I am about to leave my extremely well rewarded corporate career in the middle of a raging economic and health crisis (middle of it...? who knows) and follow my heart and mind into property development. I have done everything in my power to prepare for this change: I have been developing and renovating properties for the past 20+years. I have studied startups, and I am still paying for the best property education money can buy. Sounds like a straightforward journey of becoming a full-time developer? Was it straightforward? It wasn’t.

My natural way of learning is to dig in, amass and synthesise as much knowledge as possible. I used that approach many times when I had to tackle complex problems in my corporate career. And I used the same approach with the books and blogs written on startups and enterprise leadership: I read and listened to most of them between 2017 and 2019. I learnt a lot about building startups, and about psychology, and I enjoyed writing about both. I wrote blogs and a book (kind of). I tapped 80,000+ words into my iPhone during my commutes and nicely structured my content around the life stages of companies, entrepreneurship and property. I used creative thinking and some models to identify large underserved markets, and I came up with some promising startup ideas to serve them. For a while, I believed I would launch a tech startup after leaving BAT...After a while, I came to my senses. During all the learning I was most alert when I listened to property-related audiobooks. That helped. Ultimately, I realised that the UK housing market was that large underserved market I was looking for. The market where my passion and twenty years of experience in property overlapped with an unmet need I could satisfy.

There is significant unmet demand for safe, well-built and beautiful homes in places where people want to live.

I have experience and skills in property development; it is time to step out from the safety of salary, bonuses and share awards to make my passion my profession.

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