Property Hub - Investment Insights & Inspiration - Get Invested: Kieran Clair on the value of valuations

Episode Date: May 28, 2021

As a property investor, your biggest assets are equity and borrowing capacity. So property valuations are absolutely critical for property investors to grow their portfolios and have success. But why do we see such wide variation in valuations between buyers, agents and even among professional valuers? On a $500,000 property it’s not uncommon to see an $80,000 variation across two or three different bank valuations. This is because we live in the time of rational tangible measurement, where you don’t necessarily want to be right, but you fear being wrong, so this reduces everything to the lowest arse-covering denominator and builds in conservatism. So if you want to be successful as a property investor, you need to start thinking like a professional property valuer - with your head rather than your heart. And there is no better person to help you with this than our guest Kieran Clair. Kieran had over two decades of hands on experience as a property valuer and investor with one of Australia’s leading valuation companies, before becoming an award-winning journalist.  He’s the former editor of Australian Property Investor magazine, a national board member of the Property Investors Council of Australia (PICA) and he’s a regular commentator on property markets across radio, television, print and digitals outlets. Kieran helps other property experts grow their influence as co-founder and director of Bricks & Mortar Media – a business that helps create content and media opportunities for some of Australia's best known and most prolific property personalities and organisations. In our engaging discussion, Kieran reveals: How property valuers think and the set of rules that they have to operate under. He outlines the ‘carn’ defence.  We chat about what approaches you need to adopt in relation to valuations. He demystifies and debunks some of the perceptions of property valuers and the media. And much more. Given the importance of thinking like a property valuer to your investment success, Kieran provides a rare behind the scenes view of the world of valuation and unpacks all of the key valuation ingredients that will be important to you in the future. And if you want to hear more from Kieran and other property industry leaders on all of the tips and tricks to successful property investment, join me every week on Australia’s longest running and most popular property show, Real Estate Talk at www.realty.com.au.  Before we get into today’s enlightening chat with Kieran, if you’re ready to find out how investment can support your growth goals and create the life you were meant to live, join me in our unique KnowHow Property Freedom Flight program, where I’ll personally guide you through my proven process for property investment success. To book your ticket or find out more, click here https://knowhowproperty.com.au/freedom-fighters. Kieran's book recommendation: Perfume: The Story Of A Murderer by Patrick Suskind 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.

2003 was a rocketing market and people are saying that this one's similar yeah you know trying to keep up um with values is is really very difficult unless you are right on the you know right at the front of that wave you know about each sale property owners people in the industry probably feel like um value is uh i don't know many dictators in a way but you're walking into houses that are under contract you have some idea and by the time the 30-day contract's done the market's gone up another you know one percent yeah so it's it is tough what do you do in those situations i think as a valuer you will tend to try and support contracts um within reason but there are some hard and fast rules about valuation and speculation isn't one of them you've got to

value a house on a certain date the sales can't be older than three months well six months i suppose with flexibility but they locked them within three months they had to be within a few hundred meters of the subject property they had to be arm's length transactions etc etc etc so someone might come through um for a house in in suburban brisbane um and the house might actually be have potential for i don't know a small subdivision or something like that but the rule come through from the bank you have to value this as a house site like you can't take because it's a simple valuation. We just need it done. We don't want any complexities around it. So we need this valuation done as is, where is. And in that case, maybe that's not necessarily highest and

best use. So those sorts of things can end up being a bit of a problem. There are some very rigorous rules around what evidence you can apply and how you apply it. That said, that's in its purest form because a bank wants to know once the house is finished, if I stick it back on the market what will i get for it yeah if i have to to retrieve that money from the borrower so you were always trying to comply but it lost that kind of elasticity to be able to use use a bit of intuition about valuation and the market and that was a bad thing and i know that there'll be a lot of peoples uh out there whose contracts will fall over or will have to tip in substantially more money to back themselves in a fast-rising market because valuations can't stack up to what's being

paid. 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

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What are your biggest assets as a property purchaser, investor or owner? If you've been listening to Get Invested for any length of time, you'll know that your biggest assets are equity and borrowing capacity. And how is your equity determined? By the valuation of the property. But what is the value of a property? How do you determine it? And why is your perception of the value of your home or a property you're looking to buy often different to a real estate agent, which is also different from a bank valuer? Why is there often a gap between what

you've paid for a property and what the bank thinks it's worth? Today, we're going to delve into these questions by continuing the discussion on the concept of value that we started in the last two episodes with Mark Carter. Last week, we considered value from an investment perspective in the context of intrinsic value. This week, we'll delve into the murky world of intangible value versus tangible value. And we're going to drill down into how different approaches to value affects the world of property. And to set the scene, we're going to continue to draw on some of the great work done by Rory Sutherland in his books Mind Hacking and Alchemy. Sutherland, quite rightly, has an issue with the fact that we live in a world which now attempts to make everything look rational and scientific.

Because as soon as you give anyone the idea that what they're doing should be scientific, whether it be in business or government or even in property, they immediately hearken back to their time at school and they think, I remember science. It was a time when everything had a single right answer and if you weren't right, you were wrong. Unfortunately, the idea that trying to make real life things purely scientific and economically rational and logical in this way

may be leading us badly astray. Sutherland starts his book by giving us a good example against rationality with a very simple thought experiment about how a rational person might think about competing with Coca-Cola where you'd sit in the boardroom and you'd go OK, for about 120 years or so now Coke's been the best-selling cold non-alcoholic drink in the world apart from water

So how can we get a bit of that action? and the three logical people sitting in the room would say well it seems to me that what we need to do is to produce a drink that tastes nicer than coke costs less than coke and comes in a really big can so people get great value for money now no one's going to get fired if you tried that approach and failed

because in today's rational world you never get fired for being logical we've developed a fundamental bias in our decision making that if you do something logical and it fails you keep your job but if you do something illogical or emotional and it fails you're dead so what has emerged is that we have a very strong bias not towards making good decisions but towards making decisions that are very easy to defend and so in this case the natural inclination of anybody in a business meeting is to say okay we want this drink it needs to taste nicer than coke cost less than coke and come in a really big bottle and everybody would go along

with that logical plan and you'd go and research it and people would say yes this tastes very good In fact, I might even say it tastes better than Coke. But the problem is, no one's actually succeeded with that approach in more than 100 years. In fact, one of the only drinks to take a chunk of Coke's market share is Red Bull, which, in my opinion, tastes like shit, it costs a lot more than Coke, and it comes in a tiny can. The complete opposite of what you'd expect with the rational, objective approach. Why? Because the logical approach ignores our unmeasurable emotional and psychological drivers of value.

When we're trying to value or improve something generally, there's an engineering-style rational and logical approach, and then there's an emotional psychological approach. And because of the dominance of maths and science in our early education, we tend to regard the logical engineering-style approach as honest, decent and fair. because it improves objective metrics while we regard the more intangible, psychological and emotional approaches as a bit of a con.

And unfortunately, when this is taken to extremes, it creates a very dangerous and false dichotomy. Let's take our concept and experience of time as an example. The fact that humans don't react to time objectively, as proven in some of our common phrases like it was the longest 10 minutes of my life or time flies when you're having fun reinforces that our perception of time is not linear like that of a metronome or a ticking clock. Whether someone feels like a long time or something feels like a short time is dependent on lots of things including

the mood we're in. It's also worth remembering that almost all scientific units of measurement of time, distance, weight etc. are independent of human perception. And our experience of temperature is another good example. According to Sutherland, when units of measure of temperature were first being introduced, there was some debate about introducing a scale of temperature that would actually give consideration to human perception of the experience of temperature. but unfortunately the objective scientists won out and if you've ever traveled to america you remember that american weather forecasts generally say it's 73 degrees but it feels like 68 so this is an acknowledgement that what a temperature is and how it feels to us aren't

quite the same thing because it depends on wind chill humidity and loads of other conditions and similarly nearly every scientific unit is perceived by an objective measuring device not as perceived by a human and the way we perceive things is hugely different to what conditions actually are. This almost universal attempt to make everything look rationally scientific may be quite problematic because one of the noticeable things over the last 15 to 20 years, particularly since the dominance of the spreadsheet, is you can't do anything unless you have an exact case in advance on what's going to happen and how it's going to work and to what extent it's going to pay off. The only problem with this in a complex and unknowable world with

a very high degree of uncertainty is it completely prevents you from doing anything which is probabilistically worthwhile, but not predictable or measurable in advance, or not attributable in hindsight. Similarly, the value of anything is reduced purely to the tangible, with the intangible being discounted or ignored. This leads to conservative lowest common denominator ask-covering measurable numeric approaches to just about everything. And in this way, costs are much easier to quantify than opportunities are because costs come out of something we know from the past and can recognise

while opportunities in the future basically come out of the blue. So one of the reasons we appear to have become worse at innovating particularly in big corporations and governments is that we've become good at working out the costs of things but when something's unquantifiable like an opportunity we immediately back away because once there's a degree of uncertainty even if probabilistically doing something looks like a good idea

once there is real uncertainty, once you can't quantify the benefit we lose interest completely because we can't put it on the spreadsheet. But the reality is that human behaviour and our concept of value is a massively complex system where there are feedback loops and interdependencies and emergent properties more or less just about everywhere. Now an area where simplified rational logical models of the world have been created in an attempt to measure the unmeasurable and try to make the intangible tangible

is in the field of economics, which has an almost excessive influence on government policy and as a consequence on our lives in general. And as Sutherland suggests, economic forecasts have predictive power that is somewhere between water divining and palmistry. And yet, because economists provide people with unambiguous certainty, however inaccurate it might be,

they're incredibly popular in policymaking because they can provide a definitive answer to what should be treated as a murky problem. And Sutherland goes further to suggest that classical economists tend to assume that everybody makes decisions in an atmosphere of perfect information and perfect trust, with stable, transitive preferences. And on this basis, they assume that everybody already knows exactly what they want, they know exactly how much utility they're going to derive from buying something, and they therefore know exactly how much money it's

