Acting as an intermediary on hundreds of residential deals a year, Property Hub Invest works with housebuilders and city-centre developers to secure fast, discreet bulk sales to qualified investors.
Sam Smith, Property Hub Invest director
Led by co-founders Rob Bence and Rob Dix, the business is able to leverage its investor client database thanks to the success of the duo’s The Property Podcast and an active social media presence, including a YouTube channel. This year, the firm aims to sell more than £200m worth of housing.
Recently appointed director Sam Smith tells Property Week about Property Hub Invest’s sales strategy and the current market outlook for residential investors.
How effective is The Property Podcast in generating sales?
The podcast is B2C [business-to-consumer] marketing, really. A lot of the clients who come to Property Hub Invest come off the back of listening to the podcast. Our founders [Rob] Dix and [Rob] Bence, who host the weekly podcast, cover various topics regarding property investment. Recently, we’ve been discussing the impact of the war in Iran on interest rates.
A lot of our enquiries also come from our various other channels; we’ve got a YouTube channel that has over 100,000 subscribers. And then on social media, we’re very active across LinkedIn and Instagram, and it’s starting to pick up with TikTok.
It all comes down to the content and the marketing. We’ve got a captive audience that we have at any one time. We’re constantly nurturing those leads. So, when doing a launch, before we’ve even put out any information, we know how many people we’ve got actively looking and where their budgets sit.
How has the sales process been going so far this year?
Last year, we sold over 450 units, which was over £150m of gross development value (GDV). This year, we are aiming to sell units with GDV over £200m, which translates to about 1,000 sales. Q1 has been a strong start. We’re trending against our targets, which is great. We’ve got the investors, we have that demand and what we’re trying to do is keep up the supply.
We’ve got the investors, we have that demand and what we’re trying to do is keep up the supply
A lot of developers and housebuilders were also having a very strong sales start in 2026. The momentum was really strong in January. That’s very much changed.
There are a number of factors to that; obviously, the economic climate due to what’s going on in the world has made a few people nervous. We have seen some people in our world who are a bit nervous about spending their money at the moment. So, we’re always trying to educate them as to when is the best time to invest.
What is the sentiment from investors looking at the UK’s residential market?
Momentum at the beginning of the year was very good, but in the past six to eight weeks, we’ve definitely seen an air of caution.
But if you’re a property investor and you’re doing things correctly, everything you’re looking at is for the longer term. So, our narrative and the education piece we put forward for our investor client base is teaching people about long-term investment.
We’re seeing institutional capital still coming into the residential sector in the UK. Actually, we’re following where that institutional money is going, because that is a real indicator: it’s the cities and areas around them that we need to be investing in.
We’ve seen that with single-family [rental housing] over the past 12 to 18 months with the amount of investment that goes into the suburban build-to-rent market.
Property Hub Invest also deals with rental scheme sales. How have upcoming regulations in the sector affected investor appetite?
There’s always lots of talk about what’s happening in the sales market, but people only really talk about owner-occupiers, for example people buying homes.
What I don’t think there is a big lens on is the investment side of sales. Yes, it has been well publicised that landlords are leaving the market with all the new legislation that’s come out during the past few years, and obviously with what’s going to be launched in May with the Renters’ Rights Act.
But all this is really doing is just professionalising the sector, which isn’t a bad thing. I’ve worked in the sector a long time, and I think it’s very much needed. That’s where we’re coming in: to educate private investors as to how they need to operate and set up their investment portfolio.