Amanda Wilson had been trying to buy the house next door for years. The original owner would not sell to her. Then the property fell through with three separate buyers. A building company eventually took it on through a part-exchange deal - and still could not shift it. Amanda rang them before it went back on the market, pulled up Property Filter's fall-through history, and walked into the negotiation with evidence.

Two days later they called back and accepted her offer. She paid £245,000 - £10,000 below their asking price. Her first buy-to-let deal now generates £650 a month in net income against a mortgage of £750.

Amanda Wilson's challenge before Property Filter

Before Property Filter, Amanda was searching for properties using Rightmove and platforms like OpenRent. The approach worked up to a point - but it was, as she puts it, "cumbersome." She was restricted on how many sellers she could contact at once, there was no deal analysis built in, and tracking properties meant writing things down on paper. "If you've seen my desk," she says, "I've got bits of paper everywhere. You lose them."

The bigger problem was the absence of data. Without a tool that showed a property's full market history, Amanda had no way of knowing whether a listing had previously failed to sell, how many times it had come back to market, or what that pattern might mean for negotiation. When she eventually sat down across from a building company with a property they could not shift, she had nothing to back her offer with. That changed once she joined Property Filter and found how to find motivated sellers using real market data.

"You're writing it down on bits of paper, and if you've seen my desk, I've got bits of paper everywhere. You lose them, and you think, oh god, where was that property?"

How Amanda Wilson uses Property Filter to find buy-to-let deals

Amanda discovered Property Filter at a Properties and Poppadoms networking event in Huddersfield, where a member of the Property Filter team got up and spoke. She wanted to sign up immediately. Her approach to getting up to speed was methodical: she opened Property Filter on one screen and watched the tutorial videos on the other, working through each feature as she went. "The more you use it, the more user-friendly it becomes," she says. "You get used to it, you get to know what to do with it."

Two features changed how she works. The first is the pipeline. Rather than losing properties between Rightmove sessions, Amanda now saves everything in Property Filter with notes attached. "If I'm doing a bit on Property Filter and my phone goes and I've got to move to my other business - I don't forget what I've just done," she says. The second is the deal analysis calculator. "It's very clear, easy to use, gives you an idea of what figures to put in," she says. For someone running a contracting business alongside a new property strategy, speed and clarity matter. Property Filter as a property sourcing tool removed two of the most common barriers to moving forward quickly.

"It just makes it so much easier. Doing the deal analysis and being able to filter it out - it just saves so much time, with little effort, really."