The Property Unleashed Podcast

Ten Practical Property Strategies To Build Income In 2026

• Mark Fitzgerald • Episode 377

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Ten different ways to make good money in property investing in 2026 sounds simple until you try to run the numbers and realise how many investors get stuck using only one approach. 


I’m Mark Fitzgerald, and I’m breaking down a full menu of property strategies so you can stop guessing, start choosing, and build a plan that fits your real life, not a highlight reel.


We start with buy-to-let and why the “vanilla” model has tightened as house prices and mortgage rates rise. From there, I explain how the same property can perform very differently depending on the rental strategy, including serviced accommodation (Airbnb and Booking.com) and working with social housing, supported living, and care providers. If you’re looking for a lower-capital entry point, we dig into rent-to-rent for HMOs and short-term lets, what costs you take on, and why margins matter more than hype.


If you like renovations and big chunks of profit, we talk flips, the risks of a stagnant market, and how assisted sales can let you profit from an uplift without buying the property outright. I also cover BRRR (buy, refurbish, refinance, rent) for building a portfolio, how HMO conversions can create value, and why checking Article 4 planning constraints is essential. Then we hit commercial property realities, the experience barrier with lenders, and how commercial-to-residential conversion can unlock value when planning and valuation line up.


Finally, we get honest about predictability versus upside with HMOs and serviced accommodation, including the tax and VAT traps that can wipe out what looks like strong cash flow. If you want more property investing education, subscribe, share this with a friend who’s stuck, and leave a review so more investors can find the strategies that actually work.

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Why Strategies Matter In 2026

SPEAKER_00

Ten different ways that you can make good money in property investing in 2026. Hello, my name is Mark Fitzgerald. It's great to have you joining me here on the Property Unleash podcast. So I hope you are well and winning and things are going in the right direction for you. But the one thing that I keep coming across, potentially with a lot of people who are maybe getting started in property, maybe maybe got started, maybe just moving forward, but aren't getting the traction that they want. And that is sometimes down to and due to the fact that they're not always aware of the different strategies that they can use to actually get the results that they want. So I just wanted to clarify a few things here because I have some getting to know you, if you like, calls, Zoom calls with people, particularly when they want to come and join our community and things. I'm always trying to, you know, make sure that I'm connecting with the community, make sure that I'm helping our community in education to action and any of the trainings and coachings that we offer as well. And one thing that keeps coming up to me time and time again on these calls is that people aren't fully aware of the opportunities that are out there and the different strategies that they can use and potentially learn about in our community as well, because we have a full vault of training opportunities. So this is just a list of 10 different ways that you can make things. I'm going to talk about the pros, the cons on some of those as well. Some of those will resonate with you, some of those won't. Some of those you'll have heard before, some of those potentially you haven't as well. But it's just to put out an episode there that really I can sort of go back to with people that I speak to and just say, you know, if you listen to podcast episode, whatever this one's going to end up being, then it might help you in understanding all the opportunities that are out there for you. So let's start at the very

Buy To Let And Smarter Letting

SPEAKER_00

beginning. Of course, the most simplest property investing strategy out there is buy-to-let. That is where you buy just a property and then you let it out to a tenant. Now, buy-to-let used to be, I would have said, probably about eight years ago, really, really good, really, really good. But as house prices have gone up and up and up, and rents, of course, in a lot of areas have increased as well, but they haven't really gone up as much as house prices. So trying to get the numbers to work on a buy-to-let now. And when I say to work is because predominantly as a property investor, you will buy a property, a house, a flat or whatever, but you'll put down 25% and then you'll get a 75% mortgage on there. But of course, you've got repayments on those mortgages. Now, the higher the price of the house, the higher, obviously, the amount of money that you're going to have to borrow from the banks. And of course, the percentages have gone up as well. Whereas we used to have one, two, three percent. It's now more around the you know, three, four, five, six percent as well. So that means that your repayments each and every month that cut into your profits are a lot higher. And that means that in a lot of areas across the UK, it's very, very difficult now for people to get actually vanilla buy to let's to actually stack and work. Now they still can stack and work, depending on a how much money you want to invest into the property, what you pay for the property as well. If you can get it, what we call BMV, below market value, then that can make a massive difference to obviously the payments that you're gonna be putting in each and every month. If you buy the property for cash, which I don't really recommend, but you could say, well, I'll buy it for cash and then all of the profits mine because I've got no mortgage, that's brilliant. But then you've got the potential of tying up a lot of money in one property, and that's not the best way to go about investing. But buy to let, predominantly everybody knows about, but it's got to be on my list, isn't it? Because it is a way that you can still make money. Now, if you have a buy-to-let property, there are different strategies that you can use now. You do not just have to let your property to a tenant. You can, of course, look to do service to accommodation on there, which is another one of our strategies here. Airbnb, the property, and potentially then it's a nightly rate rather than a monthly fee. So you might earn more on that property there. Or you could look to also work with social housing, supported living, care providers that'll take on your property and also take on the maintenance or the minor maintenance, should I say, of those properties as well. You've probably heard me speaking about this before because I have a business now that actually helps landlords by finding their providers. But that's another way for actually making a potential buy-to-let property that's not going to work for you, as per se letting it to a family or letting it to a tenant. These are different ways and strategies that you can use to make sure that a property works for you.

