Property Hub - Investment Insights & Inspiration - Get Invested: In the beginning: Bushy Martin on getting started in property investment

Episode Date: August 5, 2022

Find out how Bushy Martin got started in property investment and how he uses it to achieve his wealth goals. Welcome to our third and final series of interviews with Bushy, where the Get Invested host has been unpacking the story, insights and strategy behind his own property, wealth and lifestyle journey. This time a recent Get Invested guest, Rob Flux from Property Developer Network, turns the tables on Bushy for his ‘In The Beginning’ series, where Bushy goes all the way back to the start of his property investment story, revealing his own personal road map to make his lifestyle dreams a reality.  There’s plenty here that you’ll be able to learn and apply to your own process. Enjoy the show! Hour of power with Bushy: If you’d like an hour of power to talk with me personally on any questions, queries or issues you’d like to discuss about your investment strategy, finance or property portfolio delivery, whether you’re an aspiring investor or an experienced investor with a substantial property portfolio, just go here https://knowhowproperty.com.au/contact-us then click on the ‘Lets Zoom, DeepDive Meeting with Bushy’ 1 hour  option to book in your preferred time. For a small investment of just $295 you can ask me anything you want about property for a full 60 minutes.  For more free investment insights, join the Get Invested community: If you want to continue investing in your knowledge, join me and many other like minded investors in our Get Invested community right now. I send a free and exclusive monthly email full of practical ‘Self, Health and Wealth’ wisdom that our current Freedom Fighter subscribers can’t wait to get each month. It’s full of investment and lifestyle tips, my personal book recommendations, apps I use to enhance life and so much more. Just visit bushymartin.com.au and sign up at the bottom of the page … because this is just the beginning! Get Invested is the leading weekly podcast for Australians who want to learn how to unlock their full ‘self, health and wealth’ potential. Hosted by Bushy Martin, an award winning property investor, founder, author and media commentator who is recognised as one of Australia’s most trusted experts in property, investment and lifestyle, Get Invested reveals the secrets of the high performers who invest for success in every aspect of their lives and the world around them. Remember to subscribe on your favourite podcast player, and if you're enjoying the show please leave us a review. Find out more about Get Invested here https://bushymartin.com.au/get-invested-podcast/  Want to connect with Bushy? Get in touch here https://bushymartin.com.au/contact/  This show is produced by Apiro Media - http://apiropodcasts.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to the Get Invested podcast with Bushy Martin. I'm Andrew Montessi, the producer of the show, kicking off our third and final series of interviews with Bushy, where he has been unpacking the story, insights, and strategy behind his own property, wealth, and lifestyle journey. This time, a recent Get Invested guest, Rob Flux from Property Developer Network, turns the tables on Bushy for his In the Beginning series, where Bushy goes all the way back to the start of his property investment story,

revealing his own personal roadmap to make his lifestyle dreams a reality. There's plenty here that you'll be able to learn and apply to your own process. Enjoy the show. Welcome to the Get Invested podcast, where we share great conversations with experts from all walks of life to uncover their secret know-how and where they invest their time, their skills, and their money, and the benefits that this has created. You see, the truth is that everyone invests. Every minute of every day, we're investing our time, our skills, our energy and our money in something.

Some of us are investing consciously, some unconsciously, sometimes for good, sometimes for bad, sometimes for no impact. Get Invested will help you to start living by design, not by default. I'm going to help you to make it happen, not let it happen. You'll hear the top tips on how you can live with conscious intent so that you can live more, work less, and leave a living legacy by investing now. Listen to the show to discover the top tips on how to get started, make the most of your investment journey,

and ultimately to be living your dream, not someone else's. More episodes can be found on iTunes or at bushymartin.com.au forward slash getinvested. Thanks for listening, and now, let's get invested. Hey folks, it's Rob Flux here with another Sunday session. Now, today we have a very special guest. We've got Bushy Martin. Now, Bushy is an award-winning author.

He's also the co-founder of Know How Property, and he also runs one of the most popular property investment podcasts out there called Get Invested, and as of lately, has just taken over Australia's largest running podcast called The Reality Talk, which has been running for many, many years from Kevin Turner. He's just taken over that. Now, Bushy and his wife, Sonia, Australia's leading pioneers in the emergent area of living by design through smart property strategy. And with that, Bushy has actually been ranked in the top 10 Australian specialists through Property Investor Magazine. So with all of that said, what I would like to do is welcome Bushy to the stage. So, mate welcome aboard great to see you rob very honored and humbled to join you i really enjoyed

our long chat on the get invested podcast recently uh which uh we got some really good feedback from the audience on by the way mate and i'm pleased to return serve and uh i did have a tiny little graphic issue in the background but who cares about that we're on with the show now mate we just touched on the fact that you you're running a couple of different podcasts so uh the get invested property uh you've been running that for uh seven odd years i think 230 odd episodes uh so far um as you touched on i was lucky and fortunate to be i guess a guest on that very recently so thank you for that opportunity mate what got you into that into the podcast yeah well uh interesting but i i guess i'd been in the property game at consulting pretty much

as a strategist uh together with our finance broking team for quite some time and and found myself pretty much having the same conversation day in day out uh on a one-on-one basis and it was like okay well how can we get this message out there to a much wider audience and i'd sort of luckily be at the stage where you know i'm often saying now that i've shifted from success to significance in terms of what our focus is these days and uh what that meant was i'm i'm wanted to give back rob so uh the first entourage onto that was to write the book and and believe you me uh writing a book if i knew now what i knew then before i wrote the book i i wonder whether i would have done it because a lot of blood sweat and tears uh we got that going and

then uh i wanted to move from a one-to-one to a one-to-many type of format and the podcasting world was just starting to open up and i i actually many years ago spent some time in the executive recruiting game and i actually interviewed i think two or three thousand people over a couple year period and got very good at asking questions and then shutting up and listening which you wouldn't believe it given the amount that i i talk but i i thought well yeah that's a good fit for a podcast i uh this is a great way to get some great people on and share some learnings and uh it's taken off from there and it's been a lot of fun mate i love every second of it well as i said 200 and i well i think i was episode 230 so yeah past that now so you're

probably 235 ish and growing uh i guess take me all the way back to episode number one can you remember who guest number one was and how did you convince them to come on board when you were coming from absolute zero ground zero star well i i took the cheeks uh entry mate i actually reached out to our podcast producer i can remember ron's lee vaz at the time we now produce it a different way but ron's lee was a bit of a guru in the startup entrepreneurial field he he actually started the the first national podcasting conference around the country uh and uh i when i decided to do it and and we were getting him to produce her i said look uh do you mind if i grind my teeth on you and uh he came on board uh he's done a bit of an investment himself over

the years so it was a pretty good fit and uh it was interesting at the end of the conversation uh when we turned off the record button he said bushy you're actually really good at this uh i think because i i had asked some questions that that he wasn't expecting and i and i drew some insights from stuff that he was doing that that he'd never actually recognized in himself and he said yeah i think you're going to do really well on this and uh mate i've been like a kid in a lolly shop ever since rob it's just been uh rubbing shoulders from great people uh learning a lot of new stuff as we go through uh it's it's really been uh as i've said to you i fear that the best uh personal development exercise i could possibly come into and uh it's just added to

