Thirty Years. Forty Properties. One Auction Catalogue.
It started with a piece of paper on a kitchen table. Learn how ACSC grew from nothing.
- Andy Calloway, twenty-four years old and working in construction management, picked up an auction catalogue that had arrived in the post and did what most people do with auction catalogues — flipped through it out of curiosity, noted a few interesting lots and put it down again. Except he did not quite put it down. He called his younger brother Simon, then twenty-one and working in financial services, and suggested — half joking, mostly serious — that they should go and have a look.
They went. They looked. Andy raised his paddle at a three-bedroom Victorian terrace in the East Midlands that had been repossessed, sat empty for eighteen months and was in a state that had persuaded every other bidder in the room to keep their hands firmly in their laps. The hammer came down. The brothers looked at each other across the auction room with the particular expression of people who have just done something that cannot be undone.
What followed was six months of work that Andy will describe, with characteristic understatement, as educational. The property was stripped back, rebuilt where it needed rebuilding, fitted out intelligently and sold for a profit that was, for two young men who had never bought a property before, startling. Not life-changing. But startling enough to make both of them look at the auction catalogue on the kitchen table in an entirely different way.
That was the beginning. Everything since has been a continuation of the same idea — find a property with unrealised potential, understand it properly, improve it intelligently, manage it well — refined over three decades and more than a hundred renovation and refurbishment projects into something considerably more sophisticated than two brothers and a draughty auction room in the early nineties.
Andy Calloway — The Build
Andy is the elder brother by three years and the one who looks at a building and has already mentally stripped it back to its bones before he has reached the kitchen. That instinct comes from a career in construction management that predates the first property purchase — years of site supervision, project coordination and hands-on building industry experience that gave him the ability to read a property with a precision that most investors take years to develop, if they develop it at all.
Over the three decades since that first terrace, Andy has overseen the renovation and refurbishment of well over a hundred properties. His expertise sits in the structural and project management side of property improvement — understanding what a building actually needs rather than what it appears to need, sequencing work to avoid the costly mistakes that derail timelines and inflate budgets, and managing the tradespeople and suppliers whose quality and reliability determine whether a project delivers what the numbers said it would.
He is also the brother who has made the expensive mistakes. The structural survey that missed something significant. The contractor who disappeared mid-project. The permitted development assumption that turned out to be wrong. Andy talks about these things with the openness of someone who has processed them properly — understanding that the education they provided was worth more, in the long run, than the money they cost. A significant proportion of the most useful content on this site comes directly from those experiences.
Today Andy manages the day-to-day operations of the brothers’ forty-plus property rental portfolio alongside a continuing programme of acquisition, renovation and occasional development work — both for their own account and for a select group of private clients who have been working with him long enough to value his judgement over almost anyone else’s.
Simon Calloway — The Investment
Simon is the younger brother, the more financially-minded of the two and the one who, when Andy identifies a property worth pursuing, works out whether what it could be is actually worth the money required to get it there. The combination — Andy reading the building, Simon reading the numbers — has driven everything the brothers have built over the past three decades.
Simon spent his early career in financial services, working across mortgage broking and property finance at a time when the industry was considerably less regulated and considerably more creative than it is today. That background gave him a command of property finance that goes well beyond what most investors ever develop — from straightforward buy to let mortgages through to bridging finance, development lending, portfolio restructuring and the occasionally complex arrangements that ambitious property projects sometimes require.
He is also forensically honest about performance. Every project the brothers complete gets a proper post-analysis — what was made, what was spent, what the return actually looked like against what was projected and what the next project should do differently as a result. This discipline, applied consistently over thirty years, is a significant part of why the portfolio has grown to the size it has rather than stalling at the point where most private investors run out of either capital or confidence.
Simon handles the client-facing side of the brothers’ advisory work — the conversations with developers, investors and landlords who come to them wanting to approach a project or build a portfolio with the benefit of genuine experience behind the guidance. He is direct, commercially minded and has very little patience for property investment advice that sounds compelling in a seminar room and falls apart on contact with an actual deal.
The Portfolio — Where Things Stand
ACSC, now has forty-plus properties. A mix of residential buy to let, HMO, and refurbishment projects at various stages across the UK. Some held since the mid-nineties, some acquired in the last eighteen months. A portfolio built property by property, project by project, over three decades of reinvesting returns, learning from mistakes and occasionally taking calculated risks that looked more alarming at the time than they turned out to be.
The brothers are still actively buying. Still renovating — for themselves and for clients. Still attending auctions, still visiting properties that most people would walk away from and still having the same conversation they have been having since 1992 — what does this building need, what will it cost, what will it be worth and does that arithmetic make sense?
The answer is sometimes no. More often, when the due diligence has been done properly and the numbers have been looked at honestly, it is yes.
Why Ideas For Property Exists
For thirty years Andy and Simon have been answering questions. From friends who wanted to know whether a particular property was worth buying. From family members embarking on their first renovation. From fellow investors trying to understand how to structure a deal or whether a particular market made sense. From complete strangers who heard about what they do and wanted to understand how.
The answers have always been the same — honest, specific, built from actual experience rather than theory and delivered without the kind of hedging that makes property advice feel safe to give but useless to receive. This site is an attempt to put those answers somewhere permanent.
Ideas For Property is not a property investment course, a coaching programme or a seminar series. It is a resource — built from genuine, long-term, real-money experience of buying, renovating, refurbishing and managing property in the UK and beyond — that gives readers the kind of information that actually makes a difference when they are standing in front of a decision that matters.
Everything on this site has been learned the way things that stick are always learned. By doing it. Sometimes by doing it wrong first. Always by paying close enough attention to understand why.
We hope it is useful.
Andy & Simon Calloway