Rent To Rent For Faster Starts

SPEAKER_00

Next on there is a strategy called rent to rent. If you've listened to a few episodes of this, you'll know that I started in property using this strategy and I used it on HMO properties and service accommodation. And those are predominantly the two different types of properties to use to really maximize these great strategies. HMOs where you let the property out on a room-by-room basis. It works very, very well with rent-to-rent. Why? Because you'll earn a lot more money through the rental income because you potentially have a five-bed property, five different rents coming in. There's plenty of money in there to work. You go to a landlord or the property owner, you give them a set rent each and every month. You then let the property or the rooms for whatever rates that you can get, and you obviously make your money on the difference. Now you take on the bills, utilities, and all the other costs of the property and a minor maintenance as well. So you need to make sure that you've got good margins in your profit. The other thing you can do with rent to rent is, of course, Airbnb, booking.com, holiday lets as well. But you can take on, you wouldn't take on HMOs, then you would just take on single-let properties. So a two-bed, three-bed house, a flat, something like that. And then you just make sure that people will want to stay in there and you charge them a nightly rate so that people who just want to come out come and stay somewhere for a few days can use it there. So rent to rent's a great one to use as well. A lot of people who don't have big chunks of money to buy property will use rent to rent as a strategy to get started. The next one is flips.

Flips And Assisted Sales Explained

SPEAKER_00

So that is where you're really looking at buying a property that is run down, you're looking to add the value to that property, okay, and then you're looking to sell it on. And you make your money once that property is sold. So let's say, for argument's sake, you bought a property for 200,000 pounds that was actually worth 300,000 pounds, but it's so run down that you're going to strip everything out, you're going to do a whole refurbishment on that property. You're going to spend, you know, 50,000, 60,000 pounds on that property potentially, but then it should be worth 300,000 pounds. On those numbers, if you sold it for 300,000 pounds or more, of course, because you get more profit, you'd have made 40,000 pounds. Now you have to take into that, you know, your refurbishment, you'd have to pay stamp duty, you'd have to obviously pay building costs, you'd have to buy materials, there's a whole load of expenses in there. So that all needs to be factored in. But flips can still work. Now, at the moment, as I say, we're we're here in June 2026. The market is quite stagnant, so flips can be a bit of a challenge, and they can be a little bit of a risk in certain areas as well, unless you know the area, you know the demand is high, it can be a bit of a challenge. Another sort of strategy that you can use if you're looking at doing flips, and flips does involve you having a nice big chunk of cash or an investor's chunk of cash to be able to do this. You will need some money to do flips, but you can use a strategy called assisted sales. Now, assisted sale is you get the owner of the property wants to sell their property for 200,000 pounds because it's run down a bit. You know you can get it if you put some work into it to 300,000 pounds. Okay, you could do an assisted sale. Now, an assisted sale means you're not gonna buy the property, but what you are gonna do is you're gonna lock in the property price with the owner. So you're gonna say to the owner, listen, I'll give you 200,000 pounds if I can control your property for X amount of time while I do the refurb work, and then when I sell it, you're guaranteed your payment there. And anything that I can make on the uplift is A to pay me back because I'm still gonna pay for the refurbishment costs, but B, the profit on top of that then is mine to take away. That saves you having to spend out on stamp duty. That saves you on a lot of solicitor fees and things and a lot of time as well. So assisted sales can be great ways to do flips if you've got a smaller pot of money where potentially you can't afford to buy the property and refurbish it. Maybe you've just got enough to be able to refurbish the property. Now it's not going to work with everybody, but it can be a great method. And a lot of our community members are learning all about these different strategies as flips, assisted sales, rent to rents, and all of those in our community as well. So get the skill sets, get the toolkit to be able to go out there and to be able to use these great strategies. But assisted sales, when it works, can work and can be a very, very powerful way for you to make big chunks of money very quickly if like flipping properties and doing refurbs is your thing.

