Liv Cooke shares her property development tips and where her journey began

The 24-year-old from Leyland is a six times world record holder in football freestyle, but since 2019 she has also been persuing another hobby – that of property development and investment, starting up Liv Cooke Properties Ltd in November of that year.

Over the past four years, Liv’s portfolio of properties has continued to grow across the North West and her clients have included Premier League footballers and Blue Peter presenters!

Whilst she is mainly based in Manchester, sometimes she works in her hometown of Leyland and notably helped develop two new 3G pitches at the Bamber Bridge Leisure Centre.

Yesterday (September 4), Liv took to her development Instagram account to re-share a video of her latest completed property flip which saw a three bedroom run down home turn into a sleek, modern six-bed, six bath HMO (house in multiple occupancy).

In the video, Liv explains that the property cost £164,995 to purchase and £86,700 to convert and add an extension but once Liv had completed the property, it was given a commercial valuation of £369,000 – that’s a profit of £117,305.

The video was then followed later that day with a Q&A Instagram story in which her followers could ask her anything they wanted about property development. Keen to ask our own question, the Post got in touch to find out how it all began so see what Liv had to say to us as well as her followers below:

How the footballer became a property wizz

Liv told the Post: “I’ve always been obsessed with being successful and the mindset and worth ethic it takes. I study the greats in any field, originally for motivation when I was training to become the worlds greatest freestyle footballer. I loved Grant Cardones story how he came from nothing to achieve his dream, his relentless drive inspired me in training. Through watching him for inspiration for work ethic I inadvertently gained real estate knowledge

“After achieving my dream, my profile grew, my career progressed and I was earning nice amounts of money. I then realised I could probably turn these riches into wealth with my basic understanding of real estate. So when lockdown hit and we couldn’t travel or go outside I seized my chance to dive into learning real estate

“I read something like seven books and watched a thousand hours of YouTube content on investments/developments in my first week. Similarly to how I ascended rapidly in freestyle football, I got obsessed with real estate

“My first project commenced not long after, I’m not one to sit around thinking about doing something. The following week I began searching for my first project and had an offer accepted on a property I intended to renovate and convert into a high cash flowing asset. Safe to say I dived into the deep end with material costs flying up due to covid restrictions

“It was not smooth sailing in the slightest but it sure as hell didn’t scare me away. I thrived under the pressure and by the skin of my teeth pulled the deal off. From there it was addiction, I continue to chase progress daily.”

What tips did Liv offer in her Q&A?

Q- What do you look for when trying to find a brrr deal?

Liv: “Brrr is buy, refurbish, refinance, rent. Now it’s important that before you make an offer, you know your steps. So first of all, is the property in an area where there’s demand because if there’s no demand and you spend all this money doing the propety up, you’ve done a great deal, you’ve spent so much time, energy, money on it, and then you can’t rent it out so all of a sudden it’s a liability not an asset. Cash flow is the most important, so check demand and while you’re checking demand, you’re going to come across who the end user should be so is it youn professionslas, students, families, social husing- and that will give you an indication of what your renovation needs to look like and therfore your refurb cost and when you know your end value, you know your refurb cost, you know how much you can pay for the property. Make sure your purchase price is below market value.”

Q- How do [you] recommend starting out with property in the UK?

Liv: “I see this question in my DMs every day and it depends, it depends on your goals, it depends if you’ve got a budget or not, it depends on your strategy, it depends where you live. There’s too many variables for me to answer this sorry.”

Q- 35k to spend, where to start. Do I need more?

Liv: I would probably look to do a quick flip to get my budget up so that I can do a much bigger deal.”

Q- Best advice for someone with 100k savings looking to invest?

“100k’s a good budget you know. I would be mixing that with a bridging loan and I would be brrr HMO so buy a property that’s ru7n down but in a good area, covert it to a HMO so meeting all the local authority regualtions, health and safety requirements, fire safety blah blah blah and building control are happy. Then I would be renting it out room by room in order to amximise cash flow so it’s like a brrr by to let but on steroids. We are recyclying you capital and we are getting good profit.”

Q- How do you seel deals as a Sourcer? I have two but can’t seem to close

Liv: “There’s a possibility that you’re looking at it too much like a sale because even just the word ‘close’ is very liek sales training. I think if you’ve got a great deal, it’s not a case of selling it, it’s a case of matching it to the right person that’s looking for that deal and it will sell itself, it will close itself. If you’ve got something that somebody needs, it’s just a case of putting it in front of them and they will take it. Of course, you’e got to have a frigging good deal becasue there’s a lot of competition in the market. It can be tricky because at the end of the day, you’re probably getting a sourcing fee that’s 3,4,5,6,7k but that person is letting go of hundreds of thousands so it’s about reassuring them, building their trust and just making it as frictionless as possible- go above and beyond.”

Q- How did you get on when you first started developments

Liv: “You know that saying, you’ve got to kiss a few frogs to find you prince – I kissed the whole f****** pond, I was flithy. Made a lot of mistakes, hired the wrong teams, in some cases it weren’t even my fault but I can’t have that victim mentality so held myself accountable, educated msyelf harder and didn’t make the same mistake twice."