There is an extraordinary investment opportunity available local to where I live for anyone who may be interested (honestly, I'm too busy and distracted with other things).
Let me give you some context.
Around about 23 years ago, I moved to West Bridgford in Nottingham from another part of the South side of Nottingham. West Bridgford was, at that stage, the most desirable place to live, and still is the place which hosts 3 outstanding secondary schools. So if you get a seat at West Bridgford, your kids get to go to an outstanding secondary school (and several outstanding primary schools).
This is a big driver for house prices and for people there.
At that stage, lots of people had the same idea, and lots of people in my situation had the same idea, and so they moved in either before they had kids or with young kids, and off they went. Interestingly, though, if you get your head up and pay attention and don't just keep your nose to the grindstone all the time, you'll realise that what West Bridgford was doing at that in Nottingham was stealing the young people from the centre of Nottingham in a place called Wollaton, which had become old and already gone through that cycle.
And so we all got our noses to the grindstone and carried on, and West Bridgford improved and got better and started opening coffee shops, bars, gyms and things for the people that were there because that was the demographic that needed/ wanted them.
Services follow the public and the public demand, and so if you get enough of the public of a type, then you get enough of the services that are associated with that type. This is geography, which is an extraordinary subject and is linked to economics.
The opportunity close to me, though, now is the fact that West Bridgford is now becoming old. What's happened is that everybody who moved in at that stage in their late 20s and early 30s (me) have got old and so have their kids, and their kids have gone to uni and have moved out, and now the houses are too big, and they don't need to be there, and so they move.
And where they moved to (and not all of them move) is out of town. And so we moved out of town, not for that reason, but because we wanted room for my wife and my daughter's horses to live close to the house (huge privilege alert). But as I moved out and started to pay attention, what I realised was that the villages to the South now are being expanded by people like that, and also the younger people who can't afford West Bridgford, but who are young professionals locked in that part of the economy where they think they're a bit wealthier than they actually are.
The first village where this happened, 6, 7, 8 years ago, was one called Ruddington, where my eldest daughter now lives. Ruddington is brilliant, and it's exactly the place I would choose to live if I were them, or I was me, not wanting to have land for horses.
But the village next door to me, which is called Cotgrave, where my friend Stuart lives, is just coming up where Ruddington was 6 or 7 years ago. I went to the gym with Stuart (we’re trying to go twice a week in the morning now), and Cotgrave is an old mining town, very much the same as where I grew up, except we were shipbuilding. What's happened is that the guys who were there from the mining times, in what were the council houses, which have now been bought over as private houses. Their houses have improved, the place around it, and generally, it has an up-and-coming feel.
My son was playing football at Cotgrave Miners' Welfare last night, which is a throwback to what Cotgrave used to be, but what's happened to Cotgrave now is that, because there is such a push to build as many new houses as possible, there are lots of really nice new houses going up in and around Cotgrave. What will happen next, as I've said above, is that the services will follow the people who buy the houses, and all of a sudden Cotgrave will have coffee shops and bars and gyms and places like that.
If you get your head up and watch what macroeconomics looks like and watch how the changes occur, you'll understand that Cotgrave, Keyworth, East Leake, Ruddington, and the South end of Nottingham are where it's at 10 years from now.
If you can look at opportunities like this, see the patterns and see the changes, that's where people win, that's where investment works, that's where futures are built. I guess that's what clever people and people cleverer than me do. It's probably why they get rich.
Blog Post Number - 4452
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