The Property Unleashed Podcast

From Zero Experience To Profitable Serviced Accommodation

• Mark Fitzgerald • Episode 361

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Ready to rethink what’s possible with serviced accommodation? 

We unpack a real case where a first-time buyer with low income and a gifted deposit bought a property and turned it into a profitable Airbnb—legitimately, with the right mortgage, and without complex renovations or bridging finance. 

Rob Peters, our go-to mortgage expert, walks us through the lender mindset, the product selection, and the exact numbers that made the deal work.

We start by clarifying why standard residential and vanilla buy-to-let products often prohibit short-term letting and how the right serviced accommodation mortgage changes the rules. Rob details the client’s profile—no assets, living with parents, limited earnings—and explains how lenders evaluate risk when a borrower lacks experience. 

Then we dive into the mechanics: a £124,000 purchase with a 25 percent deposit, an interest-only loan around £93,000 fixed near 4.99 percent, and zero product fee with a free valuation to de-risk the process. 

You’ll hear the monthly math side by side: roughly £800 as a long-term let versus about £2,300 on Airbnb, a mortgage payment close to £386, and an estimated £600 in operating costs, leaving about £1,300 profit each month.

Beyond the headline figures, we focus on execution. You’ll learn how to present a clean case to lenders—documenting demand drivers, using conservative occupancy, and proving you can operate like a business with proper cleaning, pricing, and guest management. 

We talk risk buffers, compliance, and the importance of a power team: a broker who knows SA products, a solicitor who keeps timelines tight, and a community that helps you avoid rookie mistakes. 

If you’ve ever thought lenders would shut the door because you’re new, this story shows how the right structure can open it. If this sparks ideas for your next move, subscribe, share with a friend who’s SA-curious, and leave a quick review to help more investors find the show. 

Got questions or want us to analyze another strategy? 

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SPEAKER_00:

How to buy properties to use for serviced accommodation if you have no experience in property investing. That's what we're gonna share with you today. Hello and welcome to the Property Unleashed with me, your host, Mark Fitzgerald. It's great to have you joining me here today. So I thought you would like a little treat. We have obviously the Property Unleashed ETA community, education to action, property investors community, where we have live sessions each week. And a couple of weeks ago we had Rob Peters, our financial expert on, who does our monthly mortgage and financial updates. And he also shares with us key learnings and also case studies on very specific topics that can help different property investors. Now, because you're listening to this podcast, which means you're a part of my community as well, I wanted to share with you the case study that Rob ran through. Why? Because there's a lot of people out there that want to buy properties, don't necessarily want to do rent to rent, although there are a lot of people that want to do that as well. But there are people that obviously that want to purchase properties to run as serviced accommodation. Now, sometimes those people are quite young and maybe have no property experience whatsoever. So do sometimes think that lending could be potentially the biggest pitfall for them when it comes to buying a property to run it as SA because you have to have it on the right mortgage and you have to make sure that you're setting yourself up, as we like to say, for success. So Rob's gonna run through exactly how you can do that and what to look out for, and also how to make sure that you set yourself up in the best manner possible. You're gonna love this recording. So without further ado, I'll leave you to it. Take it away, Rob.

SPEAKER_01:

