Property Hub - Investment Insights & Inspiration - Get Invested: Part 1 - Dr Cameron Murray on property & fresh economic thinking

Episode Date: February 2, 2024

How can property investors overcome information overwhelm and dubious analysis to make smart decisions? Dr Cameron Murray joins us to explain. Over the next two episodes, you'll hear that Dr Murray believes that housing analysis, whether about investment or policy, is missing at least one key economic insight, making it partial and probably wrong. To say that is concerning is an understatement.  We are in dire need of fresh economic thinking, and Dr Murray provides exactly that. A highly respected economist and author, Dr Murray specialises in property and housing, environmental economics and corruption, and he dabbles in just about everything from macro, to money, to institutions, to evolutionary economics, and much more. This week we share his personal story and philosophies, before deep diving into the world of economics next week. Connect with Dr Cameron Murray https://www.fresheconomicthinking.com Join our Facebook community Join the The Property Hub Collective, connect and learn from likeminded investors and experts. Join the Property Hub community on Substack! Sign up to get Australian property news, opinion and episodes in your inbox: https://propertyhubau.substack.com/  Three easy ways to Get Invested right now: Subscribe to this podcast now, if you haven’t already, and get the inspiration delivered to your podcast feed each week Get a copy of my book, Get Invested, for FREE, and find out what it takes for you to invest in living more, working less. Go to: https://knowhowproperty.com.au/get-invested-free-ebook Join the Get Invested community. Each month Bushy sends a free and exclusive monthly email full of practical ‘Self, Health and Wealth’ wisdom that our current Freedom Fighter subscribers can’t wait to get each month. Just visit bushymartin.com.au, scroll to the bottom of the page and sign up. About Get Invested, a Property Hub show 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. Get Invested is part of the Property Hub podcast channel, your home for property investment insights, inspiration and stories from Australia’s top property experts, investors, leaders and analysts. Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Google Podcasts to get every Get Invested episode each week for free, and also get full access to RealtyTalk, Australia’s top online property show for red hot property investing news and insights direct from property industry leaders and influencers. Property Hub is a collaboration between Bushy Martin from KnowHow Property, Kevin Turner from Realty, show producer Andrew Montesi from Apiro Marketing and Apiro Media, and Australia’s largest independent podcast networkDM Media.  For business enquiries, email [e-mail] omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Probably one of the differences between me and maybe your typical bank economist is that I've been working in property. So I didn't start in economics, I started in property. Welcome to Get Invested on the Property Hub podcast channel, the leading weekly show to help you unlock your full self-health and wealth potential. I'm your host, Bushy Martin, and each week I go deep with the best investors, experts, leaders, and founders to find out what it takes to break free from the grind, discover freedom and live by design. Subscribe now and join me and get invested in the life you really want. Let's get started.

Hi Freedom Fighters. How much do you want and need certainty? And how do you make sense of the world? In our times of exponential change, rapidly growing complexity and endless information, it seems we all crave for increasing levels of certainty in order to feel safe and secure about the future. So the greater the level of change, the higher the level of certainty we seem to desire. Now throughout millennia of evolution, humans have managed to survive and thrive by creating simple mental models and frameworks that have become almost intuitive. In order to

scan and filter the never-ending stream of information that bombards all of our senses. And this allows us to focus on those that are critical to anticipating what's likely to happen and to make the decisions and actions necessary to allow us to survive and prosper as a race. And this has led our subconscious minds to develop perceptual and behavioural biases that almost invisibly guide our thoughts and emotional responses. All of this to help us anticipate the future in order to make good, quick decisions that reinforce our innate need

to feel safe and secure through the sense of certainty that this entails. But certainty has never been more under threat with the escalating rate of change in a constantly connected world where the only certainty is more uncertainty. So how do we make sense of this dynamic complexity and continue to safely navigate it. In recent times, the perception of certainty, or might I say misconception, is being offered by an increasing reliance on big data. But is this a panacea or a Pandora's box?

And nowhere is this more evident than in the world of property, where every conceivable measurable is being captured in order to justify property decisions. But property conditions and movements are as much about the intangible as they are the tangible, because our behaviours are driven more by our subconscious emotions and our baked-in biases than they are by our rational logic, which is often used to post-justify the decisions that our subliminal subconscious mind has already made. And applying simple apples-for-apples commodity market metrics and

comparisons to housing and property assets may make for good media, but every home and every street and every suburb is different from every other of the 11 million odd properties in over 15,000 odd suburbs right across the country. So the notion of property markets and reliance on single correlated cause and effect metrics are a bit of an anathema to me, when we're actually comparing an apple with every other known fruit and vegetable. Yes, they appeal to our need for certainty by creating simple mind models, as they may actually work for a period, but they're unlikely to stand the test of time because the simplification misses or overlooks many elements of the associated dynamic complexity, but they increasingly drive sentiment, which is having a

growing impact on property decisions. So instead of becoming preoccupied with forecasting the future and trying to pick tops and bottoms that are actually never known until after the event, I've always played the long game over 15 years or more with patience and persistence and plan for the worst and expect the best by focusing on the consistent underlying fundamentals and mitigating the unknown and uncontrollable risks by just having healthy rainy day reserves. And what's helped with this understanding of the world

