Help Yourself to Help Others By Helping Us Build a UK Property Portfolio!
What is Your Why?
On a cold Christmas Day in 2019, two years after we had started building our UK property portfolio my wife, my daughter and I spent a couple of days at the Children’s Youth Centre in the Shatila Refugee Camp in Beirut, Lebanon.
Shatila has been home to thousands of Palestinian refugees for over seven decades. The camp was initially established to accommodate Palestinian refugees who fled their homes during the Arab-Israeli War in 1948.
Over time, the camp has grown with successive waves of refugees seeking shelter, including those displaced during subsequent conflicts.
By the time of our visit in 2019, the camp’s population had swollen to up to 40,000, despite the fact that there were originally just 3,000
It is now home not just to Palestinians, but also to Syrians fleeing the war and even to local homeless Lebanese.
Life in Shatila Refugee Camp is not easy.
Hell Water
Although it was originally intended as temporary housing, Shatila has become a densely populated urban jungle lacking many basic amenities.
The water is so salty and ridden with chemicals that locals call it hell water. When you wash your hands, it feels like you’ve plunged them into water mixed with oil.
The Children’s Youth Centre has a very basic guest house to accommodate humanitarian volunteers. Income from the guesthouse helps fund the centre. The water was so dirty that we decided to avoid showering for the two nights and three days we were there.
The electricity situation is even more dangerous. Children are at risk of electrocution by the low-hanging mess of water pipes and electrical wires.
The camp's residents endure numerous challenges, including inadequate access to fresh water and electricity
What’s This Got To Do with UK Property?
A fair few years ago, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), which is mandated by the United Nations to care for Palestinian refugees, agreed to build a water rehabilitation facility at Shatila. It was never completed.
What’s this got to do with UK property I can almost hear you saying…
Lots of people in property and marketing will tell you to think about your why? Or your values. Or your mission. I talked a little bit about this during my interview with Vanessa Warwick of Property Tribes (We are the proud sponsors of the Expat Tribe )in Episode 10 when she was asking for support for pets left behind during the Ukraine crisis.
Well, we have two why’s as I have mentioned from time to time on my property podcast.
One is to return to live in the UK and to buy a family home. A home with a kitchen at least as big as those of our tenants. You’d be surprised how small our kitchen is now! And when we return, our ambition is to no longer work for others.
Our second why, is to do something to help refugees. I’m wary of making false promises or unrealistic ambitions, but we would just love it if we could improve living conditions at the Shatila Refugee Camp as a start.
But we don’t want to just help the refugees at Shatila, although the camp does suffer from ‘Donor Fatigue’ which is when potential donors become overwhelmed or desensitized by the frequency and volume of appeals for various causes, and the tendency for people to be swayed by the latest crisis, leaving the oldest ones in the lurch…
Refugees come from all four corners of the globe…
Invest your money with us so we can invest our time in refugees…
The chart above shows the ranking of the major source countries of refugees as of 2022. As you can see, refugees come from all four corners of the world.
And when we recently spent a few days in London (for our first summer holiday since 2019), we were shocked to see that so many of the homeless people living on the streets were no longer British, but clearly refugees.
We work with high-net-worth investors who perhaps don’t have the time, knowledge or contacts to invest in property themselves and who may be fed up with the ups and downs of the stock market so they prefer to invest their money with us for a good return.
There are lots of small UK property businesses like ours looking for private finance these days, so why should you put your money with us rather than someone else?
Firstly, and most importantly, we pride ourselves on making sure your money is in safe hands.
And secondly, rather working with someone who is only helping themselves or their family (nothing wrong with that in itself), you could be helping others too.
So, you’re helping yourself by investing your money, rather than losing it to inflation sitting idle in the bank.
And you’re helping others knowing that we will be dedicating some of our time to helping refugees.
Much like the instructions on a plane in the event of an emergency, you put on your own oxygen mask first in order to help the person next to you.
And so we came up with our slogan:
Help Yourself to Help Others…
By making your money work as hard for you as you do, you help yourself, knowing that after we’ve built our UK property portfolio, when we’re financially free, we’ll be helping others.