Why Property Training Often Fails - and How to Choose the Right Program for Success

‘I wish we’d found you first’ 

There’s hardly a meeting goes by that someone doesn’t say that to me.  Typically, they’ve spent anything from £15K - £30k+ on one or more property training courses that haven’t worked.  In fact, a large majority of the attendees at the 1-day events I host have already done some training and with a wide variation of results.

Why doesn’t training work? 

The trainer’s insufficient depth and breadth of knowledge of the subject being taught is the reason that it fails to meet expectations.

People start out with high hopes and expectations and are more often than not disappointed with the outcomes. That doesn’t mean that they failed to learn anything at all, they almost invariably were more knowledgeable than before they paid for the training. It was mostly a value for money issue and plenty of over-promising and under-delivering.

Commonly trainers will shift the blame onto their students, citing that they didn’t apply their learning correctly and quit too easily – and, in some cases, that’s true, for sure.  There are always people who want a quick fix, without putting the work in.  They want results with minimal input and aren’t prepared for the struggle and ‘silver bullet’ training doesn’t really exist. As the saying goes “there’s no such thing as a smooth mountain”.

And there is always some struggle - when you’re doing something you’ve never done before it’s going to feel difficult and clunky; you’ve got to keep at it to be good at it.  Some people aren’t prepared for the difficult bits and that’s the point where they give up and claim that the training doesn’t work.

However, that cannot be the only reason training doesn’t work and I have done a lot of digging to find out why?

I have spoken to many investors to get their view on what problems they encountered that resulted in them making significantly less progress than they initially hoped to.

I thought long and hard about what they told me - and my conclusion is that, in essence, there are three reasons for training failing.

Reason 1: The trainer doesn’t have enough experience.

If a property investor has undertaken some training on a given aspect of property, has been applying what they were taught and it has worked, it’s a tempting step to decide to teach others.  The problem lies with not having enough miles on the clock to understand their subject sufficiently.  In effect they’ve jumped straight from driving go-karts to trying to control an F1 car.

In their unseemly haste to become a trainer, they haven’t seen their subject from every possible perspective, or experienced all the setbacks and know how to overcome them. 

I had many years’ experience of my subject before I ever considered training anyone on it – and then only because people kept asking for it – call me ‘the reluctant trainer’.  I was somewhat surprised to discover I loved it, but I started small and learned my craft. 

Reason 2: The training is flawed. 

They’re teaching something that doesn’t work or only partially works, however easy it is made to sound on the course.  There’s a downside that they either deliberately or from ignorance, leave out some critically important learnings out of the training. 

One example I often see is where they recommend rent-to-rent as a strategy to get into property and start building a nest egg.  The premise being that you can find demotivated landlords with properties that you can tidy up and re-rent, potentially as an HMO or serviced accommodation. 

A good rent-to-rent trainer will make sure their students know that mortgage lenders don’t allow using properties in this fashion, it’s a multiple breach of their T&Cs. This means the strategy works best with landlords that don’t have a mortgage on their property.

If all of the above is covered as part of training course, all well and good, but it seems that this whole issue is glossed over at best or just ignored. You can see the temptation to make the whole strategy sound much easier by overlooking an inconvenient truth.

Those T&C breaches –

1. Mortgage lenders maximum permitted rental term is 12 months - anything longer is a breach
2. Their only permitted rental agreement is an Assured Shorthold Tenancy – any other contract is a breach
3. The only permitted signatories to that contract are the owner and tenant-in-situ – any other signatory is a breach

As rent-to-rent only works with mortgage-free landlords, which gives the newbie who is trying to break into property through rent-to-rent a much harder nut to crack.  Mortgaged properties have to be refinanced to a commercial mortgage that permits this usage. This is a not inconsiderable cost meaning, in reality, the owner is highly unlikely to consider the rent-to-rent proposal.

My interviews with investors reveal the temptation to leave out the awkward bits was often too great. This is where some training programmes are incomplete and inaccurate – and there are many other examples.

In essence they are sharing the ‘what’ not the ‘how’. No surprise then that incomplete training is extraordinarily difficult to implement successfully.

Reason 3: Insufficient support

This is probably the biggest reason training doesn’t work.

When you’ve finished a training programme, you’re usually excited and keen to get started.  But suddenly you’re flying solo. 

You can see what’s possible, but there’s nobody to interpret it and your understanding can be misaligned between what it seems to be and what it is.  This is all underpinned by a lack of confidence that most of us start out with.  The basic human response is that when unsure, do nothing, so many people hesitate to move forward.  It just feels safer to take no action when fearful of taking the wrong action and of course, that’s what many investors do.

Of course, there are some people who are more ‘gung-ho’ and learn by making mistakes.  There is a saying that you either pay for education or pay for mistakes.  But if you pay for both, you get the worst of both worlds.  It’s a massive issue.

There are some courses that offer some follow up support, but the ones I’ve seen offer something like a 20-minute mentoring call, once a month.  Once you’ve explained the issue you’re trying to tackle, that doesn’t leave much actual mentoring time.

Training without the right support is like trying to pass your driving test by reading the highway code. 

The biggest thing I do is support people; this is why the Ninja investors that complete my programme get loads of support.  Both online groups on Facebook and WhatsApp, that gives them direct access to me, as well as regular follow ups.  They also have access to the Ninja Aspirers and Ninja Achievers mentorships to continue their learning.

The big question here then, is why is support so lacking, so often?

Let’s give trainers the benefit of the doubt, its not that they are deliberately misleading (in most cases) i.e. offering support when they know there is insufficient bandwidth to provide it.

Not knowing when to shut the door is the issue. When support capacity is reached and breached, stop taking on new students until some capacity is regained. Seems simple, but turning away money takes a lot of willpower and discipline, doesn’t it?

How do you choose the right training?

It’s tough to weed out the good from the mediocre and bad when all you’ve got is the marketing fluff to go by.  It all looks good, and the promises are many.

There are almost certainly powerful testimonials, but no trainer will share feedback that isn’t 100% positive, and you don’t know the level of knowledge and experience that person had to start with.

I always offer my qualified Ninjas free access to any of my 1-day events – they get refreshed experience and they’re a living breathing testimonial.  However, anyone who asks about their experience of applying their learning will be disappointed if they expect the response to be “It was wonderful, dead easy,” etc.’  It’s always “I struggled at first, but it works if you stick at it.”  Some of them are still working at it – and that’s the secret, they are sticking at it and have someone (in fact a whole community) to ask for help.

I get some people who come to my one-day events and, instead of taking the next step to get the training, they tell me, “Let me go and give it a try, with my current knowledge, then I’ll do the training later.”  I don’t train people at the 1-day events; they get the headlines with some insight into what the training covers and how it works.  They’re effectively saying “Let me pass my driving test, then I’ll get some lessons.”

A few will have the background experience and a few years of knowledgeable implementation behind them, so the 1-day may be all they need, but that’s a pretty small minority.

I don’t believe there’s a course that is so profound that you can do, learn and apply without support.  One of the key differentiators between good training and not so good training is the level and length of hand-holding on offer.

You can probably buy every moving part for the car, but can you put it together?  You can find all the instructions, but not in one place, even on the internet.  A good trainer shows you the whole process from start to finish and is then around to support your initial efforts for as long as you need to be ready to ‘fly the nest’.

So why doesn’t training work?  Inexperienced trainers, incomplete information and insufficient support.