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.

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.

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