‘Property investment courses left us thousands out of pocket’

“Property is such a safe asset class, you’re going to succeed 99 times out of 100, or more in my case,” Smith says on his YouTube channel, which has 100,000 subscribers.

Curious, Clara and Julian progressed from a free webinar to a £99 introductory course, eventually paying £14,995 for a 12-month programme called the Wealth Academy.

The course promised a “power team” of advisers and one-to-one coaching to guide students towards their first investment. Touchstone also offered a money-back guarantee: if students didn’t earn double their course fees back within two years, they would be eligible for a refund.

“The guarantee meant it didn’t seem high risk,” says Eleanor, who joined the academy in June last year. Eleanor, who was investing for her pension, lost £55,295 in total. She had to forfeit the deposit on a property purchase she could not complete after a lender downvalued it by £63,000. “You feel stupid, shameful,” she says. “I’ll be working my full-time job and not earning anything for a year and a half to recoup what I lost. I don’t think it will ever truly leave me.”

Clara and Julian are still working on boats overseas. Like Eleanor, the couple are not two years away from their course start date so they cannot yet see if they are eligible for a money-back guarantee. Clara is in tears as she calculates how much she and Julian have spent: £115,000 on the course fee, and the deposits and associated buying costs on two flats they could not purchase after they were downvalued by their lender by £19,500 and £75,000. “We thought we were alone,” she says. “Then we found this WhatsApp group with all these extremely intelligent people in it, many of them in a worse situation than us.

‘Always look after you’

Touchstone Education is a popular training and coaching company that teaches people how to make money from property through a variety of investment strategies.

Twenty-one former students contacted The Sunday Times on the condition that their full identities would not be published, sharing stories of substantial lost deposits.

Students feel aggrieved because they paid for impartial mentoring without fully understanding the financial risks and ended up losing their life savings. Touchstone Education provides legal disclaimers that it is a property educator and does not give financial advice.

Property mentors or “educators” are not regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority, which means they do not have to sign up to a regulator or a redress scheme, because they sell training courses, rather than a specific financial product.

Two Touchstone Instagram posts about the power of property investment

The Times and The Sunday Times are calling for financial regulators to create better protections for consumers online as part of its Smarter With Money campaign.

Rowan Morrow-McDade, a chartered tax adviser at the accountancy firm Alexander & Co, has used LinkedIn to criticise information given in a Touchstone Education video. In one example he cites, Hookway says property investors can transfer their portfolio into a limited company without paying any stamp duty if they spend more than 20 hours a week managing it.

Morrow-McDade says this is “completely wrong” because the legislation only refers to a potential total relief from capital gains tax, so the investor following this suggestion would find themselves with an unexpected stamp duty bill.

He said: “I’m regulated by a few professional bodies, but someone like Abi Hookway, who calls herself a ‘property mentor’ is not regulated by anybody. And that’s where the real issue is.”

The Property Redress Scheme has a voluntary arrangement with the Property Investors Bureau who provide an accreditation scheme for property educators, but only 1 per cent of the estimated 200 providers operating are accredited.

Touchstone Education used The Sunday Times’s masthead without authorisation to advertise its educational services on its website, despite only having appeared in the newspaper in June 2020 after Smith encouraged people to take out post-pandemic bouncebank loans for struggling small businesses, which he called “free money” to invest in property. The Sunday Times did not endorse a Touchstone Education course.

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‘Financially free’

Wannabe investors enter this unregulated world with no way of knowing who to trust, some with little investment knowledge. Property is presented as a failsafe, quick and easy way to earn a lot of money with very little upfront capital.

The Touchstone students who spoke to The Sunday Times were typically trying to make the most of a lump sum — divorce settlements, life insurance payouts, inheritance or years’ worth of savings — but now feel they were given a false sense of security. Students described how they invested in property days or weeks after joining the 12-month course.

In 2024, students received a professional advisers pack that listed brokers, solicitors, and accountants among other companies that Touchstone Education “have or are using”. On the front, it said that students should carry out their own due diligence.

The booklet did not disclose that Paul Smith and his wife, Aniko Smith, are directors of two of the companies listed; the conveyancing firm Smith Benedict & Co, which was registered at the same address in Doncaster as Touchstone Education; and Redmayne Smith, an estate agency that specialises in selling off-plan [not-yet-built] properties that has had two previous names and has a related marketing company based in Dubai.

Paul Smith, a director at Touchstone Education, and his wife, Aniko

MYMONEYMAKINGEXPERT

Hookway and Gordon Dutfield, another Touchstone coach, are also directors at Redmayne Smith; former students we spoke to said this was not clearly explained to them.

