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Unlocking off-market success for Mountbatten Estates

Discover how Dave Hartnett, CEO of Mountbatten Estates, was able to save hundreds of hours finding sites and rapidly scale with Nimbus®.

"Nimbus® has allowed me to truly scale my property business - going from sourcing 3 sites a month using traditional methods to 600."

Background

With over two decades of property investing experience, Dave Hartnett, CEO of Mountbatten Estates, had a mixed residential portfolio of Buy-To-Lets, Houses of Multiple Occupancy as well 
as owning an estate agents in London. 

In less than two years, Dave had built a pipeline of development sites in excess of £50 million Gross Development Value (GDV). 

Dave aims to grow the investment arm of his business via the ‘build to rent’ strategy so that Mountbatten Living has a portfolio of investment properties sitting in the background.

 

London houses

There are too many success stories for me to recount with Nimbus and that’s why I’ve recommended it to everyone for years. Plus, the service, price, functionality and simply how user-friendly it is just make it the go-to property tool.

Dave Hartnett

CEO Mountbatten Estates

The opportunity: going off-market

Following legislative changes to use classes and  Permitted Development (PD) rights, there has been a surge in opportunities to make money from property. 

However, with this influx of new opportunities comes an abundance of developers and investors interested in profitable opportunities. The race to find them as quickly as possible is on. Off-market is a winning strategy in this market and one that Dave wanted to embrace.

Dave would speak to agents, middlemen, brokers and land agents to search for off-market opportunities. It would take him days to find and manually consolidate the various datasets he needed to interpret the viability of an opportunity and assess risk.

The worst part? He never secured a deal. 

This led Dave to set up his own off-market site-finding service, leveraging property tech to find, assess, and quickly secure property opportunities for himself. 

Lacking direct access to the right information and tired of wasting time using middlemen to spot opportunities, Mountbatten Estates needed a more efficient and strategic approach. So they 
got in touch with Nimbus. 

The solution: from sourcing 3 sites a month to 600

Because of the competition in the market, it was critical that Dave could rapidly assess whether an opportunity was viable and move on to the next one before another developer. 

The key here is speed! With Nimbus, Dave was able to move quickly to easily find the best sites with the right information. He could quickly assess the viability of the opportunity and connect with owners to secure the new property investments.

In the past, Dave would typically find 3-8 sites a month but 
these would also have been shared to other developers on 
the agent’s database. This would create more competition 
and would further impact the purchase price.

Today, with all the information at his fingertips, he now finds 
400-600 potential sites per month using Nimbus, The business’ letter campaigning is all automated via the Nimbus platform - saving hundreds of hours and providing a truly scalable solution.

On average, they get a 3-5% response rate, which equates 
to them then analysing 20-30 sites a month. 

Results

Using Nimbus Maps, Dave said that he has too many success stories to recount and a pipeline full of current opportunities. Here are just a few current ones:

  • 50% profit on GDV site currently under construction these profitability levels are unheard of.
  • £80,000 paid for a site in west London, half-built and comes with planning for a 2 bed detached house.
  • Further planning gain in the roof space. Land value paid is 16% of the 
    GDV, when other similar sites with consent would be in the 35%+ range
  • £800,000 profit on a joint venture, with no money down - his partner is the land owner and Dave has secured 100% development finance with a senior lender due to a strong proposal.
  • 50/50 JV was agreed, meaning it’s a win win for both parties.  The land value is 15.7% of the GDV.
  • £23.5 million GDV no money down deal - this is a land assembly and another JV with 2 landowners for 
    30 houses and 22 flats. 
  • Terms with a large housing association agreed meaning it is de-risked with a guaranteed exit in place.
Mountbatten-2

"Nimbus has allowed me to truly scale my property business."

Eliminate the guesswork

Be in the right place at the right time to find and act on off-market property opportunities, with the tools and resources to identify and assess your perfect site with ease.

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