and its impact on you and property? Quite simply, it's by appreciating economics. And before your mind shuts down because of the negative associations you may attribute with the boring and apparently irrelevant economic jargon that you hear in the soundbites on the nightly news, I'm talking about economics in the context of understanding scarcity by studying how we use resources and respond to incentives, as well as a study of decision-making and behavioural economics. Because in reality,

economics is a very broad discipline that helps us understand historical trends, interpret the headlines, and make much better informed predictions about what's likely to happen in order to address our world's most important issues from the macro to the micro right down to the micro. And while a lot of economists sadly get somewhat of a bad rap because forecasting the future and explaining it in easily comprehensible terms is about as easy and accurate as predicting the weather

given the level of variable dynamic complexity. Good economics helps you to better understand our world and help us to make better informed decisions so that we can invest our time, energy and money much more wisely. So today we're joined by one of those good economists, Dr Cameron Murray, who's an author who brings fresh economic thinking into this often staid rationalist industry. As you're about to hear over the next two episodes, as we first unpack his personal journey and philosophies before deep diving into the world of economics next week,

Cameron specialises in property and housing, environmental economics and corruption, which really spikes my curiosity and he also dabbles in just about everything else from macro to money to institutions to evolutionary economics and much more. So welcome and let's get invested Cameron. Thanks for having me Bushy. Cameron I'm really looking forward to this exercise as I guess already outlined economics I think gets a pretty bad rap in Australia generally but in property in particular so to sort of kick things off and really draw the line on the sand there can you sort of run us through what you do differently and why you do what you do Cameron. Yeah I think probably one of the differences between me and maybe your typical bank economist is that I've

been working in property so I didn't start in economics I started in property. If you can believe it I tried to sell real estate for a while thinking that there was easy money to be had got my real estate agent's license and was the world's worst real estate agent for a year and realized that actually the interesting part is not you know selling for people the interesting part is the investment and the market and the you know the details of property as an asset and so I ended up doing a valuation property economics degree and ended up working in a listed property development company for a while and so that was sort of my transition at the same time I was investing in property personally so I've unlike your typical economist I start with the

sort of practical on the ground and as you said in the introduction every property is unique and so yeah it's great to have these metrics but you can still outperform the market with the right property with the right local conditions and so I was very aware of that and so I guess what I do differently is is my perspective is a little bit deeper in terms of those details and then I try and bring the the big and powerful economic concepts to those practical details that I've experience, rather than just sort of sticking with my head in the clouds with these high level concepts, which can be powerful, but if you've missed a key detail, might send you down the wrong path.

So that's probably where I think I differ from many economists. Yeah, well said. And it's more a bottom up than a top down growth path that I think you've taken, which means you've got your hands dirty in the trenches. you understand the nitty gritties and then you've recognized the need to understand much much broader concepts what what was it that uh you know jumping from being a real estate agent effectively into uh the economics world is quite a leap that i don't think would happen very often what was it that attracted you to the the world of economics in that context yeah so probably it was uh my dad

was a bit of a casual real estate investor all through my childhood so I spent a lot of weekends fixing up houses with him and arguing about you know lifting and carrying and hammering and doing all those things so I guess I was immersed in it from a young age and and I'd started an engineering degree and realized that engineering's kind of boring I mean, it's just not easy money to be made when you first start out. So this was in the early 2000s, right, just before property took off. It was taking off in Sydney, but just before it was taking off in Brisbane. And I just thought there are people making a year's salary just trading houses.

Maybe that's where the money is. So, you know, then I tried my hand at real estate and realised that actually, you know, you want to be involved with development and investment more deeply, not with sales. And so that's sort of the path I took. And after a while, I went further into economics. I've worked in a couple of property developers.

I worked in the government dealing with, what were they called infrastructure charges and those sorts of policies yep and it's a funny story because I was getting involved with economics and I was getting very frustrated I'd worked in the government for a while after being in property development we had our first child got a sort of stable job and I was really frustrated with it so I decided I'd actually do medicine and i i said to my wife i'd like to get up every day and do something useful for the world and and working in the government and dealing with policy arguments just wasn't cutting it yeah and uh so i i did i studied for the gamsat the entrance test and i aced it and i got accepted

to medical school but then i hosted paul friders who was a professor at uq at the time for an economics society event and afterwards we stayed there drinking and i was like yeah economics is just nonsense i'm gonna go and do medicine and by the end of the night we decided that i could do a phd in economics and do something useful and practical and so i gave up my medical school spot and and started a phd in economics that's a pretty pretty pivotal conversation you had sort of right there clearly yeah yeah it was well you know i i did a lot of research as well i had a few doctor friends and i you know spoke to all of them and one of them organized for me to go on an observership and follow them around at the hospital and see what it's like and i spoke to

the hospital careers person so i did my research as well and and it was all pointing to yeah it's pretty hard slog with young kids at home um so yeah I did the PhD and and that result of that was the book Game of Mates about grey corruption so I was very interested at the time in why in the government everything seems so politically sensitive rather than just getting on with the job and and so that was what i did in my phd and anyway here we are years later applying that uh game of mates exercise to the property arena has a there's some ripple effects there that uh in terms of the mindset uh that have and do have an influence so while we're talking about it can you expand a bit on that yeah so one of the one of the interesting

decisions in in property is is how we regulate property right and so in lots of areas of the economy we regulate you know what royalties do you pay when you mine how do you get an approval what are your obligations and in property we do this through the planning system quite often as well as the building you know codes and there is a game to be had from getting the rules changed in your favor just like there is in every sector but i did recall from my time in property that you know a lot of the game is buy something that's going to get up zoned because you know that's essentially an extra property right for you that you didn't have to buy and so one of the one of the research studies i did was looking in queensland in the early in the 2000s a new