the armory in terms of the uh the breadth and the depth of information that i now have at my disposal mate so it's been been awesome absolutely mate i feel the same in going through my journey uh i'm fortunate to rub shoulders with many many people some of them like yourself uh i don't do as many interviews and that's something that uh i'm starting to get a little bit more into but uh mate it's a it's a fun process um now i'm not gonna hold your feet to the fire and ask you who's your favorite uh i guess guest because that would be unfair uh however uh can you can you give us some really fantastic lessons that you've picked up from of that and who was the person that actually gave you that lesson if you can recall wow okay uh that's such

a broad depth mate because i one of my and we'll probably get into this but my my definition of sustainable success is the intersection of self-help and wealth and i'll talk more about that shortly so i i don't just focus purely on the property piece i throw the net a little bit wider because i i think you know that sustainable success is the intersection of those three if i look at some of the memorable guests and the ones that uh i got a lot out of and enjoyed the most for the likes of paul roos who was the sydney swans coach uh for quite some time i've I've been a big fan of Paul's for many years anyway, but to actually spend some time with him understanding the trials

and tribulations that he's been through and the very different way that he approaches things. And it's funny how what I got from Paul was that a lot of football teams are very micromanaged and very transactional. He took a very visionary approach to saying, okay, well, we're not worried about what we're doing today. let's worry about what we're doing in five or six seasons time and work towards that so and he took the the whole management team all the players all the support team on exactly the same journey

had a very clear vision of where he was going and got everyone to buy into that vision and it's it's a lot of parallels with what he did in that arena with because i've always said that sport is almost a microism of life anyway but the property investment journey is no different You need to have a very clear indication of what the end destination looks like and get very vivid in the detail of that, both from a lifestyle, a financing and a property perspective, because there's three elements to that. And then if that's magnetic enough, you'll override the inevitable speed bumps that you're going to incur along the journey. But you also then have a compass upon which to measure the decisions you're making day to day. So is what I'm doing taking me closer to that destination or further away? So that was one of the big learnings I got from Paul.

In terms of the property aficionados that have come under the show, there's been a lot. I'm trying to think of some of those that would be really relevant. I've had some really good buyers agents on the show that have shared a lot of information. Kevin Turner, who was the host of Realty Talk and he's now been some would say brave enough and others would say dumb enough to let me loose on the microphone and he uh he because it's similar to you and i rob uh he's spoken to so many people

over the years that he just brings a wealth of wisdom to the table when it when it comes to property and uh a lot of insights that have come out of that so uh that's probably just a little bit of a sample of some of those but there's been some awesome guests from a whole range of areas from property through to the equities markets i've also had some great guests on there john lee dumas who uh is a massive uh he's an incredible audience over in the states and and across the globe uh with the podcast that he hosts he he came on the show and and shared his investment journey which is more on the equity side of the equation mind you he he lives in puerto rica because there's zero tax in puerto rica and he's got property yes yes good good tax saving and the puerto rican

government actually entices people to come and live there for that very reason so i make it very attractive for people to do it but he's he's more an equities investor because as we probably all know the states is a much more in equities market than there's a property market and very different dynamics in property in in the states and i own property in the states so i i know that firsthand but uh yeah i've had the privilege of talking to some great people including yourself mate so um it's been a great journey yeah thank you and i guess what i want to do now bushy i guess people uh i guess may know you from those two areas this might be the first time that they're actually meeting you uh but uh give people just some insights into i guess how the how you're

actually living your life by design that's one of your uh core principles how you're living your life by design and then what we're going to do is we're going to unpack that and take everyone all the way back to how did you actually get there in the first place so so where are you at right now yeah well we're loving life rob as i sort of mentioned briefly before i've sort of shifted from the success of the significance stage of my life and it's more about giving back uh in in all forms so uh one of the one of the key things i learned from my good mother rob was that true fulfillment comes from giving freely to others without ever expecting anything in return and or in fact then knowing that you're even doing it so my mother was one of those country girls who was always about

helping everyone and everyone else and uh to sort of pass that on to me so uh we now live a very privileged lifestyle mate so i spend my weeks uh podcasting both on realty talk and the get Get Invested podcast. I still do a fair bit of writing because I love writing and getting the information out there and sharing it. We love to travel. So we're on our road trip as we speak. So we're spending a month on month off in different locations around Australia at the moment. We've traveled a lot overseas, but given the COVID exercise, we've never really taken the time to have a really good look around our own country. So I'm speaking to you today from south of Adelaide, down on the Fleurieu Peninsula.

From one of your investment properties, yeah? Yes, exactly right. Exactly right. So we're doing a little bit of work on, or we're organising a little bit of work on the investment property as we speak. So, but we're doing a road trip that's going to take us along the coast of Victoria

and up into New South Wales and the northern, northwestern region of Tasmania over the next six to 12 months. We don't really have a timeline on it. We can pretty much do that from anywhere now. We've really set up life in terms of the business exercise where our team operates from all over the country. It's all virtual now because thanks to COVID,

people are quite happy to meet via Zoom and we don't need to be sitting in their living rooms at nights and on weekends anymore. So that's freed us up a fair bit. The other thing that we love doing, we actually rescue Samward dogs, Rob. So we've currently got two. We had four up until recently

and that we take on old dogs that people don't want anymore. They're just a beautiful dog, the Samoids. You know, the white smiling faces are great to wake up to. I'm a closet muso, so I spend a lot of time on the piano. And don't let me near a microphone, Rob, because I don't even need to have a drink to jump on the karaoke. I used to play in bands for years. And I'm still a mad keen field hockey player.

so I'm actually playing my 800th game in about two or three weeks time I've been playing since I was 11. That's a lot of effort. Well I've got the scars to prove it Rob and you'd share with me the scar that you got under your eye from playing in Darwin years ago I think. For everyone's benefit out there I dabbled in playing I guess outdoor hockey for a little while and have seven stitches underneath my eye from a hockey ball straight to the head. It did save a goal. So it was, I guess, was not in vain.

But it was to the bone and it was not a very pretty sight. So the AstroTurf got a little bit of a spray that day. But anything when you're getting out and actually exerting yourself, pushing your limits, and particularly in a team sport, I guess most of mine was in rugby. But I guess there's the physical endurance for yourself, there's the teamwork, there's the camaraderie,

there's the social aspects, and then there's the embellishment of the stories that get better and better into the night. Exactly right. Exactly right. And that's what keeps me going. I'm one of those people who needs a goal to be working towards. If you don't give me a goal, I don't do anything. So I'm either a sort of 100% person or a nothing person.

