Talking house shares at the Property Investment Show

After a busy Wednesday to Saturday in London at the Property Investor Show, my colleague Liz and I have many people to email and talk to over the coming week about potential acquisitions.

It appears that many investors are looking to rent rooms out, but do not have the time to set them up, and have asked us to help them.

So we are putting out an appeal for suitable four, five and six-bedroom properties in and around Telford, Shrewsbury and Wolverhampton under £120k that could be used as house shares.

I presented a seminar to over 40 people who are interested in renting rooms as a profession, which was very exciting and gave me the opportunity to launch Limecastle's one day training event.

There are limited places available for the next date, November 6th down in London.

But enough about me - what did I pick up for you whilst I was at ExCeL for the Property Investment Show?

There were lots of seminars and free resources available to those interested in property investment - you could easily pass three days just chatting to people on different stands and popping along to the various talks.

The best thing to do with these types of events is to plan them well - book seminars in advance to make sure you get a space.

However, it looks like there are still a lot of companies offering to put together portfolios for a fee. This isn't really my cup of tea - I lost some money using some of these services back in 2002.

I was pleased to see there were a couple of quality property training companies that seem to have weathered the economic storm well.

My top two recommendations are Tigrent, who run wealth training branching off to many different specialised fields in property and Simon Zutshi's property investment network.

Many people gave praise to Simon's training skills, although I can only personally vouch for his singing and dancing abilities - they were superb!

I also met up with 'Karaoke' Phil Martin - the owner of singingpig.co.uk, a property entrepreneur discussion forum and some other really useful property services under the name of Rapid Property Group.

Liz and I were both impressed with their team and think they are well worth a look.

We caught up with local business woman Sally Lawson from who has set up Concentric Lettings, a franchise letting agency.

Her team are lively and on the ball again - definitely worth a look if you're thinking of starting your own agency.

Sally managed one of my rental properties way back when I first started in property - she is well respected and talks at many of these events.

The best advertising gimmick that I saw was a leaflet the size of a twenty-pound note.

The top half of one side was printed as a note and cleverly folded to look real, but then opened out to reveal some great marketing from Property Investor Club.

There was plenty more that was of interest at the event and I'm sure that more will come to me as the week goes on - watch this space!