worth, and that the value of the thing is unaffected by anything other than the thing itself. And this has in turn led to what has become known as the quantitative fallacy where everything has to make sense, everything has to be measurable, everything has to be quantifiable and that's based on the assumption that life is like physics where all the important metrics that determine the outcome of something are numerically available and you have all the information required to understand the condition and it can be expressed in one, two or three simple units and their interrelation. But as Friedrich Hayek revealed in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech some years ago, if you think about human behaviour, there are hugely important things in human

behaviour which don't have a simple unit measure. They don't have a mathematical expression. for example there isn't a simple unit of measure for irritation or annoyance or regret or disdain or insult or on the flip side or on desire or beauty or any of those things which often drive our behavior they just aren't mathematically expressible so the idea that you can create this mathematical model of human behavior as though humans were like robots is basically absurd But there isn't a metric for hearts and minds and emotions. We're forced to pick what happens to be numerically available, which may be a completely irrelevant or misleading measure

that doesn't capture the essence of what's really important. And in parallel with this, among the very fundamental findings in psychology, is that we don't really know what we want, nor do we know or accurately understand why we do the things we do or value what we value and that most of human conscious reasoning is actually an act of post-rationalization. We essentially do and value things instinctively and then construct plausible sounding stories to explain them after the event. And in concert with this,

we don't really have a concept of the value of anything except in comparable context. The idea of rational utility which pervades economics isn't really accurate because the same thing can be valued as either good or bad entirely dependent on our frame of mind at the time or what we're comparing it to. All of this points to value being subjective

as opposed to objective. And a good analogy of this is a restaurant, where the idea that a good restaurant purely depends on the quality of the food is a bit of a nonsense. The quality of the food multiplied by the setting and the context and the service and the experience and the expectation is what influences our value of a great meal. The idea that it's only about what comes out of the kitchen and not at all about what sits in your head, is clearly missing the point. In this way, something that's really good can be badly presented, and consequently isn't valued as good at all.

You can have a kitchen producing Michelin-starred food, but if it smells wrong, or if one of the tines in your fork is slightly out of alignment, or the service is grumpy, or you're not even led to expect that the restaurant is particularly good, you can completely ruin the effect. On a similar note wine tastes better if you pour it from a heavier bottle and all of this is the way we perceive the world as a whole. But increasingly we're getting stuck on what Sutherland describes as sat-nav thinking. Sat-navs are very good at optimising one thing what is the fastest possible journey to a desired destination. However the problem here is that sometimes we end up optimising the wrong thing.

For example, a sat-nav has no concept of taking the scenic route. And this rational, tangible measurement approach, inculcated through artificial intelligence and online automation, is now permeating the decisions that we make. Let's look at the world of property. From the property research and buy perspective, what we value and the choices we make have become hugely biased by the way that choice environments are now designed.

As humans, we often don't notice the choices that we don't notice, strangely enough. For example, if we bought out the way we select and buy property, Picasso paintings would be really cheap. Let me explain. The way we buy property nowadays when we're searching the web is to fill in the place or the suburb first, then the price range, then the number of bedrooms, etc, etc. and all of these search fields contain a lot of things

which happen to have a kind of numerical definition. In this way, we focus and obsess about the things that are easily quantifiable and then we end up with five or six homes and we buy the nicest one of those. In this way, the style and beauty of the property doesn't even get a mention. Now, if we bought art the same way,

we'd start by saying that we'd like a painting in landscape format, about two metres wide by a metre high, mostly blue with a little bit of green, and we like to feature three cows and a tree in it. Under those conditions, Picasso's paintings will be cheap because we've left the value of the artist and the quality of the artistry too low down on the value decision-making tree.

So under this approach, I think we need to introduce a scoring system similar to wine tasting ratings that puts a high value on the intangible nature of beauty, style, proportion and aesthetics. And we insert this as a checkbox at the top of the property search web form. Now you can hear the frustrated architect in me coming out. Now this leads us back to the reasons why property valuations, which are absolutely critical to property investors in terms of buying and adding properties,

often demonstrate such wide variation between buyers, agents and even amongst professional valuers. It's not uncommon on a $500,000 property to see an $80,000 variation across two or three different bank valuations. Why? Because we live in the time of rational tangible measurement where you don't necessarily want to be right but you fear being wrong. So this reduces everything to the lowest common denominator and it builds in conservatism. So if you want to be successful as a property investor, you need to start thinking like a professional property valuer and start thinking with your head rather than your heart. And there's no better person to help you with this than today's guest, Kieran Clare. Kieran enjoyed over two decades of

hands-on experience as a property valuer and investor with one of Australia's leading valuation companies before becoming an award-winning journalist. He's the former editor of the Australian Property Investor Magazine, a national board member for PICA, the Property Investors Council of Australia, and he's a regular commentator on property markets across radio, television, print, and digital outlets. Kieran helps other property experts to grow their influence now as co-founder and director of Bricks and Water Media, a business that helps create content and media opportunity for some of Australia's best known and most prolific property personalities and organisations. Now in our engaging discussion today, Kieran

reveals how property valuers think and the set of rules that they have to operate under. He outlines the Kahn defence, so keep an ear out for that. We chat about what approaches you need to adopt in relation to valuations. And he demystifies and debunks some of the perceptions of property valuers and the media generally. And of course, we talk about a lot more. Given the importance of thinking like a property valuer to your investment success, Kieran provides a rare behind-the-scenes view of the world of valuation and unpacks all of the key valuation ingredients that will be important to you in the future. And if you want to hear more from Kieran and other property industry leaders on all of the tips and tricks

to successful property investment, join me every week on Australia's longest running and most popular property show, Real Estate Talk, on www.realty.com.au. Before we get into today's enlightening chat with Kieran, if you're ready to find out how investment can support your growth goals and create the life that you were meant to live, come and join me on our unique Know How Property Freedom Flight program, where I'll personally guide you through my proven process for property investment success. To book your ticket or to find out more, click the link in the show notes at knowhowproperty.com.au forward slash freedom fighters, or just visit knowhowproperty.com.au. Now, enjoy my great chat with Kieran Clare.

welcome back freedom fighters now in the world of property the two most criticized and often blamed yet generally misunderstood professions for all the issues and ills in the game are valuers in the media but is this really justified and what's the real story well today we're going to find out as we do a deep dive with active property investor and leading property media and public relations consultant, Kieran Clare. He spent decades as a property valuer before switching to property journalism and the media. Now, I'm lucky enough to know Kieran from the time I spent with him on PICA, the Property Investors Council of Australia. So welcome, and let's get invested, Kieran.

Let's do it, Bushy. Why not? Absolutely, mate. Mate, for those who don't know who you are, just give us a quick rundown on what you do and, more importantly, mate, why you do what you do. For those two people who don't know, I'm kidding. Well, who am I? So you've wrapped me up pretty nicely there. I'm someone who has a deep passion for the property sphere, born of of being the son of someone who is a who is a passionate property person

and but I found that I probably wasn't comfortable in that professional space even I gave it a pretty good nudge as you'll find out but but more so probably liked the idea of being able to talk and communicate with people and so you know combining those two loves I've got this fantastic opportunity which came to me fairly late in life to um to go into the space that was property media but but also now into a space where um i'm a business owner i get to control um my day i get to control um how i spend my time and um it's really enjoyable and sort of you know at the grand old age of 51 sort of think i finally found my groove if you know what i mean i do i do So the sort of big underlying why that's attached to that, mate, have you sort of put any thought around that?

Why I do what I do. I suppose I do mostly what I do because I love it. I really enjoy the experience of – I mean, I enjoy the property experience. It's brought me a whole lot of reward, not just financial, just some huge rewards personally. But also, I really just enjoy communicating and being part of the story with people. And I also feel like, probably like most people do, I feel like I've got some sense of integrity and value that helps me be part of the conversation in a way that, you know, that sort of thing about, you talk about people being able to be trustworthy and having a good agenda about

things. I like being part of this whole environment, but also being probably one of those players within the industry who doesn't have a bad agenda about the industry. I just really want people to understand, love property as much as I do. I mean, you know, I don't make any more money if someone buys a property or doesn't buy a property or takes my advice or doesn't take my advice, but I love the conversation. Yes.

Yeah, it's a really good point, mate, because you're sort of, in a way, you're standing outside observing and you're helping people to communicate messages in a better way and helping them to target the audience of people they want to be talking to, but you're not influenced by that. You're really acting as the amplifier in that regard, and that's quite a rare position to be in, and really gives you a more independent, transparent look at really what is going on and where it's heading, I would have thought. Yeah, yeah, it's good.

I think there's – and it's probably that sort of thing that pervades a lot of what I've chosen to do professionally. I mean, as a valuer, you sort of were in that role of being a filter between clients and banks and the market, sort of trying to cut away the white noise and feel like that you were working, you know, with value in its purest form. And in the same way, I think when we got into the media space, I think the media plays a really important role in being a filter and when applied properly, a filter of integrity. So it's really nice to be working in that area. I'm not much of a salesman, Bushy, so I probably wouldn't have made a decent quit as an agent or anyone like that.

Anyway, so, you know, I occupy a space in this industry that I really enjoy. Yeah, and I think the key words that I'm picking up from both your involvement as a value around the media is the filter piece. And we'll come back to that later in the discussion because it's certainly something – I think the filter's evaporated in a lot of areas of the media in particular. and having a voice of someone who understands the industry, who's got their hands dirty with the industry and then can provide some educated filter to a lot of the noise that's currently floating around the place is something that we need to see more of.

But, mate, I'd love to backtrack now, if we can, right to the beginning of your journey and sort of get a sense of where you've invested your time, energy and money along your uh life plan so far and go back as as early as you can remember because often our parents and you've mentioned your dad already in relation to his influence um uh i'm guessing an influence in relation to property finance and property development at some stage whether that might have pushed you away initially and then drawing you back again later on who knows which is often that was my case so so we'll be interested to see your thoughts on

that but uh yeah can you take us through we've invested your time and your money what you've learned from it what are some of the challenges and issues you've had and how that's led you to where you are now yeah absolutely as long as you promise to pull me back in line if i disappear anywhere but you have a tendency to do that um if i was thinking back i i my dad um he's no longer no longer around um passed away in 2011 but he was he was absolutely my my hero he um he was one of those sort of big hearted um incredibly generous uh individuals he's sort of like who his word was his bond um and you know unfortunately it's it's when you're no longer here that you probably realize how fully appreciate you are i mean it was standing room only at dad's funeral

and it was people from generations who came to see him off um so i always remember my dad affectionate man you know he wasn't he wasn't blustery he wasn't full of bull or anything like that and um i remember him working in sort of the real estate he had a real estate license um he wanted he was the sort of bloke who always wanted to uh more for his family and a typical uh 19 uh you know mid-1900s dad you know looked after the finances looked after the family his job was to make sure there was food on the table and, you know, don't you worry about any problems that might come your way.

