Natasha Collins spent sixteen years managing commercial portfolios before she ever put money into her own name.
She’s a chartered surveyor, the founder of NC Real Estate, host of the Honest Property Investment Podcast, and author of Confident Commercial Property Investment.
In this session, she walked through the due diligence she runs on every commercial deal, and most of it applies just as much to a landlord with three buy-to-lets as it does to someone buying an office block.
The Headline Number Is Never The Real Number
Natasha says never to buy the headline yield.
A ten percent return sounds good until you ask why someone is selling it to you at that price.
The same logic holds in residential.
If a deal looks unusually strong, the risk is sitting somewhere you haven’t looked yet, in the tenant, the condition, or the true cost of managing it.
Know Who Is Actually Paying You
Rental income only means something if you know who’s behind it.
Is the tenant secure?
Are they paying on time or catching up after falling behind?
Would you get the same rent, more, or less if you had to re-let today?
Landlords who only check the number in the bank account, not the story behind it, get caught out when that tenant disappears.
Stop Hiring The Cheapest Person You Can Find
The mistake Natasha sees most often, in commercial and residential alike, is landlords cutting corners on the team around them.
The cheapest accountant, the cheapest broker, the solicitor who does it fastest rather than properly.
Her own solicitor has represented her for fifteen years, and she doesn’t mind paying for that relationship, because when something goes wrong, having someone who already knows your portfolio is worth more than saving a few hundred pounds up front.
Her direct warning:
Don’t use ChatGPT to draft a lease.
If a solicitor gets it wrong, you can hold them to account. If a generic AI tool gets it wrong, you’re on your own when a tenant exploits the gap.
Every Problem Has A Price
Natasha’s approach to due diligence isn’t to look for a property with no weaknesses.
She assumes every property has them, and goes looking for what they are, then decides whether the price reflects the risk.
A short lease, a weak tenant, deferred maintenance- none of these rules a deal out on their own. What matters is whether you’re being compensated for taking them on.
The Proactive Team Beats The Cheap Team
Landlords who build a team that catches problems early, rather than reacting to them, end up further ahead.
That applies whether you’re negotiating a commercial lease renewal or just deciding whether your current accountant actually understands property.
Watch the full conversation, including how Natasha bought a telephone box in central London for £11,200 and rents it out to a coffee shop.
The Five-Question SWOT Natasha Runs On Every Deal
Before she prices any commercial property, Natasha works through four questions in order:
What genuinely makes this investment strong?
What problems are you knowingly buying?
Where could you improve income or value?
What’s outside your control that could hurt it?
The goal isn’t a property with no weaknesses. It’s knowing exactly what you’re taking on and pricing accordingly.
Her rough risk guide by yield:
Under 8% is lower risk, 8 to 10% is medium, anything over 10% means assume there’s a problem you haven’t found yet. And if an agent prices something at 6% and insists there’s nothing wrong with it, that’s worth checking too.
Get the book: Confident Commercial Property Investment by Natasha Collins
Find Natasha: ncrealestate.co.uk
