In the last week I have been travelling around the country a lot and one day I was booked in to talk with some professional connections of a financial adviser, when I asked for a list of attendees I was a little surprised to discover the majority of the audience were property professionals.

Given I had been asked to talk about property and pensions perhaps this shouldn’t have been a surprise, but looking in detail they weren’t property solicitors or valuers or even those involved in lending to pension schemes, but mostly estate agents.

I don’t usually talk to estate agents and my personal dealings with them haven’t led me to think that I should engage with them with on pensions and the joint possibilities. I have always assumed that those who used pensions to invest in property were those that had their own commercial properties and a property savvy financial adviser.

This was a very different type of audience to those that I am used to and meant tailoring the presentation in terms of the words rather than the slides. Once the presentation started the questions came thick and fast, could they buy this, can they borrow that, what about stamp duty? All good questions, raised by knowledgeable and highly engaged professionals.

It was really interesting to see that pension led funding, or loan backs to you and me, raised the most interest, many were not aware of the ability of a SSAS to lend to an employer, going through the rules with them raised their interest levels in this particular area and the possibilities it could open up to their clients. As a Sipp and SSAS provider who doesn’t do execution only business, I was grateful for the adviser in the room, he had arranged the session, and was able to progress the referrals.

I also dispelled a number of myths for the estate agents. Some of them had heard about, but not fully understood, the issues with residential planning permission or what is deemed a commercial and residential property for pension purposes and some of these issues had previously just led them to dismiss the options available to those with significant pension funds but little other assets.

As the end of the presentation I could feel a buzz in the room and I suspect the adviser that arranged this will be pretty busy with calls in the near future.

Not all will result in business for them but it will mean another source of leads and property business is one of the stickiest types of pension business there is, so I am sure it will be worth the time and effort for the adviser and I regret my initial reservations about the meeting.

Professional connections come from all walks of life and not just the accountants and solicitors we all usually focus on, there is clearly a wealth of business knowledge out there that should be tapped into and help educate on the benefits that we all know about within pensions.