I mean, my memories of my dad were always things like dad, unfortunately, as an entrepreneur, as a property entrepreneur, wasn't as successful as he wanted to be. He dabbled in a few projects around the place, did a couple of developments. Some of them went pretty well. And a couple of them, you know, a turn of the market and overextension on your borrowing and suddenly he was working pretty hard to keep his head above water, which is probably a common theme you'd find when you talk to people whose parents were involved in property development and speculation.

um i remember a period in the 70s when dad and and mum sort of said oh look we're we're going to sell the house and move up to mckay and and um we ended up living in a sort of a fibro shack on the beach up in mckay which was the best time of my life i would have been all of all of 10 at that stage you know little known to me is that that they'd had a tough run financially and and um Dad being the way he was, he was determined to pay back each of his debtors. So rather than declaring bankruptcy and writing off, you know, debts, Dad worked hard to make sure that everyone got the dollars they were owed, which, of course, you know, as hard as that was for him, I'm sure,

and I knew very little of it because he was a pretty protective bloke. You know, years later, when I started working in this industry and going forward, I would meet people who recognised my surname and fondly recall my father to me, you know, stories that I knew nothing of him. So he's, as you can hear, he's a big influence on me. Yeah. Yeah. I'm interested in while we're talking about that because you sort of, as you say,

you probably didn't realise at the time that perhaps he'd overextended himself in some of the property development stuff. Did that even by osmosis or by learnings at a later point influence you in relation to your attitude to property? Look, it probably did to some degree. I mean, you know, sometimes I think it made me, look, for want of a better word, Bushy, and it's pretty funny for someone who writes for a living, sometimes I get stuck for a better descriptor. But in a way, it's maybe made me a little more ruthless in protecting my interests. And I don't mean that in a bad way. I think that deals are good deals when everyone walks away happy i know that you know some people are a fan of tv shows that that uh maybe talk about wall street types might say you know no one walks away from a deal

happy but i i think i think that um i think that uh uh it's good when sort of both parties walk away in a good way but i sort of saw my dad by the same measure a couple of times probably get taken advantage of and um so i'm sort of very i'm probably a little more cautious in making sure that um the people are treated fairly um including myself so i would say that i'm not the sort of person who likes to compromise um too easily if i feel like someone is is trying to take advantage of something has it affected has affected your trust do you find it uh difficult to trust people or not no no look i'm pretty no look i think i i don't think it's affected the way i trust people it's just that sort of thing where i i tend to uh double check myself so you know if someone was

buying a look a typical example of someone if i'm selling a property you know regardless of kind of my um my uh background and property valuation i triple check my my figures and my my assessments I make sure that, you know, if someone's putting in an offer, where's it coming from? Is it genuine? What is the backdoor? Could there be a backdoor agenda? Those sorts of things. I want to make sure that the deal is good for everyone involved, including me, because, you know, I've got a family to take care of as well as everybody else.

So I think it's important when you do these sorts of things in life to make sure that you're looking after everyone involved in a deal. The one-sided deals don't sit very well with me, I've got to say. Great to hear, and never should they. And later in the discussion, I might sort of dive into, when you're talking about that sort of triple-checking process, the sorts of thoughts you go through and the sorts of mental checklists that you go through to say, well, yes, this is a good deal or no, it's not a good deal for these reasons. If you're happy to share that, that would be pretty useful, I reckon, mate.

Yeah, sure, sure. Okay, so having fun on the beach in Mackay, I'm guessing, or there for a period of time, where did that go to? Yeah, yeah, I didn't wear shoes for a couple of years up there. It was great, but when I came back and went to the private school in Brisbane, I kept getting blisters. So, you know, we did that and things turned around and got back home and sort of, you know, settled back into a more normal life. Dad ended up not just property.

He was a finance guy. And as I probably indicated, you know, he was good with his networks. He was a very personable bloke. So old school kind of finance bloke worked for Asanda and Mercantile Mutual and a few others like that and was the sort of bloke who could probably write his budget in the first six hours each year because he'd make several phone calls to contacts he'd had for the last three decades, you know. This was in the time of the long business lunch, of course, too, Bushy. I remember those.

Yes, so do I. What a distant memory, but I hope they come back one day. Yeah. Well, let's start the movement now. Yes, you're on. So, you know, what happened really is I was around his kind of entrepreneurial finance real estate world, And I found that that slotted in pretty nicely to me.

I wasn't of high intellect, smart enough to get through school and get a decent, back then, a TE score, but was never going to be a builder or anyone who could work with their hands, was never going to be a doctor or a lawyer. So that sphere tended for me to sit pretty well. And so when it came time to graduate, I looked at all of my options. At one point, I thought perhaps being a teacher would be fun. And I think actually that's something that I probably would have enjoyed if I'd pursued it. But by the same measure, Dad said to me one day, oh, look, you know, you're at a bit of a loss of what you want to do.

I tried everything. Through senior school, I thought I might be a pilot. I thought about joining the Army, but then I liked having long hair. I hear a bit of a muso too, mate. Share us that story. Yeah, there was a bit of that too going on. There's a small rebellious streak, which, you know, all teenage young adult men have angry youngish man angry for no reason because my life is pretty

good um and when it came sort of time to graduate school i looked at a few things and put in for for teachers college etc but dad said to me i look you know i've got a suggestion for you um can you um go out for a day's trip with a mate of mine his name was frank heggie and frank was a valuer who'd worked in banks and then went out on his own, and he was a real character, Frank, you know, wore a Mickey Mouse watch and drove around a really old Land Rover. And I remember fondly kind of jumping in the car with Frank, you know, at the tender age of sort of 15, 16, somewhere around there.

And, oh, it was probably a bit older, yeah, 16. And then Frank took a drive down the coast. He drove past a few houses. He went into a couple. We had a cup of tea with someone. Then he went and saw one of his mates at a Porsche dealership down there, so we kind of swarmed over the cars for a while. Then he came back and his wife – gave his wife some notes,

and they wrote up these valuation reports, and he billed out, you know, a few hundred dollars, and this is, like, in 1985. And I'm like, this is the best job ever. Like – Drive around, cups of tea. You just drive around, you talk to people, you come home, and then you bank. you know this is fantastic and so um put my put my hand up to to be a property valuer and that's

kind of where it kicked off so dad kind of shuffled me in that direction anyway um and and i ended up going into valuation knowing look in many ways precious little about you know i i there was so much to learn yeah yeah and i even in the investment world even having a a father who was who is involved in that kind of space i think that there's a big difference now and i notice it now with my own kids is um parents back then probably protect the family by looking after the finances and ensuring you've got a good education and a decent feed um and taking on the stress themselves i find now as much as i appreciate that i find now that i want my kids to know as much as possible about life i want them to know about finances and budgeting um i want them to

understand the value of a dollar and as such we sort of are far more my wife and i are far more open book with my children than my dad would have ever imagined being with us um so no let's drill in there because i'd like your thoughts on this as well but i think there's a gaping hole in the education system at the moment in relation to uh our attitudes and our relationship with money and uh you know i know in my own case i saw a lot of people i went through school with who because they weren't good at maths they automatically thought they weren't good with money there's this somehow there's this correlation between the two uh which is it doesn't really hold water to be honest but that's how it is uh and it may have changed because my my son's left school

well over a decade ago, but I didn't see much different there in relation to embracing money and finances and all the rest of it. Your kids might be close to that age. I'd love for you to share what that experience is and what sort of things you are doing with your wife and the kids at home to ensure that they're at least open to and absorbing a better relationship with money. Well, look, I mean, our kids are 10 and 13, so they're pretty young, but we brought them in quite early with how things are done. The background too, I can't go too far without mentioning that my wife is, you know, as much as I do what I do, my wife is the property person.

She comes from fourth-generation real estate. um she was flying for Qantas but always had a hankering to be in the property sphere um and um ended up going and doing valuation and that's one of the when I said valuation giving me a lot of stuff other than my personal wife it also gave me an extraordinarily good marriage because I met her through I met her through through the the field um but absolutely best uh best employment contract I ever negotiated that one and uh and uh um so So, you know, she and I both were very like-minded when the kids came along that they needed to understand that things can't be – well, things will be given to you. I mean, we're very – I feel that we're quite generous as parents, and most parents might think that about how they are with their kids.

By the same measure, no one's going to take care of you financially through life. um you know once you're sort of underway you've got to learn how to you're going to receive a pot of you know you're going to receive some money each week or each month and that's got to see you through and you've got to pay for clothes you've got to pay for a house you've got to pay the bills um you've got to pay your loans all of those things need to be understand understood um and so we would do things we introduced money as as a uh like most people the first the first time was sort of in the pocket money thing. We probably didn't make them work that hard for it,

but that wasn't the idea when they were younger. I think we probably introduced it to them as young as kind of their first five, maybe when they were five. We probably had them playing with money and coins and understanding that, you know, from age three upwards like you do with kids. But we then sort of went into those ideas of, you know, you've got your savings, you've got your spendings, You got your givings and you got your investings out of your money each week and showing them the ways that if they invest a certain amount, we would match it and sort of building up that familiarity with what money is and how it can be spent and invested.

And we still do that to this day. My son is counting down the day to his 14th birthday because that means he can get his first job. Awesome. he's very excited about the prospect of going out and starting work and earning his own money. And that's very satisfying as a parent. That's brilliant, mate. Thinking about that sort of stuff now.

