Mustafa
33.3K posts

Mustafa
@KingMusss
3x founder 👨🏾💻 & TikTok growth expert 📈 20M downloads for 200+ consumer apps 🚀 7 years under the belt 🥋
🇬🇧 Building Tham gia Ekim 2010
682 Đang theo dõi873 Người theo dõi

I Left UK Property 18 Months Ago. Here's Why You Should Too.
I spent my career in investment committees evaluating risk.
18 months ago, I saw structural weakness forming in parts of the UK property market. I exited.
Here's what most investors haven't understood yet.
Property doesn't rise because it "always goes up." It rises because the assumptions underneath it hold. When those assumptions break, price follows - with a lag that traps everyone who wasn't paying attention.
The Single-Assumption Trap
Strong markets have multiple demand drivers.
Take the Jewellery Quarter in Birmingham. Massive hospital nearby. Universities. The premier office space in Birmingham is a short walk away. You can segment that demand pool and understand that if there's an economic shock, not everyone goes bust at the same time. The demand has multiple legs. That's resilience.
Then there are markets where this is not the case. Tertiary student towns. Towns with massive HMO concentrations. Cities where the university is the economy.
These places are dependent on international students paying premium fees to keep the university solvent. That pipeline is weakening. The reasons are multiple and debatable - but the direction is not.
Chinese, Saudi and Indian families who historically sent their children to these institutions are reconsidering. Not Oxford. Not Cambridge. The ex-polytechnics. The ones where the degree doesn't justify the cost, and where the UK's offer is no longer as compelling as it was.
International student enrollment in UK universities has fallen for two consecutive years. Chinese enrollments dropped 17% last year. Indian enrollments dropped 9%. Study visa applications fell 15% in Q4 2025. The Office for Students has warned that over 80% of English universities could face deficits within three years.
The pipeline is constricting, like a snake.
I spoke to a property contact of mine this week. He told me it's already happening in his market. Investors who bought at £300k, took out enormous mortgages, and are now sitting on assets worth £180-200k. Rents are through the floor because the students aren't there. They are underwater. Multiple people. In a market where the main university went from 500 students in 1996 to over 15,000 today.
The entire market was priced on one assumption: 15,000 people show up every September. When they stop showing up, there's nothing underneath.
Occupancy is the canary. Price is for the autopsy.
Occupancy softens before prices drop. Always. But most people only watch price. Because they're lazy and it's convenient. By the time price reflects reality, you're already trapped.
My contact described it perfectly: the rollercoaster has crested the top and it's coasting along before the drop. The price hasn't fallen yet. But the vacancy has already arrived.
If vacancy is ticking up while prices hold flat - that's not stability. That's the lag before the cliff. And the people buying into these markets right now, reading "stable" comparables, are going to have the worst buyer's remorse of their lives.
Delay, pray, and the debt trap
Here's the pattern. Can't sell - you'd lock in a 30-40% loss. Can't refinance - your LTV is blown because the asset is worth less than you owe. So you hold. You run partially vacant. And you pray the market comes back.
It's not a strategy. It's the absence of one.
And the debt makes it worse. Many of these investors financed during the ZIRP era - the base rate sat at 0.1% through 2020 and 2021. Within 20 months it hit 5.25%. They're now facing refinancing into an asset worth less than they paid, at a cost of capital that completely destroys whatever equity cushion they thought they'd built.
The demand collapse is killing them. The cost of capital is burying the body.
I've seen this play out in portfolio reviews. The conversation always starts the same way: "We're going to wait for recovery." Then the follow-up question lands: "Where's the proof that recovery is coming?" And there isn't one. There's no catalyst. No new demand driver on the horizon. Just hope that the trend reverses because it has to.
The regulatory squeeze
And that's before you account for the supply side.
In many of these tertiary markets, there's no Article 4 Direction in place. That means councils haven't restricted the conversion of family homes into HMOs. Anyone can still create a new HMO without planning permission.
Think about what that means. Demand is collapsing - students aren't coming. But supply is completely unconstrained. New HMOs can still enter the market freely.
In cities like Manchester or Nottingham, Article 4 at least puts a brake on new supply. In these smaller tertiary towns? No brake pedal.
Falling demand and unlimited new supply at the same time. That's not a correction. That's a structural collapse.
The stress test
Before you underwrite any property market, ask three questions.
What happens to my tenant base if one demand driver disappears? If you can't name a specific alternative source of demand, you're exposed.
What does occupancy look like over three years - not price? Price is a lagging indicator. Occupancy is where the truth lives.
Would serious institutional capital deploy here in five years? Not "will values go up." Would a real allocator look at this market and put money in?
The investors getting destroyed right now aren't stupid. They just never stress-tested the one assumption their entire return depended on.
I stress-tested it 18 months ago. The answer was clear. I left.

