Laura Sheldrake is a doctor based in Hampshire and co-director of Tadorna Property, a buy-to-let and HMO portfolio she runs alongside her husband. For years, her approach to finding deals was the same as most investors: hours of Rightmove scrolling, a crib sheet of properties scrawled in columns she could no longer decipher, and the nagging sense she had already seen the same listings before. When she saw Property Filter demonstrated at a PIN meeting, she recognised herself immediately in the description. That was the turning point.

Today Laura spends 5 to 10 minutes a day on Property Filter when actively looking for deals - down from hours per week - and her first deal via the platform came in under 2 months from the moment she spotted it. The speed that made it possible came from a single alert: back on market and reduced.

Laura Sheldrake's challenge before Property Filter

Before discovering Property Filter, Laura's lead generation process was one familiar to most property investors: Rightmove, evenings, and a growing sense that the same listings kept reappearing. She describes sitting at her laptop for hours, getting excited by a property, then recognising the curtains. "I'd seen this before. I may have even visited this property." Without a way to mark off what she had reviewed, every Rightmove session risked covering old ground.

The deeper frustration was data. To track properties properly, Laura had built her own crib sheet - a spreadsheet with columns for the date she looked, the price at the time, when to check back, whether she had spoken to the agent. "Even though I was the one that wrote it, I didn't understand it," she says. Finding motivated sellers in property requires acting quickly on the right signals; a confusing personal spreadsheet does not help you do that.

"I was sitting there for hours and then going on to properties and getting excited for a second, and then spotting really ugly curtains and thinking - not this one again. I've seen this before."

The turning point came at a PIN meeting, where Guillaume from Property Filter described the typical investor evening: home alone with a glass of wine, pretending to enjoy scrolling Rightmove on a Friday night. Laura recognised herself immediately. She had never heard of Property Filter before that evening. By the time Guillaume finished his demonstration, she understood exactly what the tool was replacing.

How Laura Sheldrake uses Property Filter to find motivated seller deals

Once Laura got to grips with the platform - helped by her husband Ian, who watched the onboarding videos and joined the starter calls - she settled into a consistent daily routine. She sets up bots (alerts) for specific criteria in her target areas and checks her pipeline each morning. When actively looking for deals, that takes 5 to 10 minutes. When she is less active, she might spend 15 minutes one day and nothing for a few days after. The critical point is that the property sourcing software is doing the monitoring in the background - she only needs to review what it surfaces.

One of Laura's most valued uses of the platform came when she and Ian decided to invest remotely for the first time - in a northern area more than 6 hours from their Hampshire base. Previously they had only invested within about half an hour of home. Property Filter made the leap straightforward: she opened a new bot for the northern area and could monitor it exactly as she monitored her local searches. "That's pretty amazing," she says, "to be able to have more than one area at a time that you're looking for."

"Rather than spending hours on a Friday night, I could actually go out and have some fun, and then I could just do 5 minutes a day on Property Filter once I'd got it all set up."

Laura also points to a less obvious but substantial time saving: fewer wasted viewings. Property Filter shows historical sale data - what a property sold for previously, when, and whether prior sales fell through. Armed with that information before calling the agent, Laura can identify properties that would never stack at the asking price and skip the viewing entirely. "Anybody that's trying to buy properties and is out doing 5 or 6 viewings a week, and you're finding that 4 or 5 are hopeless - can recognise that that's a big time saving," she says.