Mind you, the daughter, she's the smartest one in the family. I'm pretty much going to give her my super and let her put it wherever she wants. Mate, you've done well, mate. You've got a great wife, and that sounds like the daughter's following the same path. So you've been well looked after, mate. Well done.

Yeah, I actually have to put in no effort whatsoever. It's been... I love that. No, thanks for sharing that, mate, because it is something that I think is a gaping hole. And it is... I know a lot of people are thinking about it, but I haven't seen much that's been done about it.

And the best way to do something about it is around your own dinner table, which is exactly what you've done. I absolutely agree. And when it comes to property too, um you know we don't hide very much from our kids we will talk to them about what properties cost um we've purchased a few of them uh we've purchased a couple of well not surprisingly a 13 year old we've purchased a few properties in the last 13 years you know i have a photo of

of our son uh sitting at the dining room table pretending to sign the contract on the house we have at the moment and explaining sort of to him he would have been oh gee what would he have been maybe seven or eight maybe eight and and talking to him about the deposit and how do we get the money when we go to the bank but the bank rents it to us they don't give it to us so we got to pay them rent which is called interest you know and and and talking about those sorts of things so we don't hide very much from them about that because we think their skills that they will they can comprehend they can appreciate they know how to keep a secret too which is good probably better than me in many ways and uh and um you know that sets them up nicely for for making their own

decisions well what i'm loving about what i'm hearing there kieran uh you've demystified it and there's no fear around money i see a lot of people that just have this fear of money whereas you've made it every day it's part of part of what you do every day and there's a comfort level with it then they're much more likely to manage it well to spend it wisely and do the right things with it Cross fingers. Oh, that's awesome, mate. No, brilliant, mate. There aren't too many parents that are doing what you're doing.

I remember sitting down with my son, and that was back in the, because I had my Kiyosaki moment many years ago, and of course Robert Kiyosaki wrote a rich dad, poor dad for kids. I remember sitting down and reading with my son and going through it, and he said to me many years later, you know, You were talking about assets and liabilities, Dab. Well, when they raised it in late high school, I knew exactly what it meant.

I didn't even have to think about it. So it's that sort of familiarity, though, I think, that just takes away the concern that they might have and, as I say, the fear that many people have around money, mate. So that's brilliant, mate. That's awesome. Mate, let's continue the journey then. So you got into valuation.

I know you were with Heron Todd White for a long time, and for those that aren't aware of Heron Todd White, they really are a premium player in the property valuation space. And for those listeners who aren't already onto it, the monthly property clock that Heron Todd White produces is a must-read in terms of at least getting a taste and an indication of what's going on. Talk to us about the journey there, mate. Yeah, sure. So, look, I was fortunate, you know, I went through college and learnt a lot about what I didn't know. And both fortunate and a case of nepotism. Once again, my dad used his connections, no doubt,

but he made mention when I was graduating to the founding partners that I was kicking about the place. And I'm sure his job at Asanda at that stage did me plenty of favours. but um you know it seemed to work out for all parties because i came on board my first office job straight out of college was with um heron todd white htw in brisbane working with kerry heron and um uh bill gardner two of the founding partners there um you know just doing the general dog's body work that would have been in what would the graduation have been about 1990 i guess You know, before computers were a thing, people were still doing spreadsheets on butcher's paper spread out on the desk, you know, with a pencil.

Because if you had to change the interest rate by half a percent, you had to spend another hour reconfiguring and getting out your Hewlett-Packard calculator trying to work out what things were worth, internal rates of return. It was horrible. It was horrible, Bushy. A horrible existence. But I was an architect for 20-odd years, and we were the same, mate. When I first started, we still had slide rules. So that gives you an indication of how laborious the whole process was in those days, mate, but love it.

Oh, look, and the day, look, the day as an assistant valuer when they gave you the mobile phone, which was the weight of a car and the shape of a briefcase so that you could wander across to the land's office across the road and physically, you know, search sales evidence and get titles and someone could ring you on this thing, you know, that had terrible, I was 200 metres from my desk and I could still not get decent reception on it. It was appalling.

But that was a, you know, I found that it was a great education in property. Now, you know, that sounds like the bleeding obvious, but being in that environment with really smart property people is very academic. You know, this is how we assess values. This is the process. you learn about um office relationships about taking care of clients about keeping integrity that integrity thing again i really loved that about the profession you know stand your ground make up your mind stand your ground i thought that that was um a terrific thing make up your

mind stand your ground but you know that's by the same measure there's also a lot of things that i'm not adverse i wasn't adverse as a value or if a client came to me and said i disagree with you They'd say, okay, well, that's fair enough. Show me why. And if they were right, then, you know, I was probably able to be swayed, but they had to give me the evidence. Well, it's pretty rare. That's very rare, mate.

I mean, I've been in that space for, you know, a good couple of decades, and I could count on an amputated hand how many times a value has been prepared to actually re-look at a valuation and then be prepared to change it. I think that the industry in some measure is a little bit more stymied than it was. Its flexibility has been taken away. And, again, I don't mean flexibility in the terms of, you know, the Kahn defense, as they call it. Kahn. Can't you find a few thousand Kahn?

Like that's – you don't bend to that. But I certainly think that the way that it's become incredibly rigorous, the industry itself has become one of high turnover, low margin. Valuers still have to do their jobs with integrity. They have to, you know, they're legally liable for the things they say. They have to work very hard to come to a decision, but now they have to do it quickly. um and there is about three or four layers well there's multiple layers of compliance and qa that they need to satisfy as part of that process it's taken a little bit of the it's taken a lot of the client relationship out of the out of the discussion yeah um which some might see as a

benefit because it puts another layer between the value and the client that that um you know is meant to make sure that they can keep that integrity without being swayed but by the same measure you know people uh property owners people in the industry probably feel like um value is uh i don't know many dictators in a way but but i do know from being in the field um uh tell me bush have you run across have you run across the valex system yeah totally yeah we've got a brokerage business so we're uh you know we uh caught up with valex all the time and it's and i'll be honest kieran uh we're at a point in play and it has been for the last couple of years and it's for all the reasons you've just mentioned that under valex that it's

it's become a high volume low margin game so it's really clear that that's the case And as a strategy, Kieran, we actually say to our clients now, we may have to get more than one valuation. If Bank A gives us a valuation that is below where we think it is and equity is important to them in terms of what they want to do, then we'll go out and get valuation B from a separate bank and potentially valuation C from a third bank. And what is disturbing about that a little bit is that, you know,

I can give you a recent example where we had a property that was worth about roughly half a mil. We ended up getting three valuations, and they're all bank valuations, and there's an 80 grand spread across them. And my only thinking around that, and I'd love your thoughts on this, is the bank who's engaged the valuation, do they have any influence in terms of the terms upon which they're engaging you that may differ from one bank to the other,

or is it just, am I reading too much into that? No, look, they don't, I mean, they don't have any dictate on how the result will come out. But what will happen is that there will be a set of rules applied when an instruction comes through. So someone might come through for a house in suburban Brisbane, and the house might actually have potential for, I don't know, a small subdivision or something like that but the rule come through from the bank you have to

value this as a house site like you can't take because it's a simple valuation we just need it done we don't want any complexities around it um so we need this valuation done as is whereas not necessarily and in that case maybe that's not necessarily highest and best use you know so those sorts of things can end up being a bit of a problem another really difficult thing that came about is that a system like Valex, and it was sort of one of the things that I found very difficult to deal with and maybe in the tail end of, was one of the things that I needed a break from that ended

up flipping me into the media sphere, was that they had some very set rules. Okay, you've got to value a house on a certain date. The sales can't be older than three months, well, six months, I suppose, with flexibility, but they locked them within three months. They had to be within a few hundred metres of the subject property. They had to be arm's length transactions, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Now, that's fine if you're looking at a suburban house in a market where there's good turnover. But if you're, you know, I used to do rural residential properties out in Brookfield in the mid-90s where, you know, someone could have something up on top of a hill. um i remember i remember going up and seeing a house being constructed on top of one of the the ridges up there it um it was it actually looked down onto the roof of the house of the guy who was the director of sunland developments i mean this this bloke i was valuing for was another 300 meters up in the air you know almost looking at this bloke's pool and i thought that That guy down there is rich. How rich is the guy I'm valuing for?

And, you know, he owns most of a mountain with a huge house on it. Now, how many sales do you think? Zero. Exactly. But you would do your valuation to the best of your ability. You'd send it back through a system like Valex, and it would bounce back to you saying, well, your sales don't comply with the rules. And so you'd get into these discussions about what do I use, how do I get around it, you know, and they were kind of unwavering about, no, you've got to meet the rules. If you don't meet the rules, you bounce back the valuations.

Bounce back valuations are bad for valuers because if you got too many of those under a VALX system, they would start to reduce the number of instructions you got. so so you were always trying to comply but it lost that kind of elasticity to be able to use use a bit of intuition about valuation and the market and that was a bad thing because i would be working you know i worked in the industry for 20 or just shy of 23 years i would have worked with guys um who had similar if not longer careers guys and girls who had similar if not longer careers than me and you know their ability to walk into a house and get a feel for the value pretty quickly because most of us specialized in our suburbs yeah in the first 10 minutes they could probably come up with a figure but trying to justify that within the

rules became a really a really tough ask sometimes and i think that sort of inflexibility that loss of um that loss of connection with clients with owners you know high volume turnover means that you've really only got time to go in and do an inspection and get out again um back in the good old early 90s when i was valuing out at ipswich you know you do two or three jobs a day get paid a reasonable amount take your time nowadays they've got to turn over six to ten jobs you don't get time to talk to people about what you do and how you do it and and i think that a lot of valuers don't enjoy that uh and it probably is a big reason why the industry cops a bit of flack because we don't get enough time to communicate.

Well, yeah, I think you've hit on it there, and it's like every industry, and we'll get on to the media later, but I think the media's under similar pressure. There's a drive to the bottom, and when you get a drive to the bottom, that's the sort of results you start getting. And in the valuation industry,

given the litigation that's attached potentially to the figure that you're putting on the paper, and then trying to join the dots on a fairly complicated matrix around the rules that Valex or the other panel providers are looking to orchestrate. And all of a sudden, there's a built-in conservatism that's bound to occur as a consequence of that. I think good valuers will do things.

