Jean, How Did You Get On The Property Ladder?

One of my lovely readers asked me how we got the property I posted in my previous article, as she wants to own at least one property in the UK. So I told her I would respond with an article as its a topic that I have been meaning to write about for a while.

Okay, I am going to be very brutally honest in this article. My husband is a West African, from Ghana, and one thing he taught me in life was that you have to think outside the box of the black man.

When we first got together we had one very heated emotional argument, after he had said “I refuse to think like a black man.” And I took so much offence at that statement, because I am very pro black, and all hell broke lose, but today I see what he meant.

West African men normally are smarter and are hustlers, compared to Southern African men. Most Southern African men are happy to work for their master, they believe in being “workers” which is okay I guess, because someone has to be the hard worker on the ground for the world to function socially and economically.

Now when it comes to properties, when I was married to a Zimbabwean man, and was in the Zimbabwean community, I was conditioned to believe that you have to work your butts off doing long hours in hospitals and nursing homes, then you get a mortgage, and spend half a lifetime paying out a huge mortgage every month, which you don’t even enjoy anyway because you are always at work. That is the life in the UK, you live to work ,pay bills and pay mortgage. The house you “own”, you can lose anytime too, because as long as you have not finished paying back the loan you took from the bank, the house is not technically yours. It happened to me, my ex-husband made sure I lost the house when we divorced, and the house got repossessed.

Now with a bad credit history, it was even hard for me to get a house to rent! I was denied a council house because I moved towns. I ended up losing one house I was renting, I had also put my Uncle as a guarantor and he made things very difficult for me.  Then my Boaz could not get a property to rent in his name because at that time he was still sorting out his UK stay. So we found ourselves homeless, simply because on paper, both of us could not get a property to rent.

But this was the beginning of our breakthroughs. When we were homeless, we lived in service apartments, and we were paying a lot of money in these properties. My husband being a hustler and a man hungry for success, one day as I was literally crying in the car, pregnant and homeless, he said to me, ” Sweetheart, stop crying, we will own properties around the UK, very soon. This will be our story. “

So as we were homeless, living in service apartments, my husband has very good communication skills, and people just like him, so the landlords would get to know him, and before I knew it, he was giving these landlords advice on how to run their service apartments, helping them with brand projection and marketing strategies so they started calling him to their offices, saying, “Kofi, you need to come and work for me, I want you to be my marketing manager etc.” They saw his potential.

So I sat my husband down, in one of the service apartments we were staying in, and told him that “These people are landlords, and yet they are benefiting from your wisdom, and paying you peanuts to do these things for them. Why not start your own PR Company, where you deal with high network individuals, and charge them accordingly, and also make money off them.” And lo and behold, LookGold London was born.

To cut the long story short, my husband started attracting very high net-worth clients, most of which were property tycoons. And through my husband’s PR company, our lives were changed.

When we were looking for a property to rent, we had raised the rent and deposit, and my husband asked one of his clients to rent him a luxury property, because we would never get such a property going through the Estate Agents, but the property tycoon said to my husband, ” Young man, why should you pay all this money to rent a house, when you can add a few thousands and buy your own property with cash.”

“But I thought I needed a mortgage…” My husband thought.

So this guy showed us that you can buy a property for even £20 k cash in the UK, or even way less than that. The property would need a full refurbishment, which can cost as little as £5k, but it is way better than getting a mortgage from the bank. When you think about it, people raise £10k for a deposit to buy a house through a mortgage, when you can add a few more thousands and use that money to buy a house with cash!

Our homelessness was a huge blessing, because we learnt about the service apartments and Air BnB industry, which is one of the most thriving businesses in the UK today. You can never go wrong in life if you own properties. My husband made friends with Asians, who dominate the property business in the UK, and from them he learnt how they run this game.

So it is about going to property auctions in the UK, that’s another way of doing it, get a property which is cheap, very cheap, and slowly do it up, and then you can sell it, use the money to buy more properties, or rent it out, or even just live in it.

Below are pictures of one of our properties bought from the auction currently being renovated. These properties will look so horrible and be daunting, but when they are done, no one would ever know it used to be a dungeon.

We have met a few West Africans, Nigerians and Ghanaians in the property industry, (key word “few”) but we have never met any Southern Africans who own a chain of properties in the UK.

Sadly for black people, especially Southern Africans, when they get their hands on even £15 k, which is a lot of money that can be life changing, the first thing they think of is buying  a Range Rover, a plasma screen and designer clothes. Black people in general are not into wealth building, but they are into wealth spending, that’s why they are always at the bottom of the social ladder.

I will give you an example of a Southern African UK based woman,  who poses on social media as very rich, when she is actually very poor, both materially and spiritually.  Like I said I will be very brutally honest in this post. This Zimbabwean UK based woman who doesn’t even own a single property in the UK, lives in a council house, drives a car on finance without even a driving licence, but because she flaunts designer shoes on Facebook live videos, Zimbabweans actually think this woman is one of the richest women to ever come from Zimbabwe, when she doesn’t have a house, a driving licence or a net-worth. How do you even begin to educate such a people on what it is to actually be wealthy and build an empire, when they think to make it in life you have to own a pair of Jimmy Choo heels?

To build wealth, black people have to start thinking like Asians and White people. Who sells you your weaves and wigs? Asians. Who sells you your designer clothes? White people. What do you sell to them?  NOTHING. You work for them. You can’t even sell them African print clothes, Stella McCartney has to make African prints for white people. These people have no time to flaunt Jimmy Choo shoes or Range Rovers on Facebook and Instagram. They build wealth, (using black people mostly) and leave an inheritance for their children and grandchildren.

One of the reason why my husband is actually now practicing polygamy is because of wealth building. He understands the role of women in helping a man build his empire. He understands that women are uniquely gifted in helping their husbands build wealth. So obviously if you have 3 intelligent women as your wives, surely your empire can only expand.

So today, my Boaz is on the property ladder, and it is through buying cheap properties either through auctions or through networking, he has build himself a network of friends who are  property tycoons, and is learning from them.

And I am ever eternally grateful that God gave me a West African man, who sees things differently from most black folks, and doesn’t want to spend his money buying Gucci shoes, but wants to build an empire and a NATION for his 6 children and many more to come.

The Genesis Of The Revelation

By Mary-Tamar was Jean