And the reason I keep playing hockey is for all the reasons you just mentioned but it but it means that i need to keep fit so as you know hockey's a very active game uh there's a lot of start stop and and you need to be pretty fit to to get out there so that really keeps me on my toes as far as that goes but uh if we sort of draw that back to the living by design what what we're doing now is is very much what sonja and i decided we wanted to do about 25 years ago when we first got together and we being a spending you know an architect for 17 odd years So it sort of becomes part of your way of looking at life where you're always designing how you want something to be and get really clear on what that looks like. And then it's a matter of just taking the steps between where you are and where that is to make that happen.

So we spend a lot of time and every year when we go on holidays, we spend between two to four days revisiting our life plan. Has anything changed in our goals? Has anything changed in terms of our, you know, what does our lifestyle cost? Has anything changed in relation to our portfolio in terms of its values? Do we need to restructure the finance? It's a constant monitoring exercise now just to manage that. But it's been all about focusing on exactly how we want to live. And we, you know, it took us over 15 years to make that happen.

but we we're very privileged now to be able to give back and to spend time sharing a lot of lessons we've learned along the way on on the podcast and shows like yours and and through the other work we do in that regard that's great man well let's start that process of taking you all the way back now you touched on the fact that you are an architect some would say that gives you unfair advantage uh in the process uh so firstly when did you do your architects degree how long ago was that and how long did you actually work as an architect yeah so i uh finished high school i'm a country boy and hence the bushy but uh bushy from the bush my old man was bushy senior i finished high school in the huge rural metropolis of border town in the southeast

of south australia many years ago and that was in about 1977 i think mate so uh you do the maths now you can you can probably work out how i know there's too many numbers there there's too many numbers but the reason i probably important for me to say why i got into architecture actually because it has a bit of a a property based tour because um i was born with a uh a hair lip and And, you know, it looks like a hockey scar, but it's actually a hair lift. And I was also, I had really bad chronic asthma when I was a kid. So I spent a lot of time in bed. And I used to get called a flat-faced, punk-chested runt because I was always, we moved around

the countryside. My old man was a stock and station agent. So we used to move from country town to country town across Victoria and South Australia. So I was always the new boy in town. So I used to get picked on a fair bit. And because I spent so much time in bed, I used to draw. I used to love drawing and designing and, you know, I just had a real creative bent.

And I always remember my good father saying to me, well, that's all very good, son, but someday you're going to have to get a real job. And so the old young brain was ticking over going, well, how can I combine my love of drawing and designing with something that's a real job? And I know, I'll become an architect. So that's about as simple as it got.

and i i'd sort of made that decision i think in about first year high school uh so i was on a mission to get into architecture i knew zero about architecture and and i the first couple of years at uni were a real challenge to me rob because i was alongside a lot of people in the course who whose family had an architecture background so they knew that much more about the whole exercise than i did but i sort of uh one thing i learned uh being the punk tested runt was i just work harder than everyone else so i just went hard and and you know i reflect back now there were a couple of years there when i did my honors and thesis in the last two years where i average four hours sleep a night for those two years to make that happen uh and uh out of that and part of

the reason for that was also my father used to dabble in property so he was a stock and station agent we were in in remote country towns but he was also wanting to make some money because stock and station agents weren't paid big quids in those days so he delved into the property side of the equation and and he was actually back in the days where you could actually buy blocks of land with a long enough settlement period and then he would assign the the sale before he settled and make a make a few grand on the way through so we used to spend a lot of our weekends sitting in the car with that driving around looking at areas and that sort of sort of started to get into the psyche to some degree and sort of without me it was a bit more peripheral and almost subliminal but it was

like okay well there might be something in this property thing so that's what started the architecture exercise when i finished architecture i did it in adelaide at the adelaide uni uh when i finished there was no work for architects uh at the time this is in the early 1980s and about the only i often jokingly say the only thing being built in adelaide at the time were gravestones uh rob so i actually worked for free for a couple of architectural practices for a few months just to get some experience i said you don't have to pay me i just want to get some experience but i ended up scoring a job in new guinea uh working for a developer up there who'd made big money uh in the crocodile farming selling crocodile skins to the jewelry makers in france

and japan and he got into property development and he wanted someone in-house so i call it my indiana jones years rob because i spent a couple of years up there and it's it's real very interesting territory in new guinea i can imagine i know many many people that have spent uh lots of time in new guinea and there's uh there's areas where you need uh i guess guns and machetes and barbed wire fences and there's other really beautiful majestic areas so which part were you in mate a bit of both so i spent uh half my time in port moresby and i've often said if if the world needs an anima that's the right place to do it because excuse my french it's a bit of an of a place to be honest and and just as you described we were living in

uh compounds with uh 12 foot high razor ribbon uh wire around the outside dog security grills on the doors uh i lost a girlfriend who came up to visit me and we got broken into by a bunch of um uh of the locals uh the rascal gangs as they used to call them in those days uh he broke in and she jumped on the plane uh the next day and her next day never spoke to her again but uh but a really good experience mate i i'd actually designed some townhouses in in warsby for this guy and and building them was a bit of fun and games but i also did a wilderness lodge out in a beautiful spot called toothy on the northeast coast so i actually lived out there with a kiwi surveyor at the time and we we did the design and put it together and then used locals

to actually build it very basic and fundamental but absolutely beautiful part of the world mate it was like there was we were right on the coast it was in the the area where the old mosquito squadrons from the u.s navy used to hide and zip out and attack the japanese during world war ii so the the beautiful deep harbors that were full of fish it was a real tropical paradise mate so i had the best of both worlds i loved the time out there but uh didn't enjoy the time in moresby so much well on on the surface mate you've got a cracking start so you architect by trade you you're getting in-house experience from a developer and that sort of thing so you know i'm looking forward to where this is going to go to see whether or not that actually comes out to

fruition a little bit later but um after png mate what was your next move after that yeah so i went from new guinea to darwin so i spent a couple of years in darwin and had a great time up there there was lots of work happening and lots of building going on in darwin at the time a lot of the great developers we we did a lot of work for them unit developments and a whole bunch of others commercial buildings you name it and after that i then we probably bumped into each other there bush i spent 33 years in darwin uh it's it's a hell of a it's a lovely place to visit but after 33 years you kind of i think you're over it well darwin and png a bit similar mate they used to say to me that the only people who end up down they're all running away from something

and uh in the new guinea exercise they used to say that people that go there are either missionaries mercenaries or madmen and i'm still trying to work out which category i fit into mate but uh that that sort of was a pretty equivalent description for darwin but i had a had an awesome time there mate a lot of work going on it's a sort of place where as an architect you You know, in Adelaide, for example, it was more about who you knew rather than what you could do. But Darwin, if you had the ability and you were prepared to work hard, you got lots of opportunity.