I mean, the trick was always, for me, was, look, no one, and I say this all the time, no one is good enough to land on the dollar every single time they do a valuation. Yeah, of course. But most valuers will want to land on a traditional house, will want to land within a 5% variance. I mean, and really what you do is you sit there

and you look at enough information to say, well, it's not worth any less than X, and it's not worth any more than Z. I'm going to value right in the middle of those two. I'm going to go Y. And I think that's about the best you could do. Now, throw into that shifting markets, you know, So emotional buyers and sellers, you know, there's a whole lot of little variations that can throw that little equation out of kilter.

But a good valuer should at least be able to say I'm within a range of tolerance and I'm going to try and hang pretty much into the middle of that range in most instances. And this is, you know, that's another thing I would apply if someone gave me a contract of sale. if i sat there and saw a contract of sale and it's at 500 000 and my valuation was saying well it's it's somewhere between 480 and 505 i'm pretty well going to come on the 500 000 if it's a good arm's length contract yeah i'm not going to stick to my hard and fast got to go in the center figure rule there because no one's good enough to come in on the dollar and it's in your range of tolerance yeah so i think that um i think sort of understanding the thinking behind how those figures are derived would go a long way to helping the profession,

but unfortunately it just doesn't get the opportunity to sort of sell itself. Or, in fact, educate the other allied professions and the buying public on the sorts of things that values are taking into consideration as a basis to come up with those figures because it's, as you've well pointed out, But the severance of the relationship and the distance between the day you are now and the buyer or the seller, depending on who's involved in the transaction, means that that understanding is also gone. And therefore, you become the donkey to pin the tail on. So I guess the other area that we haven't touched on in that is that you see a lot more variance in the new build space

because it's then in the land of the future, not in the land of today. What's your thoughts around build valuations and how that fits into the equation? Look, that was always a very tough area to play in because you're absolutely right. like people would be a little bit pioneering i think that you would find that most uh sensible valuers would recognize um that a little bit of a premium there's a new car premium that attaches

to these some of these properties you know so so uh particularly for homeowners um and so you'd be trying to marry those sorts of land contract plus build contract um uh figures to what was happening in the market because the rules of the game are you've got to use completed second-hand sales as your comparables. So as a valuer, you know, often I would say probably the majority of heated but healthy discussion that you would have with someone would be around the idea that they'd say, well, I've got six contracts in this estate and these are the construction costs.

you know simply aren't you simply just adding construction and land together and coming up with your figure well you're not no because no one accepts evaluation that does that you actually have to come up with three to five sales of houses as new as possible that have sold between private parties um within close proximity in the last six months you can see where the the challenge is coming in then you know to try and come up with a figure and you know you again you you'd like to I think that sometimes as a valuer you could intuit a little bit about which way the market's heading. You can intuit a little bit about how much of a premium people might pay for something new, whether it be an investment or a home. But there are some very rigorous rules around what evidence you can apply and how you apply it.

That said, you know, that's in its purest form because a bank wants to know once the house is finished, if I stick it back on the market, what will I get for it if I have to retrieve that money from the borrower? and that's what that sales evidence is supposed to tell you. But it's a very, yeah, look, it's a tough place to work in the new build space, I think. Yeah, and thanks for sharing those thoughts because that does add a layer of that understanding that you spoke about. What about the current climate where,

and this doesn't happen all that often, of course, but in a rapidly rising arena, which we're currently experiencing, and given those rules that you're talking about, we're talking about sales in the last three, maybe six months, in a time when values are racing ahead. Can you share the view on how that's treated? Because that's potentially problematic as well,

given that the future's always a guess. Yeah, look, no, hugely. Look, a good example of that's probably in 2003, which was when Brisbane's market was racing. I think we in some locations had between 20 and 30% capital gain and I happened to be doing

evaluation in around the Kedron area and what it was was a fellow from Melbourne had contacted us and these are pretty rare because most of the work is of course mortgage security but he called us up and said there's a house going to auction on Saturday

I want to put in a bid uh what should i pay i can recall doing the valuation of that property remember this was some time back doing the valuation on that little cottage and and saying in his report saying to him look comparable sales evidence under mortgage security rules this thing's worth 440 yeah uh if i was being a little flexible on how i would assess the sales um knowing a little bit about what's going on i'd probably be up to 460 however knowing what i know about the last two weeks in this market you will need to be over 480 to get it yeah um that property sold for 492 yeah so so you know this was a really good opportunity or a really good example of me

being able to communicate directly with a buyer about how really, really fast-moving. 2003 was a rocketing market, and people are saying that this one's similar. You know, trying to keep up with values is really very difficult unless you are right on the, you know, right at the front of that wave. You know about each sale. This is why value is specialising in their suburbs is a good thing. You're walking into houses that are under contract.

you have some idea and by the time the 30-day contract's done the market's gone up another you know one percent yeah so it's it is tough what do you do in those situations you tend to be i think as a value you tend to be um as bullish as as logically bullish as the market will allow you to be um you will tend to try and support contracts um within reason but there is also you know there's no escaping what i said previously there are some hard and fast rules about valuation and speculation isn't one of them um yeah you know it's hard to be right on the cusp of figures every time and i know that there'll be a lot of peoples uh out there whose contracts will fall over or will have to tip in substantially more money to back themselves in a fast rising

market um because valuations can't stack up to what's being paid uh you know all i can say is that you've got to be right up on your sales evidence as a valuer when that market's on, even quoting sales that are under contract but not completed to justify where you come in on a figure. But there will be a point at which you have to draw a line and sometimes the buyers are going over that line because they're two months ahead of you. I probably haven't answered your question very well there, Bushy.

It's a bit of a tug-of-war sometimes. I think you've made a really good point because it's something that we talk to investors about, Kieran, in that particularly in times like these or in areas like these, regardless of what's happening now, there are also areas dotted throughout the country that are always going to be in very strong demand because of the nature of it and limited supply.

And therefore, people are often having to pay more than what the value is prepared to put against it, given those rules that you've talked about. And we say to them as a strategy, look, there's a fair chance here that the valuation may come in below what you're paying for it. That doesn't mean what you're paying for it's not fair value. It just means that the valuers' rules and regulations don't allow them to be able to put that value on it.

So what we're doing is we're going to create an equity war chest or a rainy day reserve fund over here that can contribute to that shortfall so you don't miss out on the property. it's a way of actually protecting the investor and and because if they're totally reliant on that valuation without any extra funds to contribute then that's problematic clearly yes but where they're in a position where they have access to other funds or other equity they can contribute it providing everything else is ticking the boxes and and you know you can put your hand on your heart and say well look that that value is fair value for this property at

this time then that that's the only uh option they have other than going shopping for valuations which as i say is as be unfortunately because of the nature of the industry has become part of the strategy that we adopt for our investors because we don't get the result the first time there's a fair chance we might get it on on try two or three and mate you might find in those in these fast rising markets that you know the valuation will move up as you go from yes valuation to valuation you're a few weeks down the track there's been another two sales supporting the upper figure suddenly that value was armed with evidence the previous one wasn't so that occasionally happened that's a very good point now that really interesting discussion mate thanks for taking

the time with that and again what i like about this is you're very uh intimate with the industry but you're not part of the industry anymore so you you know what i love about your observations is you're not defending your own turf uh but you are defending your knowledge of how the industry work so um in terms of that integrity we spoke about and you're talking about that that gives it much more credence to me uh the other thing that i i've seen over the years and and i think it's uh probably because of that high volume low margin exercise uh i'm seeing the average age of the day you are dropped significantly and and quite often graduates are out there actually doing the inspections and without that that depth of knowledge uh and or experience uh they're just

not at the point where it's intuitive like it would be for someone like yourself who's been in for a long time i wonder that whether that's influencing some of the conservatism that that can flow through into the actual valuations that come out i i that's an astute observation astute observation is in particular bushy because um one of those things that i did find um when it was my time to move on from the industry was the guys and girls making the good money were the ones who could do the high volume turnover uh that you know were probably in their 20s um late 20s you know they'd kick off at seven in the morning they wouldn't get home till six and they didn't have to worry about picking up the kids from school or getting meals ready for the family or all the

rest of it so it became kind of you know it became a a little bit of an exhausting exercise trying to keep up with them. Actually, I'm not very competitive, so I probably didn't mind not having to keep up with them. I just patted them on the back and said, well done, you. Look, that's right. And most, I think genuinely, you know, valuing a house in a traditional house in a traditional suburb where there's plenty of evidence, it isn't that hard a job. And most people can do it.

And the average punter can probably come in at a figure that's as good as the average valuer when it comes to assessing the value of a property. The distinct advantage that a valuer has is they're unemotional about the property. So that's a key thing. And I can tell you my example of that one was my parents asked me to value their house when they moved from Brisbane up to the Sunshine Coast. I had about six goes at that thing.

And it was the house I grew up in, you know, it was the house my brothers and I damaged and partied in and, you know, there's a lot of tears and laughter that went on in that place. I just could not fix it. I had to report back to my mum. Whoa, massive emotion from your side and her side and expectation attached to that as well, mate. That's a job I probably would have tried to say no to, I reckon.

You do not want to disappoint your mum, I'll tell you that. You think it's hard telling a bank? No, you should try telling your mum. So I actually said to my parents when they came to sell it, I had a couple of guys and I said, I can't do this and we're going to get someone from the office to do this for you without any input from me because I can't take the emotional attachment out of the property.

