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The Property Auctions Podcast

The Property Auctions Podcast

Di: Dominic Farrell
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Welcome to The Property Auctions Podcast. I’m Dominic Farrell, property investor and author of the UK’s No.1 bestselling book on property auctions, Property Auctions: Repossessions, Bankruptcies and Bargain Properties, now in its fourth edition. This podcast is for anyone interested in finding and buying property opportunities, whether you are preparing for your first investment, building an existing portfolio or buying through auction, before auction or off market. We’ll explore how the auction market really works, how experienced investors identify genuine bargains and the common, and often expensive, mistakes buyers make. We’ll look at valuations, legal packs, finance, bidding strategies, distressed assets and what separates a genuine opportunity from a property that is simply cheap for a reason. But property auctions do not operate in isolation. We’ll also examine the economic trends, legislation, investment strategies and news affecting the wider UK property market, including buy-to-let, rents, finance and the changing opportunities available to investors. The aim is simple: to help you recognise genuine value, avoid the traps and make better-informed property investment decisions.Copyright 2026 Dominic Farrell Economia Finanza personale Gestione e leadership Leadership
Episodi
  • The Contrarian Property Investor

    The Contrarian Property Investor
    Sep 27 2026
    The Contrarian Property InvestorI once bought a small block of flats in Liverpool for £20,000, at an Allsop auction in London. Using UK consumer price inflation and taking 2008 as the starting point, that’s the equivalent of about £33,900 today.The story of how I came to look for opportunities like that begins in Cyprus, in 2008.I was a property developer there when the credit crunch arrived. Lending dried up. Buyers walked away. The market we had been working in changed completely. At the time, it felt as though the whole world had collapsed.That experience was really where my book started. It was also where we began thinking seriously about distressed assets, and about what happens when owners need to sell into a market where very few people want to buy.Hello, I'm Dominic Farrell, and welcome to The Property Auctions Podcast.Today I want to talk about the contrarian property investor. We've discussed avoiding the herd before. This time, I want to explain where that thinking came from for me, through a couple of purchases, and why I think it matters again today.I don't expect the next few years to be on a par with 2008. That was an exceptional financial crisis, something I would describe as a generational event like the Wall Street Crash of 1929.But I do believe there will be opportunities for people prepared to take a different view of particular properties. You don't need another global banking crisis for an owner to want out, or for a good asset to become available at an attractive price.What being contrarian meansA contrarian investor is willing to disagree with the prevailing view when the evidence supports a different conclusion.When everyone seems to be running for the hills, you are prepared to stop and look at what they are leaving behind. Sometimes you'll find that their concerns are justified. Sometimes the price has fallen enough to make a property worth investigating.Warren Buffett expressed the idea in his 1986 letter to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders. He wrote about trying to 'be fearful when others are greedy and to be greedy only when others are fearful'.That's easy to agree with when you're reading it at home. It becomes harder when the news is dreadful and you're considering putting your own money into something everyone is worried about.There's comfort in having other people agree with you. If everyone around you is buying, joining them can feel sensible, even when prices have become difficult to justify. When they're selling, you can feel uncomfortable buying at a price that gives you much more room.The way through that, for me, is to understand the individual property well enough to explain why I want it. If the only explanation is that everyone else hates it, I haven't done enough work.You can also agree that the economic outlook is difficult and still find a purchase worth making. A seller may need a decision much sooner than conditions are likely to improve. A buyer who can take a longer view may have a useful opening. The two people are working to different timescales.The Liverpool purchasesThat brings me back to the Allsop auction in London and that small Liverpool block at £20,000.It gives you some idea of the opportunities that became available around that period. Looking back now, the price sounds extraordinary. At the time, you were making decisions with the uncertainty of the financial crisis around you.And there were other purchases. For example, we bought a block of flats and a plot of land in the Sefton Park area of Liverpool that had gone into receivership. The developer sadly could no longer continue to operate. I negotiated with the receiver, who was based in Manchester, and my offer was accepted at the 3rd attempt.We still hold that block today. The income has been tremendous, and the value has gone up several times over.That is a much more useful example than simply saying you should buy when people are frightened. It shows what can happen when you acquire a property at a favourable price and continue to own it over many years.When fewer buyers are competing, you may have more scope to negotiate. And the price you agree stays with that investment. If you acquire the same rental income for less money, the numbers improve from Day 1, assuming the other costs remain the same. That is why I pay so much attention to the purchase. A good decision at that stage can continue to benefit you for a very long time.I also think you have to be fair about hindsight. We know how that investment turned out. At the time, we couldn't look forward and see today's income or today's value.You hear people talk about the opportunities in 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011 and 2012 as though the decisions were obvious. They weren't. Buying the right property mattered, and so did being able to hold it. Someone who ran out of cash before conditions improved could have had a very different experience.That's one of the lessons I take from that period. Your finances have to allow your investment ...
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    16 min
  • 30,000 Landlords Sell Up - An Opportunity For Smart Investors

