The questions were already dealt with on your original thread almost a year ago which Zanderman linked above.
On that thread, one of the early answers was that if you did not have that property, and had inherited the fair market value sales proceeds instead, would you choose to buy that investment in a run down flat hundreds of miles away, out of all the investment choices in the world? No of course you wouldn't,. So sell it as it is, and take the cash.
You laughed at that and agreed that of course you wouldn't buy it if you didn't already have it. It doesn't make any kind of sense to choose a flat or a rental shop over having the cash, especially when it needs money and effort spending on it and you are not local, don't have DIY skills, or experience running a (commercial or residential) lettings business let alone one hundreds of miles remote from where you live with worries over quality of tenants etc.
The people on the thread who had pretty much all told you to sell up, said that it was a serious point, not a joke and you should take it seriously. You said you understood it but it was a funny way of putting it into perspective like that. It's not the thing you would buy of you got the sales proceeds from it.
And then you went back to talking about maybe selling the flat but keeping the shop, on the grounds that although the shop had had empty periods, bad tenants doing a runner etc when your father owned it, it made decent money when the tenants weren't running.
You should have sold it all a year ago like everyone suggested. You should still sell it all now, like people are suggesting now. You are waiting for someone on one of the several threads to come up with an amazing idea and help you have the breakthrough moment where it becomes clear what you should do. Are you going to come back another one year from now and try again to ask for new opinions? You should have had that breakthrough moment last June when someone told you that if you wouldn't choose to buy that place with the cash that it's worth, you should not choose to keep it..
You said it was amusing to get that clear perspective - but the logic is used in business and investing all the time. If you wouldn't want to buy something because the ownership proposition is not the best potential use of your money or time, don't keep hold of it. Dump it and take the cash.
It doesn't really require you to have a fresh investment idea for the money you raise just yet. It will take a while to sell anyway. All you need to know is that a commercial premises with flat above, hundreds of miles away, is *not* the best use of your wealth. Whether the alternate use of your wealth is adding to your pensions or filling your investment ISA with investment funds or some other long term property based investment local to you, the one thing we all seem to be quite certain of is that having a six figure sum tied up in this property, is a silly thing to have when you could just take the cash for the property in its current state.
Splitting the property is an idea if you can do that effectively and cheaply, and do refurbishment at cost price etc. Buy you are likely to be selling out to a professional investor who has a portfolio of this sort of stuff and industry contacts for getting cheap supplies and reliable labour to do a refurb job, and will do it at lower risk than you because he has a whole portfolio of other things going on.
Trying to change what you have to make a bit more money out of it when you sell it is a noble idea but not a very practical one. Just play the cards you are dealt, and get the money. Then later, once you have it in your hand, decide on the various compromises between spending that money on yourself or your mortgage or improvements on your own property,, or investing for income, or investing it for less income and some longer term gains, etc.
Last edited by bowlhead99; 09-05-2018 at 3:56 PM.