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Tristan Gordon and I have barely started our interview when he says something that threatens to scupper it.
“My uncle told me Norfolk is where aspirations come to die.”
As someone who grew up on the Norfolk Broads, treasures her days out on the coast and actively chooses to live and work here, celebrating this glorious county for all that it offers, this is not what I want to hear.
“Actually, it is a compliment,” he continues. “People have enjoyed themselves in other parts of the country – they’ve been off in other parts, they’ve done whatever else – and they come to Norwich and it’s a gorgeous place and [they] don’t end up leaving. You don’t go anywhere else afterwards.”
Tristan is, in some ways, proof of this.
He grew up in Norfolk but landed work abroad and then went on to study. After 11 years in London and Southampton, he has returned.
But as the director of hassle free, hands-off, property investment firm ZebraInvest, he does have aspirations – and not just for the business but the future of housing, too.
In some ways, it seems inevitable that Tristan was going to end up in business.
Since a young age, he has always been something of an entrepreneur. “I’ve been wheeling and dealing since I was a kid,” he says. “I used to live in Little Plumstead [and] to work out how to earn a bit of money, I went round to every single house.
“I started off doing lawn mowing [but] no-one wanted their lawns doing, ever, [so] I went off and did a car wash. That made me enough to money to be able to buy mobile disco gear, so I was then DJ TJ and I’d go off to Thorpe St Andrew and all the local schools and do a disco there.
“I was like 16, 17, and my dad would turn up and we’d load it all out the van.”
After finishing school, he became a water ski instructor – a job which would later lead to work abroad and his eventual love of flipping properties.
While working overseas for tour operator Mark Warner, Tristan says he would talk to “anyone and everyone” and collect people’s business cards in case they might one day be useful.
It worked.
“Every single person you talked to who had come on these holidays seemed to work in property,” he says, and one of them – who just so happened to own 150 houses back in the UK – offered Tristan a job.
The firm bought student house shares and then did them up, a job that gave Tristan the chance to cut his teeth in the world of property.
“I was doing project management, gutting them, refurbing them, just trying to make the property as best [I] could,” he says. “I was quite happy doing that, but when you do the rinse and repeat model, you keep doing the same thing. You’re doing it for someone else, so you don’t get to set your own standards.
“You don’t get to say ‘I want to do things this way and this is the way I think things should be done’. That’s what I don’t and didn’t like about property.”
Tristan eventually left that role and moved to London just as Brexit had been announced. “A lot of people from European countries that were based at embassies or whatever all started leaving,” he says.
“They all tend to have houses in and across London, large ones, and for love nor money, letting agencies couldn’t find anyone to put into these so they kept reducing the prices. We would rent those properties and then turn them into house shares.”
But once again, Tristan says he found himself frustrated by working for someone else.
“With property, if you work for someone else you get given the bricks, but not the mortar, so nothing to hold it together.” Instead, he decided to arm himself with as much information as possible, and attended industry events, listened to podcasts and picked up books – old fashioned learning, some might say – in an attempt to fill the gap.
His earlier ethos to ‘wheel and deal’ also applied to budgeting. “Every month I was saving as much as I possibly could because I knew as soon as I started working for myself, it was going to be a constant uphill battle.”
On the cusp of starting his business, ZebraInvest, Tristan wrote a business plan and set up a website – everything, he says, to try and make himself feel legitimate.
“When you’re trying to start or do anything for yourself – even working from home – you’ve got to have your get up and go and want to go and do it. For me, it was push, push, push.”
His first property as an investor was an empty student house in Southampton. “No one had lived in it for about three months,” he says. “They had all moved back to Greece and left everything in the house.
“The landlord had got to the stage where he had just given up on it, so I went in, cleared the place out and turned it into something. It was five beds, all en suite.”
It wasn’t just the finish that made Tristan proud but the ethos behind it. In doing the property up, he’d put something back into use and because it was empty, he hadn’t taken anything away.
“From there, I’ve just always focused on ‘let’s buy something that’s a problem’,” he says.
A change in personal circumstances brought Tristan back to Norwich part-way through the Covid pandemic.
“Originally it was ringing in my ears that Norfolk is where aspirations come to die,” he laughs. “It was only once I’d been back that I realised no, it’s lovely. It’s a really beautiful place and I absolutely love being here.”
But a return to his roots also meant a return to his innovative, out-of-the-box thinking.
“In the middle of Covid, there was no cash flow, nothing coming in, expenses going out, paying out interest hand over fist – just stress through the roof.
“I started coding a piece of software [and] I wrote loads of other stuff just to try and get anything in the door.”
And he also brought with him ZebraInvest.
“In Southampton, I had managed to build a track record and demonstrate I could do it,” he says. “Fortunately most of the people who initially backed me in Southampton were quite happy to back me in Norwich.”
The location might have changed, but the business’ focus hasn’t: ZebraInvest is still about giving something back and often, his projects involve giving new life to properties that have been on the market for a long time, won’t sell, or those that are facing dereliction or have been repossessed.
“My ethos and my business has tried to stick with just buying stuff that is empty. If you are buying something, don’t put someone else out of a home because it’s not nice.”
Recent projects have included the restoration of a Grade II listed property on Chapel Field North in Norwich and the division of one build into two on High Low Road in New Costessey.
He’s also transformed a home on Ashtree Road in Costessey, which had been repossessed. When the team took it on, there was rubbish in the garden, tiles smashed in the bathroom, faeces on the walls and it was riddled with asbestos.
As part of the work, ZebraInvest removed and replaced the roof and installed
a new boiler and heating system – as well as making it an attractive, market-ready home. It eventually sold for £400,000.
Tristan is currently working on several other projects, including plans for an industrial, funfair-themed property on St Faith’s Lane – currently uninhabitable – which he hopes will include mirror-maze style lighting and a boardgame library.
He’s also working on the conversion of former office space on Yarmouth Road into six boathouse-themed flats.
As well as the development side of things, Tristan is passionate about lifting the profile of responsible property investors and championing the sector.
He’s pitched on Property.TV, regularly shares updates to building projects on Youtube and set up and runs Norwich Property Meet, a networking event for local investors to meet, catch up and share knowledge – just the sort of event that he says helped to kick start his career.
Visit zebrainvest.co.uk for details.
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