So that's why I was attracted to the place. And I had a ball up there. It was a very social town and, you know, played indoor hockey and outdoor hockey like you did. Met some great mates up there. I then got attracted to Alice Springs to open an office for an architectural practice that was based in Adelaide. They were looking to expand and I heard about it

and I put my hand up, went to Alice to do that. I ended up starting my own architectural practice, I think I was in the early 20s at that stage, with another guy who was a fair bit older than me. And again, we were doing a lot of development work and that really was the trigger for us to do our own development, which my first entree into the serious property investment place and and and this is all the way back when so we're talking how long ago now uh this would have been mid 1980s okay so

so architect worked for developer and png worked for developers in darwin uh i guess you've got your own architecture practice in alice springs and then you go i can do this it looks easy absolutely and that's exactly what how hard can this be i mean i've been doing it for years this is dead set easy so there was myself and two other architects that we were part of the practice we said and we actually partnered up with a local developer to do a one into four apartment uh development uh and it was like oh this is going to be so good we're going to do something that's so much better than everything else that's in town and it was it was like the taj mahal of uh apartment developments there were there were three bedroom apartments corner block uh overlooking

your park it was it was it was the perfect exercise the the mistakes that let me talk about the mistakes we made uh number one we had no clear exit strategy number two we had no clear uh i'll call it the prenup but no clear shareholders agreement that that focused on how we were going going to get out and what happened if we didn't didn't have any of that we spent way too much money over capitalized beyond belief in terms of what the market would be because you know i often say to people now if you get into property you want to be in the sweet spot of of what prepared people prepare to pay and start there and work backwards in terms of which is a really really important thing that i want everyone to walk away with because it doesn't matter how perfectly you

run your project or how well uh i guess you've identified an easy site or i guess how much you get it exactly on budget if you can't sell it like you never get paid spot on absolutely spot on and the other thing i would say to that is uh plan for the worst and then expect the best so if you can't sell them and you end up having to hold them and rent them is that sustainable for you until such time as you can pass them on so which is what we ended up doing we ended up renting a bunch of them we sold them progressively over a period of time but we went through one of the one of the partners ended up in divorce so he wanted the fire sale it just became an absolute nightmare rob when i look back on it but some really good learnings that came out of that

because you know that's i tend to have that tendency of either diving in deep or not doing it at all and walked away from that with a lot of lessons that were very useful uh moving forward beyond that but uh certainly uh over capitalizing and not reading the market and if you're doing a development let's face it you're you're not looking at what the market's doing today you're looking what the market's doing in 12 or 18 months time and that can shift pretty substantially so you've got to be very conservative and really control the cost to make sure that the uh the the sale price with some profit in it is going to be sustainable at the time when you do want to pull the trigger on that and that that's the that's a massive mistake we made mate we just

thought oh well these are going to be so much better people are going to pay so much more for them but i often use the old holden analogy you know between the difference between a statesman and a belmont they're still holdens which is what the average punter thinks well that's a holden i'm only prepared to pay x for a holden we don't care whether it's a statesman or a belmont we're only going to pay that amount that's exactly how you need to think about property because look at the base common denominator. What are people paying for a three bedroom townhouse in that particular area at that particular time, and then work backwards to configure your cost to make sure that you can actually make profit at that level. Yeah, absolutely. So you mentioned lots of lessons

and you've touched on a couple of them, but what one lesson would you say is still living with you today from that particular project? Yeah, start with the end in mind. It's pretty much influenced everything i've done since that time mate so i get really crystal clear on what the end game looks like and uh be very conservative with that and worst case with that so that uh you know if the worst case happens you're still going to be okay uh that was very much the exercise and then formulate make sure that you actually have an agreement if there's four of us involved in that so that's like marrying four people pretty much that's that's the analogy i like to use and you have enough trouble when you marry one person, let alone

four, because we all have a change in... That's exactly right. That's exactly right. And when you're marrying four of them, I don't know how polygamists do it, mate. It's not my cup of tea. But getting really clear

and actually having a prenup or a shareholders agreement or a JV agreement or whatever you want to call it, that looks at the what-if scenario. So if this happens, this is what's going to happen. And do that at the start while you're still in love with each other and you've still got the rose colored glasses on because when it turns to poo uh people tend to take a very different view of life and it can get ugly and very expensive very quickly

absolutely i'd add to that that you whilst you want to capture all of that uh and and put it for every single exit strategy you can think of you know is someone going to get sick is someone going to die is you know does is the market going to change all sorts of things like that you know does somebody lose their job um the best contract is one that that you've gone through that you know is is there but sits in the top drawer and never gets looked at spot on absolutely spot on you have those provisions there so that you have to fall back on it you've already had the discussion but if you've done it well you'll never need to mate it'll end up in the waste bin at the end of the project but if you haven't had the conversation and had the hard conversations around all of those

what ifs then you're really setting yourself up for some expensive lessons so so how long were you physically stuck in that deal you said it went horribly wrong you had to hold on to them how long were you stuck in that before you had to unravel it or before yeah yeah well about a five-year period uh that before we were totally out of it uh we we tried to go down the road of of there was four of us so why don't we have one each but then then people start feeling well yeah but yours is worth more than mine and there's all of that stuff that goes into it as well mate because we haven't had the conversation so uh we we ended up doing that in the finish once one of the parties sold and got out the three remaining we ended up taking a property each and then i just waited for

the right time to to sell it and we basically fire sale at the at the finish mate we we lost some money on it but we we certainly learned a lot of very valuable lessons as a result of that i i can imagine that would have made you very gun shy towards the property development process moving forward uh and i guess that's going to bear out and i guess in the rest of the chat that we're going to have here but uh did you ever i guess have a second crack at property development or or i guess later on did you did you go for that more passive approach yeah a bit of a mix actually again this is one of the probably the core messages that is worth focusing in on it's about what is the right approach for the right time

given where you're at so you need to align where you're at in terms of your own investment journey and and you know i often talk about in the freedom formula my book i talk about the capital growth the cash flow curve and depending on where you're at on that capital growth the cash flow curve and what's happening in the market and what your risk appetite is and all of the factors that we need to feed into this that will tend to drive the type of property solution that you need to adopt at that time so yes the first couple of properties of ours were initially bought on the basis of and this i'm talking i often talk about my life being in two halves rob there's the ad which is the uh that's sorry there's a bc which is was before my early life crisis uh which is

when my marriage went belly up in my early 30s and then there's AD which is after the divorce and once I got back into the investment arena after the divorce with a very different mindset that was initially more about buy and hold but in saying that the property that I'm sitting in now that I'm talking to you from we picked this property up back in 97 98 for about 84 grand we actually did some major renovations on this particular property pretty much doubled its footprint we'd held it for about four or five years when when we did that the property is now worth just shy of a million bucks given what's happened in the last couple of years so weren't scared to get stuck into the renovation side we have done a one into two I did a corner block one

into two uh how long ago now about five years ago ish uh and have done a lot of new build property so again the architecture side of things means i'm not scared of building uh i and i have learned some lessons around the exercise about making sure that it's more about the numbers than is about the property and that's something that i probably want to reinforce that uh do your numbers and do your numbers well uh right from the get-go build it on paper first and make sure the numbers work and then the property falls out of that not not the other way around i see way too many investors focus purely on the property and the numbers become a secondary exercise that that's a recipe for disaster absolutely and we'll dive into that in a little bit more detail but you kind

