Laura Jane Baxter
Invest with security, sincerity and soul
Hi, I'm Laura-Jane.
Who I am
I am a 24-year-old British full-time property developer based in Sheffield, UK. I come from a highly academic background in maths, philosophy, strategy and operations management, academic writing and critical thinking. I chose to transfer my academic rigur over to business strategising and analysing real estate investments.
In 2022, I founded More Than Bricks, marking a shift to investing full-time. I’ve built a portfolio of 4 projects to date: 3 high-end short-stay serviced apartments, and 1 co-living house-share.
I plan to take on 10 more co-living house-share projects, refurbishing each one, within the next 2 years.
What I do
My training focuses on converting high-end homes into shared houses in central Sheffield, in northern England, UK. Alongside running a portfolio of high-end short-stay serviced apartments across Sheffield, having invested my own capital in a local co-living conversion project, I now analyse primarily terraced Sheffield properties with the potential for conversion into 6-bed shared houses.
I plan to purchase spacious 3 bedroom houses, convert them into high-end house shares for six young professionals, leveraging my industry knowledge and contacts. After increasing the property’s value through refurbishment and change of use class, I will apply for a mortgage to release substantial equity.
Laura-Jane's Story: security, sincerity and soul
1. Self-Sincerity
I read Philosophy at university. When people hear this, they usually ask me one of two questions.
1. What did you do that for? What is anyone going to do with a Philosophy degree?
2. How on earth did you end up in property investment from that?
Have you ever found that, when you’re in a different physical space, it allows you to find a new headspace, too? Well, this was the case for me on my year abroad in Valencia. I realised that, for too long, I had followed in the suit of others, askign myself, “What kind of job do I want to do?” instead of asking myself the question “What kind of life do I want to live?”
So, then, I built a vision of the kind of person I wanted to be, the kinds of things I wanted to create, and the kind of life I wanted to live. I figured out how much that would cost, adjusting for inflation. Then, I reverse-engineered the ‘career’ question: how do I fund the lifestyle of my dreams, packed with growth, challenge and adventure?
2. Building Financial Security
I had known for many years that I wanted to invest: it seemed like a financially wise thing to do. I figured out that, to fund a lifestyle, I needed to have full control over assets, grown or acquired. I then figured out, much to the dismay of my love for safety, stability and security, that a business is the kind of asset over which an owner has maximal control.
Then I got up at 5am every morning before university for a year and gave myself a financial education.
I worked through each of the main asset classes: the stock market, precious metals, NFTs, and cryptocurrency, until I found property. Property, particularly in the UK economic market, was by far the most lucrative and stable of them all, all things considered, and was the only one that could reliably enable me to achieve my financial goals I’d figured out after all that soul-searching.
Here’s a quick 60-second video where I explain why property trumps other asset classes like stocks, every time.
3. Soul-Searching
So, the best way to proceed, I concluded, was to build a business, investing, in real estate. Once I had figured that out, the ‘what job to do’ question had all but vanished, and the new, better question was:
How do I become the sort of person who can achieve that?
I invested in my education immediately, and returned to the UK, and spent the final year of my degree building my business. As soon as I graduated, I went into it full-time, and never got a 9-to-5 job.
Before building three businesses in real estate investment in the UK, I gained extensive experience as a Strategy Analyst for an academic journal, having developed the organsiation as a whole, as a springboard for learning how to build, inspire, motivate and grow the skills of members of a team, helping them to be the best versions of their professional selves.
If you want an epic adventure, then let your heart lead the way, and make your head a diligent soldier who will doggedly and conscientiously take all the action needed to build the dreams of your heart.
To me, communication is everything. We use it to learn, to connect, to understand, to love others, to navigate tricky situations with tact and authenticity, and to share our voice with the world. My skills and professional experience up until getting into property revolve around this one pwoerful fact. With not only experience in both creative and academic writing in English, communication for me extends beyond the Anglosphere: I’m fluent in multiple languages.
I’m also a qualified teacher of English as a foreign language, and I hold a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy with a year of that philosophical education in Spanish from the University of Valencia, Spain.
I’ve been blessed enough to have been able to travel across the globe extensively, mostly solo. I’m also a minimalist: besides owning very few personal possessions and the obvious benefit this comes with of being able to pack light, minimalism for me is a spiritua practice of carefully cultivating what we choose to bring into and keep in our lives. Having also a keen interest in psychotherapy, meditation and theology, reading a lot around these areas, minimaism allows me to practise the profound art of letting go, enabling me to continually assess what is working and what isn’t, and focus more keenly on what truly matters. We change ourselves and uplift other when we are equipped with the right questions, and the right words.