Ivan Lopez had spent years educating himself about property investment - courses, deal analysis on Rightmove and Zoopla - but the process was slow and the picture was never quite complete. Then, during a Property Filter free trial, he found a Coventry flat that had been quietly reducing in price. His first instinct was that something was off. The comparables tool told him exactly what it was worth - and exactly why it was the deal he had been looking for.

Ivan Lopez's challenge before Property Filter

Ivan Lopez started investing in property young. He bought his first flat in Kennington, London at around 20 years old - it did not go entirely to plan, but he did not lose faith in what property could do. A couple of years later he bought a freehold house in South London, then left the UK to follow a professional path back in South America for several years. He rented the house out while he was away. When he returned, it had all but paid itself off without him putting in any of his own money - and the value had nearly doubled.

That was the moment the penny dropped. He began taking courses and studying deal analysis properly. He learned to find comparables using property sourcing software like Rightmove and Zoopla. It worked - but it was slow and gave him only part of the picture. He had to piece together each deal manually before he could make a decision.

"Most people teach you to go through Rightmove or Zoopla and then find ways to find comparables. It works, but it's time-consuming."

He was looking for a more efficient way to identify opportunities - something that could surface the kind of detail he needed without the hours of manual research. That is when he came across Property Filter.

How Ivan Lopez uses Property Filter to find short-lease deals

From the moment Ivan started his free trial, Property Filter changed how he approached deal analysis. For someone juggling a professional life alongside building a property portfolio, cutting the time cost of each deal was not a small thing. The platform aggregated the data he had previously been assembling by hand, and layered on top the kind of context - comparables, motivated seller signals, floor-surface data - that portals do not provide.

The feature Ivan leans on most is the comparables tool. In the deal that convinced him to commit to Property Filter, it let him see in seconds that an identical-dimension two-bedroom flat in the same building as his target property was on the market for £475k. Without that information, he would have been looking at a flat that had been reducing in price and wondering what was wrong with it. With it, he could see exactly what the opportunity was.

"Something that really caught my attention, which is why I love the comparable part of Property Filter, is that a flat with the same dimensions in the same building - but this was a two-bedroom flat - was being sold for 475."

Alongside the comparables tool, Ivan used Property Filter's floor-surface filter to narrow his search. He set up a filter looking for one to two-bedroom properties where the floor surface was large enough to accommodate a second bedroom conversion. This is not a search you can run on a portal - it is the kind of precise, data-led targeting that separates investors who find opportunities from those who wait for them to appear.