"We had no choice": Two best friends bought and renovated a crumbling Victorian house together because it's nearly impossible to buy one alone

• Two best friends bought a house together in 2019 when they were 25. 
• They invested in a crumbling Victorian house to renovate and increase its value while living there.
• The house is now worth $250,000 more than the buying price, and the project has gone viral. 

In summer 2019, Olamide Soyemi and Cullen Farleigh, best friends and colleagues, started dreaming about buying a house together. 

Soyemi wanted to move out of his family home, and Farleigh said he wanted to stop paying "extortionate" rent.

"We wanted to figure out a way we could invest our money, get some space, and have our own place," Soyemi said.

After they both read "Rich Dad Poor Dad," the friends learned the importance of investing in property.

The 25-year-olds bought a house together because they couldn't afford one alone

"The reason why we had to buy together was because we had no choice," Soyemi said. "It's almost impossible to buy a house in London if you're just a normal 25-year-old."

Both had been saving since college. Farleigh had saved £30,000 and Soyemi £35,000, about $38,000 and $45,000, respectively, but working as freelance advertising creatives, the pair didn't think they could get a mortgage.

They were surprised in September 2019 to hear from a specialist mortgage advisor that they could secure a £500,000 mortgage. 

By November 2019, they were given a mortgage in principle — a prospective mortgage with a time limit on it — that would last up to three months. 

Before making the final leap, the friends sat down to make an informal contract

They agreed: Make no major life changes for five years. Reassess what to do with the house after that time. Split the mortgage and future sale of the house evenly. Refrain from having dogs. And if one of them died, then their half would go to their family.

Farleigh had a long-term girlfriend, to whom he later became engaged. All three were happy with the arrangement and ready to move forward.

"We all get on really well," Farleigh said.

They quickly started looking for houses they thought would grow in value. 

"We looked at anywhere on the Elizabeth line," Farleigh said. "But it also had to be close enough to Central London so that we could travel back and forth."

In late January 2020, they had an offer of £452,000 accepted on a Victorian house in East London. The only glaring problems with the house were damp and outdated decor. 

Their crumbling Victoria townhouse had more problems than they had thought 

They completed the sale of the house six weeks later, in April 2020. The pair, who moved into the house in April and July 2020, quickly found there were problems with the house they hadn't seen. 

But now, they had no savings and very little income to address them.

When the pair had settled on the house, they decided to work for an employer at the same company instead of continuing to work freelance.

However, when lockdowns started, they were both furloughed. As they hadn't been working for the company long, Soyemi and Farleigh were getting paid 50% of their monthly income.

It meant that every bit of monthly payment went into the house.

"Our diets took a hit," Soyemi said. "It was a lot of jam bread, custard cremes, and a whole lot of nothing."

Even before they knew about all the renovations that would be needed, Soyemi and Farleigh planned to film the process of buying and renovating a house together. 

"When we started freelancing as ad creatives, we had a dream to transition into making our own content," Soyemi said. "We had no idea the house would feed us disaster content in the way it did."

Over the course of their first year of ownership, they found damp, penetrative damp, asbestos, missing supports in the loft, dry rot, woodworm, and poorly installed joints. 

"We pulled down some wallpaper, and the wall came off with it," Farleigh said. "There was a physical hole in the hole we could see through."

A few weeks later, a bit of the kitchen floor felt spongy.

"Cullen pulled up the floorboards, and he fell through the kitchen floor," Soyemi said. "Turned out, the kitchen wasn't concrete but decaying wood."

"It's the nightmare thing to have in your house," Farleigh said. "If we had known that was there, we wouldn't have bought the house."

There was a period of months they lived with a family of rats who had infiltrated the home after one of the outside walls had been knocked down. 

"They were only downstairs," Soyemi said. "Getting a nighttime snack was treacherous. They were quite brave — climbing up our cupboards."

The pair worked full time and completed the renovation project, all while living in the house

When the pair started working again in summer 2020 after being furloughed for months, they were both relieved to have more money coming in and exhausted trying to juggle the renovations alongside their jobs.

One month at a time, Soyemi and Farleigh plugged away to get the house in a comfortably livable condition, all the while uploading videos of their renovation to their TikTok page.

In March 2021, they started freelancing again to give them the flexibility they needed to keep working on the house and create content, but by August 2022, they stopped freelancing because they were getting enough money through TikTok brand deals. They're now making as much as, if not more, than they were freelancing.

As a fallback, they both knew they could always dabble again in freelancing if money got tight.

The renovation was a success as an investment, financially and careerwise

Last year, they had the house valued at £650,000 — nearly £200,000 more than the original price. They are both hoping it will be valued at a higher amount at the next evaluation.

"A lot of work has been done since that evaluation," Farleigh said.

"The markets have also changed," Soyemi added. 

Two years away from the five years they agreed on to not make any life changes, Farleigh and Soyemi have started dreaming about what's next. 

"This house has become more than just a possible asset — more than just a house," Soyemi said. "Now it's our headquarters for us, our page, and the content we create. It's become our jobs."

Even though they haven't made any decisions yet, they are toying with the idea of using the house as a base of operations and investing in other renovation projects.