Execution, Efficiency & Where The Real Opportunities Are #BizUpdate

In today’s episode, I’m sharing a business update and giving you a real look at what’s happening inside my portfolio and wider businesses as I head into 2026.

This year isn’t about experimenting or chasing new ideas. It’s about execution, efficiency and tightening what’s already been built. I talk through how changes in my personal capacity have reshaped my role, why focus and discipline have become non-negotiable, and how better execution is already translating into stronger performance.

I share what’s been working, what hasn’t gone to plan, and why touching on portfolio performance, operational pressure, refinancing, live development projects and the reality of running a property business at scale.

If you’re building or scaling an HMO business and want a grounded, behind-the-scenes update that reflects the real challenges and decisions involved, this episode will give you clarity and reassurance that this is all part of the process.

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Transcript

Andy Graham (00:02.67)

Hey, I'm Andy and you're listening to the HMO Podcast. Over 10 years ago, I set myself the challenge of building my own property portfolio. And what began as a short-term investment plan, soon became a long-term commitment to change the way young people live together. I've now built several successful businesses. I've raised millions of pounds of investment and I've managed thousands of tenants. Join me and some very special guests to discover the tips, tricks and hacks, the ups and the downs, the best practice and everything else you need to know to start, scale and systemise your very own HMO portfolio now.

Andy Graham (00:40.654)

Today's episode is a business update. I do these regularly because they're a great opportunity for me to give you a real insight into what's actually happening inside my business. They also give me a great excuse to stop and pause and reflect, take a step back from the day to day and think about where my focus has been, how my role is evolving, what's working, what's not and why. So in today's episode, I want to share with you how I'm thinking about 2026, what my focus has shifted to. I want to talk to you about what's been going well, what's not been going well and most importantly,

Why? I want to give you a better look across the portfolio, across the wider business and the projects that I'm involved in. I really hope that these business updates help keep things real for you. I know that it can be tough building a property business and I hope that in some ways I'm able to inspire you, to motivate you, to just give you that dose of reality that often you need when you're building a property business. I've got plenty to update you on today. So let's get stuck into it.

Hey guys, it's Andy here. We're gonna be getting back to the podcast in just a moment, but before we do, I wanna tell you very quickly about the HMO roadmap. Now, if you're serious about replacing your income, or perhaps you've already got a HMO portfolio that you want to scale up, then the HMO roadmap really is your one-stop shop. Inside the roadmap, you'll find a full 60 lesson course delivered by me, teaching you how to find more deals, how to fund more deals and raise private finance, how to refurbish great properties, how to fill them with great tenants that stay for longer and how to manage your properties and tenants for the future.

We've also got guest workshops added every single month, we've got new videos added every single week about all sorts of topics, we've got downloadable resources, cheat sheets and swipe files to help you, we've got case studies from guests and community members who are doing incredible projects that you can learn from, and we've also built an application just for you, that allows you to appraise and evaluate your deals, stack them side by side and track the key metrics that are most important to you. To find out more, head to theHMOroadmap.co.uk now and come and join our incredible community of HMO property investors.

Andy Graham (02:47.811)

Welcome back. So today is a business update. This is my opportunity to give you an insight into what's going on behind the scenes of my business. Show you what's going well, what's not going well, why that is and how I'm approaching the year and the months ahead. Now, 2026 for me isn't about experimenting or trying new things. In fact, quite the opposite. I've set myself two clear objectives this year. The first one is to grow our revenues by around 15 percent and the second one is to increase our net profit margin by about 15 percent as well. 

Now those numbers aren't arbitrary. They're the result of looking really carefully at what the businesses are already capable of doing, where the inefficiencies exist and where with some better execution we can move the dial. And that's the key point for me. Efficiency is going to be the primary lever this year. It's the primary objective. I'm not trying to do more deals for the sake of doing more deals. I'm not trying to scale up blindly. I'm really focusing on tightening execution, improving systems and making better use of everything that we already do. And in some cases, killing the dead weight. We've picked up quite a bit of that over the years. 

Now, as always, I like to look at my goals with a few things in mind. First and foremost, I like to think about how I want life to be like around my businesses. I'm building a lifestyle business. That's what I want. That's what I'm doing. That’s my objective for many, many, many, many years. So how I feel on a very personal level, what I'm able to do is the most important thing. Now, it doesn't mean I always get what I want. I have to make lots of sacrifices and lots of compromises, but I do very heavily focus on my personal objectives first and then the business objectives. So let me give you a bit of an idea as to what's been on a personal level happening and what I've been changing.