And this is sometimes where the tug-of-war goes on between the valuer and the property owner. The valuer is going to be very unemotional about your home, and quite rightly a homeowner is going to be very emotional about that particular asset. So that sometimes plays into it. The other key, young valuers can be really good at their job, but I think the advantage is the ones who are at an advantage are those who specialise in certain suburbs. They know their pockets really, really well. And as much as I like to support the little guy and girl out there,

I've got to say, you know, the big firms where they've got multiple valuers, but they're only doing sort of 10 to 20 or maybe a couple more suburbs every day, day in, day out. Those valuers are going to be – they can be in their 20s, they can do high volume, low margin, and they're going to be fairly accurate. It's when you get a valuer who's got to do every property from Maroochydore to South Caloundra for a firm, everything from beachfront to acreage out the back of the southern coast,

they're going to be the ones who are going to struggle to come in on the dollars each and every single time. Yeah, it's very good insights there, mate. And it's something that, you know, we talk to our clients about on occasions because, you know, through our broking business, we've got access to 40-odd different lenders. And while most of them adhere to the VALAC system,

so for those that aren't aware of the VALAC system, it's a rotor system, basically. so it makes sure that it's like spinning a dial and whoever's name comes up gets that particular valuation so that it's fair and not unduly giving advantage to one day or over another. What that means is that, again, in terms of an investor strategy, sometimes if the valuation is really important to making something happen, you can select lenders that either have their own valuers

or use different sets of valuers where you've got some confidence around the likelihood of getting a valuation close to where it needs to be. It can be very hard. Look, a good example, Bushy, that I've experienced myself some years back, my wife and I are fortunate enough to have bought many years back a little fibro shack up at Moffat Beach, like one of the original ones up there. We're not on the beach. I'm not that well off, but we're close enough too that, you know,

I can hear the ocean and occasionally build a sandcastle out front somewhere. And we love this little place, of course, as you can imagine, great place to bring up the kids and have the dog run around and all the rest of it. Beautiful. And we ended up doing a renovation there, which was an extension out the back, put in a pool, those sorts of things that made it a bit more comfortable.

But the original section of the house, we polished back the floors. Every wall was a different colour, so we colour-matched every wall. The kitchen had this sort of kaleidoscope of colour, and it was a really typical 50s, 60s beach shack look. You know, we just made it look what we felt was beautiful. A value I came along, I think at the time for that one, we paid about, this was some years back, the shack itself was about 640 we probably spent a good 100k on it um maybe a touch more

doing the renovation and the valuer who came out was a young bloke um from a reasonable firm we told him you know about our job i should have i did mention that my wife's a property valuer as well she's a registered valuer too but um had a bit of a chat with him he was one of these guys who was doing great stretches of the sunshine coast and uh we sort of said oh we'll keep out of your way because the worst thing you can do is sit on the valuers' heels while they're doing their inspection. And at the end of it, he came up to us and said, oh, you know, this is a nice position. We said, oh, yeah, it's all really good.

He said, when are you going to renovate the rest? Slap. At which point we've said in the nicest possible way, mate, this is a classic. It's a retro. This is a retro fit. This is a bloody Rolls Royce, man. We're not touching this again. um you know and the valuation came in uh at 750 you know uh after after just one of those things

where we just went well he didn't really get it but he wasn't he was covering a lot of area he was a young bloke and and maybe not i'm i'm looking forward to the revaluation of that one in the next few weeks because i've a feeling that uh the sunshine coast and moffett beach in particular has done all right and they might come up a little bit higher than uh our valuation from five years ago i'd have no doubt mate given what's uh happening in that neck of the woods but there's a classic case in point probably someone who almost ran through the property uh with his iphone and then then made a couple of comments on the way out the door on his on his way to the next one uh isn't given the the geography that they're they're covering

just isn't going to understand uh that the intimacy around what what the real value of that property is. And then that can have significant impacts. I mean, if the equity's not there, that can significantly hamstring someone from doing something. So, you know, really interesting, mate. It's been a great discussion around the valuation piece. It's something that we haven't touched at all on in the podcast and its history over the last three years, mate. So, that's been very illuminative for myself as well in terms of understanding some of the challenges that the valuers have around the quite restrictive rules and regulations that they've got to play with.

Would love now to sort of bridge into the rest of the journey because I can see why you would have got frustrated in the valuation game given all of that stuff that's come in in terms of the compliance and the volume expectations and it really becomes a game of join the dots rather than the art of valuation. Was that what sort of prompted you to start looking further afield? Yeah, well, yeah, it kind of was.

I mean, the impetus to, after being in an organisation for so long, you know, in early 2000s, you know, I'm hitting into my 30s and I'm sort of going, what am I going to be? Like, I don't think I'm going to be one of the directors of the valuation firm. You know, are you going to do something new? I even took a time off there, which you alluded to earlier. You know, I took some time there where I went to my boss who, you know, when he started, he probably started on the same rung I did and now is running the – is running – is chairman of the board or whatever. But I went to my boss and I said, look, I kind of –

I've got to pursue some passions in life. I'm going to join a band. We're going to tour occasionally. We're going to record. I may need to disappear. every now and again for days on end does that can i still keep my job and uh i knew them well enough that they said yeah of course you can you know as long as you're coming back to us and and we can cater for that then that's fine so i had a i had a few years there where i was kind

of tinkering with the idea of of playing music i was never going to make a living out of it um as it turned out very few do but it was certainly some sort of creative release for me uh from the daily grind of um of churning valuations and a really healthy thing i think if you spoke to anyone who sort of has a creative bent in some way giving that up entirely is extraordinarily painful and quite unhealthy um you need to be well-rounded no matter what you do um for creative people um whether you're talented or not if you're creative you sort of need to have that outlet then the other thing that i found is htw were producing as you mentioned before the property clock was part of a document called the month in review yeah and they were producing the

month in review every month again and sort of i think it was in the 2000s and it was like valuers talking to valuers about the market on a monthly basis and if you're yawning here bushy i would forgive you because it was turgid i mean it was just you know it was this sort of i don't know it was it was it was a bit highbrow no doubt valuable and there was nothing like it really going around i mean they were physically printing out like you know 500 copies of that thing onto the pieces of paper and folding them and sticking them in envelopes and mailing them to clients that, you know, people were musing about the market. And so I sort of hit them up.

Things were starting to move a little bit more towards email, et cetera, but we were still doing printed. And I hit them up. By this stage, I'm furniture, mate. I can get away with just about anything in there. So I hit them up and said, look, I've got to – I'd like to do something with this. I'd like to write for it because I enjoy writing.

And so what it kind of developed into is if anyone's checked out, I don't know, do you get it regularly, Bushy, the month of review? Every month, mate, every month. Oh, great. So I got this thing where I said, well, let's do a theme every month. Let's ask everyone around the nation to contribute. Let's put it all together and let's do a feature article that's a little irreverent, you know, at the start of it

or something a bit funny or something a bit unconventional. and let's be conversational about it. And, you know, through a lot of hard work from a lot of people, it came together as a document that kind of saw its distribution run from, you know, a few hundred people up to I think at this stage it's over 20,000 in the email list. I couldn't tell you exactly how many. They don't tell me that now.

but i've managed to stay on that little project into even into this new business now awesome um but it was sort of my first thing where i sort of said well there's a crossover point here because our industry as a valuation industry is full of incredibly smart people who are not great at communicating um their knowledge to the wider public they either don't have the time they don't have the the ability or or they you know they just can't be bothered which is absolutely fine because They've found their groove. Yeah. But we've got stuff to share with everybody,

and we need to find a way to do that. So the month of the review was that vehicle, and that kind of has evolved really nicely, where we still do the themes over and over again. I mean, every July there's a where would you spend it? We just recently raised the budget, but you used to do where would you spend half a million bucks? Yeah.

And so, you know, over the course of a decade, if you go back to every July's issue, you can see how markets have changed year on year by where you'd spend half a million dollars. But, you know, that sort of theme document was really great. Yeah. And I was doing that, getting a little bit of money on the side from HTW for doing that as well as my regular job.

Okay. And I thought, oh, I've got to go and do some more into this. So in 2008, you know, with my son just about to be born, I went and did postgrad study in journalism to learn more about what it's like to write. write for media. And it was really terribly valuable. You know, I learned about the reverse pyramid and putting, not hiding, not bearing your lead and, you know, how I learned about all the things I'm really bad at when it comes to writing and, you know, trying to fix those. I'm still

not the greatest speller in the world. And if you talk to my business partner, Nicola would be absolutely agreeing with that. Spellcheck's a wonderful thing, mate. Oh, visit ever. But it was really valuable. And I didn't know what I was going to do with it, but I knew I had to do something with it. And then in about 2012, so I'm doing month in review. I've got a little bit of writing under the belt.

I've been doing a little freelancing for some of the magazines. My first freelance was for Yip, for your investment property. Yeah, awesome. And people might know of Neela Sweeney, works at the AFR now. um uh so neela gave me my first freelance gig and that was really good i really really loved it in fact the day my son was born he arrived early and i had deadline on about 6 000 words and i called neela from the hospital and said my son's arrived today and i've got that article due and she said don't worry about it you can have another two days great so while i'm folding nappies and

looking after my wife you know i'm serious man i was sitting there my dad came and picked my dad again my dad came and picked me up at 2 a.m one morning from my desk at her and todd white because i spent like seven like six hours straight trying to pump out this article with the deadline pending knowing that i had a newborn sitting at home you know so i was you know but i committed i had to do it you know show some dedication right there mate yeah they don't there's no forgiving the deadlines when you when you're in the media so um so i started doing that and then i looked one day on linkedin um and there was a there's an advertisement for uh one 12-month contract at australian property investor magazine one of their writers uh vanessa de groot i think it was

she um who's you know in the property space nowadays she um she was going on maternity leave i hope i got that right i haven't just given vanessa a baby but in any event um so they asked me to come in and do an interview so i got to to meet up with um lane boyd and enos brody the owner and the uh editor and have a chat and uh enos actually um i don't know if people um recall she She was there for ages. She was a brilliant boss, fantastic. Enis gave me a spelling test. She talked to me about – she had two tests she used to give the journos.

One was a property test and one was a spelling test. And she pulled out the property test and looked at me and said, I don't have to give you this, do I? And I said, nah, I'm going to be good on that because I've pretty much been working on that for the last 23 years. She said, I'm going to give you a spelling test. And I said, now, if I get most of these wrong, Is that going to blow it for the job?