BRRR Method And Article 4 Checks

SPEAKER_00

Staying on the track of refurbs is obviously the buy, refurbish, refinance and then rent method as well. The BRRR method. And again, you're basically buying the property and you're doing some work to it, bringing it up to another level so that you can potentially then refinance the uplift that you because you've done the refurb in the property, back out of the property, and then you'll go and rent that on the open market. Now you could Airbnb, you could do what you like, but that is a great way if you're looking at momentum investing and building up a portfolio for yourself. A lot of people do this very successfully with the HMO strategy, because if you can take a residential property, a C3 property, maybe it's a three or four bed, but potentially you can add some extra rooms to it or add some more living space or an extension on it. You then convert it into an HMO, then you get the uplift because you've got the HMO, potentially, if it's if it goes into C4, which is an HMO planning, and then you you can refinance a lot more because the property is worth a lot more. I could do an episode going into all of the details of that on its own, but just suffice to say, it's very important that you check your area and you look for something called article four with your local council. Because if article four has come in, you need to see on a map of your area where article four is. If you're looking at buying a property to do this with in an article four area, you will struggle to get the planning through. It's not always impossible, but it can be very, very difficult. If it's not got article four or it's outside of an article four area, then chances are you'll be able to get the planning to do that.

Commercial Property Reality Check

SPEAKER_00

Obviously, commercial property is the buzzword. I see it advertised all the time. I any time I go on YouTube, adverts pop up. You know, have you thought about this? A lot of uh buy to let landlords are now doing commercial and all of that great stuff. I can tell you now, commercial is great because you'll get, you know, your costas or you'll get your Starbucks or your subways in there, you'll buy a commercial property, they'll take a 10, 15-year lease, you know, fully repairing FRI lease, happy days. Listen, if you're just starting out and everything like that, chances are with commercial, you're going to need to piggyback off somebody else's experience because most commercial brokers won't actually give lending or commercial lending to people when they've got no experience in property or they've got no commercial experience as well. It's absolutely crazy because even if you're being a landlord for a long time, you're going to buy a commercial property. A lot of the lenders will not work with you until you've got commercial experience. And that just makes me laugh because how do you get commercial experience if you can't get a commercial mortgage? So it's not always sunshine and roses, it's not always as easy as possible, and there can be a lot of other costs in that one. So when everybody thinks, oh, that that sounds easy, I just get them in there and I put it in uh I put Starbucks or whatever in there for a long time. Happy days. Listen, it can be done, but none of this is easy. Property investing isn't easy, it's hard, it's tricky, there's a lot of pitfalls to it. So do make sure you know what you're doing. The next one is commercial to residential, which

Commercial To Residential Value Uplift

SPEAKER_00

can be great. So in this case, you're actually looking at buying a commercial property. You might even be able to bridge that on a commercial, and then you're looking at converting that commercial property into a residential property. Now, this can work very, very well because predominantly commercial prices are lower than residential C3 prices. So if you can find a property that is commercial that you know you can get through planning and change the planning uses to C3 and then get a bricks and mortar valuation by adding value to it, that is a great little strategy to do. And that can work very, very well.

HMOs Versus Service Accommodation

SPEAKER_00

As we touched on as well, HMOs, houses of multiple occupation. Whether you're looking at buying them, whether you're looking at converting them yourself, doing the BRRR strategy, whether you're looking at doing rent-to-rent on those, they're very, very good properties to get great cash flow from. Likewise, Airbnb service accommodation, booking.com properties, again, also are very, very good. Now, I personally actually prefer HMOs over serviced accommodation for one very specific reason is I like to know what I'm gonna earn each and every month. When I do service accommodation, I don't always know what I'm gonna make each and every month because we're always waiting for bookings. And chances are you could have a couple of months where you haven't got any bookings and people are booking at the last minute. And yes, you might do well, and you might earn a lot more than you would with an HMO. But in my little head, I like to know each and every month what I've got coming through. Now, once you've done a couple of service accommodation deals and you can see what profits are coming your way, then that gives you the confidence to be able to go out there and then do more of these types of deals and things like that. So just make sure that there is demand in your area, that you know for a fact that you're going to get bookings and that you do have a bit of a plan B as well, just in case it doesn't quite work out for you. So always make sure you're stacking your numbers.

Tax And VAT Traps In Short Lets

SPEAKER_00

But the one big thing that you need to take into consideration as well with service to accommodation is your taxes. As a business, we all pay tax, but on service to accommodation, because of the way that the actual HMRC will monitor your business, you will actually be charged tax on your gross profit. So if you make £4,000 a month on an HMO, okay, once you've taken off all the expenses, once you've taken off all the other bits and bobs, it might be 1200 quid. You'll only be taxed on that 1200 quid, which is profit. On a service to accommodation, once you've taken 4,000 pounds for the same sort of scenario, that's where you're taxed at. It doesn't matter if you've got costs, it doesn't matter if it comes down. Yes, you can offset a few bits and bobs. Don't get me wrong, you need a good accountant to do all of this, but predominantly you're going to hit VAT, the 90,000 pounds a year threshold, a lot quicker. So when you're stacking a service to accommodation deal, please do stack it and then have a look at taking off another 17% for VAT, just in case you hit that threshold. You might see that's a long way off, and it could be a long way off. But if you have a really good year and you hit that, and all of a sudden that 17% is all of your profits, and you're laid with a big tax bill, that can be a scary place to be. So make sure you're the property professional, as I always like to say, and that we do things