body was created the urban land development authority that had the power to take planning regulations planning controls away from the councils and fast track and up zone and do whatever it did and the shapes of these areas that they took control of were very unusual and i thought that's kind of weird to draw it that way so it's a little bit like gerrymandering yep for political electorates but for upzoning areas and so i've got the property records from all the property owners inside and outside those areas the ones just outside it could have been upzoned but weren't and the ones inside and i thought can i predict who got the upzoning from for example political donations or their social network and after scraping all the corporate

records and a database of former politicians and the lobbyist register and the donations register I came up with a sort of social network of 12,000 entities and 250,000 relationships and it turned out that you could fairly easily predict where that boundary of that upzoning was drawn between whose properties based on where the property owner was in the social network so how well connected they were and what was super interesting is that these same metrics of centrality they're called like how well connected you are can predict in organized criminal gangs who earns the most from being a gang member so their their wealth in the criminal gang is proportional to their centrality in the social network and it was true in Queensland that well-connected property owners

always got inside the rezoning decision not never left just outside they were all the unconnected owners and we found that the value of those sites with the boundaries drawn around them went up in value 710 million dollars in the first year based on property sales records so you know that was sort of um a big interest of mine is well we kind of need planning regulations but planners seem oblivious to the fact that what they're doing is handing out hundreds of millions of dollars to different property owners willy-nilly with every decision and I've been on a bit of a a program of training planners to understand the economics of what they're doing sometimes they make development infeasible sometimes they give away valuable upzoning right

And so I've been actually recently doing courses for the Planning Institute on property economics, trying to build that knowledge because it's a huge point of contention in the day-to-day administration, but also politically, it's a hot topic because the favours can be very valuable. Yeah, I find it really interesting. I'd spent 17-odd years as an architect and one of my biggest frustrations, Cameron, was having major decisions made on properties and the shape, appearance and otherwise of properties at much more micro level than what you were talking. But they were influenced by the local fish and chip shop owner who was best mates with someone else. and it was it was very much about who you knew not what what you knew uh to get the sort of and i and i i that was part of the reason why i left architecture actually because the the the common sense and the the right aspect was being overshadowed by the relationship uh aspect very much along what you're what you're talking about there with the the concept of centrality so

where so and i think it's uh wherever there's people in those relationships it's going to be very difficult i think to um legislate or to try and control that because that's just human nature what's your thoughts on that yeah so that was sort of the conclusion i got to at the end is that you can't regulate human nature what you can do is accept human nature how it is and and to be honest there's a flip side to this social relationship it builds a lot of trust it actually it's very efficiency enhancing to trust those people in your well-connected network because you know when you cut a deal with them you don't spend years in the courts afterwards trying to enforce it because you know you all work with the same people for years afterwards you've got to trust them

so there's a there's a massive benefit to it but of course politically you can use that trust to move the hand of government in the favor of certain people as well so that's sort of a cost on everybody else as well so so i guess my conclusion was we can't change people but what we can have is institutions that price political decisions so that if you give them a favor someone still has to pay for it if it's got a market value and we can randomize decision making or decision makers so that even if you trust people you don't know who's making the next decision and those people making the decision don't have any loyalty because they just got randomly put there once and we do this in criminal courts with juries we randomly select the ultimate decision makers

because we know if we had professional juries that eventually they'd be seduced into organized crime and everyone would get away with their their crimes so we know it works we have good examples of of where we do it when it's important but we miss those key insights in day-to-day regulatory decisions um we we sometimes think rotating stuff for example from private sector into the regulator is a good idea because it gets this experience but the flip side of that is it brings those social networks and those social obligations with it as well right so this is why for example your judges in criminal courts don't just rotate in and out of private um you know private sector legal jumps because you've got to sort of insulate those decision makers so i think there's a lot of

lessons there we can apply um in many other areas and it's not about changing people because there's a very good side to trust it's just about having systems that work really well uh when people trust each other um and yeah that's that's brilliant or we price things yeah that's pretty that's pretty exciting and we'll we'll talk more about that in in part to our uh conversation because i think in terms of future solutions there's a lot of merit in in exactly what you're saying there that has applicability in that aspect one thing i'm sort of picking up from what you've shared with us already is that there's a uh a lean towards the analytical efficiency is the best word i can or term i can use to describe it in terms of where where your uh preferences tend to

lead uh yeah am i reading that right and uh if if that is so if that's one of your sort of almost core values and beliefs if you like uh how does that continue to influence who you are and what you do yeah so i think you've probably picked up uh a good insight there bushy um i i would say economics training makes people acutely aware of inefficiencies of resource use and um you know everybody's frustrated by paperwork and middle management and terrible rules but economists are trained to be even more frustrated and I think I'm naturally a little bit like that and I think most people are at the end of the day most people just want to do the job they don't want to talk about they don't want to tick forms or jump hoops and you know we often regulate for the lowest