Big driver for me this year has been a shift in my personal capacity. Last year, my daughter was born and she started nursery this year in January and Gemma also went back to work. So there's simply just less flexibility in the day, especially now as I am doing Isla's nursery drop-offs and pickups. It's limited my working window a few days a week. Now that is not in any way, shape or form something that I am obsessed about or frustrated by.

Andy Graham (05:05.346)

It is a very intentional choice. I want to take Isla to nursery. I want to drop her off. I want to spend that time with her at either end of the day. And I love it. And it's a really important thing to me, but it has had an impact on the amount of hours that I could put into my business. So I've had to change a few things. There's also some other stuff going on and other things that I want to do and achieve, but this has forced me to be much more disciplined with my time and my energy and to be much more honest about where I add the most value across my businesses. 

So as a result, coming back this year, I very deliberately re-prioritized my role. My focus is now much more heavily weighted towards the strategic work across my businesses, income generating activity, things that we can do that'll actually generate more income and risk reduction. I am of course a developer after all, and I buy risk. That is what I do. Now, this has meant that I've had to delegate a lot more across the business. I've had to trust a lot more people with a lot more responsibility. I've had to step away from a lot of things that I've been historically quite involved with. 

It's also meant just putting down a number of legacy tasks, things that I enjoy doing, things that I'm actually quite good at doing, but tasks that commercially just don't make sense for me to be doing anymore, especially if I'm serious about building a business that I can scale profitably and sustainably, but doesn't require more and more and more of me. Now alongside all of that, I've been much more intentional about protecting my time for training and exercise. As you guys who listen to the show regularly will know, it's one of my top priorities if I'm not training and exercising, if I don't feel good physically, I'm definitely not feeling good mentally and I'm never going to be as productive as I can. I'm never going to be able to operate my businesses in the best way possible. 

Now, any of you listening who've got young families yourself will know how difficult it can be to fit everything in. Well, I have quite literally been putting this time in my diary and being very, very strict, very, very regimental. I work really well to structure. I am not good if things are not in the diary. I'm not good if the idea hasn't been committed to. So I've very intentionally been much more focused on a lot of this stuff, protecting my time, focusing deep areas of work on certain things, on certain days, certain weeks of the month. And I'm having much better results from doing all of this straight away. I'm pleased to say that I've been on top of all of this work and it has already had some massive

Andy Graham (07:32.404)

and very positive impacts on my business. Now, to give you a bit more context to this, I want to just rewind a little bit and take you back to Q4 2025. A lot of what's happening or what has just happened in January and the results that we've had is actually the fruition of work that we did in Q4. And that is very normal in a business. There is often quite a lack, especially in real estate. 

Crucially, at the end of 2025, so Q4, we went into that period knowing what we wanted 2026 to look like as a business. It was no surprise to me that my diary, my personal limitations were going to change a little bit and we got ahead of it. The objective wasn't to implement new strategies or try and reinvent the wheel or add new crazy things or do some mad deals. It was quite simply to tighten up what we were already doing and then start to raise the standard of execution across the board. So January has been the first real point at which we've seen the fruition of some of that work. 

Now, I am so, so, so pleased because, and I don't have the report in front of me just yet because we're a few days behind because we've been really, really busy, but I do already know that top line revenue, we have just obliterated any previous month. So January 26th, we've outperformed any previous month. And that's all the revenues across all the business, everywhere I generate income from.

And that is something I am exceptionally proud of. I mean, last year I took my foot off to a large extent. I just maintained last year for me was all about spending time with Isla, just taking advantage of the businesses that I built. I still worked very hard. Don't take that out of context at all, but that was one I did. You know, we didn't do any big campaigns. There wasn't a huge push to do anything new. It was just about working with what we had built. 

So to come straight into this year after just kind of putting some points of execution into Q4 last year and get the results that we just had in January is absolutely incredible. And what it does is just shows me very quickly what we're capable of and how the results that we can get if we're just a little bit more intelligent about stuff that we're already doing. Now from a recurring income perspective, it has been, like I said, without doubt our strongest month today. That's across the rental portfolio, that's across trading businesses, and it wasn't luck.

Andy Graham (09:55.727)

None of it was a surprise. This is the outcome of planning and preparation that we did. Now, alongside that financial performance, there have been some other really good signals of momentum. I've started to work with more clients on the Accelerator program. I've also been asked to contribute to lots of really interesting press and commentary, much more so than I've done previously and some other bits and pieces. A big part of that is again, because of all of the activity that we put in place at the end of last year.