Development And Social Housing Profits

SPEAKER_00

right. And of course, another great way to make money in property is by development. So it's buying a plot of land, getting planning on it, and building some dwellings on there, obviously, then to sell those off. Now, that normally incorporates quite a large fund, quite a large pot of money and a lot of skill sets to be able to do that. But again, it's another way that you can make money in property. And of course, last but not least, it's social housing, supported living, temporary accommodation, or see to children's care or adult care properties. That is another great way to maximize your profits from any properties that you have. Now, what you can do is with supported living, social housing, and all of these, is you can do what is a bit like a rent-to-rent with a landlord and a provider. And we call this back-to-back leasing. Now, where back-to-back leasing differs from rent-to-rent is you find a landlord and a property that suits the providers in those areas. When I say providers, that could be supported living, that could be for people with disabilities, it could be people with learning troubles, it could be people who are just trying to get back on their feet. But you find a landlord with a property, you do a deal with them. So let's say, for argument's sake, they've got a little bite to let it's worth a thousand pounds a month. You say to them, I'll give you a thousand pounds a month for the next five years and I'll take care of minor maintenance and everything, very much like we would on a rent-to-rent. But you then have a provider in the background who's happy to pay you 1,300, potentially, 1,500, potentially, potentially. Then you do a deal with that provider and you sit in the middle. So the provider takes the property on, they look after it, they cover the minor maintenance. You basically pay the landlord a thousand pounds, the provider pays you 1300, 1500 quid, you sit in the middle and you make your money. Now, it won't work all the time. None of these things will work all the time. You need to find the right investors, you need to find the right people. Obviously, if you're flipping properties or you're doing more of a conventional way of buying property, then that'll probably work. But some of these more niche strategies you do have to do on a case-by-case basis. But you know, back-to-back leasing can work very, very well. You just need to make sure, as I say, that you're you're working with a landlord that knows exactly what you're going to do with the property. Okay. And also you've got the right provider. And I always say, get the right provider first so that you know exactly the people that you're going to be putting in there. And if you

Back To Back Leasing Plus Next Steps

SPEAKER_00

need any help with that, obviously, to find the right providers, then social spaces solutions, my company, can help you with that. Obviously, we're always looking for landlords, for investors to work with. We're looking for blocks of flats. We can take on the whole blocks of flats, or our providers can. We're looking for bungalows. If you've got any bungalows, reach out to us. Go and visit socialspaces.uk as a website, put your property details in there, and we'll get back to you and tell you what we can or maybe can't do with that property. But we're always looking for studio flats up to four-bed flats, houses, any houses from you know two-bed upwards, uh, some HMOs in certain areas, but definitely looking for bungalows as well. If you've got a three-bed or a four-bed detached bungalow, we can probably help you make an absolute fortune each and every month, doing the right thing and helping people as well. We don't take advantage of anybody here, but we've got the skill sets to be able to help you. As I say, it won't work on every property, depends on the area, depends on the property, but on a case-by-case basis, we're helping more and more investors and landlords with this. Likewise to that, if you like the sound of a lot of these strategies, most of these sort of strategies you can learn in ETA, which is just a monthly subscription. You get access to thousands and thousands of pounds worth of training, thousands of pounds worth of coaching when we have our live sessions each and every week where you can come and ask questions and we can help and support you. And anything from deal sourcing, which I haven't really talked about here, because I mean that is a property investing strategy, but you don't really ever control or hold the properties, do you? Purchase lease options is another great one to learn about rent to rent, service to accommodation, HMOs, flipping properties, assisted sales, you name it. We've got the skills and the trainings in there to help and support you. So do check out education toaction.com or check out the propertyunleash.com. But if you do need any help and assistance in your property investing, do feel free to reach out to me. You can email me, you can message me on social media. Let's all become friends and let's move forward. But I wanted to put this episode together right here, right now, to give you all a few understandings and a few ideas of the different methods and ways that you can get involved in property and you don't always have to have large sums of money. You know, when I started, my first deal actually cost me after I paid for the contracts, and they weren't cheap, they're £1,200 for the contract, but after I paid for my contract and everything, my first deal only cost me a couple of hundred quid. The most a rent-to-rent deal has ever cost me is £900, which I'm sure anybody can find if they need to, if they know they can make between £500 and £800 a month on a property. Now, sometimes you might have a month, you might have a bad month. So you need to make sure that you have got a level of money that you can have in the background whilst you get yourself up and running. But once you're up and running, treat it as a business and move yourself forward. It's all about getting out there, it's all about taking action. And I thank you for joining me here. And I look forward to you joining me in the next episode very soon. Take care and bye for now.