Because I don't want you to have any grand expectations on my result on this one. And to her credit, she sort of laughed and I did it. I got like four out of 12, you know, spelling spaghetti wrong or something. But she gave me a call and said, look, you're going to, you might knock us, you're almost saying you might knock us back. You're going to have to take a huge pay cut,

but would you be happy to do it? And I talked about it with my wife, you know, who, as I said, just an just one of the greatest things that ever happened in my in my life was was marrying michelle she said you've got to pursue the things you love yeah um so you should take the year off and go and do this thing that you enjoy um we'll find a way you know because we had a newborn and all sorts of things on the way but but she sort of convinced me that it wasn't a bad idea to to not worry so much about the money and think more about being a happier person yeah and uh so i took 12 months there and then at the end of the 12 months um uh they turned around and said look

stay and uh i decided to stay and that evolved eventually into editing the magazine um i came in there after nicola mcdougall and nicola um is my business partner in bricks and mortar media um i enjoyed it immensely i thought that was going to be a job for life until the day that the doors were shut on that on that little publication it was a very sad very sad day when that occurred but i always said you know i'd like to think i didn't break it and then as as a wise man said to me uh when i was talking about he said you can't be blamed for the internet mate yeah yeah fair enough i'll take that i'll take that as an excuse yeah exactly exactly so But when that did happen, that was the, I guess,

the push that created bricks and mortar. Am I reading that right? Well, yeah, it kind of did. So it went from there and I didn't know what to do once the doors closed because we were literally told on the day there's no more money and we're closing the doors this afternoon. So that's a pretty horrid day for anyone to go through, particularly I think it was like five days before Christmas.

And I was suddenly in this position where I was sort of dealing with staff who were my friends, you know, finding out one by one that their jobs weren't around anymore. And I did a post on LinkedIn and that was about the only announcement that came out about the closure of the MAG. So I was wandering around like a lost soul for some time and then I got a call from Michelle Hill who's the editor of the real estate editor for The Courier Mail.

Yeah. And Michelle invited me in and I had a really nice chat with her and she offered me a job there as a real estate reporter in 2017. Now, Bushy, you've never met anyone less educated in being a news person in your life. I think I was a constant source of amusement in there because people would refer to things like sub-editors and front desks and we've got the conference on at 2 a.m.

And I have no – 2 p.m. I have no idea what they're talking about. So I've kind of – If you went in there with any sense of trying to keep up, I just knew I had to be shameless about my ignorance. Yeah. And that tended to work pretty well. I really loved working there.

It was a great team. And I almost didn't go in. Like two days before, I said to Michelle, I don't know if I'm cut out for this. This is a high-pressure, high-volume, high-deadline role with people who are building careers in media that I don't know if I'm cut out for this. But I went in anyway because I said yes. I committed to it, and I said yes. And it was really hard and really fun and a great way to network and learn about that industry and earn a real appreciation for the people in it.

um but by the end of 2017 nicola and sort of tapped me on the shoulder and said there's a lot of work because we were good mates back from the magazine days so there's a lot of work out there maybe we should be looking at doing something together helping people get into the media and helping them home their messages and um i said yeah let's go for it so i was only at the career mail for a year but i've made friends there and contacts there that have been just wonderful both professionally and personally. Love it. Something I wouldn't mind just touching on while we're on the subject

because as I sort of mentioned in the intro, the media gets an absolute slamming generally in relation to, particularly around the property sphere. It seems when things are on a downturn, then the sky is going to fall in. when it gets on the growth and the bus is just around the corner. There's a lot of fear-driven sensationalism that seems to have crept into the press generally

and it's understandable given that mainstream media is under massive threat for eyeballs and earbuds given everyone's got an iPhone in their hand and directs access to 15,000 other means of getting their information. What's your thoughts around all that? Because, you know, you mentioned the filter word earlier in the conversation, which I think is, you know, very pertinent because, again, we're seeing an industry that's been filtered with, you know, again, I would say the average age of a journalist has dropped significantly given the volume pressure and there's just no money in the game anymore. Can you give us your insights and thoughts around all of that

so that we've got a much better understanding of how it all works? Yeah, you've touched on a whole heap of things there. I've often said journalism is a great way to go broke. I get absolutely fired up. I'm not prone to emotional outbursts, but I get absolutely fired up when people attack the media without considering the broader context and the role in which they play because you've made a really good point.

In the time I was in there, the hard and fast rule, particularly with an editor of Integrity, and, you know, Michelle absolutely was that person, And the journalists, career journalists, these are people who spend, you know, years and years fighting to get that role. And when they get in, they work hard. When I was in there, there was a requirement because of a contract that News had with realestate.com and sharing content and stuff. There was a requirement that the News Desk had to produce something like, the Real Estate Desk had to produce something like around 40 stories a week. Wow.

between kind of, you know, between sort of four to six staff and you could find yourself plus the newspaper stories that you'd see in print plus the extra stuff that goes online. So you would see staff trying to pump out two or three or four stories in a day. But the rule was, you know, they had to come up to editorial standards. You know, you had to, you still had to do a proper job of your research. that you had to find a good case study to highlight.

You know, the idea would always be it would be good to have balance in the story. Argument, counter-argument wasn't a bad thing to have. But at that time it was also trying to find eyes. So, yes, you would have to do things like sexy up the headline to try and make people click on it. You would have to have big numbers or you'd need to have dramatic occurrences, all that sort of newsworthy,

they call it news value or there's sort of these 10 news values, all of those things that made people want to read and digest it. But you still, as a journalist, got to run that filter over the top of it. And here's another thing that, you know, was good is that particularly the time i was in there 2017 you couldn't buy space in the editorial section yeah so you could be a big advertiser um but we would often have the ad people who are selling advertising coming up to to our desk and saying hey i've got a really good auction on the weekend you want to write a story about it now if it was interesting yeah i would yeah but if it wasn't uh it was dull it just

happened to be that the agent was spending five thousand dollars on advertising there was no guarantee they were going to get that story up yeah um it absolutely had to be newsworthy and i really appreciated that about um about the people i worked with you couldn't buy that you couldn't buy their column inches yeah you had to have a good story and that's that's continued uh now and probably where we found our value as a business um in helping get our clients into the paper for us it's always about where's the story what makes life as easy as possible for the journalist to say yes to this um is it a you know there's a good story there's a case study there's good quotes interesting it's immediate it's appealing to their demographic all of the real

they call it the hey martha moments those stories that um if you imagine the guy in the singlet sitting at the coffee table in the old american sitcom reading the paper and suddenly something catches his eye and he turns around and goes, hey, Martha, you should read about this. That's the hey, Martha moment. That's the sort of story you want to get, the one that makes one person want to tell another person about it. So the journalists there are exceptional filters. The other thing that I would say is that in my own experience, my own

personal experience, you'd get pitched hundreds of of, um, press releases, um, a week, sometimes, you know, tens and tens in a day. I knew from my experience in valuation and at the magazine that there were some operators out there that really shouldn't be in the press. Like there were buyers agents and, uh, well, maybe not buyers agents. There's probably investment advisors in that unregulated space that, that you go, uh, these people have a history. Um, I'm not going to give them the credibility of, of editorial content right i can find someone else who i know is trustworthy smart and has some good advice and some good tips that are valuable to readers yeah so i think you know i

think in that sense also there was that sort of natural filter of being able to try and at least shield readers firstly from the bad in bad elements um i know that that's a value call by me and some people may not agree that i get to be the arbiter of that but i guess you know when my name's going on the story i get to choose who's turning up in it totally and in an unregulated space like the the property arena yeah very fortunate to have someone with your background and understanding to be able to be that filter and i think that's the the scary part to some degree now in some areas is that filters diminish because the experience and understanding is not there and therefore they're only as good as the information that gets put in front of them

Look, I think so. I also, I just also think that the dangerous space that we have now, and this is maybe what I find most frustrating when people attack the media, is that often people will attack the media as, you know, they're lying, they're sensationalising, et cetera, et cetera, in the same breath that they will say, oh, did you read about this thing I just saw on Google? You know, they will happily, I mean, a whole American bloody presidential election seemed to have been won on this basis, but, you know, they'll happily take at face value something that someone said somewhere in the world that they wrote on a blog piece, you know, that promotes their own, that writer's own agenda and own interests

without flinching yet because it appears in mainstream media where there is some sense of balance and editorial control that seems to be rife for being pilloried and I can't marry that up with consumers you know, the other element is paying for good news, now I don't know the solution Bushy and I wish I did probably if I did I'd be a far richer man um um but you know the amount of work effort blood sweat and tears that goes into producing

good news and good information is so wholeheartedly undervalued by um accessibility to other stuff that's free that it's that we're doing ourselves an entire disservice as a consumer um you know So it's easy to find free stuff because there's a lot of it that's, you know, basically not worth the screen it's printed on. Not toilet paper. Exactly right. That's exactly right. But good journalism is good journalism costs money.

Unfortunately, we live in a world now where people don't want to pay for that. And one of the – I mean, that was one of the frustrating things that happened with the demise of the magazine is we would hear people saying, oh, here's a PDF of an article that appeared in the magazine. and we would have to go after them, not, you know, in an aggressive way, but write to them and say, could you please remove that? We have a copyright on it and it cost us, you know, $700 in freelance fees plus a $400 photographer plus printing costs to produce the story

and you've photocopied it and posted it on your website. You know, there's nothing, like you can't do that. And, you know, we'd hear stories of people who would wait until the magazines ended up in a library somewhere, which is, you know, again, fine for back issues and things like that, but you'd sort of go, you want to consume your news for free, but no one wants to pay for it. It's very frustrating to produce good content under that sort of condition.

It's a real challenge. That's why you're seeing a struggle in the media at the moment. Oh, it's the age-old artist dilemma, Kieran. It came out of architecture and exactly the same. I used to say architecture is like the Van Gogh professions. You earn nothing while you're in the game. You eke out an existence and maybe become famous after you're dead. But that's about the only chance.

And it's very similar in journalism. There's that creative thread there that's really important. And it is real craft. The ability to write great, great stories is an absolute art form without question, particularly when they're well-researched and they're balanced and informative. They can be life-changing, in fact. Oh, absolutely. I think that they absolutely can be a well-written and researched piece.

