About Letting Focus

I'm David Lawrenson of LettingFocus.com. I'm the author of the UK's top selling property investment book and am also a freelance property writer, public speaker and property blogger.

In addition, I help private investors, property buyers and companies as a property investment coach and mentor.

This page explains more about my background.

I started letting out property back in 1988 just after finishing my MBA at City University (now Cass) Business School. (Before that I went to schools in the Wirral, Dover and then to university in Cardiff.)

In my early days as a property investor, I mixed being a landlord with working as a project manager in the financial services industry, mainly in insurance for leading banks.

But my love of property investment eventually won the day and in September 2002 I gave up my day job to concentrate on building and managing my property portfolio full time.

As a landlord and property investor, I made some mistakes and although I had read quite a few books on the subject - some of which were quite good - none of them really taught me how to avoid the mistakes that I made.

So I put down some ideas which eventually led to a publisher offering me a contract to write "Successful Property Letting - How to Make Money in Buy to Let." 

The book came out in September 2005 and in less than 3 months had sold out its first print run and established itself as the fastest selling book on buy to let in the UK and Amazon.co.uk's highest ranked property book.

Following on from the book, I was often asked to write articles as a freelance property journalist about buy to let, property investing and property letting issues for newspapers and magazines.

I have either written for or been quoted as a property expert in all the UK national papers and leading websites.

I also became a regular speaker on property matters at trade shows and for private companies and associations in the buy to let field.

I am well known as a scourge of the buy to let fraudsters and con men in the field and I warned many years ago of the problems that are now emerging - in which flats were sold to amateur buy to let investors at way above their long term value.

I now do an increasing amount of consultancy work for big companies and associations and for private individuals who are either already in buy to let or looking to enter the market for the first time.

In recent years, the success of buy to let has attracted ever larger numbers of advisors and property seminar companies who say you can become a property millionaire in a very short period of time (usually by buying what is often over-priced property from that same company).

In my view this is very dangerous advice. All too often the properties the promoters sold to investors did not let at anywhere near the rent promised and the properties have now collapsed in value.

After "Successful Property Letting" came out, many people asked me if I could run property seminars which would expand upon the book and which would be completely unbiased by any desire to sell property or indeed any other service "off the back" of the seminar itself.

In response to these requests I now run occasional low cost landlords and property investors networking events where you can meet other investors and listen to me and others giving a few short talks and provide unbiased information to help you. Read the testimonials to see what other people say about us.

I also help people and companies who have specific problems or property investment issues by giving one to one consultancy advice. For more information on all this, please click on Seminars and Consultancy.

You can send me an email at any time. Click here and this will open an email in your browser window.