How Liv Cooke Built A £100 Million Property Business In Her Twenties

The freestyle football world champion and seven-time Guinness World Record holder has developed more than £100 million in property. Now she’s investing in other entrepreneurs on Amazon Prime Video’s Property Elevator.

Most athletes know their careers will end. Few plan for it. Liv Cooke saw it at 17, right after she became the youngest freestyle football world champion in history. “I planned everything to become world champion and nothing for the day after,” she said. She remembers the first Monday after the win: everyone else went to work, and she stayed in bed asking what came next.

A decade on, Liv Cooke, 27, from Leyland, Lancashire, has developed more than £100 million of property, and her training program has produced more than 11 millionaires. She is now the youngest investor on Property Elevator, a five-part, Dragons’ Den-style series on Amazon Prime Video. Aspiring developers pitch real deals to a panel of angel investors for funding or a joint venture.

Liv Cooke: From injury to world champion

Her sporting career started with an injury. Training with a top youth side in her mid-teens, she hurt her back and was out for seven months. Unwilling to stop touching a ball, she found ways to keep it moving without pain and ended up in freestyle football. She took second at the 2016 World Championships despite breaking her foot in the final, then won in 2017. Her achievements include seven Guinness World Records, serving as a UEFA women’s football ambassador, and appearances on the BBC’s Football Focus and Match of the Day X. She has also built a substantial social media following.

She did not treat that income as security. “Sport has a shelf life, and nobody prepares you for that,” she has said. She saw her body as an asset with an end date and decided to secure her finances through property. She founded Liv Cooke Properties in November 2019, at 20.

Property: the first HMO and the BRRR system

Her first project was a house in multiple occupation (HMO), a shared rental home, converted from a family home (C3) to a small shared house (C4). She says her approach came from the training ground. “Freestyle is trial and error,” she has said. You practice a trick a thousand times, land it once, then repeat it until it is consistent. She says property works the same way: learn the deal, then build a system that repeats it.

Her system is buy, refurbish, refinance, rent. She buys run-down stock, converts it, refinances against the new value, and reuses the capital. On one 2023 project, she said she bought a three-bed house for £164,995, spent £86,700 converting it into a six-bed HMO, and had it valued at £369,000. She has also said the business was completing at least five projects a month by the end of 2024.

Growing meant giving up control. “The biggest lesson was that you can only go so far alone,” she has said. Her brother left a job in law to run part of the portfolio.

HMOs: the criticism and the social case

HMOs are among the most disputed parts of British housing. Critics blame them for crowding neighborhoods and anti-social behavior. Cooke says one of her Greater Manchester properties was vandalized with “No HMO” graffiti in November 2025.

She defends the model. “HMOs get a lot of wrong assumptions,” she has said. She says her company takes properties with asbestos, mould or collapsing roofs and turns them into safe homes, many of which are used to house women escaping domestic and sexual abuse through a charity partner. Cooke says demand for affordable housing remains high, while shared accommodation continues to face criticism over its impact on local communities.

She puts the number of women housed at more than 1,000. She has also mentored hundreds of aspiring developers, many of whom started with no capital, and helped deliver a £2.6 million pair of 3G football pitches in Bamber Bridge, near where she grew up.

Why did she join the ‘Property Elevator’ panel?

When the show’s producers first approached her, she said no. She felt the panel’s years of experience were too vast next to her own. Then she looked at what her company had built and changed her mind. “I decided, I’ll let the work do the talking,” she has said.

She sits alongside Hayley Andrews and John Howard, who bring decades of experience across residential, commercial and large-scale development. She says her edge is speed and adaptability. On the panel, “you see very quickly who really knows their numbers and who doesn’t,” she has said. She adds: “I’m not afraid to say no.” Cooke says she has often faced skepticism as a young woman in the property industry. “In property you’re underestimated before you open your mouth,” she said.

What Athletes Can Learn From Her Career

Her advice to athletes is blunt. “Start before you think you’re ready,” she said. Most plan their careers but never plan their exit. The skills that win titles, such as discipline, repetition, and handling pressure, are the ones business needs. “You just have to point them somewhere new,” she said.

This article was originally published on Forbes.com