Hi,

I've had a little look at the programme, and entered the details of my flats. Here are few of my thoughts.

I have been feeling the need recently for a spreadsheet type of programme linked to a callender so I can track all the various payments I have to make for the flats in my portfolio and keep on top of things in general.

What puts me off the i-Portfoliotracker is:
1. it is on-line. My internet connection isn't too bad but bascially it is still quite a slow process skipping around between the different pages. This is one reason why I want an off-line programme (plus of course the fact that I can use it while travelling and do not have internet).
2. It does not have a clear callender-style layout for tasks, where I can see in ONE place, what I have to do in one month.
3. I did not understand why you were going to AUTOMATICALLY contact my letting agent. There was no satisfactory explanation, and even if you have one, I'm not sure I want you to do that.

I can appreciate that you may have your own reasons for making an on-line tool (you after all have all this information about our flats) but as for what I want to manage my portfolio, well, I may just make my own complex excell spreadsheet - unless anyone has any other ideas.

I haven't tried the tools which track how much the portfolio is worth ... but that presumably depends on my inputting data on current values, which I don't reliably have.

Cheers,

Richard Goldie

Hi Richard,

Thanks for the comments.

I can understand you wanting to use an offline tool, and there are plenty of these available (the best cost several hundred pounds, but are relatively easy to find).

The point about the calendar is a good one. There is one place where all the reminders are displayed, which includes reminders to renew mortgages, insurance, rent reviews etc. There is no reason why everything such as dates rent is due shouldn't be added to that. With appropriate filters to not overload with data the clients with large portfolios that is something that we should do.

The automatic contacting of letting agents is very straightforward. When you link one you can see their published email address on the directory of agents, or you can add the agent's details yourself. If your agent does not respond to emails sent to their published email address then the automatic process will fail.

In this case, giving them a ring and saying "I'm paying you monthly to provide a service and keep me up to date with rents received, contracts, payments etc. Please use this free service to provide me with this data all in one place so I don't have to retype it when you post it to me quarterly".

If your agent needs help getting started with this, put them in touch with us and we will help them (for free). If they are unwilling to provide this service then we will be very happy to publish on our site the names and contact details of managing agents who are willing to provide the level of service that their landlords expect.

On the subject of whether to put the system online or offline there are at least five main reasons why we want to put it online:

1) with the service online we can make it possible for other service providers to fill in your information for you. You are paying managing agents, so why type your data in yourself? Why not the same with valuers? Why not put the details of property you are considering buying in and see how the assumptions affect the performance of your portfolio? You can only have this done for you online. Offline your insights are always limited to what you type in yourself. Online you benefit from your service providers entering the information, or your peers sharing benchmark information with you.

2) If you shrink wrap and sell the software then every time you add a new feature you have to tell everyone to go back and reinstall the software. This is a great excuse for companies to sell you upgrades, but online is the only way to ensure that everyone has the latest and best version of the software.

3) How can you be reminded of important things you need to do on your portfolio (like risk hundreds of pounds by not re-negotiating rents or mortgages) if you first have to remember to open your portfolio software on your home PC, or your work PC (as you can't have it on both). An online system delivers emails to your inbox which you can read easily from any location.

4) we can earn some revenue from this in the form of discrete advertising. We will not (and are not allowed by law - the Data Protection Act) to pass your details to third parties in any way that would identify you, but we can put context-sensitive adverts on the site - say when you are reminded to review your mortgage. Without some revenue we can't afford to create and provide the service for free.

5) yes, the aggregated information is of interest to us as publishers and commentators on international property markets, but as above the DPA doesn't let us do this in any way that identifies individuals. The benefit to users is that we are able to show you how your portfolio compares to others. For example if you put your mortgage rate information in you can see your average interest rate compared to that of other UK landlords who use the service. We hope to expand this so that you can benchmark more parts of your portfolio and gain valuable insights.

We want to work with people willing to give constructive feedback and practical suggestions on how to improve the service.