of threw it i guess a throwaway line in there i guess the before crisis side of things and uh i want to dive into the fact that you know you're off to you know a a good start from a career uh you had a good crack at i guess having a development that didn't quite go to plan uh and then i guess like many of us uh i guess we i guess hit a wall and uh in your instance i think it was a divorce that actually hit um what happened in that in that spot there because i guess what we're trying to show our our audience is that hey these bad things happen uh but i guess it's the resilience that we have it's how we actually get out of these so let's dive deep in there if you're okay with it bushy and then uh we'll see we see how you crawled out mate

yeah and i'd love to make and i agree with you uh you know if if you've read the book the obstacle is the way uh which sort of goes back to the old stoic principles it's your uh biggest challenges in life that give you the biggest learnings and the biggest opportunities and it doesn't feel like that at the time uh in fact it feels very much the opposite at the time but uh when you reflect back on it uh i wouldn't be where we are today if it wasn't for those challenges that came along and you're right my biggest challenge was the uh downfall of my marriage and i've got absolutely no one to blame but myself from uh as i think i've touched on i was a bit of a workaholic and in my i learned early in life because i was that flat chested short ass uh punk chested runt

uh my only way of keeping up with everyone was to work harder than everyone else and that became pretty much a sort of a go-to approach for everything that I did from that point on and that's good to a point but it has its downfall so you know as an architect it can become extremely obsessive you know I was a miserable person as an architect actually because I've become very critical of the world and you know you're trying to design everything and control everything is pretty much the way it sort of leads you towards going and you know you're sitting in a restaurant and you'd be criticising the cornice or those chairs don't match, it becomes a very obsessive, critical sort of way of looking at life.

I was working, I was running a practice and running projects, so I had a fair bit on my plate. I was working 10 to 14 hours a day, seven days a week. I was married. I had my son during that stage. I was still in Alice Springs at that time. and no surprise uh my partner had enough and when i look back on it now i can't blame her at all i was an absent absentee father pretty much uh and i took it pretty hard i've got to say rob

because i being a country boy and brought up uh in that environment you know it was the old one wife and one bank for life sort of routine was pretty much the the upbringing so i took it pretty hard when the marriage went down and I pretty much withdrew for two years I call it my Howard Hughes years where I sort of crawled into a hole and I actually did my master's in business during that time that was purely an excuse to be honest to have a really good look at myself and look at what was I going to do differently from that point on so I had more counselling on myself at that stage to get my head set right because you know as I say I think sustainable success is a is a mix of self which is what's between your ears health which is your happy

habits and your daily disciplines that then build the determination and discipline that you need to be able to be successful with your wealth so that's really key so i without knowing at the time i immersed myself and i read every book uh that you could get your hands on at that stage and i'm in hundreds of books i'm still an avid reader uh but uh about the same time my good father who'd always been my role model he was also a bit of a workaholic his his body started to fall to bits so he had cancer and he had multiple strokes he actually spent the last 10 years of his life dribbling out of the side of his mouth paralyzed in a wheelchair with mum as a carer and i'll never forget him saying to me son and this is not long before he passed he looked me

on he said son it's about time you stopped working for money and started to get money to work for you and that really resonated because I'd always respected dad it pretty much became a mantra and about the same time another mate of mine dragged me along to a Robert Kiyosaki conference in Adelaide Robert Kiyosaki was actually in Adelaide at the time so I went along and I had a listen and again he said something that that still resonates with me today he said that the moment you make passive income a part of your life your life will change forever and that there was an absolute penny drop i actually call it my kiyosaki moment these days and then i read everything i could get my hands on here so rich dad poor dad i bought the cash flow

game because i wanted to get my family involved and understanding what was that that was all about and pretty much from that day onwards everything that we've done that's with my good wife now wife Sonia and I has been based on if it's not going to grow in value if it doesn't give you an income stream and it's not a saleable asset we're not interested so and that that flowed through what we invested in to what we did work-wise so I'd gone from pretty much an employee up until the the crisis from that moment on it became crystal clear I did have an architectural practice in partnership with a couple of people but you're still still not doing it by by your own essentially uh so from that point on uh we decided that we would uh i use a

expression now we became passive aggressive investors so we were very aggressive about pursuing anything that had a passive opportunity yeah so and clearly from what you've touched on uh i guess where you see the opportunity to actually force value onto the property through renovations or uh new builds and that sort of thing so you you kind of uh you're blending the the development world with the investment world uh opportunistically in that uh by the sound of it very much so very much so so that you know very quickly uh sonya and i decided and and i talk about now is that i call it the money madison uh we we decided that uh one of us would work and the other would build the wealth so it's the worker and the wealth builder and if you if you

familiar with that olympic bike race where you've got uh two riders riding as a pair one's going flat out around the track while the other one's sitting up on the on the bank waiting and then they come down they change over and the other goes hard sonya and i did the same thing so initially she was actually running a recruitment business at the time i got into share trading because we had zero that at 33 i had nothing mate i got out of my first marriage with an old beat up toyota and my cassettes that that was it uh so we had to literally start again so i thought i i know how i can put some money together quickly i'll day trade so i spent five and a half grand i borrowed the money actually to do a day trading course uh i traded cfds and that was an absolute roller

coaster ride i i had some pretty heavy losses but i managed to cobble enough money together to get our first deposit on the property and then we also decided once we started investing in in the property side of the equation uh we were looking at allied businesses that we could put our energy into and leverage off our skills so sonia started a property management business because we were so dissatisfied with the quality of the property managers that we had in our own properties we thought we could we can do this better so i went and got my real estate license and then sonia drove the business uh while she was doing that i actually went back and did some project management consulting for the department of health and looked after the health portfolio here in adelaide once

the rent roll had got up to a particular point and it was carrying it then i jumped in and started a finance breaking business because i learned very early that property is very much a game of finance and your access to finance and the cost of that finance can really make a massive difference to your ability to continue to acquire property and and the holding cost of that so i jumped on board into that exercise we end up then selling the rent roll and we're we're investing in properties all the way along this track by the way but uh one of the other key messages i guess i would like to in part with with your audience rob is that you need an income to create an income so you know i hear a lot of people talk about the need to you know become a full-time property developer uh that's

okay if you if you can get in bed with someone else who has the income that's going to allow you to borrow the money to put into the property exercise but for us we we recognize that we need one to be generating the income the other one to be creating the wealth and that that brought us to a point where we could sell a rent roll and now sonya and i work hand in hand in the property and it's very much a lifestyle business for us now we don't want to be a big business we get a lot of fulfillment from helping others on their journey and helping them to get really clear on what their strategy is based on who they are where they are and what they're they're trying to achieve and that's the essence of the living by design and freedom formula approach that we