common denominator in these things so I think your experience in architecture was well what if we get an ugly building okay well you might get some ugly ones and you might get some amazing ones is it okay to just have a mix and i think yeah probably it is because the gain from just the simplicity or the efficiency uh from not having all those fights and ending up with a mix is probably worth it but i think you're right in my personal life i'm very very similar i'm i i would say uh as a young guy cheapskate wouldn't have been too far from the mark i think a lot of young guys when they're working hard for their money are very efficient and analytical with their money and i think only you know it sort of took till i had kids to loosen up on that and go we only

live once it's great to be efficient and save and um you know not waste your time and work all the time but you know also there's the life to live as well and so these days what i try and do is I compress the work time so when I work it's really hard focused and high value work and when I don't unfortunately I often still think about work so in the shower at the beach I get amazing great ideas but at least I'm you know going to the gym walking the dog on the beach doing other things and sort of trying to to keep the balance so I think I think most people are appreciate efficiency and for economists it's a much bigger it's a much bigger and more important thing uh for economists the only reason we're rich is because we got more efficient right and

the biggest probably one of the biggest topics in economics is why are poor countries poor why aren't they all rich why don't they catch up and the question is well are they do they have rules that don't let them uh are they constrained by international capital flows can they not get finance can they are they political you know great corruption that is undermining actual capital investment these are the huge questions economists have so i think i'm just a small part of that um but i definitely probably live that philosophy as well personally um you know economists are renowned for never buying fancy cars because we are very aware of buy a cheap secondhand Toyota and drive it into the ground that is the most efficient outcome and we do all our research

now I've got a cheap secondhand Mitsubishi but I'm very close to the market I love it I love it in in that context and in the perception of economists which I've sort of alluded to in the introduction what do you find that most people misunderstand about you most me personally or economic yeah no you personally because they we have all of us have a tendency to put people in a box so if you mention the word economist there's a perception that immediately comes to mind how does that sit in the in the context of misunderstanding you and what you're about yeah it's it's been hard for me to know at the moment because i've lived this lifestyle for such a long time and i'm so entrenched but uh you know the biggest um

the biggest confusion is that economists are not accountants uh so we use money as a measure for well-being in you know so when we say we want a bigger gdp we don't want it because we want more dollars in bank accounts we want it because high gdp means living a long time higher education better health outcomes have higher happiness self-reported happiness correlates so all the good things you want in life uh it's not about the accounts even though hilariously i was uh the treasurer for sport climbing queensland the uh the queensland competition climbing and they're like don't worry he's an economist i'm like but i'm not my account it's it's a different thing um so that's probably the main confusion and and i guess the other one is it's all about

finance and investment like i don't know what stocks are good or what's going but i understand the big conceptual frameworks around risk and around the substitution of different assets and around the macro economy and so i'm really you know i'm torn with economics personally sometimes i think it's it's terrible sometimes i think we won't update our textbooks and we won't incorporate better views and then sometimes I think it's great because at least we have a common language and can communicate with each other we're in a lot of other social sciences it's just a word salad of no one's really sure what anyone means and it's almost entertainment so so that's that's where I sit a bit of a love hate thing at times and I think people don't

I have pretty broad interests, so I don't think they get me too wrong. I generally can find common ground with people in my economic interests. Well, certainly from a personal perspective, I can connect with having followed you for a while and listened to your observations. There's a broader understanding, I find, in what you're sharing than what I see with some others. And you've touched on this already, but what do you struggle with then, Cameron?

uh time management switching her off um i i would say because my i'm so analytical all the time um you can you can probably should interview my wife after this but just interpersonal just letting letting things slide and that's definitely something I'm aware of and at least trying to change but it's it's it's a skill to just be deep in the economics and you know just this morning I was um I was walking and I just had on my mind this um you know simulation exercise I want to code up and all I can think of is oh god when can I get a few hours free to sit at the computer and check this whereas you know it's nearly christmas i should probably reach out to some friends shouldn't i so um that's that

is just uh i mean it's good again there's two i'm going to be the two-handed economist it's great for focus and it's great for ideas and it's great for communication but that that is the flip side is is managing it and managing yourself so um you know in terms of economics in terms of research in terms of what's happening that's that's awkward but it's it's really the juggle that uh and i think i've accepted that life goes in waves so you have periods where it's really intense work and then you you need to switch off for a period and and i think i i understand it intellectually i just have to live it more for sure well and i'm the reason why i'm uh smiling and laughing quietly on the inside is i'm resonating with absolutely everything you

I have this almost obsessive, once an idea is in the head, I can't let it go. And, yes, while intellectually I understand the need for balance and there's this constant talk about balance, maybe I'm getting old and crusty, but I don't know that that is achievable or sustainable depending on your mindset and your outlook. and if you're, you know, when you're doing the walk on the beach

or what have you, that's often when some of my best ideas come. I'm in the shower and I've got this inspiration and I've got to sit down and I've got to get it down as quick as I can before I lose the thread. So I think, yeah, while we know that we need to be doing more balance as the word, I'm not sure whether that works and it's probably more surrounding yourself with people who understand you and how you operate that can accommodate

that than trying to completely change who you are. And I guess that's a good segue into something else I want to ask you, Cameron, is, you know, what challenging event in your life has brought about your greatest learnings and your best changes? Good question. greatest challenges um yeah uh probably probably having kids was the so we were young had uh unplanned first pregnancy and both studying and just um in terms of perspective