The choice is obviously with the user whether to pay several hundred pounds for a fixed, offline piece of software that will only reflect back what they type in themselves, or to engage with a free, evolving and improving online system that offers much more powerful insights and less work long term.

Good luck with the complex excel spreadsheet. Spreadsheets are good for evaluating individual properties and business plans, but for ongoing tracking of a complex portfolio there are seriously diminishing returns.

We have several that are free to download to Property Secrets members, and you can buy a large number of them from various sources.

And obviously you can spend as much time creating your own one as you like, _then_ spend the time entering the data. Then remember to open it every day to check if there's anything that you need to do.....

It's a complex challenge managing a portfolio, and we're certainly not there yet, but the more people who use and give feedback on the i-portfoliotracker software, the better it will get for everyone.

All the best

Peter Bennett
Director
Visium Group Ltd

Publishers of www.propertysecrets.net & www.i-portfoliotracker.com

p.s. please do contact me directly with any specific things going forward and I'll be happy to respond if there are particular things and you're willing to keep giving it a go.

Hi peter.I have sent messages to you via the Portfolio tracker but you havent responded; excuse errors but i amon a french keyboard. the idea is excellent but there r several things that need changing. On my property in france where I purchased in euro i cant edit it to make it euros; is this because it was set up before you added foreign currency? also on some of my rentals they appear in GBP, whereas on the set up they are in foreign currencies. also re the agent I do not agree; very complicated. another thing to add re foreign rentals, very often we have to pay witholding tax and very often community charges that are not included on the software. also in the UK I do have HMOs that are not taken into consideration in displaying the rentals. Also life assurance; building insurance; Another thing is the graph; I think it only works when you add more than 2 estimated growth prices? If you cqn answer these questions then I can move on to the next exercise;
thanks
Lynn r

Hi Lynn,

Rather surprisingly I replied to your comments on the i-PortfolioTracker site just about the same time as you were posting this on the forum! I've been in Prague for the last two days, so that delayed my reply.

For the benefit of anyone else on the forum, here's a brief response to your post....

You can now edit the currency of a property, and of a contract on a property. When you add valuations they default to the currency of the property in question. Then the capital growth curves use more-or-less realtime currency exchange rates to bring the figures together.

On the categories of payments, we're changing those so that they match the HMRC categories, but with an 'Other' category so you can put in things like Withholding tax.

You have a very interesting (and complicated) portfolio of UK and foreign investments so if we can make this work seamlessly for you then I'm confident that we can make it work seamlessly for everyone :-)

All the best

Peter Bennett
Director
Visium Group Ltd

Publishers of www.propertysecrets.net & www.i-portfoliotracker.com

Hi peter.
Every day you are improving this service. Now another challenge. In the case of my palm property, it is paid by stage payments, and as I have been unable to get finance due to the current scene, so I have paid 90% (it has killed me), so how can I put this one into the Portfolio listing. Also, how do you edit a unit 'sold' and work out the capital gains tax on a foreign property i:e: Bratislava, that was bought in SKK, sold in SKK but will have to pay the capital gains tax in euro?? will this be the figure quoted before they went into the euro? Plus how to enter payments when it has been bought including a rental guarantee, how to deduct the withholding tax ie. Spain, Portugal, Poland? and finally in the case of my property in France I have a mortgage called 'interet de fine' a type of a endowment mortgage that is unique to the French!
Regards
Lynn r

Happy to give the i-portfolio a go. Happy with anything free, nicely done. I like the idea of it being online and accessable wherever, and the inclusion of a calendar. Have just started using it, and there's just a few small things to ask about so far:

- I can't seem to add a tenancy agreement from before 2007

- I self manage my tenancies, starting on a 6 month then virtually always revert to a month to month unless I'm increasing the rent. Is there an option to select month to month ongoing tenancies? Because when I select indefinite, the portfolio page displays those properties as void????

- You shouldn't have to set up a rental/mortgage reminder for the calendar. The software should do it as soon as its entered in the property section?? Then adding Gas Safety check reminders is fair enough, but otherwise, you just go filling in the same info over and over.