now help people with mate we've got so many similarities in that story it's not funny like it's it's ridiculous the uh what you're calling the money medicine we did something similar in our household it was one person was cash flow the other one was cash cow uh you know different terminologies but the same thing uh i did uh i did foreign exchange trading and uh i guess what is called uh i'm trying to think what the uh i'm trying to think what the name of it called a covered call so it's a it's an option uh over a share that you then uh i guess on sell to other people so did a lot of it um uh equally uh enjoyed the same roller coaster um uh and uh i guess decided to step off a little bit uh about 80k lighter for the privilege uh in the process uh

so i think all of us that have been successful have gone through many instances where we've won we we need to make something work and you know when you get far enough down you go well it's time to time to step out of that because that clearly ain't it um until you finally find the one that sticks so so well done in finding the one that finally sticks mate uh in in in that process of of uh i guess doing that um for yourself at what was the point that you decided that hey there's actually a business in trying to help other people to step into this realm and show them show them the way so so you've got a business called know-how property uh so i guess when did that start what was the what was the i guess the segue that got you into that

business yeah i that's really good so uh the the predecessor to know how and i mentioned that uh i i got in got on board with with two partners in a finance broking business and they were finance gurus i knew nothing about finance so i knew i needed to align myself with people who really knew the ins and outs of it uh what i could bring to the table was the property knowledge So that became the heart of the triumvirate. And we built a really successful business at that point in time. But, and here's a big but for me, we ended up with a business that was controlling us, not us controlling the business. So we had 30 employees.

We had a lot of financial pressure. There's a lot of mouths you have to feed when you've got that many under the tree. luckily because i learned that lesson years ago we had a prenup with my business partners that we sit down we had a had a love fest for four days before we even started the business where we went right through all of those what ifs and we actually signed off on that agreement and it got to the point where we all sat down with each other one day and said we just don't want to do this anymore this is too hard we're back into working long hours and and everyone else is walking out of the business with money but but you know we're doing okay but not not

for the amount of time and energy we need to put into it so that old obsessive workaholic thing started to kick in again it's like nah i'm not doing this again so we actually pulled the pin and we all walked away mates uh with a it was a the easiest uh business divorce you could ever imagine we we still catch up with with each other for drinks and beers uh but but uh once we'd done that then we had the perfect opportunity with know-how to do what I'd always wanted to do and that is to share the information and knowledge because we you know we'd had a very successful journey in the property sphere ourselves and without the leaderships and business partners around that it always gets a little bit tricky I then had the the opportunity to start spreading

the word and and because the reason for that is that over the years a lot of a lot of people said oh bushy uh you know i'd love to do what you do can you can you teach me how to do it uh that's why i wrote the book uh that was my first entourage into moving from this one-to-one to a one-to-many type exercise and then uh i'm really keen i guess i get a lot of satisfaction rob probably as you you do out of sharing knowledge and and and seeing the the light bulb go off on other people's minds and then seeing their lives transform over a series of years it doesn't get any better than that for me absolutely um i like i like to think of it bushy that uh if you're at the top of the mountain the the view is very uh is very good uh but it's very lonely and the the

top of the mountain's quite kind of pointy and it's not very comfortable uh i guess where you're sitting but if you come down the mountain just a little bit uh i guess you can bring a few people up uh there's a lot more people that can actually share the view uh how much money do you actually need i guess we all we all want to live by design absolutely uh but a lot of us have delusions of grandeur as to what we think is financial freedom uh but in reality we don't need any of it spot on we must be simon's twins i'm sure rob because that that's the when people come to us to talk about property we say okay we're going to park property over there for a minute uh how much is enough that's that's question number one how much is enough how much is enough for you to live

the life you want to live the way you want to live it and you're when you actually drill down into that it's it isn't a massive amount so uh but if you spend the time and this is where i encourage everyone to actually take the time and work out what's your perfect day week month year look like how much income do you need to sustain that that then determines what the size of the nest egg that you need to generate that's going to create that income income flow once you're there job done and and the the biggest issue i see with a lot of investors in particular is it's um why are you doing it are to make money well how much for what what's it going to do because if you're not clear on that then you're also not very clear on what type of property you need to be investing in or

what type of development you need to be doing what sort of entity you need to be buying it in everything else falls out of what what that very clear definition of what the end result needs to be absolutely and you touched on it before it's a and it's a phrase i repeat often it's start with the end in mind if you know exactly where you want to go then the next part is to have a look at where you are and the difference between them is then a journey that you can actually map out just like a gps it's very easy gps needs to know where you are it needs to know where you're going and very easy when you go off track to be able to measure to bring yourself back on track um so totally we're doing almost the identical things but we're

doing it with a different vehicle so yours is more uh i guess long-term buy and hold ours is more i guess manufactured growth type approaches but we're doing the exact same mechanism uh for want of a better word um and this is what i love about property there is no one silver bullet or one one super solution that solves all problems it's about what is right for you and where you're at and where you're heading what your risk level is you know that sleep at night factor has got to be underpinning everything you do but if you if you do take some time to get clear on that and i go through chapter and verse that whole exercise in my book the freedom formula uh to give people a number of different ways of actually starting to put that together and then then actually coming

up with their own freedom numbers so you know that there's about five or six very key numbers that you need to know uh in relation to what that long-term exercise is and uh once you're clear on those then that the actual property strategy that you need to adopt because if we break a couple of those down your lifestyle income is the first one so how much do you need per year to to satisfy that lifestyle uh that then determines the nest egg number that the other really key number is the break free timeline so how many years before you want to be in that position because that duration will have a major impact on the sort of strategy you need so if you're looking at doing something in uh you know five to ten years you need to be much more active

and proactive in your approach so property development is is the uh probably the only vehicle that's going to allow you to do that in such a short time if you're more career focused and family orientated and you don't want to create a second job when you're investing you just really want to buy good quality properties that are going to grow in value over time and then transition them into a into an income flow at the other end then buy and hold can work uh for those that that really are time poor and and that's that's what we tend to focus on and helping those do that But we are moving into a time, Rob, where we've just seen the second highest property boom in the 230-year history of the country happen over the last few years thanks to COVID.

Now, that's effectively brought forward five or six years' worth of capital growth. So I've been saying to people now, if you're looking to achieve big results in 10 years on a buy-and-hold strategy now, it ain't going to happen. So you're going to need to get more proactive. You're going to need to look at anything from renovations at one end to full developments at the other to make that happen, depending on what your capacity and capability is and what your risk appetite is to make that happen. And of course, the other really big ingredient there is to make sure that you've surrounded yourself with an elite team that are good at each and every aspect of making that happen for you. And your only role, as I see as an investor, is to manage your managers to make sure that they're doing the right thing. You know, that old analogy of if, you know, if you're going to perform in an elite sport, if you wanted to try and beat the, I'm an AFL man, so if you wanted to beat the Melbourne Demons who won the premiership last year, you wouldn't rock up on the field yourself and try and beat those 18 specialists.

