ABOUT THIS EPISODE
https://www.thisweekinproperty.tv/jason-kelly
Some investors run a mile from the words "listed building". Jason Kelly runs towards them.
In today's episode, Richard heads out to Eaglesham, East Renfrewshire, to walk the site of Jason's latest project: a Grade B listed former sheriff's house, built in the 1600s, sitting inside what became Scotland's first conservation area, designated back in 1960.
It's a world away from the £35k flat in Wishaw that gave Jason his start, but the fundamentals, he says, haven't changed.
This is an assisted sale. The owner inherited the house from parents, who bought it in 1953. Planning permission was held for years but the owner never had the funds to use it. Jason has structured a deal that works for everyone involved.
None of it is Jason's own cash. Two investors have funded the £150k refurb between them for a fixed return, one of them a fellow member of the PMW community learning the ropes by getting hands-on with a live project. Jason has taken security over the asset to protect them, and pays referral and agent fees along the way, because, as he puts it, "you're speculating to accumulate."
Inside the refurb
Hear Jason explain why listed building consent, and three or four months of due diligence with architects and building control before he even negotiated the deal, "doesn't give him the fear" the way it puts off so many other investors.
Listen to him walk through the back extension that adds a second bathroom (the house only ever had one, upstairs), the retaining walls and terraced flowerbeds transforming a steep, overgrown garden into lawn and patio, and the archaeologist-witnessed dig required before any groundwork could even start.
Hear the cost trade-offs play out in real time: sash and case windows kept at the front to match the street, wood-effect PVC at the back to save roughly half of a £25k window bill, GRP roofing in place of slate or zinc on the flat sections, and a full switch from oil to gas heating via a new SGN connection and boiler.
Listen to Jason talk about reinstating the original fireplace with a log burner, keeping and repairing the house's ornate cornice work using a mould salvaged from the property itself, and sourcing reclaimed doors from Glasgow's architectural salvage yard for his other projects.
Hear how a simple, neutral colour palette and a professional stager help the finished house appeal to the widest possible pool of buyers, and how reworking the existing layout adds a fourth bedroom to the listing without laying a single extra brick.
And listen to Jason and Richard talk candidly about risk, about why every project he's bought has been unoccupied, and about the "tribe" of investors he now brings through his projects to learn, hands-on, the way he once did himself.