it's very useful um i used to take our first son and take him to uni and put him on the floor and he's playing that next to my computer um yeah so i guess it was a bit of a shock and a challenge and then it sort of forced me to grow up in terms of a level of maturity so you know as a young guy nothing in life is too serious or important you know it's easy to go and make some money go on a trip here do whatever you want but this was a sort of step up in maturity responsibility in terms of managing money it was all very oh actually there's a reason now to be more cautious with the money so I don't know if it was not a challenge in terms of you know running a marathon or anything like that where it's just you do it and you push yourself

it's it was more of a uh emotional maturity challenge for me um and i think most guys go through this my i have two sons and they're teenagers now and you can you can see them going through that emotional learning as well and it's very difficult but i think for guys it lasts you know at last another all through your 20s as well and um so i guess what i'm trying to say is if i look back at myself in my early 20s uh i'd have a lot of words of wisdom uh for myself uh so that's that's probably the big picture uh what i can think of now Yeah, I think guys generally, actually, while they won't admit it, have a real challenge with the responsibility for others. And I'm probably talking more for myself here than anything else, because that's certainly something that I also struggled with many years ago now.

but it's something that really flipped the lid for me in terms of what I was doing, where I was heading and how I needed to actually respond, given that added responsibility for someone else's life, which I looked at seriously at the time. But you've touched on a couple of things. And again, there's an assumption around economists having their head around money and the relationship with money.

What does money mean to you, Cameron? Yeah, so money. it's funny people i know people who have household budgets and different you know apps for saving and this and that i don't have any of that and my attitude is now i guess when i was young and it was all about make money and invest and focus now it's well you know money is just there to be spent that's what money is for and I don't know if it's having kids that you realize the money when you're single and you're young money can just come in and you can hold it because you don't have many expenses and then you've got a whole family and it's just a pipeline it just flows straight through

and so my relationship now is well I'm going to spend everything I earn so I'll just stop when there's no money left and wait for more money and then just keep going like i don't know you know as an economist i guess people will assume i've got this budget and i've got this this and and yeah i've got a bit of a long-term you know we've bought our house and this long-term thing and i've got super so i'm an economist i'm like i don't have to buy shares i've got super someone's doing it before me yeah so my attitude now is it's just it's just the money pipe if we just spend on something we won't spend on something else yeah and and i guess my wife has probably forced me to realize that she's like well you just want to spend on that i just want to spend on that we're

just going to spend on something right and so that's my attitude now i just earn money comes in one end goes without the other and as long as i've got a fairly mature view of what i value in life so i think that's probably something that takes a while to learn people yeah and what is that let's talk about that what and it does change and evolve over time so what do you value now and how's that changed if you look back on your journey so far so for example when i was young i wouldn't go out to a fancy restaurant or i wouldn't even eat nice food because i'm like it's just calories what difference does it make I chew it for 20 seconds it's gone um and now I'm like oh actually meals are this great social

event where you hang out and you you do all this stuff and it's fun and it doesn't matter if it costs a bit more money it's actually I enjoy the event of dining out and you know chatting and trying the wine and uh and maybe that's again an age thing but it's also just uh i didn't value it because i thought i it's like you know when you're a teenager you pre-drink before you go out for drinks because it's efficient i would just pre-eat i'm like oh spaghetti good fill up the tank oh we're gonna have something fancy i'll just have a taste so just appreciating things um i still don't value clothes and cars and stuff that a lot of people spend money on but we do travel so we took the kids skiing in japan earlier this year

um i i really value like life events big births birthdays weddings all those big get-togethers and celebrations um so i those i value we just got back from a week at the coast with my brother's family we all shared a house and so that's kind of i think most people see that but but for me the the difference in value between that and buying a fancy car or fancy clothes is probably much more extreme. In fact, at my website, I have an article where I literally documented roughly what we spend on different categories of expenditure each year to match the ABS consumer price index weights. So for example, your typical house spends 12% on clothes and 8% on insurance or whatever the numbers are and i compared our house to see how abnormal it was yeah um and and ours is

very very high on entertainment and recreation and holidays and kind of low on transport and clothing as you can imagine yeah so you what i'm hearing is you're more about experience than things uh and and i think there's there's always an evolution with that when we uh i don't know about you but i know when i was young i needed to look successful so it was all about the things that i could show that what made me successful if i if i rolled through just an hour i couldn't it's about uh more life and less stuff uh for me now so there's been a massive shift in that and the experiences that you you've just shared with us are much more important to me than what they were then so where it sounds like we're similar there i i now want to sort of transition if we

can Cameron into your personal investment journey because again you've sort of alluded to it during the conversation and I'd love you to take us through that starting with you know why did you decide to invest at all what triggered your interest and and what were some of the initial fears and concerns that you might have had before you actually dove in well yeah as I said my dad was a bit of a keen investor and so actually this these when when my dad was 50 he had uh throat cancer and decided that um he needed to set us kids up for life financially uh that was you know one of his his goals and so he uh he gave us thirty thousand dollars each and said buy a house that will that's what you need to do and this was um 2002 three sort of period

just luckily just before the boom in brisbane which is where i live yeah and although at the time it still seemed very expensive um but you know went through the process of borrowing money and finding a mortgage broker and just learning the paperwork and administration side of doing it. It's not just like, you know, there is a process to it all, right? And that's what got me started. And conveniently, it was right before the Brisbane boom, not that anyone knew that was coming.

