Starting in procurement, not property
My first career was in corporate procurement. It is not a glamorous description and I have never tried to make it one. What it gave me was a way of working: read the contract before you sign it, understand who carries which risk, sequence the transaction so that nothing important depends on a verbal assurance, and assume the other side will behave exactly as the paperwork allows them to.
Those habits are the same habits that, over a decade later, define how I underwrite a Title Split. The strategy did not choose me because I was looking for it. It chose me because, when I eventually found it, it was the only UK property strategy that rewarded the way I already worked.
The years of working across strategies
I moved into UK property investment full time over a decade ago. I did not arrive with a specialism and I am sceptical of operators who claim they did. For several years I worked across a number of strategies — single-let, HMO, refurbishment, small commercial — not because I was indecisive, but because the only honest way to know which strategy you should concentrate on is to have run capital through several of them and watched how each one actually behaves.
Most strategies, when you strip the marketing away, are a position on the wider market. Rents will continue to rise. The valuer will be kind on the refinance. The buyer will turn up at the right price. The planning committee will be reasonable. There is nothing wrong with taking a market view — but it should be named for what it is, and the investors funding it should be told.
The first Title Split — and why it stuck
The first Title Split I completed was, in retrospect, the moment my practice changed. The headline uplift was not a forecast. It did not depend on the market moving. It did not depend on a valuer taking a generous view of a refurbishment. It was produced by the registration of separate legal titles at HM Land Registry — a documented, repeatable event that either happens correctly or does not happen at all.
What struck me was not the return on that one deal. It was the shape of the return. Underwritten properly, the project's economics were set at the point of acquisition. The remaining work was professional execution: the right solicitor, the right surveyor, the right lender, the right sequence of applications. That was a workload I knew how to manage, because it was the same workload procurement had taught me to manage.
Why I chose to concentrate, not diversify
The conventional advice to a property investor is to diversify. That advice is correct for an investor who is allocating capital across operators. It is, in my view, the wrong advice for an operator allocating their own time. An operator who runs five strategies at once will be average at all of them and excellent at none. The professional team will be thin in every direction. The sourcing pipeline will be diluted. The mistakes will be more expensive because they will be the mistakes of someone who is still learning.
I chose to concentrate. Specifically, I chose Title Splitting. Repeating a single, technical strategy compounds advantages that simply do not exist for the generalist: a panel of solicitors who have drafted the relevant leases dozens of times; surveyors who understand how the valuation methodology actually shifts; lenders who know what they are looking at; and a sourcing filter that screens out the great majority of opportunities in seconds.
Founding Inspired Property Group
Inspired Property Group was co-founded for one purpose: to undertake this one strategy, with consistent discipline, on behalf of a small group of investor partners. The firm exists because the work needed an institutional vehicle — a professional team, a documented process, the standard expected by family offices and sophisticated private investors — rather than the operator simply "doing deals" under their own name.
Today the practice is, by design, deliberately small. I remain personally involved in each project. Most of the capital we deploy comes from investor partners who have reinvested across multiple cycles. That, more than any individual deal, is the metric I pay attention to.
What I would tell a younger operator
Choose the strategy you would be willing to be known for in ten years. Choose it for technical reasons, not aspirational ones. Concentrate. Build the professional team before you need it. Underwrite each project to its own stand-alone economics, not to the average of a portfolio. And tell investors what is accurate, not what is convenient.
None of that advice is original. It is simply the advice that, had I followed it sooner, would have shortened my own learning curve by several years.