    30,000 Landlords Sell Up - An Opportunity For Smart Investors
    Aug 30 2026
    30,000 Landlords Sell UpWhy Smart Investors Should See OpportunityThirty thousand landlords have left the buy-to-let market. That is the headline. And, depending on which side of the argument you are on, it will either be presented as proof that landlords have finally had enough, or as evidence that the private rented sector needed reform in the first place.But if you are a serious property investor, I want you to look beyond the politics and beyond the headline. Because when a market changes, it creates risk for people who are unprepared and opportunity for people who understand what is actually happening.The old model of buying an average house through an estate agent, paying the full retail price, putting in a tenant and hoping that inflation bails you out has been under pressure for years. Tax, interest rates, regulation, maintenance and compliance have all tightened the margins. Many landlords are deciding that they have had enough.That creates a genuine problem for tenants if the supply of rented homes falls. But it also creates an opportunity for smart investors who know how to buy below market value and operate professionally. The properties have to go somewhere. The question is: who is going to buy them, at what price, and what will the numbers look like when they do?INTRODUCTIONHello, and welcome to The Property Auctions Podcast. I’m Dominic Farrell and author of the UK’s No.1 bestselling book about property auctions. I also run a property auctions and distressed assets workshop in London which is streamed live online the details of which can be found on our website.In this episode, I’m looking at the report that around 30,000 small landlords left the sector, the latest Knight Frank evidence that rents are still rising as rental supply tightens, and why I believe this market could create one of the best buying opportunities we have seen for disciplined investors in years.Now, I am not saying that every property being sold by a landlord is a bargain. Far from it. A tired landlord can still want a ridiculous price. Nor am I saying that rising rents will rescue a bad deal. They will not. What I am saying is that motivated sellers, constrained supply and resilient tenant demand are three conditions that a smart investor should pay very close attention to.WHAT THE 30,000 FIGURE REALLY TELLS USThe Telegraph reported that government figures show an estimated 30,000 small buy-to-let landlords left the sector in the year to April 2025. These are landlords operating personally rather than through limited companies. The average small landlord declared about £20,500 in rental income, only £200 more than the previous year before allowing for inflation. Total declared property income fell by £10 million, and London recorded a particularly large fall.Those figures matter, but we need to be accurate about what they do and do not prove. The reporting period ended in April 2025. The Renters’ Rights Act did not come into force until 1 May 2026. So the 30,000 figure cannot, by itself, prove that the Act caused those landlords to leave. What it shows is that the direction of travel had already changed before the new regime started.There is another qualification. Thirty thousand landlords leaving does not automatically mean 30,000 homes were removed from the rental market. Some landlords own more than one property. Some homes will have been bought by other landlords, and some by owner-occupiers. Nevertheless, the figure is a clear signal that the traditional small-landlord model is under pressure.The causes are not difficult to identify: higher taxation, the increased stamp duty charge on additional properties, more expensive borrowing, higher repair and insurance costs, and a much heavier regulatory burden. The Renters’ Rights Act has now added another layer. Good standards and proper protection for tenants are necessary. I have no argument with that. But legislation does not repeal the basic law of supply and demand.If the cost and risk of supplying a rented home rise, some providers leave. If the number of homes available then falls faster than tenant demand, rents come under upward pressure. That may be an unintended consequence, but it is not a surprising one.WHAT KNIGHT FRANK IS SEEINGKnight Frank’s August report gives us a current picture of that mechanism at work in prime London. It found that new rental listings in prime central and prime outer London during the first six months of 2026 were 14 per cent below the five-year average. At the same time, average rents in prime outer London rose by 3.2 per cent in the year to July, including a 1.2 per cent rise in just the previous three months.Prime outer London rents are now 36 per cent higher than before Covid. In prime central London, rents rose by 1.1 per cent over the year and are 37 per cent above their pre-pandemic level. Knight Frank also said some landlords are setting a higher asking rent from the outset because the new rules prevent ...
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    19 min
  • Spotting a Fake Bargain at Auction using AI