Touchstone Education describes Redmayne Smith on its website as a “sister company” and the latest edition of Redmayne Smith’s off-plan investment guide explicitly names its directors. But a previous edition of the guide did not. Former students said they often did not understand where mentoring by Touchstone ended and off-plan selling by Redmayne Smith began.

Pat joined the academy “in a state of desperation” after an injury ended her career but she failed to get a mortgage after she exchanged on an off-plan property and lost more than £30,000 within weeks.

In a letter to Liam Byrne, her MP, she wrote that Hookway introduced herself as her “mentor”, then “just days later, this same individual pivoted to acting as a salesperson for Redmayne Smith”.

Pat believed that she would easily get a mortgage and, she claims, no one told her she would struggle due to her personal circumstances.

When she couldn’t finance a purchase, Redmayne Smith sent a “guide to releasing equity”. “If I had enough equity [in her home], the intense pressure from the company would have convinced me to do it,” she wrote.

Many students on low or unconventional incomes found themselves excluded from the conventional market and restricted to a handful of high-interest, specialist lending options with far higher interest rates than they expected.

Neither Touchstone Education nor Redmayne Smith present off-plan properties as risk-free, but students believed that upbeat marketing material downplayed the downsides of investing in off-plan property.

In a video sent to Touchstone students, Hookway describes Redmayne Smith off-plan properties as “easy, hands-free” and says: “I know peace of mind because all the due diligence is done.”

Some Touchstone students also based their financial planning on estimated figures provided in material from Redmayne Smith.

At one development in Manchester in 2024, one student expected to achieve rent of about £2,000 a month for a one-bedroom flat marketed by Redmayne Smith, but achieved rents were closer to £1,300.

In a Redmayne Smith email sent earlier this month, another development is promoted as securing investors “£1,600 a month guaranteed rent”, but the small print says “forecasted figures are estimates only and not guarantees of future performance”.

Redmayne Smith says property investment carries risk and market changes between reservation and completion of property purchases can affect valuations and mortgage availability, and investors should have sought independent legal and mortgage advice.

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‘I hate what I did’

One student said she believes “there is a genuine public interest issue here about education providers, and the vulnerability of inexperienced investors operating inside highly structured sales ecosystems”.

As an educational provider, Touchstone is not required to be regulated or to do affordability checks on its students. A former student who joined the Wealth Academy in 2024 expecting to meet like-minded investors said she became disenchanted after she met an 18-year-old who had borrowed money from his parents.

The Sunday Times asked Touchstone Education what percentage of students have been granted a money-back guarantee or a refund of its course fees, but it did not provide this information.

A few weeks ago, Paul and Aniko Smith dissolved Touchstone Wealth Education Ltd on Companies House, but Smith continues to promote courses online through a new website, mymoneymakingexpert.com, where he says that “anyone can achieve financial freedom through property”. In a legal disclaimer at the bottom of the homepage, there is “a quick reminder — that this is for education only” and he does not give financial advice and everyone should seek their independent advice.

This is little comfort to Chris, a teacher and a Touchstone student, who eventually bought two flats in Somerset after a prolonged struggle to secure a mortgage following a down valuation of £45,000.

Chris still has access to the Touchstone course on his phone but can’t open it without “feeling ill”, he says he feels badly treated. “When I look back, I hate what I did. It was a foolish mistake.”

‘We are transparent’

A spokesman from Touchstone Wealth Limited said: “Touchstone Wealth Limited is a property education and coaching business and does not sell property or provide financial or legal advice. Students are free to choose their own professional advisers, and any property purchases are made independently of Touchstone with third parties. We are transparent with our students about our relationships with other businesses.

“In 2025, Touchstone provided services to approximately 25,000 individuals and received 87 complaints — around 0.35 per cent of those served. While we take any complaint seriously, this represents a very small proportion of our student community.”

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A Redmayne Smith spokesman said: “We are an estate agent. We do not provide financial advice and purchasers obtain independent legal and mortgage advice as part of the transaction process. Purchasers are responsible for carrying out their own due diligence and assessing whether a property investment is suitable for their individual circumstances. Property investment involves risk and market conditions can change between reservation and completion, which may affect lending valuations or mortgage availability.

“In 2025 Redmayne Smith received 17 complaints, representing a very small proportion of the purchasers we worked with. We are transparent about who our directors are, their roles within Redmayne Smith, and any roles they hold with other businesses — including Touchstone. Every Redmayne Smith webinar introduces our four directors to prospective purchasers.”
*Some names have been changed