So what I thought we'd do this month is, well, every month I like to what I like to do is have a have a few minutes just to talk about a particular area of the market, a particular product, something that's gonna add value that that helps bring things to life, or you can take away and have an extra tool in the kit in case you think, well, do you know what this property might suit that thing that Rob was talking about? So what I wanted to do this month was actually have a bit of a case study. We've covered off various different areas, but one area we haven't talked about too much is serviced accommodation. So short-term letting, Airbnb, holiday lets, contractors, that sort of thing. You can't do that on a standard mortgage. Normal mortgage providers generally don't let you do it. They might let you do it for a few days a year, but you can you can't you can't really run it as a business. Um, so what I wanted to show is an example of a case that we did in November last year for a client that was referred to us who needed to, who wanted to buy a property and use it as an Airbnb. So the circumstances of this case, but there were quite a few what we would call challenges or issues to do with the overall profile of the case. The first thing was that they were a first-time buyer. Now, generally speaking, service accommodation is considered an advanced strategy, and the lenders who offer service accommodation mortgages, they want the borrowers to have experience and or assets. So they want them to have some other property, they want them to have some experience of running something, even just to buy to let, or even just to own their own home. In this instance, this was a first-time buyer, no experience, no assets, living with parents. Gifted deposit. So what we mean here is that where is the money coming from that's gonna go in as the deposit on the property? Well, lenders generally want to see you putting your own money into deals because they know then that you're not going to walk away from it because you've got skin in the game. In this instance, this client was putting a little bit in herself, but some of that money was actually a gift from a family member as well. And then on top of that, we had low income. So this client was earning 9,700 pounds per year as a self-employed dog walker, so fairly low income. Now, each one of these things individually, you might think, well, we can we can deal with that, but let's put all this together. So they're a first-time buyer, they've got no experience, they've got no assets, they don't own their own home, they're not putting their own money in, and they've got very little income to back things up if it goes wrong. Now, all of a sudden, you've got this kind of picture here where actually not a lot of lenders are going to want to look at this. But I can say that we've we obviously found a solution, otherwise, I wouldn't be bringing this case study, would I? So the purchase price was 124,000 in this instance. Let's put some numbers to it so we can really see how it works. This was just a normal purchase. There was nothing really creative going on as such, it was just a difficult case. So they were putting in a 25% deposit, so that was$31,000 going in in cash to make this happen. They had 16 and dad was giving the other 15. The rent here, if it was running as a buy to let, would have been£800 per month on this property. But the plan was to run it as Airbnb, and the projected rental income was£2,300 per month. I mean, wow, look at the difference between those figures, right? It's it's almost three times the amount that's being expected here. So this is in stockport, if you're interested. So what that means is that we were expecting to get a mortgage of about$93,000, and that mortgage would have an interest rate of 4.99, and this is back in November, remember. So these rates may have come down since then, and that was fixed for five years. So on the mortgage, the payment would be£386. Remember, we've got this£2,300 coming in, we've got£386 going out for the mortgage. That mortgage is interest only, but there is the option to pay some extra capital if you want to. You don't have to, you're not obliged to, but there is the option there. There's no mortgage product fee on this, so the lender doesn't charge a fee for this product. You know, those high fees we talked about in the last slide. That's zero here. It's a free valuation, so we're not paying to have the property valued. So if the valuation comes about really bad and there's an issue, you don't have to go ahead. You know, there's not there's not much that you've you've really lost unless it was, you know, you'd you'd you'd paid some sort of reservation fee. And we arranged the solicitor for them and we monitored the solicitor to ensure that they remained on track. Our advice fee was£698. After the mortgage, the clients left over with£1,900 per month. And then if we think about the running costs, because it's Airbnb and you've got to have cleaners and insurance and all those other elements, it costs about£600 for the month. There's£1,300 per month profit left in this deal. So I thought I'd illustrate this one because it show brings to life that number one, don't think that because there's a complication, low income, I don't own any property, I don't have any experience, I'm not putting all my own money in. You can't do deals. You can, we can make it happen. If it can happen, we can do it. And number two, just doing something such as this without too much complication, without too much, there's no renovation, significant renovation, there's no works, there's no bridging, none of that stuff is going on. But there are strategies out there that can deliver really good ROI and returns just by doing the basics. Thanks very much.

SPEAKER_00:

Back to you, Mark. Brilliant, brilliant stuff. As always, Rob, thank you ever so much for that. It's always great to see the interest rates and the updates and everything there. Obviously, not a lot's already happened here. We've had some good greens in the right direction, but you know, it's beginning of the year at the end of the day. But I love the case study as well because it opens up so many thought processes for people, I think is the main thing. And that that's one of the things because it's not just you know theory, as you said rightly in your own presentation. What you're actually showing us here is a case study of somebody that's done a deal recently that probably a lot of us or a lot of people out there would have looked at and said, I can't do something like that because I don't own property, I haven't got the experience and things. But it just goes to show that if you're speaking to the right people, and the sooner you do that, the better as well, because there may be certain things whilst you're trying to find deals that you can start to do in the in the process as well, isn't there?

SPEAKER_01:

Absolutely. True story, we arranged a mortgage for a client, a Nigerian client who lives in Nigeria, who'd never been to the UK in one of the highest risk countries in the world, didn't own any property in the UK, and we arranged a mortgage for them. If we can do it for them, we can do it for you.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, yeah, and that's the beauty of it. So do reach out to Rob and his team. They are marvelous, they are first class, and you'd be silly not to. So that's why he's a member of uh ETA and our uh financial expert. So um, yeah, love the case studies, always, always love a case study, don't we? But great to have you on, Rob. Thank you ever so much for your time today and for sharing your knowledge with us. Fantastic. Thanks very much, Mark. So I hope you've enjoyed this episode today, and of course, the key learnings that we've had there makes life very, very interesting when you're trying to get out there. And I also do say that a lot of the time it's having that right power team in your corner so that you can ask questions as and when you need to. Because a lot of people miss out on very, very good deals and opportunities just simply because they don't know the answers or they fear the answers to certain questions. So if you need help and support on your property investing journey, check out the propertyunleashed.com, scroll down to ETA and have a little look at our community. It's a very, very small monthly fee to be a part of this community with thousands and thousands of pounds worth of training and support and coaching and live sessions in there each and every week and each and every month. So if you are interested in that, check it out and come and trial us, see what it's all about. There's no long commitment to it, and within two clicks, you can cancel any point. So it's worth just having a little adventure into there because chances are if you need a bit of help and support or you just need to learn more, we can help you with that. And as Rob put today in his case study, we are always expanding everybody's knowledge and learning. So I look forward to you continually expanding your knowledge and learning, just like I'm doing myself all of the time. And I'll see you in the next episode. Well, how about now? Take care and bye for now.