Want to be famous?


Neil Simpson is a former Personal Finance Journalist of the Year and the author of the Buy-to-Let Investor column in Financial Mail on Sunday. He is a keen property investor and writes about buy-to-let online as well as for a variety of publications including City AM.

Do you want to be on television or in the papers? Nowadays you don’t need to have the X-factor or to live in a house full of cameras. Owning an investment property or two can be enough. Property shows continue to dominate the television schedules and property supplements fall out of most newspapers at the weekends. They are all what the media calls ‘content-hungry’ – they only work because plenty of people want to take part in them.

So is it worth signing up?

The television shows are toughest to get into, require the most commitment and are most likely to go wrong. Until someone comes up with a good idea to make buy-to-let work on camera the property shows also focus more frequently on owner-occupiers. But it is possible for investors to take part in something like Property Ladder or Relocation Relocation on Channel 4. If you fancy spreading your wings and buying or selling foreign property there are even more options, from A Place in the Sun to Selling Homes Abroad.

You can get more details of the application process on websites such as www.channel4.com/takepart, www.five.tv/wanttobeontv or www.beonscreen.com.

Getting selected isn’t easy. I sat with a team of producers at the end of last year and saw them go through a mountain of applications. They tend to be very specific in their requirements – the best of them know instinctively what sort of people or properties make good television. So if you are picked you might be right to think your requirements – or even your appearance – has been deemed just a little bit out of the ordinary.

Sign up and you do need to last the course. Something like Grand Designs can take a year or more to put together. You will need to be ready for extra filming throughout the process and you won’t know until the end which bit of the hours of footage will actually be screened. Get on an overseas property show and you will get an all-expenses paid trip to the sun. But you will get worked hard. You will be with the camera crew and producers all day every day, even if there are only a few moments of screen time to show for it. Again, you will have signed a waiver at the start so you can’t get shy and opt out half way through the process.

Quicker, more painless ways for buy-to-let investors to have a bit of star treatment come from the newspapers. The property and financial pages use dozens of ‘case studies’ every week – those (normally) happy smiling people in photographs who tell their stories as part of the feature articles. Every newspaper has a different approach to case studies. Some want to give their readers a lot of detailed facts and figures – the reporters will wan to know everything about your mortgages and property values and rents. Others only want to give a more general overview of how easy it might be to get into the buy-to-let world so they just need some broad advice for other readers.

Case study interviews are almost always carried out over the phone and don’t normally take that long. In almost all cases papers will need to send a photographer to take a picture – to illustrate the page and prove that the case study really does exit. I know the case studies I use for the Mail on Sunday’s Property page reckon this can be the best part of the process. Professional photographers tend to have a lot of good stories to tell and can normally raise a lot of laughs in the half hour or so it takes to get a decent picture.

A lot of self-employed people and people who run their own companies like being case studies because they reckon that any publicity is good publicity. The article might be about the pros and cons of having a fixed rate buy-to-let mortgage. But if the case study text also mentions the mail order sports equipment company you run – or whatever it might be – then it can be a useful way to raise your profile.

It is possible to write to newspapers and say you’d like to be featured as a case study, though often letters might get misplaced amidst the rest of the postbag. If you can find email addresses for individual writers then that can be a better idea. Or get in touch with your lender or broker. I know that a lot of my colleagues on other papers will call a company like Landlord Mortgages when they are writing on buy-to-let and ask if they have any clients who might want to be case studies. The more willing names they have on their lists the easier it is for everyone.

People have been predicting the end of the era for property television shows for some time now. But even if the big shows do start to disappear the newspapers will still be looking for new faces. Buy-to-let certainly isn’t going away. Editors and writers are always going to be looking for people with strong opinions or good advice to give. Take part and you could even end up as the next Kirsty or Phil.