So I can't really take any credit for the timing there, But it turned out that it seemed like easy money because prices were just going up. So I tried to leverage and buy some more property and ended up in the early 2000s buying three houses in a block of land in very cheap places in Queensland. So Ipswich, Brisbane, Rockhampton. And I don't know if you know Russell Island, but the block of land on Russell Island was for $3,000 in the 2000s. They're only $40,000 now, by the way, if anyone wants to retire to a beautiful island,

a short ferry ride from Brisbane. I'm surprised. I would have thought they would have been a lot more expensive than that. So I guess it's just the separation and the infrastructure challenge. Well, I mean, a completed house is around $250,000 there. And so, yeah, it makes sense to spend a couple hundred thousand on a sort of cheap house. Yeah, so, yeah, well, I want to get onto that in a moment

because maybe when we talk about the policy debate around housing, people forget that there are cheaper houses in this country. They're just not in Sydney. Exactly. So that was my sort of start of my investment journey. I did sell a couple of houses, and I don't know if I ever was too worried about it just because of the timing was good,

and so I got a little bit bailed out with the capital gains early on. Nothing happened, of course, between 2006 and 2019. I could have sold everything in 2006 and had the same amount of cash as 2019 in Queensland. So we forget also that there wasn't a lot of price appreciation for more than a decade. And so that was sort of my introduction to it all. Obviously, at the time, I was working in real estate

and property development, and so very entrenched in where do you get value in the market? Why do things go up in value? um very much starting the thought processes on all those questions that i think i've got a very good handle on today so i don't think i was ever too worried my my dad was super helpful and he always made sure i had uh landlord's insurance because i didn't live in any of these places which which really helped uh i had a place at ipswich that i rented to an organization that um housed or the children of people who were in jail um so they had carers and they rented a bunch

of houses where you know their carers would take the children yeah and um it worked out really well for a few years until one of the kids started stealing the neighbor's cars and smashing out the house and pulling the fence palings off and starting bonfires and and the last straw was when they snuck away leaving the bathtub filling and no one turned the tap off and the the drain in the bath room was covered by a mat and so hours later when they came home the whole house had been flooded and so I had to you know I had all the experiences I had to fix everything up had to chase the insurance company they didn't want to pay I had to have an argument and all that's fine and you know I was made whole at the end and sold that place but I don't think I was ever

too worried because I think my dad was you know had a bit of experience and was always double checking on me. Is that a mentor in that context as well but you probably definitely you probably already summed this up but if you look back on and particularly on your property part of the journey what's been your best and worst investment in that context and and what have you learned from each of those um uh look probably the worst was that one um just because i should have sold it way earlier uh went through went through years of grief without actually making any extra money uh the best one was probably the first one i bought when i was 19 in in brisbane that i just sold before covid again not great timing um right before the boom um but i sold it um just before

christmas in 2019 but luckily in 2020 i bought the house we live in now so during covid i was very uh like we were cashed up and ready to buy yep during covid i was actually really worried people thought prices were going to fall and interest rates were already i felt pretty reasonable in 2019 you could get a three point something percent interest rate and yields were still five percent exactly a lot of places yeah and then they dropped even further you get a two point something in mortgage i just thought no one there's nothing for sale no one's panicking and interest rates are low how can prices go down yeah and so i was really in a rush to buy something and and we did um but i remember i was on a podcast in in may in 2020 right when the bank

economists were saying oh prices might fall 30 nationally and i said in that podcast prices are more likely to rise 20 than fall 20 because of the low interest rates and i said if you look historically uh higher employment is is not a it doesn't correlate with falling house prices it's just not a thing um why people saying it is just look at the record yeah and uh and people said to me where did you get your degree the back of a cornflakes packet all this sort of stuff right and of course 12 months later uh all those guys that got it wrong were now explaining why prices went up and uh so luckily luckily i didn't wait too long cashing out at the low in 2019 before getting back in um so yeah i guess i guess that's my story i don't i don't think there are

any super terrible things and i guess that's perspective right i think when you first when you first start investing in property a lot of people expect miracles very quickly they expect a linear yeah in my experience they expect this linear uh curve but if you actually and you would have done more research on this than i have but research that i've done that would would suggest you know over the last 45 or 50 odd years that things tend to go on almost a sort of an s curve but it varies by location that you know one precinct right next to another can be going through a completely different uh growth cycle than the others and it's not not unusual for you You know, property values to go flatline for, you know,

five to eight years or more, and then they have a spike in growth and then they might even come back slightly before they then extend out. So I think, you know, you know the stats. Fifty-four percent of first-time investors sell a property within the first five years, and I think that's about expectations as much as anything because they have this – they often buy when prices have just gone through their major spike, and then they see the values just flatline for a period

when they're expecting this sort of linear year-on-year growth uh it's just they're just thinking and looking at it the wrong way i agree i think because i worked in real estate and i knew a lot of old guys who'd been in real estate and they're always talking about the cycles picking up and the cycle this and then in property development everyone's aware of the cycle you don't want to miss the cycle right you've got to be prepared for i was i was not um i guess i I learned that lesson fairly early. I didn't sort of have to learn it firsthand by losing a lot of money or anything like that.

So that was very lucky. Yeah. Shifting gears a little bit, Cameron, what does financial independence mean to you? Yeah. So that's, I guess, that's been, how would I put it? And that's been a sort of life objective, principle, philosophy of mine since I was young is since my sort of my dad got me investing, it's, oh, wow, I can actually not have to have a nine to five job. And if I lose it, I'm okay for a few months because I've got this asset buffer.

