"yesterday"

After a day dedicated to head-down development yesterday I had to spend some time catching up with communications this morning.

That included several consultancy client responses but added to it were a couple of new things that arrived this morning and a viewing booked at the property I'm currently trying to let.

I scheduled today as a PaTMa marketing day, although also had an HMRC webinar booked for lunch time - all about individuals with property income.

Having watched the HMRC webinar I thought I'd also watch the recording of the Making Tax Digital one I only managed to half watch while at LTVConf last week.

That started me down the rabbit hole of Making Tax Digital and finding out about talking to HMRC about software. It turns out HMRC have a github account and a "Dev Hub" and even a blog with lots of articles targeted at developers!

More assorted consultancy related issues interrupted this afternoon. Along with nearly an hour(!) downloading bank statements from Barclays that had to include a phone call to their support desk because it seems they can't make a website that's compatible with Firefox! Unfortunately rather than saying that, they've managed to make it work intermittently and when failing, provide an error message that just states a number and says to call (which to me suggests and error on their side, not a browser compatibility issue).

Only very limited marketing work managed to fit in around all of this. It did include getting a few overdue emails finished and sent though which will hopefully progress some exciting things.

Paused early for dinner today as I'm off to Crawley Property Meet this evening.

Then more urgent consultancy changes, just before dashing out - prevented me providing much help with the children!

Crawley Property Meet

These are consistently good and busy monthly meetups for landlords and general property people.

Today started with some GDPR, mostly re-affirming that there are still many different (mis)interpretations going around. Lots of audience participation during this which was really interesting. I wish I had the time to write up something decent on GDPR for the PaTMa blog. I must at least find the NLA recommendations though, which from the sound of tonight are relatively sensible.

Second speaker tonight was Andrew who told their property journey over the last fifteen years or so. It was a fascinating story of what's possible, with some important lessons he's found along the way. His main tactics have been moving walls to create extra rooms; initially within single properties but later across blocks of properties and also with title splitting. Both approaches that I'd really like to get into (looking at floor plans on Rightmove and thinking how they could be adjusted is certainly something I spend more time on than I should).

I really must remember to turn my "bed time" alarm off when I'm out though - as it goes off even when my phone is in silent mode. :-(

Time for kitchen chores (and some more listening to Keeping your sh*t together) and then finally bed.