Property deal packaging: a template that actually protects you

If you source deals and sell them on, the deal pack is your product. Not the property, the pack. The investor is paying your fee for a bundle of verified information and honest arithmetic they didn't have to produce themselves.

Most templates floating around the internet get this backwards. They're sales brochures: a hero photo, a headline yield, a paragraph of adjectives, an invoice. They're built to close the fee, not to survive the buyer's solicitor, and definitely not to survive the deal going wrong eighteen months later.

Here's what a pack that protects you, and your buyer, and your reputation, actually contains. Use it as the template. The order matters less than the completeness.

1. The property, with its history

Address, tenure and the basics, but crucially the marketing history: how long it's genuinely been on the market (including relists), what price it started at, every reduction, and any fallen-through sales. Plus the sold-price history of the property itself.

Why it matters for you: the history is usually why the deal exists. "Reduced twice, sale fell through in April, vendor needs out" is the story that justifies the price. An investor who can see that story documented doesn't need convincing, and can't later claim they weren't told what they were buying into.

2. The numbers, with the assumptions written down

Purchase price, works budget, end value, rent and the returns arithmetic: every packager includes these. What separates a professional pack is that every number carries its assumption:

• End value: based on which comparables (see section 4).
• Rent: based on what evidence, meaning actual local lettings, not a hopeful figure.
• Works: based on what scope (see section 3).
• Yield and ROI: at what purchase costs, whose management fee, what voids allowance.

Never, under any circumstances, a bare "guaranteed 12% yield." Nothing in property is guaranteed, the word is a regulatory red flag, and any investor sophisticated enough to be worth having will read it as a warning about you. Write "projected, on the assumptions above" and list the assumptions. If the numbers only work with zero voids and a phantom builder, the pack should show that, because if you hide it, the deal's failure becomes your fault, in writing.

3. The refurb scope, with evidence

A one-line "needs light refurb: £15k" is where most packs go to die. Instead: a room-by-room scope of works, photographs of the actual condition (your own, from the viewing, not the agent's flattering wide-angles), and the basis of the costing. A builder's walk-through quote is gold. Your own line-item estimate is acceptable if it's labelled as an estimate.

The refurb number feeds every other number in the pack. If it's soft, the end value, the refinance and the returns are all fiction with extra steps.

4. Comparables, with reasoning

Not a list, an argument. Three to five sold prices (not asking prices), like-for-like on type, size and street quality, with dates, and a sentence each on why they're comparable and how you adjusted: "No. 42 sold at £142k in January, same layout, worse condition, supports £150k done-up." Per-square-foot figures help anchor it.

If your end value relies on listings rather than sold prices, say so and discount accordingly. Asking prices are opinions; sold prices are facts.

5. The deal terms, in writing

What the investor is paying you, when, what it's refundable against, and exactly what they get for it. Sourcing fee, any deposit-holding arrangement, what happens if the purchase falls through, who's responsible for what during conveyancing. Ambiguity here is where friendships, reviews and occasionally solicitors' letters come from.

6. The compliance page, the part almost everyone skips

This is the section that separates a professional from a cowboy, and it's the reason "property sourcer" gets said with a curled lip on the forums. Sourcing deals for a fee is, in regulatory terms, estate agency work, which means the law already has opinions about you:

• Redress scheme membership: you must belong to The Property Ombudsman (TPO) or the Property Redress Scheme (PRS). It's a legal requirement for agency work, not a badge.
• ICO registration: you hold clients' personal data, so you pay the data protection fee and handle the data accordingly.
• HMRC anti-money-laundering supervision: estate agency businesses must be registered for AML supervision. You'll need basic client due-diligence habits to go with it.
• Professional indemnity insurance: required by the redress schemes and, more to the point, the thing standing between one bad deal and your house.
• If you ever hold client money: client money protection, held properly and separately.

Put your registrations in the pack: scheme name, membership number, ICO number, insurer. Two lines that instantly set you apart from most of your competition, because most of your competition can't write them.

None of this is expensive relative to a single sourcing fee. Skipping it isn't lean, it's uninsured, and it hands any disgruntled buyer a ready-made complaint.

7. The honest-risks paragraph

One short section the brochure-writers would never include: what could go wrong with this specific deal. Down-valuation risk, a soft rental market on that street, the Article 4 direction two roads away, the lease length, the mining report. Three or four bullet points.

This feels commercially suicidal and is the opposite. The investor was going to find these anyway, or their solicitor was, and finding them in your pack converts each one from a reason to distrust you into proof of your diligence. Repeat buyers, the only kind that make sourcing a business rather than a hustle, are made in this paragraph.

The template, in one list

• Property, tenure and full marketing/price history.
• Numbers with every assumption stated (no "guaranteed" anything).
• Room-by-room refurb scope with your photos and costing basis.
• Three to five sold comparables with reasoning and adjustments.
• Fee and terms in plain writing.
• Compliance: redress scheme, ICO, AML and PI, with numbers shown.
• Honest risks, named.
• Your contact details and the next step.

A pack like this takes half a day the first time and an hour once you've done ten, most of that hour being the gathering: the listing history, the sold comparables, the local rents, the time-on-market evidence. Which is, not coincidentally, the part that's automatable.

BrickSift is being built with sourcers in mind: the property's full history, sold comparables and local rents assembled in one place, the evidence half of a professional pack, ready before your coffee's cold. Join the waitlist to get it first.