I work with private investors. I have lots of fantastic relationships with people in all sorts of different areas of our industry. And a lot of those relationships have been very dormant and it's interesting when you start to just open those doors and start to have conversations and just remember certain things. Lots of great stuff can happen. A big part of our current focus has also been AI. Now I know that AI is a buzzword at the minute, but we haven't been doing it. I haven't been spending time investing into that because it's fashionable. 

I have seen it as something that can genuinely support my shift in focus. We're using it now to automate much lower value tasks to improve our reporting and visibility, to accelerate delivery across many areas of the business, both the trading businesses and the rental income. And it is having huge, huge benefits already. And we're doing all of this and this is the really special thing without increasing head count and without increasing the complexities. 

So Q425 was very strategic. Q126 has been about more of that and then delivering some of that and actually executing a lot of what we planned. And we've just started to see some really fantastic results as a consequence. So very pleased going into February and beyond. Now, let me talk to you about some other areas of the business. Let me talk to you about portfolio performance and efficiency and profitability. From a rental perspective, things are currently in a really strong position, but if I'm honest, things felt very, very slow, very tired, very heavy at points at the end of 25. 

Now overall, the portfolio is super stable right now, very predictable. There are still a couple of legacy tenant issues, fairly normal when you're operating at the scale that we are, but they can still be very draining. We had quite a lot of churn in Q3 and Q4 last year, and we had a lot of work to do to fill new units because we built and finished a lot of units. So managerially, it was very intense and a lot of stuff happened all at once.

Andy Graham (12:22.603)

That put a lot of pressure on us from a managerial perspective. We in turn put that pressure on our managers, our property managers. And if I'm honest, there were cracks and those cracks tend not to be visible at that time. They tend to wash through several months later. One of the challenges has been that churn and the churn has been absolutely because we took our eye off the ball some areas. Some tenants that should not have been in our houses slipped through. They didn't necessarily fail referencing, but we should have been more diligent, if I'm honest. And we just were not as on top of some issues like maintenance as well as we should have been. 

And that upsets tenants and tenants will eventually hand their notes in if they get upset and holding my hands up. We were not good enough across some areas of the business and we paid the price. We spent a lot of time through Q4 25 and then into January this year, fixing that very intense. We've had to invest in that process, lots of systems, lots of processes and Lewis and our team has done a fantastic job in a big area of that. And it's had some pretty immediate results as a immediate, but within sort of three to six months, but that result is improved efficiency, better net profit margins, less stress, happier tenants, happier landlords, if I'm honest. Cashflow is just much more predictable right now. And that predictability is crucial because if you're serious about margin and expanding your business over the long term, and you want to maximize things like your refinances, which I'm about to talk to you about, it's really, really, really important. So that's what's been going on. That's where we're at now. And I feel like we're in a much better position. 

Now let me talk to you about lending and refinancing and risk management. Q4, the backend of 2025 was dominated, certainly for me, by refinancing. Just the sheer volume of involvement with solicitors, lenders and brokers to get things refinanced. Now some of this was pretty vanilla stuff.

Single buy to less and very established HMOs. That's really easy. But refinancing multi-unit freehold blocks that you've just finished developing is a whole different ball game altogether. Picking these products off the shelf is just not the same as it is for HMOs and single buy to lets. You're much more involved with the lenders and the banks. It's much more about relationships, much more about the long-term plan, and there's much more to take into consideration.

Andy Graham (14:45.149)

And as a bill to rent operator trying to hold everything as well, it's always a challenge because you've got some very lumpy finance requirements. And of course the banks need a certain amount of equity and capital left in the deals. So trying to balance lots of things all at once can be a real challenge for a development business like ours. And it certainly has been. So the other thing I'll just add to that is you aren't spoilt for choice. If you want good terms, on multi-unit freehold blocks. It's not like you can just go and choose from 20 or 30 different lenders. 

There are a very small number of lenders and you've got to find the right lender and you've got to find the right product and the right way of working with the right lender. And it takes a lot of time, but Q4 2025 was dominated by this. Took up so much of my head space. And one of the things that we, as a business identified was that we've got to get all of that in place so that we're coming into 2026 with clarity and we can just get them boxed away very early on in the year. Because if we didn't, they were going to drag on. If they were to drag on, that starts to limit what we can do next. We need to refinance money out of deals, obviously, because we've got other stakeholders, we've got investors to repay, we've got other things going on in the business, and we want to get assets up and operationally stable. And we want to be able to just run the business as well. 

We don't want to be constantly pouring through paperwork and spending our time doing that. That's not where our time is best served. But if you're not careful, it can be really easy for these exercises to drag on and on and on and on. If I'm honest, I feel like the last four months of my life, I spent half of every single week back and forth with solicitors, with lenders, with brokers, and it's not the most exciting part of the role at all. But it is a very necessary one nonetheless. 