I've got a line of credit or you know I can actually do what I want not what pays and so that's been really great for me having that flexibility being able to do a PhD and now I guess I'm trying to make the most of that again and start my own sort of one-man think tank fresh economic thinking the last four years I did work for the University of Sydney which is great but now I feel like I can do my own thing and I can yeah I can do that partly because of 20 years of investing in property and you know not buying new cars all the time and things like that so yeah I think it's just a matter of you know in life you can do things for money every day or you can do things that you want every day and work out how to make money and i think the second choice

is a lot better and that's what i've been trying to do as much as i can but you can really only do that if you can manage your money if your spending needs are low and you can invest and you can have a savings buffer that allows you to live that better life so when then get up in the morning You're not just, oh, I've got to put my alarm on and drag myself out and work for the man and deal with, you know, deal with stupid meetings or whatever every day. You know, everyone's got those frustrations, but you want to minimize them and having the freedom to do it. I think it's 2023, right? We should have as many people as we can doing the things they want and they enjoy each day and minimize the people just having to do things for money. and I think we're getting there like if you compare it if you look historically we're at the

best point in history in terms of that but but I I wanted to personally make sure I was I was doing it and so um yeah I I think it's been really good and now that my kids are in high school I I do wonder how much education in this financial literacy financial management financial independence they get um it's it's an interesting one i definitely know my kids are good at spending money but i have i have really noticed my eldest has a job now and he he when he's earned the money it's super valuable when i give him the money i'll just buy whatever um so yeah i i would like to pass it down but i think it's it's a it's a life lesson and you know getting slightly off topic i really think um uh some people just never know what that is to be financially dependent to

be in a household that's more financially dependent but i really wish we could um teach it more widely and have more people experience it doesn't mean you don't have to work doesn't mean you don't have to work hard but you don't have to do things you don't like every day you can work hard at things that sort of pique your interest even if you're a builder or a tradie oh you start your own business you try this you do this oh you become a specialist in that like you still work hard but you you you can sustain an interest well and if to have the autonomy to have the freedom of time and choice uh in terms of fulfillment that that flows from those uh and again you'd know this way more than i would but i know from my personal experience when we hit

financial independence and suddenly i was i was working because i wanted to not because i had to The mental shift, you can't put a dollar value on that, to be honest, in terms of your outlook and enjoyment of life from that point. And I guess, again, slightly leveraging off that, can I get you to paint us a picture of your ideal lifestyle and life vision and in association with that, what's your investment strategy to both attain

and maintain that if you're, it sounds like you're probably doing it already, but can you share that with us? Yeah. So I guess in terms of overall principle or lifestyle, yeah, I think I'm living it in a way. Let me just go on a bit of a tangent here. when we talk about superannuation we're all about save save save save save and then boom retire at 65 or 67 but i think the better lifestyle is to save spend do what you want save spend do what

you want and have many many retirement periods or career changes or um you know just um do the things you want when you can physically enjoy them and so i think that's sort of what i've done i've worked in real estate i've studied we've um you know had various different breaks and um i think you know the the lifestyle i want is now the one i have where i'm working for myself and i'm flexible i can go to the gym i can take the dogs out i can have a day off i can catch up with my friends um but my mind still ticks over and i can still have those periods of focus so So that's how it is. How do I do it?

Well, yeah, I guess when I was studying my PhD, we did draw down on the mortgage for one of the investment properties for a couple of years. But to be honest, it's not so much. If you're earning a little bit, you're just topping up a little bit and you've bought yourself a few years of doing what you want. and um and so now i've got no investment properties in a house that's um nearly paid off so paying off the house saves you a lot of money and um and of course i can redraw out of

out of that as a buffer as well so that's you know it's not complicated um it's really not that complicated it's just um you gotta have you gotta I guess accumulate appreciating assets is the the and I've done that and now it's it's the house and the super and that's probably okay yeah well you you've used those assets as enablers for your lifestyle which is yeah which is a and sort of coming back to your point around retirement I'd I'm right with you there it's because it's like an on-off switch retirement whereas for me And my wife and I, we talk about rewirement, not retirement, because we're just transitioning and changing what we do in line with both our interests and our ability, which is a much more enjoyable way of life. And if you look at the stats on those who retire, it may have changed, but some years ago I looked at this.

So there was three out of five males were dead within five years of retirement because suddenly they've got no purpose in life. And I think the key here is if you're pursuing your interests and that gives you the purpose and you're helping others and the fulfilment that flows from that, then that's something you can do as long as your heart keeps beating. Yeah, totally with you there. And I think even if you have a physical job when you're young,