you're better off being the manager and the owner of the team and having a specialist on each and every position that are playing to your strategy and kicking your goals and your only role is to manage those people to make sure that they're actually doing things in your best interest absolutely now but between the two of us we're probably uh as i said the same framework but different execution models so it's probably good to uh i guess do a a bit of a rounding to say what of the options that actually exist for people so uh i guess fundamentally but i guess how i assess it is there's really only four reasons to buy a property so uh cash flow capital gains manufactured profit and lifestyle so uh where i think a lot of people go wrong is they don't know which

strategy they actually want to execute and they they might buy a lifestyle property and then turn that into investment property and then wonder why it's not performing or uh or they you know they want capital growth, but they've not assessed the area correctly for the capital growth. So you know, though, it's really about being very clear on what your strategy is. And, you know, for me, it's manufactured profit, that's, you know, forcing value on. But even then, it's dialing that in. But then there's three personality types to apply to those four properties. So

there's the passive investor, who, I guess, wants to, I guess, do a small amount of effort, research the right property, and then let the market do the heavy lifting. There's the active investor, which is, I guess, my end of the world, where, you know, we're doing this sweat equity to actually force value on. And then there's the bit in the middle, the semi passive. And this is where, I guess, there's both of us have got crossover clients where, look, they might have bought a property that, you know, some time ago had development potential, but wasn't profitable at the time. And now all of a sudden, the market, you know the city has grown towards it and it started to become in demand and all of a sudden

it is a developable site and they're sitting on this asset that they don't know how to do anything with uh you know that so that semi semi-passive approach might be well i might join forces with the developer to actually go and execute this for me and together we'll share the wealth in that or the other approach would be well i've built all this equity through my uh my passive approach How do I leverage that equity to actually accelerate that? And maybe I can have a developer leverage some of that funds that I've created and I can actually force that through. So there's really those three approaches on those four strategies. And that's a great framework.

And it's a framework that people need to spend some time getting their head around. And certainly talking to you or I will certainly point them in that direction because, as we both know, there is no one-size-fits-all with this, and it does change over time. But getting really crystal clear on what you're doing and why you're doing it rather than becoming – there's a lot of accidental investors out there, Rob. And I've seen a lot of them who buy a house to live in

and then they go to buy another one and then they'll say, oh, we'll turn that into an investment property. well there's no fundamental basis for that at all and and putting the filters through it to to look at which strategy you're adopting and then what are the key criteria that that type of property needs to make are really important if you're serious about uh you know advancing the cause as a result of that absolutely and and to be clear to our audience um every strategy works but it just doesn't work everywhere and it only works if you get bloody good at it spot on and so uh i guess when you choose whatever strategy it is whether it be capital gains whether

it be cash flow whether it be manufactured profit um what you choose will then determine where that's going to work and yeah that's that's probably the key is you got to start with that what am i doing first and then build up from that not the other way around not choose the area and then try to force something to happen in that area totally 100 agree and i think the other other key thing with that is that because i i always hear this argument about well i should i be pursuing cash flow or should i be pursuing growth now for for me uh you know again i talk about this in a fair bit of detail in the freedom formula but uh it's a very easy answer that exercise if if where you're heading if if we project forward based on the asset values you

have today uh based on growth rates and taking off inflation everything else if if that isn't going to reach the nest egg level that you need in the timeframe that you've decided on, that's going to generate the income flow that you're looking for, you're following a basic growth approach. So that's about either growing equity or manufacturing equity. Once the nest egg's projected to reach that timeframe, you're then into more of the cashflow exercise. And there's very different types of and styles of property you need to do at the cashflow end versus what need to do in the growth end so it's really important to get crystal clear because the ones that i feel sorry for are the ones who pursue this cash flow exercise from day one

and we you know if if you throw a rope around it the capacities for people are going to hit the ceiling at a point in time and the amount of properties that you can accumulate can accumulate and the amount of rent that you're going to achieve with those positive cash flow properties is never going to be enough to survive on so yeah there's a there's a distinct difference that i think between wealth creation uh which is the capital growth and i guess the the cash flow that you actually need to put food on the table and fuel in the car and send the kids to school and all those sorts of things and i think people try to put the order of those back to front uh and you know as soon as you start to do that then you start to hit those glass ceilings that

you're talking about you need more equity to get into a deal to generate that small amount of of cash flow uh or you go into uh high cash flow type areas that don't have any capital growth but they also don't have the fundamentals of the of the market that sit behind them uh you know mining towns and things like that but that uh you know it causes all sorts of pain so being very clear on what is uh and and as you touched on why uh start with why then look at the what and i often say go for growth and then convert to cash flow because that that's the progression we're talking about so if your if your timeline is short then you need to be active which means that that you're you're going to be going down the property development front if you've got a 15 years plus

and you simply don't have the time or you're too fearful about being too active then the buy and hold approach uh can work but in both of those it's going to get to a point where you need to convert the growth properties into a and uh tax effective income stream so there's a transition there so again i see a lot of investors who who have this thought that i'll just buy properties then i'll pay off the debt and then i'll live off the rent no it won't get you there if you if you go for growth either by manufacturing it or letting time that cannot the tax man do some of the heavy lifting over time it'll become a point around when you're looking to reduce how much you work we're going to need to transition that portfolio into a more uh tax effective income

stream and that means potentially different property solutions at that point in time as well yeah now in my world we we aim for the financial freedom before the lifestyle uh and we try to do that in a three to five year period uh if someone's trying to do that in their i guess a more passive approach what's the typical timeline that they're going to take uh if they go down that that traditional investment yeah so so i'm very conservative with this uh robin i'm a conservative uh investor by nature and i've done a lot of research on this uh it's about 15 years so you need need if you're going to take a very passive approach to buying good quality properties in growth areas that are tightly held and allowing capital growth uh the tax

and the tenant to do the work you need to be budgeting for 15 years to do that if you're wanting to make it happen and you might get lucky and do it in 10 but it's more luck than good management to be honest because if you look at the growth cycles around the country over the last 30 years it takes about 15 years to go through a full cycle so but it can happen in eight to ten years but it's but i'll be banking on 15. and if you're wanting to generate uh equity and and manufacture growth early in that then you you need to be adopting your approach rob yeah and you touched on also a little earlier in the chat pushy that uh because of the the market that we've just gone through the artificial boom that's been forced upon us uh it brought forward four or five years

worth of that capital growth so i'd anticipate anyone trying to get into i guess i guess a more traditional investment approach right now that 15 years is probably going to step out a little bit longer like how far out do you think that's probably going to happen in the next little bit do you think it's going to take a little longer for everyone or yeah potentially i i just think you've got to be clever about location now rob and and as we as we know we're talking about the buy and hold piece about 80 percent of the growth comes from the location not from the property itself so uh the real homework that now needs to be done and i i say to people you've got to adopt a borderless approach to the exercise don't think that buying or building property in your backyard

is going to get you there because the chances of your location being in those top growth areas over the next 15 to 20 years is very unlikely because there still will be locations that you can can do that in 15 years but you're going to have to have people around you who know what where they are and why they are before you dip into that exercise so hence why i say surround yourself with some independent and elite professionals don't go for the one-stop shops because there's no checks and balances in that equation. But if you've got a team that can actually identify those A-grade areas and A-grade properties, you'll do okay.

