Advice

[u/Past-Establishment79]

UK Property Investors — I’m looking to test a property research service and would love some honest feedback

Hi everyone,

I’m currently working in estate agency and I’m looking at setting up a small side business providing property research for UK property investors.

I’m deliberately starting from scratch and I’m trying to work out whether this is something investors would actually find useful, so I’d really appreciate some honest opinions from people who are actively investing.

What I’m looking to offer

The idea is simple:

You give me your buying criteria, and I do the initial research for you.

For example, you might tell me: • Location: Hertfordshire • Budget: £300k–£450k • Property: 2–3 bed houses • Strategy: refurbishment/value-add • Minimum gross yield you’re interested in • Any specific areas you want to avoid • Any other criteria that matter to you

I would then research properties against those criteria and produce a concise report containing things such as: • Asking price • Property type and bedrooms • Asking-price history/reductions where available • Relevant sold-price comparables • Local rental evidence • Indicative gross-yield calculation based on the available rental evidence • Property size where publicly available • Basic local market information • Relevant planning history/applications that I can find through public sources • Potential points worth investigating further • Links to the underlying public information

The aim isn’t to tell you “buy this property”.

Instead, I’d be doing the time-consuming initial research and putting the information into one place so that you can decide for yourself whether something is worth investigating further.

Why I’m considering doing this

Working in estate agency has given me a good understanding of how much time can go into researching properties, comparing them with other sales, looking at pricing history and trying to understand the local market.

I suspect there are investors who know exactly what they’re looking for but simply don’t have the time to trawl through hundreds of listings and pieces of information every week.

That’s the problem I’m trying to solve.

Essentially:

You give me the criteria → I do the initial research → you get a concise research report → you decide what, if anything, you want to pursue.

I’m not trying to be a property sourcer

This is something I’m being particularly careful about.

I’m not looking to negotiate purchases, arrange transactions, represent buyers, handle deposits or act as someone’s buying agent.

The service I’m testing is specifically around research and analysis of publicly available information.

If someone wants to pursue a property after doing their own assessment, that’s entirely their decision and they would deal with the relevant parties themselves.

What I’d like to know from investors

Would something like this actually be useful to you?

And if it would, I’d be interested to know:

1. What information would you want included in a property research report?

2. What parts of property research take you the longest at the moment?

3. Would you prefer to pay per report/property or have a monthly research service?

4. Roughly what would you consider a reasonable price for genuinely useful research that saved you several hours of your own time?

5. What would make you trust the research enough to actually use it?

I’m not trying to sell anything in this post. I’m genuinely trying to validate the idea before putting time into setting it up.

If anyone is interested, I’d also be happy to put together a couple of example reports based on your actual buying criteria, so you can tell me whether the information would be useful or whether I’m completely missing the mark.

Honest criticism is very welcome — I’d rather find out now if there’s no demand for this than spend months building something nobody wants.