Steve Octon spent years fitting kitchens and bathrooms across South Lincolnshire before realising he could build something more permanent. He transitioned into property flips, doing most of the work himself. Then the market changed. Flips were taking longer to sell, values were no longer rising on their own, and a strategy that had once worked was starting to feel like treading water. He joined Property Filter looking for a better approach, and found something he did not know existed: a 10-minute daily workflow that led directly to his first buy-to-let, acquired at 25% below market value with £300 a month in cash flow.

Steve Octon's challenge before Property Filter

Before Property Filter, Steve's deal-finding process looked the same as almost every investor's at the start: Rightmove, sorted by newest, filtered for properties added in the last 5 days. The problem with that approach is how much it hides. Properties that return to the market without a price reduction do not resurface at the top of the list. Back-on-market opportunities, price-reduced properties that have been sitting for months, vendors who are quietly becoming more motivated -- none of that is visible in a search configured for what was added this week.

To find motivated sellers, Steve had been concentrating on two specific sectors: probate properties and auctions. He knew those vendors were more likely to need to move. The problem was the ceiling. He was limiting his search to a narrow slice of the market by definition. Beyond probate and auction, motivated sellers were invisible to him -- not because they did not exist, but because Rightmove had no way of showing him who they were.

He did not know there was a better way. That is not an oversight; it is simply how most investors start. Rightmove is where everyone begins, and without a specific reason to look elsewhere, there is no obvious prompt to do so. When he eventually found Property Filter, his first reaction was scepticism: was this not just buy-to-let data presented in a different interface? It took using it properly to understand what it actually showed him.

"I didn't know there was a better way out there. I just was doing it because that was the only way I knew of."

How Steve Octon uses Property Filter to find deals in 10 minutes a day

Steve's initial hesitation about Property Filter was that it was "just what I can see on Rightmove anyway, presented in a different way." That impression lasted until he actually used the lead generators. Once he did, the difference became clear immediately. Property Filter was not showing him the same properties as Rightmove. It was showing him the properties that Rightmove's default view was hiding: everything that had been reduced, come back to market, or met specific motivated seller criteria that he had never been able to filter for before.

His daily workflow now takes 10 minutes. The lead generators surface 5 or 6 properties each morning that are worth a proper look. At roughly a minute each, the review takes 5 minutes. He then works through his pipeline -- checking on outstanding viewings, following up on offers, deciding next steps -- for another 5 minutes. The whole session is done before anything else in his day has started. On days when he is making an offer, he will spend a bit longer: 20 minutes or so to personalise the offer letter and include comparable data to justify the price he is proposing.

The second habit that makes this sustainable is zeroing down the lead generators every day. Nothing is left sitting in a list waiting to be looked at again. If a property is not worth an action, it is removed. If it is, it goes into the pipeline. That discipline -- combined with the pipeline's built-in workflow of assess, view, offer -- is what turned property research from an open-ended scrolling session into something resembling a system. The pipeline and lead generators gave him a structure that Rightmove never could.

"I can now spend 10 minutes a day just going through the lead generators and the pipeline. It's systemised things in a way that I wasn't doing before."