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@SanjanaBandara I think they've just completely focussed on prototyping and getting you from 0 to 1. Anything more complex or out of that scope, I usually use CC for.
Although models may be same, a lot more implementation differences under the hood with these tools.
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i’ve been building 2 almost identical projects (95% same features, diff databases).
both started on lovable dev→ i moved one to claude code in cursor. now it’s moving fast, feature after feature, even if buggy i can fix and keep going forward.
the other is still on lovable → same loop: perfect looking implementaion, bug fixing plans in lovable chat ui, promises it’s “done” in 5 mins… but nothing really gets done. credits keep burning until I always try 2-3 times by blaming, cursing the ai on the exact same issue over and over again.
both use claude api under the hood (anton osika even said this). so why is claude code pushing me forward, while lovable spins me around?
technical limitation? design choice? or a money grab? or skill issue? someone needs to look into this.
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state of mobile apps on sale:
· @acquiredotcom: 112 apps🙁
· @Flippa: 28 apps 🥲
· EH: 128 apps 😎
lfg
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@rileybrown_ai Yeah Google has been on a tear since December. They’re shipping so fast now too
2.5 is my go to rn
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Just had a moment to think about what Google has been building:
Gemini 2.5 best coding model
NotebookLM best student / research note taking app
Google Veo arguably best US based video model
Gemini catching up FAST to ChatGPT
Gemini AI Studio Better than OAI playground and Anthropic Console (Currently being redesigned)
And this morning they released Firebase Studio a competitor to bolt, replit, lovable, etc, presumably with db, hosting, and auth built in.
Imagine if their image model catches gpt4o (not unlikely).
Predictions:
1. I think Google sees the amount of users ChatGPT gained by having a best-in-class image model directly in their platform that was available nowhere else. Imagine if they released Gemini 4.5 Max only in Firebase Studio. Imagine if it was best-in-class by far. My prediction is that this will happen.
2. Within Gemini AI Studio, the sleeper feature is real-time streaming. Any computer based task that is step-by-step instructions, the real-time streaming can literally guide you through interfaces to complete whatever it is you need to complete. The rate at which you will learn when you have an AI that can see your screen at all times and tell you exactly what to do is going to 10x or more. My prediction here is that by the end of the year this will release as part of their Gemini chat app, and it's going to absolutely crush.
x.com/Firebase/statu…
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I represent mobile app sellers and have been getting dis with questions like
> how do you valuate apps?
> for how much can I sell my app?
> what are the categories buyers are interested on?
I'm opening 5 slots each week to talk with mobile app devs
it doesn't matter your app size and if you're ready to sell or just curious about it
lmk if interested and I'll reach out with my cal link soon
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I spent the weekend watching over 2,000 TikToks
I ended up finding ~400 consumer apps that have gone viral.
For every app, I copied and pasted their top 3 TikToks into a Google Sheet, meticulously categorized them into categories , with likes, comments, shares, etc.
Comment “beam”, and I’ll DM you the link
UPDATE:
I got up early af this morning to put a UI on it to make it easily searchable. You can now search for things like:
“Calorie”
“Note taking”
“Ai tool”
“Bible”
And get relevant results in an instant. It’s free, fast, and ONLY contains content used to promote products.
GIF
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@iamgdsa Saw these guys a while back, they’re killing it. Esp with the way they use the AI avatars - the green screen clips take your eyes away from the avatar so it takes a while to clock on - even fooled me.
Using their videos as an example on a panel I’m doing soon
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@CastanyMiquel This is a banger man, great video. Literally all it is! Discover winning formats and iterate
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@KingMusss yeah man, i was replicating that trend cause there are lots videos like that with thousands of likes
maybe i am pushing too far plugging my app...
i have to keep trying and iterating! 💪🏼
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I'm a way better developer than tiktoker.
Since I shipped my app two weeks ago, I’ve piblished 40 videos.
Trying different formats, researching what worked for others.
Didn’t find a winning format yet. Downloads aren’t great either.
However it’s a nice excuse for ripping tons of Pokemon packs 😬😬


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