Paolo Aliatis has moved through life at a pace most people will never know. Building up a successful business and property portfolio in the UK, working with entrepreneurs, investors and property tycoons, Paolo Aliatis‘ rise has been as remarkable as it has been hard work. Hearing the story from Aliatis himself is intriguing…
I started young when I ventured into entrepreneurship. I want to tell you my story so you can understand how I ended up in the flat-share industry and how this industry changed my life.
From my youth, I have always found a way to make what I want happen. Most of my business ventures before my 20’s were lifestyle-based and often caught the attention of people in an elite society in which I did not belong. My friends had my back as I had theirs.
“We roll where we control, and we control how we roll”; that was the only rule we followed.
Paolo Aliatis: Brimming With Business
My first bright idea was to try to replicate a successful restaurant model that started in a neighbouring city. However, having little understanding of how to run a restaurant chain, control costs, waste management, maintain standards etc. it ended up a failure. The business barely sold for enough to cover the debts that I had incurred in the process of setting it up.
I later moved to Barcelona with my then-girlfriend and started a pharmaceutical distribution company which collapsed during the 2008 recession. I then decided to rent the spare rooms in my apartment, which ended up covering the cost of the whole apartment. That meant that I lived rent-free and when I moved in with my girlfriend, where I rented out the entire apartment and was making 600 euros a month.
Paolo Aliatis’ Flat Share Empire
I heard stories of a friend’s cousin who was running flat-shares, once we were introduced a partnership was born and we went from having just a few properties between us, to having 250 across 4 different cities. In 2009, we started to get calls from agents in Barcelona and London offering us their properties, acquiring properties wasn’t the challenge, renting the rooms was. At that grassroots period, I was even agreeing to pick clients up off their trains in the early hours of the morning just to secure a deal.
Portfolios grew and time flew by. Profits multiplied and workforces expanded. My role in the game began to change dramatically. No longer was I preparing and showing rooms to people fresh to London or waking up at all hours to chase tenants withholding rent who had been dodging us during working hours. My challenges then were managing teams, finances, lawyers, accountants, contractors etc. The game changed and a whole fresh ecosystem started to flourish around us.
Eventually, everything fell into the right place, people started doing their jobs, international expansion followed, in-house software was developed and new acquisitions became a priority.
With every positive or negative experience encountered, our foresight expanded. As time passed, our contracts grew to include every possible eventuality, giving us complete legal coverage against troublesome tenants, landlords and contractors.
Working with such a diverse type of landlord, from established property tycoons to former gangsters, Jewish to Muslim, those with 1 flat to those with 100 flats in their portfolio, we have been through it all, but most importantly, we have seen and solved it all.
Moving Up: Paolo Aliatis’ Progression
Now I am no longer involved in the day to day activities of flat-shares, my focus lays on how to take portfolios that are yielding a 5% return, to a 12% return. From time to time I will have a former competitor contact me with properties to take on. It doesn’t take long to see why they are trying to offload with most of them being structurally flawed and unprofitable. Timing and knowhow is everything, especially in the flat-share business.
During the past years, I have made lots of mistakes that have cost me time and money, millions sometimes. Yet I have also realised that most of the mistakes made actually added value to my understanding of business and in the long run, that knowledge will save me 10 times more than any simple loss of profits would.
When we started to run flat-shares, you could barely say the industry actually existed, it was still operating in the shadows. We learnt the hard way, trial and error. The industry was still a grey area where subletters or people running flat-shares were considered crooks whilst conventional estate agencies saw us as amateurs.
I am still surprised by the level of business and industry knowledge that I have managed to acquire, which is especially evident when I am talking with people that previously used to be my idols. I feel a lot of pride in the fact that I am now in a position to often teach them on aspects of our business they were not aware of.
