Just wanted to say from purely a return (IRR) standpoint property moose is not actually that great an alternative to just buying a house yourself and renting it out ("DIY BTL")

I ran the numbers on a some of the projects on the site to see what my IRR would be if I invested today. For a lot of projects the returns were quite weak relative to DIY BTL.

I only looked at projects with a rental yield of above 6% (yield on the day 1 valuation) and for these projects median IRR was 6.5%. At that level of return, you are much better off sticking your money in a stock market fund - can achieve same returns for much less risk.

The key reasons the returns are so low on PM is:

• Point OP mentioned about valuations used to base sale prices on being way too high. The project managers on site have to make a guess as to what sale price of house will be at exit - thus, this implies a certain growth rate in the house price per year. But the valuations used to base sale prices on often far exceed these growth rates. Add the seller's premium on top of this, and the fees propmoose adds on, and you get buy in prices that far exceed where they should be. This is the primary factor that kills your returns

  • Other key factor is the buy in fee of 2% that PM rakes . Because the time frames are so short (on average about 2 year remaining until exit) you are pretty much reducing your potential return by 2% for each project

There are a few select projects on the site that offer attractive potential returns, but until they fix this issue with the valuations I dont see PM really being a viable alternative - its just too much risk for the returns you can achieve