The Derelict Hotel, £90,000, and the Plan That Didn't Survive Contact With Reality

We bought a derelict 13-bedroom hotel in Blackpool for £90,000 in cash.

The plan looked straightforward. We used our SSAS pension fund for the purchase, with roughly £60,000 left in the fund to renovate it. The idea was to convert the building into six serviced offices.

On paper, that was a workable plan.

Then reality arrived.

Every window in the building

The roof needed repairing. The bay roofs needed repairing or replacing. Every window in the building, all of them, needed replacing to make it secure and watertight.

Planning permission took around twelve months to come through. And the whole time we waited, money kept disappearing. Not in one dramatic hit. It dripped away: holding costs, repairs, security, professional fees, work that existed purely to stop the building deteriorating further while we waited.

We got the whole building through first-fix electrics. We completed one ground-floor office well enough to actually use it ourselves, which at least gave PPS Property Management and Property Legacy Education somewhere to operate from.

Then we hit the real problem.

The money ran out.

The point where a plan gets tested

We had a partially completed building, a development plan we still believed in, and nowhere near enough capital left to finish it.

It would have been easy to keep hunting for more money and keep forcing the original plan. The temptation to do that is real, you've already put months and thousands of pounds into a vision, and walking away from the original plan can feel like admitting defeat.

But the original plan no longer matched reality. So we changed it.

We agreed to sell the top two floors for around £200,000. The buyer paid a 25% deposit on exchange. That deposit released enough cash to complete the remaining development work needed to get the whole transaction over the line.

Once the sale completed, we'd recovered our outlay. We kept the ground floor for PPS and Property Legacy Education. Effectively, we ended up with our own business premises while getting back the money we'd put into the project.

That was not the original plan. Not even close.

That's exactly the point

Good plans aren't valuable because they never change. They're valuable because they give you enough clarity to recognise when they need to change.

If we'd stayed rigidly attached to "convert the whole building into six serviced offices, no matter what," we'd have either run out of money entirely with a half-finished shell to show for it, or spent years scraping together enough capital to limp across the finish line on a plan that had already stopped making sense.

Instead, the plan bent. The building didn't get finished the way we first imagined it. But the outcome, our own premises, the outlay recovered, was arguably better than the original version would have been, and it only happened because we were willing to notice reality had changed and act on it, rather than defend a plan for its own sake.

That's the actual skill. Not predicting the future perfectly. Building something with enough give in it to survive being wrong.