You're just going to be a lot harder to find. Yeah, absolutely. And you mentioned the borderless approach. There's many advantages to that. I guess you're exposing yourself to different market cycles at different times. So, you know, as you follow the different property clocks around the place, you'll be able to pick the sweet spot in, you know,

coming at 7 o'clock at the clock. and pick up the upswing and then move to another area where the where the upswing is about to happen next so you can take advantage of that process um but uh i guess i'm a little bit more selfish in that and i go well if i'm actually distributing across many uh states that i'm i'm spreading all of my properties across uh lots of different land tax uh type initiatives and i'm minimizing a lot of my land tax because i get a threshold here and a threshold there and a threshold somewhere else and i guess that's equally as important i guess the holding costs of these things as well so absolutely and and if you're looking at buy and hold the structure of

what you do is is just as important so you know we spend a lot of time because the devil's in the detail here in making sure that the properties are at least covering themselves at cash flow neutral that you're not going to retire on the rent but if the property is covering itself and not impacting on salary savings or lifestyle then then you're going to be able to last the distance because you know if we're talking 15 years then you want to make sure you set this property up in the right way to enable you to get there because as we all know that over I think the last ABS stats that I heard were 54% of first-time investors sell a property in the first five years and a lot of that is they haven't spent the time getting right down to the nitty-gritties on how

much per week is that property actually going to cost me to hold once every cost involved in buying and then holding that property is put into the mix well part of what we help investors do is build it on paper first before you even start and get a very clear picture on exactly how those numbers work so you're going in with your eyes open yeah so in summary it's uh know what you want to do uh know why you want to do it um use those two then determine uh where you're going to do it uh and more specifically do it by design so you can actually get out that uh i think whether you're going down your approach or my approach those fundamentals are still very very sound irrespective and it's really where's your risk appetite sit and otherwise as to what you know

what best sits with you totally totally and then weave in there what your actual capability to make that happen is because that's that's going to differ and if you can't do it on your own then you've got to be creative in terms of the mechanisms that you can align yourself with others that that may not have the borrowing capacity may have equity and vice versa to start making things happen to increase the portfolio if that's what you need to do yeah very good so mate if uh if any one of my audience wants to reach out to you and have a bit of a chat about i guess your approach to things uh know how property is the place uh what's the best way for them to actually engage? Yeah, really easy. Just jump on the website, knowhowproperty.com.au. You can just

book an appointment. You just hit the purple button. There's a number of ways that we can interact. We start off with a conversation. It's a pathways conversation, really. So we get a bit of an understanding of where you're at, what you're trying to achieve. And then we pretty much take it from there. The one thing that I will add, I guess, Rob, is that something that's a little bit unique about what we do is that we pretty much become your orchestra leader in terms of the property particularly for the buy and hold stuff so we'll help you get really crystal clear on that strategy in terms of lifestyle finance strategy property strategy we'll orchestrate the finance around that because we've got a breaking team that makes that makes that happen but the

piece that is a little bit unique about what we do is the orchestra leader role so once we've helped write your life symphony uh we'll then uh organize the right instruments with the right players at the right time and then we'll sit on your side of the table and actually coordinate their input but also vet their input to make sure that what they're actually coming up with whether that be the accountant the uh the buyer's agent the project manager if it's a new build the property managers the quality surveyors all of the key players are part of that we'll actually uh be your be the client's extra set of eyes ears arms and legs to make sure that what's actually being put on the table is actually truly in the best interest and actually going to satisfy

what the client's needs are because the area that i and i've seen this a little bit with buyers agents unfortunately buyers agents have a in particular have a vested interest in trying to get a quick sale because if they don't get a sale they don't get paid and that can start to color uh the sort of stuff that they're putting in front of you so if you've got someone like yourself or like myself and i've got a senior property assessor on our team we will actually vet that in the context of the client strategy and make sure that what's being suggested meets the mark so we we've got a second layer of due diligence in terms of a macro mid-chrome and a micro level that we then apply to properties to make sure that it's actually ticking all

little boxes from the client side. And clients pay us a fee to do that, obviously. But it means that we can really add some value to make sure that the property solutions that they end up investing in are actually going to achieve the results that they're hoping it will. Yeah, absolutely. If nothing else, it's an insurance policy to make sure that things don't go horribly wrong. So worst case scenario, you get reassurance that you're on the right path and best case scenario, you throw away a couple of dud sites that you would have gone into otherwise and you know you're not waiting another five years because you made that mistake so spot on we call ourselves the John West of property yeah Rob you know that old John West

ad where it's the fish that they reject that make John West the best well we reject a lot of property because they you know we're pretty fussy and you know like you we wouldn't suggest a client invest in a property unless we were paid to invest in it ourselves so if it isn't hitting all of our marks as far as that macro, micro, micro level is concerned, it's a no, and keep looking. So because it's very easy to buy a property, but it's difficult to buy a good one. Absolutely. And for anyone who's not yet sure on what it is that they want to do and that sort of thing, I'd highly encourage them to, I guess, get involved in your Get Invested podcast. I guess, have a listen. I guess there's a back catalogue of a gazillion stories,

a lot of lessons learned along the way give you the insights as to whether or not you want to go down any any one particular path uh and uh i guess from there i guess they can then i guess know their best steps in how to go forward um uh plus your reality talk mate so uh i guess i don't know the link for the reality talk but if they search for reality talk they'll find you in any places just just go to realty.com.au and and go to the channel section uh for the realty talk show uh they're good sound bites so you know they're five or ten minute segments uh where you can just get a taste if something really grabs your appetite then you can dive a bit deeper but uh it gives you a great opportunity to get exposed to a whole wealth of different insights disruptors changes

and innovations in the industry that that may be useful to you very good but any parting words of wisdom that you would like to give uh our audience uh just to reinforce what you you've said rob and that is start with the end in mind and get really clear around what property is going to do for you because i often say that you know if kebabs gave me a better growth and a better yield i'd invest in kebabs but property just happens to be the the best vehicle in australia to make it happen but get crystal clear on exactly what the end goals need to be and then everything will work back from that don't focus on the property the property is actually the last thing you need to be focusing on because the property will be informed by the decisions you make once you

decide what that in game looks like so start with the end in mind yeah mate i can i can uh i can attest to the fact that i have invested in many kebabs at many many early hours of the morning and so that's probably a fantastic uh place to actually part this uh bushy so mate it's been an absolute pleasure uh having you on board and uh i guess i can't wait for us to catch up again Likewise. Really appreciate your time. Thanks, Rob. See you, folks. Bye for now. To get a summary of all this investment gold in the show notes,

just email me on hello at khgroup.com.au. That's H-E-L-L-O at khgroup.com.au. Or check us out at www.bushymartin.com.au forward slash getinvested. I look forward to joining you next week for another episode of the Get Invested podcast. So thanks for listening. And as always, dream as if you live forever and live as if you die tomorrow.