    Spotting a Fake Bargain at Auction using AI
    Jun 28 2026
    Welcome back to the Property Auctions Podcast.I am Dominic Farrell, the author of the UK’s No1 bestselling book about property auctions, which is available on Amazon and other good book providers.This week I want to talk about something that catches out a lot of auction buyers, especially beginners, how to spot a fake bargain at auction.One of the biggest mistakes people make is confusing a low guide price with a bargain. They are not the same thing.A property can look cheap online, photograph well, be in decent condition, and still be completely overvalued. Equally, a property that does not look spectacular at first glance can be a genuine bargain if the numbers, seller motivation and timing are aligned.So in this episode I want to explain the difference between a real bargain and a fake bargain, using two examples from a very busy week we had last week.1. The Real Bargain: Secured Before Auction I was out viewing auction properties on most days with some of my mentees. Some had travelled from far afield, while others were local here in Liverpool. We saw a lot of stock, spoke to agents, reviewed legal packs and ran the numbers.Two properties stood out. One was a fantastic bargain. The other looked like it might be a bargain, but once we did the homework, the due diligence, it clearly was not.Let’s start with the real bargain.On Monday, we secured a property before it even got to auction. While we were viewing it, an auction house was also there, presumably with a view to providing a valuation for the owner. So this property was almost certainly heading towards auction. The auction house was assessing it, and the owner was clearly considering that route.But we struck first.We were not the only interested party. Other people had seen it, and other offers were being made. But we secured it, and it is an absolutely fantastic deal for one of my mentees. I have no doubt that if that property had gone to live auction, it would have sold significantly higher.So why were we successful?It was not because we offered a ridiculous amount more than everyone else. We were in and around the same level as other interested parties. The difference was reputation.If you build a reputation for completing on properties, if you have longevity in the market, and if agents know that when you make an offer you are serious, that matters. Remember, agents make their money when properties sell.They do not make their money when someone makes a big offer and then disappears. They do not make their money when a buyer ties a property up for two or three months, only for the sale to fall through. And if that happens, the agent may lose the instruction altogether, because the owner gets frustrated and decides to send the property to auction anyway.So from an agent’s point of view, certainty has value. A buyer who can actually complete is worth more than a buyer who merely talks a good game.That is an important lesson in auction property. Speed, certainty and reputation can turn you into the preferred buyer, even when your offer is similar to someone else’s.That first property was a real bargain because the price worked, the timing worked, and the seller had a reason to move before auction. We will probably never know exactly why they chose us, and not the auction route.2. The Fake Bargain: It Looked Good on the SurfaceNow compare that with the second property. This one is the fake bargain.We went to view it, and on the surface it looked very good. It was in very good condition. It was in a reasonable letting area. It looked like the kind of property that would appeal to many new and inexperienced investors.You could easily look at the photos, look at the guide price, and think, “That looks like a deal.” That is exactly where people get caught out. They make a decision with their eyes before they have done the work with the numbers.Clean kitchen. Decent bathroom. Good condition. Reasonable letting area. Low guide price. Therefore, it must be a bargain.But that is not how auction buying works. A property can be clean, tidy and lettable, and still be overpriced. It can look easy and still be a bad buy.And this one, without any shadow of a doubt, was not a bargain. Even at the guide price, it was overvalued.So how did we know? We knew because we ran the due diligence properly.3. How We Knew: Due Diligence and AIFor us, part of that process now involves using artificial intelligence, or AI. We use Claude, and we have trained it to produce the information we need from auction legal packs and property data. You can then cross reference the findings using other AI, such as ChatGPT and Gemini.I should be clear. AI does not replace a solicitor. It does not replace experience. And it certainly does not mean you stop thinking. But it is a fantastic tool for organising information quickly and highlighting the areas that need attention.Our process is structured. First, it tells us what documents are included in the auction pack. Then it ...
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    22 min
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