Do you want to be a property millionaire?” asked the unsolicited e-mail. Know the secret of giant wealth?” Are you just talking about it when you could be acting?” I get lots of this stuff. Presumably the people flogging property deals believe that we house anoraks think about being bricks’n’mortar millionaires all the time.

All right. Out of curiosity, I’ll take a free two-hour property workshop off you, Inside Track. But which to choose? Clicking on my invitation, there seemed to be two a day — every day — across Britain. The company must think there are an awful lot of wannabe property moguls out there.

I joined about 50 people, all seemingly in their late thirties, in a conference room at a south London hotel. Most were drinking tea and eating biscuits. Nobody looked especially well heeled.

However, the first thing our seminar leader, Dennis Carr, wanted to talk about was the chance to book another course: a property weekend run by Inside Track, at the special rate of £2,495 per couple if we signed up there and then.

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• Tales of a landlady: It pays to shop around

• Tales of a landlady: Residents only

• The ties that bind

• How low can you go?

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• Tales of a landlady: Avoiding the agents

• Tales of a landlady: In the dock

• Tales of a landlady: the age of reason

• Tales of a landlady: Heroes and villains

• Tales of a landlady: High maintenance

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• In the doghouse

• Parking mad

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• It’s eviction time

BACKGROUND

• Do property workshops work?

• A letting gamble

• Spread betting

• When buy-to-let turns from a hobby into a living

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BACKGROUND

• Landlords: halo or horns?

• Bidding wars

• Time to quit the ring?

Carr, a grey-haired former plasterer, was clearly at the evangelical heart of the property-workshop world. He assured us the weekend would “hook you into our buying power”. This, of course, is the point of Inside Track, which was set up five years ago with the aim of matchmaking wannabe property millionaires with developers. One party buys off-plan bargains from the other, and Inside Track gets 3% commission on the deal.

Carr outlined what we would get for our money. Bargains! Developers! Solicitors! Tax advisors! At an Inside Track weekend, you have the chance to buy an off-plan home. Or, as he put it, “a box where you pull a lever and money drops out”.

Except that, before you can grab one of Inside Track’s special discounted deals, you have to sign up to Instant Access Properties, its sister company. It costs a one-off fee of £6,495, then £120 per month. “This gives you access to our deals,” Carr said. “You could end up with two or three properties. You could have a £1m portfolio very, very fast.”

Heads started to nod eagerly. We were clearly in the hands of a master. No notes, no time for questions, Carr carried on at what he called “warp speed”, repeating key phrases such as “I’m going to put a deal on the table for you”, and “Your property could be on a car park in Bristol or a hillside in Spain”.

After about an hour of information overload, Carr brought on his case studies: investors who had achieved miraculous financial success via Inside Track. Testimonies poured forth from people such as Claire, who has eight properties worth £2m, and Jane, who had “never heard of off-plan before”, but was “given the confidence to get started by Inside Track”.

Jane said that she owns 11 properties worth a total of £1.8m, with about £350,000 equity. That’s a combined mortgage of £1.5m — potentially problematic if interest rates suddenly rise. It won’t happen, Carr assured us. In his world, interest rates never really change, and property moves like the wind.

There were fabulous anecdotes: Spanish villas that had risen £45,000 in just eight weeks, Florida condos up from £53,000 to £167,000 in two years. There were glossy brochures showing heavenly developments around the world eagerly passed around. All were slightly dog-eared. Rather like Carr, they had clearly already done a fair few workshops.

There seemed no end to the products on offer, such as Aftercare Solutions, a helpful Inside Track service dealing with furniture and such. It, Carr said, would “sort out the problems in your portfolio”.

Plunging into the world of off-plan is tricky, and if Inside Track can sort out the developer, orchestrate a discount and get you talking to tax experts, then £9,000 upfront may not be such a lot of money to hand over to Carr and his mates. (There’s an eight-day cooling-off period with a full money-back refund for those who have a change of heart.) More problematic was the seminar’s apparent refusal to concede that property ownership was anything but a one-way bet, although the message from Pierre Williams, Inside Track’s head of communications, a few days later was more measured: would-be investors had to do their homework and realise that property was a medium- to long-term investment, and that it was unrealistic to expect markets to boom continuously. But even he couldn’t resist pointing out that “property prices have risen 5,000% in the past 40 years”, and that undersupply, which has been driving the market ever upward, “shows no sign of abating”.

Indeed, the company’s philosophy of buying, remortgaging and buying again seems predicated on prices that go in only one direction — up. Carr’s view sounded to me like this: Go to bed. Wake up the next day. Your property has increased in value. “It’s that simple,” he told us. “Property doesn’t go down. It goes up. That’s what happens. And if prices do go down, well, that’s only because you paid too much for it in the first place. Here, the profit is made on the purchase, not the sale.”

But what about mortgage repayments while your off-plan bargain is still a building site? Or kitting out your flat, paying agents’ fees, finding tenants, holding onto tenants and all that other tedious, often costly stuff?

All questions I would have liked to ask, but couldn’t, because Carr announced he was dashing off, leaving the £2,495 deal “on the table”. After, that is, he had left temptation hanging in the air for his budding disciples: “For every property you buy, I’ll show you how to buy three. What else will you do with your life?”

buytolet@sunday-times.co.uk

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