Stacked is a FREE platform, which helps you raise the funding you need, to grow your property investment business. 

Stacked also empowers you, to manage your team and portfolio, along with all the associated information and communication, in a centralised, systemised and highly scalable manner. 

This forms a virtuous cycle, as when you run funding applications through the platform, the brokers and underwriters, who are responsible for reviewing and progressing your application, will have real-time access to the information they need, in order to conduct their due diligence. 

This makes for a dynamic and scalable environment, as whenever you take on a new property, mortgage or tenancy, all the members of your internal and external power team, will immediately have access to the information they need, to do their work. 

By leveraging our powerful workflow and notification mechanisms, you will be able to run and grow your business, in an efficient and asynchronous manner, in which people receive relevant updates automatically, without needing to constantly chase for them. 

The purpose of this article, is to provide a high level overview of the functionality, which Stacked offers and to help you get started, nice and fast. 

Introducing the Stacked Flywheel

To help you visualise how everything connects together on Stacked, please consider the following graphic, which we refer to, as the Stacked Flywheel.

This summarises the journey, which all property developers work through, on a recurring basis, in order to grow their property investment business.

The idea is to spin this wheel, as quickly and as frequently, as possible, so you can accelerate the growth of your portfolio.

As you will see in the explanation below, Stacked helps to automate this process, so you can grow faster and with less friction.



Let's break this down and look at each step in turn. 

Buying a new property

Using a Google Maps powered address lookup, you can add new properties to your Stacked account at any time.

When doing so, Stacked will automatically compile relevant pieces of information about the property, so you can save time when conducting your due diligence.

To support this process, we leverage our integrations with 3rd party platforms, such as PropertyData, Google Maps and Land Registry, as well as many others.

We then display all this information on the property page, so that you and your team members can review and easily refer back to it, at any time.

You will notice that there is a lot of information and relevant actions, which you can take from the property page.



Stacking the deal

It is time to say goodbye to your wonderfully creative, but highly unstable and overly complicated spreadsheets.

Whilst spreadsheets are very useful and powerful, they have major limitations when it comes to scalability and sharing information, in a consistent format.

You can stack deals on our platform, using a broad range of creative strategies.



After selecting your preferred deal type, you will be taken to the deal stacking page, which provides a consistent and user friendly way of stacking deals.

You will be prompted to supply some key information, such as the purchase price and the amount you will spend on developing the property.

You will also be asked how you intend to finance the project, whether this is by using your own cash, a mortgage or a bridging loan.

You have full control of adding relevant mortgage and bridging loan products to your Stacked account, which you can then select, as part of the deal stacking process.

In time, we plan to supply a live feed of finance products, in order to simplify this process for you.

You will notice there are question mark icons, all over the place on Stacked. If you're unsure of what something means or how it works, you can hover over these icons to see an explanation.



Once you have supplied the headline information about your deal, Stacked will provide you with a summary of the key numbers, so you can make an informed decision, on whether you would like to move forwards with this deal.



Raising public money

Fundraising on Stacked can be thought of in terms of public money and private money.

In this section, we will look at raising public money, in the form of mortgage and bridging loans. We will cover private money, in the next section.

You can run mortgage and bridging loan applications, through Stacked to your preferred broker or lender.

If you want to work with a broker or lender, who is not currently registered on the platform, please share their name and contact details with our team, so we can send them an invitation to join.

For the sake of transparency, whilst brokers and lenders will not pay a subscription fee to use Stacked, we will enter into a commercial agreement with them, which stipulates the amount of commission Stacked will receive when funding applications successfully reach completion.

We are committed to offering a whole of market approach, which does not place any restriction on your choices, as a consumer.

That being said, we expect all of our partners to operate with high integrity and we will act quickly to remove partners the platform, if their actions fall short of our very high standards.

You can start mortgage and bridging loan applications, by selecting the relevant options on the property page.



You will be prompted to select your preferred broker or lender.

Once you have started the application, you will be able to supply additional information about the applicants. This is an important step, as it enables the broker or lender to access all the relevant information they need, so they don't have to ask you for it.

There will also be a dedicated workflow, which you can use to communicate with your chosen broker or lender, throughout the process.



When you tag people on workflows, just like you do on social media, they will receive notifications, both within the Stacked app and via email, so they know there is a new message waiting for them. 

We use workflows all over the place on Stacked, as they are an extremely powerful way of progressing important tasks and discussions, in an asynchronous manner. 