Sorry if I've missed something to help me with the above. I'd like to use the i-PT more but for now that's all I can put forward. I reckon I'd fall into the small time landlord trying to get somewhere, so hopefully the above helps in some way. I'll have another dabble maybe next week.

Cheers,
Chris

Hi Chris,

Thanks for your feedback - sorry it's taken me a bit to reply to you.

Tenancy agreements before 2007? Well, we can certainly quickly fix that.

Month by month tenancies. It ought to be what you tried - i.e. ongoing. If the portfolio page shows it as void then this is also a thing that we should be able to fix quickly (I'm guessing that the system is judging whether it is void based on whether the contract expiry date is in the future or not, and it needs to take into account ongoing tenancies).

The rental and mortgage reminders are an interesting point. The way the rental reminders work is that by going to your 'My Account' page you can either turn the rental reminders on or off, and choose whether you want to be reminded before or after the due date and by how many days.

Once this setting has been made, all contracts on all properties should trigger these reminders. If you choose to be reminded after the date due then it will only send the reminder if your account is showing in arrears (i.e. if you have already updated the rent then it won't email you to remind you).

The mortgage reminders issue is a bit more subtle, as it depends on how long it takes to arrange a mortgage / how you go about managing your mortgages. In the UK you might decide to check your mortgage again in a few months time as new products come out. In many foreign countries it can take many months to get a mortgage, so you'd want to remind yourself sooner, for example. So that way you set your reminder date as you see fit.

We ought to bring these two things closer together to that there is a default reminder set and you can then edit that if you want to.

One thing we really do want to add is more analysis so that you can see how your portfolio is doing compared to other people on the site. You'll never see their personal information, but you will be able to see whether your return on investment over the last couple of years is better or worse than average.

Let us know what you value in portfolio management software and we'll do everything we can to make it work. I know that in the current market it's more important than ever to be able to keep on top of your investments, so I'm sure that there ought to be huge value in this kind of software, if we can just get the balance between features and usability right.

Oh, and if you could tell all your friends and other investors about it that would put a huge smile on my face :-)

Best wishes

Peter Bennett
Director
Visium Group Ltd

Publishers of www.propertysecrets.net & www.i-portfoliotracker.com

Hi Peter,

1. Can we have the outstanding rent on the front page so that we can simply tick through all of them quickly and easily? (and see any that are missing quickly and easily)
2. Can we take an extract of money in and out, by property, for supplying to the accountant at the end of the year or just for info (maybe to excel),

as you know Peter, I have sent you a load of requests by mail. You have done a great job of getting through the most of them. I trust you are getting through the rest.. :-)

all for now..

Thanks!

Hi,

Good points, as ever. We tried to make it quick to get to the outstanding rent report, as it's the top link on the Management page (and the management page is one of the three very big buttons on the homepage).

You can get there directly at https: / /secure .i -portfoliotracker .com /rental _reports .html

But I agree that there should be something on the homepage that lets you know that you OUGHT to go to that page....

The money-in, money-out reporting has been tidied up but still can be better. At the moment now when you enter any costs associated with a unit it asks you to classify them and the list of cost types is the same as the one in the UK tax return (which should help). You can choose any date range to report on at a unit level or the whole portfolio level.

What's missing here at the moment is probably the Excel export functionality - which isn't too hard. I'll pop that on the list.

In the meantime, how about pointing other investors at the service? The more people hassling us for new features, the more we'll put in - how's that for a deal? (And please don't just register 5 separate accounts :-)

Cheers

Peter

Hi Again..

1. when you log a rental payment I think it would be best if it returned to the page so that you could make the next properties rental payment. I have to navigate back to the management page and go from there.
2. It would also be good if we could go from the www.propertysecrets.net web site to the https: / /secure .i -portfoliotracker .com website without logging in again.

I fully endorse the product and find it useful. It has some navigational and other quirks that need addressing, but, it is definitely near to getting there.

Thanks again