charlotte edwards

 Charlotte, aka Accidental Property Developer, didn’t know exactly what she wanted to do after high school, but she always had an interest in business.  It was actually her favorite subject in school, and she wanted to study it for as long as possible.  At that point, she thought that education was the answer to achieve in life.  After high school she went to university to study business and Spanish.  She completed that degree and went on to study marketing, which led her to work in marketing for about 15 years.  She didn’t mind the work, but it didn’t really challenge her, and she says that she certainly didn’t wake up in the morning excited to go; it was just a way for her to earn money.   

It wasn’t until Charlotte was 35 that she fell into construction.  After the sudden deaths of her brother and father, the family property development business was left without anyone to run it.  They had recently acquired a building plot with planning permission for 25 houses, bought with a bank loan.  She had no previous experience in construction and had to learn from the ground up, literally!  Charlotte says that she learned every stage of building a development by showing up every single day, watching, asking questions, making mistakes and not giving up.   

When Covid struck, everything in Charlotte’s life changed, much like the rest of the world.  Schools closed, suppliers closed and customers to buy the properties stopped coming.  Being a single mum of two little ones, Charlotte had to take them to the construction site with her as staying home with them was just not an option.  Fight or flight took over and she saw two choices, go back to her corporate job that was safe and reliable, or she could dig deeper and pull the development business out and into profit and make a future with it.

Charlotte decided to make some stretch goals for herself.  She set herself a target of creating a property portfolio of 10 houses in 10 months, which would replace her marketing income and give her passive income for life.  She achieved this goal by month 11 and with that found a new sense of financial freedom.  With the worst of Covid over, she was able to sell enough properties to repay the bank loan and get the family business into profit.  By introducing processes, cost-cutting and improving the management of the business, Charlotte helped the company achieve two of the most profitable accounting years in the company’s 30-year history.

When asked if she has ever felt out of place in the industry because she is a woman, Charlotte says that when she entered the construction industry the first thing she had to do was buy suitable clothing to work on a construction site.  She was not able to find anything at her local stores and finding anything online was also a challenge.  The stores selling construction shoes didn’t have her size either.  She also tried to enroll in a construction management course but was told that she couldn’t join because she didn’t have enough experience, even though at this stage she was running a new build site of 25 houses.  Ironically, these colleges now ask her to be a guest lecturer.  Charlotte also says that taking charge of a business in construction which is naturally dominated by men was very difficult compounded by the fact that she had no previous experience.  She can’t count the number of times that men would call on site asking her directly where the “man in charge” was.

Charlotte says that if she could go back and give her 18-year-old self some advice, that advice would be to be confident and not to worry about the future or what other people expect of you.  Find out what makes you happy and pursue it.  Through Charlotte Edwards Property, Charlotte is now taking her previous experiences and lessons learned to help other women who want to start their own property business and she aims to encourage women to join her in a property and construction industry so they too can achieve financial freedom.