Whether you're discussing a mortgage application with your mortgage broker, planning a renovation with your builder or discussing a new tenancy with your lettings manager, workflows are the way to go. 

By utilising workflows, all your conversations will be neatly organised, property by property, process by process, so that you can easily refer back to them, at any time.

It's time to say goodbye to disparate conversations, which are spread across an endless number of mediums. 

Disjointed communication across email, text, WhatsApp, social media and phone conversations, is not scalable and very quickly becomes a tangled mess, which will bog your team down, drain your energy and slow your growth. 

Raising private money

You can use investment opportunities to raise money from private investors, on either a debt or equity basis.

Debt based investment opportunities, should be used when you're planning to borrow money on a loan basis. For example, if you're planning to borrow £100,000 for 18 months, at a rate of 10%.

Equity based investment opportunities, should be used when you're planning to borrow money on an equity basis. For example, if you're planning to find the property and manage all aspects of it's development, whilst an investor puts in £100,000 but does none of the work, you may agree to split any capital and cash flow profits on a 50/50 basis, to reward the respective value, which you're each bringing to the deal.

Here is an example of a debt based investment opportunity.



You will note the key heads of terms, along with the option to review and update the associated investor pack, which is automatically generated for you.

The investor pack pulls together all the information, which was complied when you added the property, along with all the information associated with the deal stacking process.

Whilst this provides a tried and tested starting point, it is essential that you customise the investor pack, before sharing it with any private investors.



You can customise the investor pack, in much the same way that you would customise a powerpoint presentation, by clicking on the 3 dot menu icons, which appear underneath each slide, as well as in the top right hand corner of the page.

Once you're ready to review the investor pack, you can click the present button, so you can preview exactly what your prospective investors will see, once you share the pack with them.



At the time of writing, you are responsible for finding your own private investors, with whom to share these investment opportunities. 

In due course, we hope to further empower your fundraising efforts, by allowing you to publish investment opportunities, so they can be seen by our growing community of private investors. 

It's very important to note that Stacked accepts no responsibility for any investment decisions, which you and your investors take. 

Buying the property

When you're ready to buy a property, confident in your ability to raise the public and private money you require, you can start a conveyancing application directly on Stacked and route this through to your preferred solicitor. 

Once again, if your preferred solicitor is not already on Stacked, please share their name and contact details with us, so we can send them an invitation to join. 

As showcased above, you can use a dedicated workflow to communicate with your solicitor throughout the process. 

Adding value

You can create new workflows at any time, by selecting the relevant option on the property page.

In the case of adding value to a property, you may wish to create a new workflow called "Planning the renovation" and invite your builder, project manager and architect to join the discussion.

In this way you can progress things in a highly transparent and asynchronous manner.



Recycling the money

Whenever you acquire a new property, you can add it to your portfolio on Stacked. 

From the dedicated property page, for each property you own, you can add and review relevant information about the property. 

This includes information about how the property is performing, your various mortgage accounts and tenancies, along with many other things. 

The key piece of functionality, in the context of recycling money, is your ability to start a new mortgage application, against a property, which you already own. 

In much the same way that you can start a mortgage application for a new property, which you're planning to buy, you can also start a mortgage application for the purpose of moving from a bridging loan to term finance, or indeed to remortgage from one product to another. 

Recycling money out of properties, which you've added value to, can be an extremely tax-efficient way of accelerating the growth of your property investment business. 

Summary

Hopefully this explanation and illustrative spin of the Stacked Flywheel, has been useful, in helping you to understand how you can use Stacked to grow your property business.

In addition to spinning the wheel, to acquire new properties, you can also manage your team and portfolio.

From the Account -> Contacts section, you can add contacts to your account and specify their roles.

NB: Team members are able to see all the information about your account, so you should only denote trusted individuals, as being team members.



From the Portfolio section on Stacked, you will see that you're able to manage all aspect of your growing portfolio, along with keeping your properties safe and managing all your tenancies. 

Whenever key accounts, documents or tenancies etc are coming up to expiry, Stacked will automatically notify you, both within the Stacked app and via email. This helps to ensure that you never miss anything important and always have plenty of time to take action, in order to renew things. 

Continuous improvement

Our engineering team make improvements to the Stacked platform on a very regular basis, so whatever you see now, is only going to get better. 

If you have any ideas for helpful improvements, which should be made to the platform, please send an email to [email protected] and we will consider adding these to our product roadmap. 

Thank You for being a member of the Stacked community. 

We wish you every continued success with your property investing.