I bought my first house in 1996 and didn’t like living alone so I rented out one of the rooms. Then I thought, why don’t I just rent out the whole house? I did and from that I started making what I called beer money: about £120 a month. So then I thought, why don’t I just do it again? At that time, buy-to-let mortgages were just starting to emerge and I probably got one of the first. From then on, I basically kept repeating the process and bought about five properties in Harlow, Essex, which is my home town. Appreciation was such that every property I bought enabled me to buy three more by constantly remortgaging, so I started looking further afield and now I buy in a 150-mile radius of Harlow, where prices are still low.

I’ve got about 70 properties and I’ve only ever sold two because I couldn’t let them. They made money for me – I bought one at £16,000 and sold it at £31,000 – but I have two basic rules when it comes to assessing a property. The first is never buy based on what you might make in capital appreciation. It’s too unknown. I buy on yield, or what I call the Rule of 12. To make sure you’re going to make a 12 per cent return each year, take the purchase price and knock off the last two zeros; that’s what you should be able to get per month in rent. If you see a house for £80,000, you should get £800 a month. If you know houses in that area are let for about £800 and you see one selling for £75,000, buy it. If it’s £125,000, you should walk away. That rule has kept me in profit.

It’s certainly not too late to start building up your own property portfolio, especially if you are willing to buy in cheaper areas. Just get on with it as soon as you can. When I quit my job as a chartered accountant to be a full-time property investor, my goal was to make the same amount as my salary within a year. It happened a lot faster than that and now I make 20 times more. Property is a guaranteed long-term path to wealth. Even if the boom never happens, in 20 years you’ll have enough to retire on.

Ajay Ahuja’s latest book, Buy to Let Property Hotspots, co-written with Nick Rampley-Sturgeon, is published by How To Books, price £14.99

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