Now, I mentioned risk and it's a really important part of this here, because if you don't get your capital structuring right, you're going to put your business at risk. Capital and managing finance is a huge part of our businesses, isn't it? It doesn't matter what scale you're at, whether you're just doing your first deal or whether you're doing your 10th or your 100th, it's really, really important. So managing that process is a constant exercise. And that has just been where my head and a lot of my focus and attention has been for several months. And I have found it quite exhausting, if I'm honest.

Andy Graham (17:06.335)

I was ready for a break at Christmas. I was really, really exhausted by it all. It felt at times like we were just trudging through mud. And that's hard. I struggle with that sort of stuff. I like to see results quickly. I like to do things and get very quick results. I like to see the dial moving straight away. And the reality is in real estate, as we all know, that is very rarely the case. But I'm telling you this because this is one of the things that I have found very challenging. It's one of the things that as a business, we've just found challenging over the last three to six months. We're not unique in that sense, but if you're experiencing these sorts of challenges yourself, if you're finding you're spending lots and lots of time dealing with this sort of stuff yourself, I guess what I'm saying is, don't worry, it's normal. It's a high priority for you and your business. You've got to do it. You've got to do it and deliver it as well as you possibly can because it's essential for your business, but it is essential nonetheless. 

Now I'm hopeful that, give this another month and we will have all of those refinances behind us and we can focus on the much more enjoyable parts of our business, which is growing, which is making money, which is making our properties look really cool, doing deals, all of that stuff. And I guess that brings me very nicely onto live projects deals, what am I actually doing when I'm away from the desk at the minute? 

Well, I've got a few different projects simmering away, being built out. So let me just kind of recap on those. We've got a 13 flat scheme and new build a ground up project that I'm doing with my business partners in AIG. That's progressing well, a little bit behind schedule, but it's coming up. We're close to getting the roof on now. We're starting to fix internally. We've got windows in, so we're getting close to weather tight and that's exciting. So really looking forward to seeing that come out the ground. It's a couple of million pound project. So it's not small, but it's also not absolutely massive. But these things take a lot from everybody involved, lots of planning, lots of foresight, lots of money being spent and inevitably lots of problems. 

Another project in my development business is a scheme that I mentioned before the end of the year. It's a scheme of 18 flats. We've got the planning for it and we actually appointed a contractor. But you might remember me saying that unfortunately this particular contractor just before we were about to get started became very seriously unwell. Really terrible circumstances. And unfortunately what it meant was that that project got delayed and it has been

Andy Graham (19:30.731)

delayed indefinitely ever since. Now at the minute, we're reconsidering what we do with that site. Do we retender and look at building it out with another contractor? Do we sell it? We have got it on the market as a contingency. Do we go back into planning? Now that we've got planning, do we try and squeeze a little bit more out of it? That's something that we're thinking about, but it's frustrating. It's disappointing not to be able to get started when you've done all that work. But this is one of those things, those circumstances you just can't plan for.

The contingency is having a runoff, being able to afford something like this happening, but you can't have a builder sat in the waiting in case your first choice drops out or for some reason can't build it. It's just really difficult to ever sort of plan these sort of left field events. Now, another project that I've got going on at the minute is a scheme for myself and Gemma. It's going to be our family home. Now, in reality, this one has been a bit more challenging for a few reasons, but largely because it has not been a commercial project

It's been much more emotionally driven and there is another person involved. It was also emotionally involved. So this project we bought over 12 months ago. Gem and I we bought it in probate. We got the planning to develop it out. We tended for it. We had a contractor ready to appoint or price stop. We were happy but somewhere along the way, we started to question whether it's the right scheme whether it's the right time whether the economics were quite right and anyway

To cut a long story short, we decided at the end of 2025 that perhaps it wasn't for us and we put it up on the market for sale. Now I wasn't actually holding out for much at all. You might remember that December post budget, it wasn't a particularly buoyant market, but lo and behold it did sell and we went away over Christmas with the plan to come back and get it sold in the new year. But as we went up to Scotland and all of the noise just disappeared for a couple of weeks, around the fire, just enjoyed Christmas. We had a bit of time to reflect and we started to think a little bit differently. We decided that perhaps we'd been a little bit hasty and actually we did want to do this project. 