And, you know, we miss that now with the demise of the feature article in the magazines around the place. But a well-researched piece, minimum two sources, a good bank of reliable data and potentially a case study will give you a wealth of information that's incredibly valuable. Unfortunately, it takes time and effort and costs money to do that. And unless people are willing to pay for it, that's just going to continue to sort of slowly dwindle away. It's that race to the bottom again, unfortunately, mate, and that's happening across so many industries as a consequence of that high-volume, low-margin approach generally.

Mate, we could wax lyrical on that, and I'll get you back at another time to delve into more of that And to delve into some of the hot topics of the time because one thing that we haven't had time to touch on today, given your exposure to the industry generally, you really are on top of, you know, what are the current topics and stories and you're in a unique position to give us your insights on that. So I'm pretty keen to do that. But, mate, I would love to transition into what I affectionately refer to as the ambush lightning round, which is just five quick questions that the listeners always love your words of wisdom on, mate. And the first of those is what's your favourite quote and why?

Now, I'm not someone who has a lot of those sort of positive attributions sitting around his bedroom mirror generally. I don't know if that surprises you or not. But one thing I tend to use a lot of the time, whether it be talking about the market or talking about life, is I love the old army saying if there's a difference between the map and the ground, the map is wrong. I just totally dig the idea that, you know, you can lay out a strategic path for your life or for your investment program, but if things change, you've got to be prepared to change with them. um and you know if you stay on the map and and there's a pothole that's turned up in front of your feet you best not walk into it i reckon love that man i've never heard that one and it's a cracker actually that's a really good one i also liked uh tongue in cheek that um an old

valuer used to say to me well the experts get it right half the time mate yeah that's good as well that's very good as well uh excellent mate uh on the literary front which is uh something that's a big interest to you what would be the top book that you'd recommend people read more look i read look i read surprisingly probably surprise you to know i don't read all that much i suppose by the time i've digested things on the screen I'm starting to get a bit tired by the end of the day there's two books that always stuck with me there was one that was called

so I don't read non-fiction I tend not to read non-fiction but Patrick Susskind wrote a book called Perfume and I think a few people quote that but I always remember that one because I read it on those lost two years I spent travelling through Europe it brought it to life for you

given some of the content Yeah, you know, I can recall sort of, you know, sitting on the banks of rivers of various European towns reading that book and being, you know, thinner and handsomer and carefree and all of those things that your youth's all about. Hopefully you don't have the nose of the key star of that book, mate. I have both the nose and all the temperament, fortunately, of the protagonist in that one, absolutely not. But it can be quite confronting at times. But I really always remembered and enjoyed that book as a reader of fiction. And the other thing that I recommend too, now everyone's talking about the Boy Swallows Universe, the Trent Dalton book that's out at the moment.

I got to meet Trent when I was working at News Corp. And like everyone else, one of the most delightful human beings you could ever spend time with. He's incredibly generous, incredibly nice. And he was one of the reasons I got into writing as well. I'd followed his feature writing paper previous to joining up, to going and doing my course. Trent's written this book that's turned Australian literature on its head.

I haven't read it yet. I bought a copy before it hit the stores, and it's sitting on my bookshelf at the moment, sitting on my bedside table and has done for a number of years. And the reason is when I finally get to that piece of what I'm sure is going to be extraordinary literature. I want to be in a place where I can immerse myself in it from start to finish.

And that time hasn't arrived yet, but gosh, I'm so looking forward to it. I can't wait. I cannot wait. So, anyway, I know I gave it a plug, but it's one of those things in life that will be an absolute benchmark for me. Yeah, well, adding that to my kit, I'm a rabbit reader, mate.

and I use great fiction to put me to sleep at night. So I'm going to add that to the Kindle list right here. And Perfume is one of my all-time favourites. I've read it twice, actually. I've read it twice. It's a fantastic read. I just love the language and the whole – yeah, it's just brilliantly done. Totally evocative.

I think it's just fantastic, that book. Sensational. Mate, completely boring subject, tax. What's the top legal thing that you've done to minimise the tax that you pay? So I would say, number one, tax is the bottom of my list for the reasons for how I invest or why I invest. Yep, yep. So I could, you know, I'll deal with that later. I think the two things that we've done, we've managed to negatively gear.

I know that's a boring answer, but we've always bought assets that were good for capital gains. and by nature they tended to be good negative gearers and as your career goes along, then that becomes handy. And probably, I'll probably find out starting my own small business, apart from being very good for life generally, I have a feeling that we might get some tax advantages out of this. Totally. I'm trying to figure out how I can write off Netflix as a...

Research, mate, it's research. Home renovation shows, home renovation shows. That's right. Love it. Mate, back on the investment piece, you've touched on a few of these during our conversation today, but what's both the worst and the best piece of investment advice that you've ever received today? The best one I heard was follow the hippies. I love that. Those areas that are sort of pre-gentrification where the sort of fringe of community tend to congregate are usually the ones that in the following years

end up with the really good coffee shops and those sort of terrific spaces. So I loved that phrase, follow the hippies. In fact, I've probably used it seven or eight times in stories around the place. That's a good one. They probably transcended more into hipsters almost these days, but back the same sort of creative fringe that get into areas with potential where they're not there yet and then they start with the coffee shops and then the community starts to grow around them.

And it is a really good tip because they are almost future lead indicators of what's likely to happen in the area if they're moving in. So that's a brilliant insight, mate. I like that one. What about on the flip side? What about the worst piece of investment advice? Look, the worst piece of investment advice I ever got, I haven't had too many, was probably keeping in the theme of experts get it right half the time. I tried to dabble in the share market at one stage and took on a stockbroker, and he put me into a K-Line mining company that was trying to develop a new tint of paint.

Can you imagine how that went, Bushy? I'm sorry, I'm trying not to laugh. Can you imagine how much of my superannuation has gone up in paint? it's it's a it's a not great deal of scarcity around paint no no I don't even know what colour

the bloody thing is now someone's got it on their house I don't know it sounds like he had rose clover glasses on mate at the time he was suggesting to do that if he's a stockbroker he's probably fronted up to the board I've got this great company

it's 10 cents a share well he's probably in the early days those stockbrokers were getting paid by the company to push the shares. So he's probably getting a brown paper bag on the back end, mate, as he takes your money to put towards it. I personally like to think he's driving out of the trailer full of paint. Love it, love it, mate.

The final question then, what's a personal habit that you use on a, you know, I call them happy habits or daily disciplines that you believe has contributed most to your success today? ambivalence pays mate i'm i'm one of those people who i'm once again tongue in cheek i'm just one of those people who thinks that that you should hold on for dear life for as long as possible to things and you know we never sell an asset until we absolutely have to because the market is so forgiving um um so i prefer to have those sorts of my habit of being a lazy investor i guess is probably a better way of putting it of having investments that look after themselves that will

sit there and do the job over time um is is good for me and it's probably good for my for my health too because i'm not sweating about whether the market shoots up or shoots down um i just like to know that when my time comes that i can realize the profit and enjoy working a little less and spending a little more that those assets have done their job over the last decade or two for me Love it. The lazy investor. In a recent episode, I talked about looking at the equities market. The best performing investors, looking back over a long period in the stock market, were dead. They've forgotten about estates that had just sat there and ticked away over the years and had outperformed every stockbroker, stock picker, you name it, just because.

Lazy investor. They just sit and forget, let time do its work, get out of the way. Emotion doesn't influence it. Mate, it works every time. No doubt about it. Best piece of advice to Pauline, just get out of the way. That's right. Mate, absolutely, Breen, I'm loving the conversation.

Final question, though, to bring it all to a head. If I gave you a microphone that spoke to every single one of the 7.7 billion people that are currently alive in the world and I gave you 60 seconds to talk, what would you say i knew this was coming and i'm i'm i'm i just think that everyone should just cut everybody else a bit of a break like honestly um we're all good at stuff we're all bad at things we're never going to be the best at everything and we're never going to be the worst and i i just think that we need to take a moment to take stop the world's moving just so very very fast at present and it speeds up week on week i just think taking a moment to to put yourself in

someone else's positions and realize you know what they're good at and what they're valuable for will go a long way towards making your life better um that's about the best i can can say on that bushy i i just think we need to recognize people's value and not be so quick to judge them Totally, and judgment. We live in a world of instant judgment these days, Kieran, and lots of us have got excuses for why we're not able to do things because we're under time pressure. Everything we've talked about in the conversation today

is applicable across most industries, and we're quick with excuses on our own side of the equation, but we have massive expectations of everyone else we deal with. And I 100% agree with you. If we sat back and had a bit of a think before we pointed the finger, we looked at the three fingers pointing back at us and said, well, why is that? And there's probably a good reason. Let's go in with empathy rather than criticism. Then the world would be a much happier place, mate, no doubt.

I agree. Absolutely. Great way to close it, mate. Love your input. Always enjoy listening to you, mate. Keep up the fantastic work that you're doing with PICA, the Property Investment Council of Australia. It's a great group that's really looking after investors, and while I've had to take a short vacation from them, given some personal commitments outside of it, remain very supportive, mate, and very keen to make sure that many of us get on board and have a voice to look after the interests of property investors as we move forward. Yeah, absolutely.

And well put. I mean, that's the one thing I'd say, you know, for people out there, really, probably investors have precious little opportunity to have a voice at the table, particularly politically and more generally, and pick as one of those things that's a pretty easy ask for, you know, five bucks, you can join the organisation. And the more numbers we have, the more people are going to listen to us. And that's going to be just so very important about people's financial futures, don't you think? 100%, mate. And as you said, $5 a year or $20 for five years is not going to break the bank. Yet the volume in numbers and as a lobby group for governments at all levels to start sitting up and taking notice, it's a no-brainer. So I recommend – I've mentioned it a few times on the podcast, but for all those listeners who aren't members of Picker, please jump on – what is the website?

I can't remember it off the top of my head. It's like picker.asn.net. It's quite an unusual one. But if you do put in Property Investors Council of Australia, I'm going to look it up while I'm talking to you, of course. Here you go, picker.asn.au. So pica.asn.au. That'll take you there.

Jump on board and you'll get to hear more of Kieran. Kieran's very instrumental in that group and runs some great webinars for Picker. So really appreciate your time, mate, and looking forward to staying in touch. My pleasure. Thank you, Bush. you appreciate it. Thanks, mate. 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.