like anyone, we would like the best deal, but we know that if we were to source items one by one, this would take too much time... Any advice appreciated! Thanks, E

Hi all, I have been chatting in a few threads on here and some may know, and have expressed an interest in my up-coming 3 day Tigrent Professional Property Investment course. Well, I have just returned from it and would like to share with you all our experience (our, as in myself and my fiancée). Quick intro; I have renovated my own house successfully, in for a profit should I sell, cashflow should I rent, it didn't fall down etc etc. My fiancée owns her own home which cash flows. Both of us want to invest in property for the long term and for income to be able to enjoy life to the full. We have no further investments. I saw the course advertised on Facebook last spring (2015) as the "Robbie Fowler Property Investment Training Course". Naturally I laughed out loud at the thought. And I still cringe at that thought... His name has never been mentioned or alluded to on the course; all marketing. The advert kept appearing, with the same comments of "c***", "coke snorter", "easy with his millions" etc etc. It was those comments that drove me to go to the free 2 hours evening seminar. I am not a hater. What did I have to lose? 2 hours of my evening. Not a lot really. We went along fully expecting the up-sell. The up-sell was the 3 day course for £997 with a "free" tablet full of information and a "free" telephone "consultation" with an investor. (There was of course a 14 day cooling off period during which we did our due diligence checks on the company etc etc) So the main course; Firstly, we had initially opted for dates in Oxford, which got moved back twice, before being hosted in a hotel in.... Reading.... So we opted for a date in Milton Keynes (this weekend gone) instead. Some bum twitching going on as there is a 12 month window in which to take the course. The cynic in me believed this was a tactic employed to reduced the number of attendees by way of their 12 month window lapsing....?? Right, down to it then! Turn up Friday 8.45, tea coffee etc, sign in, friendly meet and greet, usual stuff. Get down to the learning bit. The main speaker was really good. Clearly very passionate and knowledgeable and his subject. A few corny jokes and some audience participation etc. All to be expected! The first morning was proper learning stuff. All very interesting. The afternoon was all about how you would fail in the property game unless you have a mentor to hold your hand. It was not direct, but all in the course material. It was pretty much the same for the next 2 days. Mornings were really good info about strategies, running the numbers, sourcing and so on. There was a lot about having the right mindset, why you want to do it, getting us to self-motivate etc. All a good techniques to sell us the more expensive packages. These started at £12k, and went up to about £34k. Did we buy? Read on. We had plenty of opportunities all the way through the 3 days to talk one on one with the speaker and his "team" of 2. They were all very pleasant and helpful to the point of running numbers for us and advising us where to go from our specific circumstances. What I did learn from the 3 days is that they corroborated everything I had learned myself, for free, on this forum, the podcasts, the one meet up I've been to, and the various books I've read. I should state now that I am in no way working for the Property Hub or endorsing it! It is purely my personal experience. So my fiancée and I find ourselves saying to each other, why spend £24k (the package they recommended for us) when I know I can learn it all for free??? As time went on the one to one conversations became "So what further courses are you signing up to?" the answer to which was "we're not". Essentially their justification, as demonstrated by several (admittedly stunning) case studies, is that your first deal or two, that would be with your personal mentor, would easily cover the cost of the training. I don't doubt it's possible. I don't doubt the success stories of others. Was there a strong confidence from them that we would definitely cover that with such apparent ease? No, we didn't feel so. In addition, they tell you you can get to financial freedom within 2 years if you take their courses. If we didn't, on average it would take us 15 years. I don't know where they get that figure from, but hey?! So we did not sign up. Of about 24 attendees this weekend, we estimated about half signed up for further training courses. I wish them well and I'm sure, having been there this weekend and hearing it all, they will do very well. It is so very dependant on your circumstances! I won't bore you with all my thoughts on that right now! Sadly, however, we did leave this afternoon with a bitter taste. When we were leaving we thanked all the tutors there, as you do when you are polite and courteous people(!), but one tutor just hammered into us that we would fail. We would lose all our money. We didn't know what we were doing. We would seek the wrong advice. The market was going to crash. It was a real shame and the others were very pleasant and accepted we hadn't signed up. And like when you choose not to buy a mobile phone from a salesman, they shake your hand and smile. (And once you've left call you names...). To sum up, 50/50 real learning vs direct/indirect up-selling. Do I regret spending £997? No, and not just to save face. I did learn a lot of tip bits, and some important number crunching ideas. Can I find those on the internet for free? Most likely! Do I see the value in spending £30k+ on further courses? I can, I really can for the right person in the right situation. But it is not for us. On the way home we did agree we felt it was a shame there was not an option to buy further 3 day courses on specific subjects, priced the same as this intro course. (Each package they were selling included a number of 3 day courses, so seems feasible.) Would we have bought one of those? Maybe. But without having the option it's hard to say. The main thing we both feel is very motivated coming out of it and do feel inspired to really make property work for us.

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