So I spoke to my contractor, checked in, they could still do the project, said we'd get started in February and that was the plan. I came back in January, I gave the agent a call, apologized and pulled out the sale. Fortunately, no money had been spent and had it have been spent by the buyer. I said, give me the bill, I'll sort you out. But anyway,

Andy Graham (21:54.421)

Very shortly after, I caught it with my contractor and unfortunately, a very key person in their business had had a heart attack and subsequently, over the following days, that person died. Really terrible, really tragic and this is a small contracting outfit. The bill, you know, was around about half a million. So not the same sort of contractors we use for our larger developments. And this was a key person in their business and what it meant was that it was going to make projects that they were already committed to very difficult to deliver. And inevitably it meant that our project was just going to have to be either delayed or canceled completely. 

Now I said, no problem, sympathized entirely. And again, just one of those things, but I couldn't believe it. This is twice it's happened to me now are very similar circumstances. And again, what it means is just a delay. It means more cost. And I suppose I'm telling you this and I'm laboring the story of these two projects because I want you to know that this stuff happens. This is very real. It's frustrating. It's disappointing. It's expensive. But there we go. That's the reality. 

So a new build scheme, 13 flats, nearly at roof on, nearly watertight on the whole, going well, but a little bit behind schedule. And then two schemes, very different ones. 18 flats, one's my own home and they are indefinitely paused. 

And that is my report to you guys, I wish I could sit down and say all three projects are going like gangbusters. We're under budget. We're ahead of the program timeline, but it's just not the reality. So if you're having issues yourself anywhere from planning to snagging, then trust me, you are not alone. Maybe it's just you and I, but I'm pretty sure there are many, many more. It's the reality of developing guys. It's the reality of investing in property, working with contractors and doing this sort of stuff. 

So my advice, be patient, be persistent, don't bury your head in the sand, whatever you do, tackle things head on, be proactive, solve problems, and do it as fast as you possibly can, unless you can afford to sit and wait. Okay, so let me now just give you a bit of an idea as I start to look forwards into 2026 and beyond. This year is very much about putting my foot down, but as I think I...

Andy Graham (24:17.969)

have explained today and hopefully have explained, it's not about being reckless. It's not about taking unnecessary risks. It's more so about doing what we already do better, taking advantage of what we've already built and what we've created, making better margins out of everything that we do, being far more efficient, being intelligent about technology that we use in our business and removing the dead weight that inevitably does just sort of start to pile up over the years of building a business. 

So for me, not necessarily a year about learning. I'm always learning, but this is very much a year about executing. It's about putting a lot of the stuff that I talk to you guys about into practice, getting into my business, sleaze rolled up, driving strategy, pursuing the vision, actually making material changes that generate income and reduce costs.

And yes, I do want to build more. I do want to develop more this year and I have got my eyes on a couple of sites at the minute. They're interesting deals too early to talk about them on the show today. But if and when they progress, I'll definitely give you a bit of an update. That's about it for today though guys. January on the whole was a really fantastic month. Really pleased with the progress, really pleased with the changes that we've made in the business, really pleased with the work that we did in Q4 2025.

Little bit frustrating to have the challenges that we are currently having in the development business. Pleased to be coming out the back of some big refinances. That's a huge refresh, big reset point for us. Lots of breathing room. Be nice to have some cash in the bank. And I'm really excited about the rest of the year. I think there are going to be some good buying opportunities. I've talked about this on the show recently, and I think that this is one of the best buying opportunities in a long, long time. If you adjust for inflation at the minute.

Property values look very, very good. Yes, costs are high at the minute. Yes, interest rates are still high, but it is all relative. If you can take a long term view, you're probably going to be just fine. And remember that when you stack a deal on the spreadsheet, you are looking at the performance today. You're not looking at the performance in three years and five years and 10 years. So I just want to quietly remind everybody that while deals don't necessarily look the

Andy Graham (26:36.401)

best on paper right now. Don't be fooled into thinking that that's the way that they will always look. There's a very different exercise to do that you can do to assess potential performance over a much longer time horizon. And that is where you will make your money. That's it for me today, guys. Thank you for tuning in. I hope, like I said earlier, that this just gives you that dose of reality. If you are having issues, challenges in your own business, hopefully this just gives you some relatable experience. 

Hopefully I've inspired you. Hopefully I've motivated you. If you are finding it difficult, push on, stick at it. I promise it'll be worth it. Now, if you are building a HMO property business, head to theHMOroadmap.co.uk, get yourself enrolled and go and take advantage of everything that we've got to offer. And if you want to take things a step further, if you really want to level things up this year and you want to work with me, then head to the show notes. There's a link there, you can find that a little bit more. And if you want to book a strategy call with me and have a chat about your business, what's going on, what's not working and how I might be able to help you, you can book that call in now. So just head to the show notes, find that link and get yourself booked in. 

That's it guys. Thanks again for tuning in and don't forget that I'll be right back here in the very same place next week. So please join me then for another installment of the HMO podcast.