Property Research and Due Diligence is a Whizz with Property Wizza

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I was updating the Research Section Section 3 of The Property Voice - Investor Toolkit the other day. I counted something like 33 web links in the section and of course I wanted to a) check the links were still working and b) take a quick look at them to see if anything had changed. I found that one site in particular had gone through something of an update - Property Wizza but more on that later...first let's just recap on why and how to undertake property research and due diligence in evaluating potential property investments.

Hopefully, we should all agree that undertaking proper research and due diligence is a vital part of any property investor's toolkit (search this site under the Research, Trends & Analysis for more content). As a minimum, undertaking property research and due diligence should:

1. Put negotiation power and control in our hands through increased knowledge
2. Increase confidence in our decision-making by understanding fully what we are getting into
3. Reduce our risk by helping us to carefully assessing our alternatives

In terms of the 'how to' undertake our property research and due diligence, my starting position is with a range of criteria that I like to check off initially when looking at any investment opportunity, which is covered in Section 2 of the Investor Toolkit. If I get enough ticks in the box on my deal criteria checklist, then I will proceed to the more in depth property research and due diligence as my next steps.

With a potential buy-to-let opportunity, some of my criteria cover aspects aside from the main Key Performance Criteria (KPIs ), like ROI and cashflow. The additional criteria would include: local population, transport, schools, house price and rental comparisons among other things. Should the opportunity get past these headline criteria, only then would I  proceed to the next property research and due diligence steps. These next steps involve a deeper dive into several aspects of three key areas of the opportunity in terms of: location, the property itself and suppliers / partners, which are covered in more depth in the Toolkit.

However, some of the headline areas that I would investigate more fully, particularly with regard to the location and the property itself, would be things like: crime rates, transport connections, area maps and environmental factors (like flood risk & coal mines say), plus many more besides. You may have noticed the image accompanying today's post is one that happens to mention all of these factors - it comes from a completed postcode search undertaken through the site Property Wizza.

Property Wizza has been updated as I mentioned earlier, it is integrated into many of the other specialist sources of information that we may look for, such as Land Registry prices for example. One neat feature is the integration to the main property portals that allows a search to be undertaken based on the listing, even without knowing what the postcode is. Anyhow, this post is not meant as a giant plug for the site - it is supposed to be a giant plug for doing property research and due diligence, with some tips as to how. There are several places that we could go for help. Property Wizza seems as good a place to go as any, when undertaking many of the necessary steps in undertaking property research and due diligence for our property investments, so I have it bookmarked (there is a browser extension available as well).

After more experience of investing in property, I can safely say that the best way to mitigate some of the risks involved...and one of my key learnings...is to undertake in-depth property research and due diligence before we get to find out the hard way, after we have bought the property. Check out the Investor Toolkit by subscribing in the big box on the right to see the 6-page, 1,500 word version of my approach to property research and due diligence.