Crisis is no longer the exception. It’s the rule.
Brexit. Covid. The mini-Budget. An energy crisis. A war in Ukraine. A war in the Middle East. Interest rate chaos. A new government. The Renters’ Rights Act. A new Prime Minister?
We live in an era of constant crisis. Each one bigger, more seismic, more unprecedented than the last. And each one would have given you a perfectly rational excuse not to buy.
Or so it seemed.
We’ve been doing this for 13 years. Looking back, there have been countless reasons not to buy. Every one of which seemed completely valid at the time. But with the benefit of hindsight, every single one of them would have stopped you from making money.
Which raises an interesting question. What would actually have to happen to genuinely break the case for property investment?
The (very short) list of things that would worry us
How do you operate in a world where crisis is the default setting? Not by ignoring risk. And certainly not by panicking every time something scary happens.
Instead, you need to decide in advance what your red lines are. Not things that feel scary. Things that fundamentally change the maths.
So, if you’re following the kind of investment strategy we recommend, what might those red lines be?
A genuine shift in supply and demand. For decades, successive governments have promised millions of new homes. None of them has delivered. But even if building rates ramped up, population growth would need to slow dramatically for supply to catch up with demand. And that flip would need to persist for years just to dent the current deficit. If those things ever aligned, it would give us pause for thought.
Sustained deflation. The entire engine of property investment runs on inflation. Prices rise, rents rise, your debt stays the same. Suppose that changed (and the government will do everything in its power to stop this from happening, because it would crush the country under the weight of its debts). But if that happened, despite their best efforts, the model stops working.
Rent controls that make the numbers impossible. Scotland has given us a preview of what this could look like. Capped rents, shrinking supply, investors pulling out. If England followed the same path (and despite what politicians say, we can’t see that it will), the calculations change significantly.
The best time to buy is when nobody else wants to
Crises aren’t going anywhere. But when you know your red lines, every new headline becomes the same simple question: “Does this change anything structural?”
Almost always, the answer is no. And while everyone else is still figuring that out, you can take advantage.
The dust never settles. The coast is never clear. But no matter what the next crisis brings, as long as your red lines remain uncrossed, that’s all you need to know.