You can, you know, evolve into other things when you're older. I've got a good mate who's a builder and he's just, he's thinking of what comes next and whether he, you know, trains other people, starting a different sort of business in the area where he's seen as a bit of a market. So I think it's this, you know, that's the way it should be, right? The whole idea of work for the man for 30 years and retire or 40 years it's sort of not how it happens and i think most i'm very satisfied that more and more

people think this way um which which is great and uh i think you know we're a rich country at the richest point in history it's probably a good thing to to get from from that absolutely i think The thing that there's a misnomer, I think, that people who embed themselves in employment and almost convict themselves to lifetime employment, they think that there's more safety and security in that. But if you actually look at the stats, given where the world's heading and what's happening, there's more safety and security in working for yourself and driving your own race than there is on the reliance on the paycheck from someone else. because that paycheck may well not be there next week. I think that's a cultural thing, right? People misunderstand the risk of working for someone else versus yourself because someone else is working for themselves

and they're paying you. So you've got the second chance on their business's income. Yeah, that is a, you know, large institutions, obviously, you know, universities where I've worked, government departments and stuff and very large companies are less risky but yeah um it is still a risk and you know these companies downsize and adjust on a whim with a new ceo and a new competitor all of a sudden yeah your risk-free job is up in the air spot on spot on so if we sort of bring this to a close if we reflect black on your journey so far

if you're starting out again what if anything would you invest in differently and again when i say investment i'm not just talking about property i'm talking about investing your time your energy your money your interests uh what if anything would you do differently look i i i'm an optimist and i'm also very forgetful as my friends will tell you so for me i'm just like everything was great um uh you know i'm sure i learned from things and adjust so so maybe i'll consider it as maybe what what would i try and pass down to my kids who are starting yeah the journey very soon and i think um it's a good very good question i think i'd just pass on my same advice my you know

my kids have had a similar experience fixing up houses with me when they were little fixing up our house um understanding investing talking openly with us about money so i think they've had a good grounding and yeah i think i would say just just start just start investing a little while your costs are low and work hard find stuff you're interested in i think what i what we've i i chat to my wife and i chat to my family and my brothers and sisters about this and i think you know what advice do you give a teenager in 2023 who's about to finish high school and embark on the world and i think it's it's probably don't stand still be trying something even if because you're not going to learn if you like something or you don't

know what your interests are by doing nothing just start participate do do it as best you can and if you realize there's no future in it or no interest then keep keep moving to the next thing so that's probably the highest level and for us i think i could give in terms of money i'll be on their back making sure they invest and they're not you know borrowing money to buy a new uh sports car at age 19 or anything like that yeah no great advice that's the generational your father speaking through you which and i had a very similar exactly my father i remember when i was at school all my mates want wanted cars and i kept saying to mom dad dad can i get a car and my dad would always say son you can have any car you like just as soon as you saved up

the money to buy it and that that that the discipline of having to do it yourself and the respect that you then give to the asset when you finally hands on it because you appreciate it uh which is the same advice i give my son by the way uh but but the uh habits and the discipline that build up as a result of that uh i i think they're they're life skills that uh you know you you just can't can't ignore so i think that time that advice from generations that flows through is the best possible i just don't think this that that is sort of timeless isn't it i don't think it would have been a problem 100 years ago try something work hard at it spend less than your own don't just waste your money on showboating things would have worked 100 years ago as well

um for sure and i think i'll give you a little bit of a positive insight there on the next generation and and maybe we'll talk more about the sort of media hype around oh the next generation is useless at everything which is of course as old as the hills um at my boys school everyone wants to start a business they all want to uh they're reading business books they are they want to be the next somebody the next new thing and i you know i'm very much encouraging yeah them and um yeah so there's very much this can-do attitude out there it's right obviously not everywhere but i just wanted to leave with this we're talking about the generational advice that yeah old advice is good but don't worry a lot of youngsters are going to go out and do it

themselves anyway because they are motivated and i think they've seen you know they look up to the guys like elon musk and they just think well he just started a business i'm going to do that for whatever um love it that's very encouraging and and i'm glad to hear that because while as you mentioned before and i agree with you i think the educational system needs to embed you know a framework for how to manage money and and how to invest it on their place it actually takes the the pressure off at the other end when uh super's not enough and the welfare system through through pensions which aren't going to be there forever uh needing to be the safety net if if we're putting the energy at the front end and giving them the skills then we don't need that

that massive uh safety blanket at the end so brilliantly said i i now want to switch into So what I commonly and affectionately refer to as the ambush round, Cameron, where I get the old blindfold and cigarette and ask you the sort of fast-forward questions that you get asked on every podcast. First of all, which feels like a bit left field, but it tells us a bit about you and your thoughts, what's your favourite song and why? Look, I don't know if I have one favourite,

but I'll tell you what I often return to as a favourite is Bohemian Rhapsody. and the reason is when i was younger i just wanted to learn that song on the piano it's got some really nice sections in it and and it took me years and i did and so now it's kind of that my go-to thing if i want to just play the piano and unwind i'll play the first few parts until the the i see a little silhouette when i get to that part i kind of give up but but you Yeah, I'm with you. I'm a closet penis myself, Cameron. And, you know, Freddie Mercury was a very talented individual

who came up with some sensational music during that real halcyon period for rock around the world, I think. So that's a classic. Slightly different subject. What superpower do you wish you had and why? Look, I think I would just bring out my inner child than go for the super superman's flying power um just you know isn't it always you just feel like one day wouldn't it be great to just fly like that i look at birds every day and go i wish i

wish i could do that i've done that since i was maybe it's a close contest but um i'm just gonna pick that one because i i remember being little and thinking gee that's amazing and probably i remember you know pretending that you could do that yeah i love it i love it if it's again different topic altogether if you could have coffee with anyone either dead or alive who would you choose and why um you know i'd probably try and find someone in my family history um there is a my my grandfather and my mother's side did a lot of family history and found that we can trace our line back to king henry the seventh or something not the eighth um and so probably just out of curiosity going back to that sort of era to someone who i can look and go wow okay

eventually um your your bloodline creates me just just i mean there's heaps of others but um that's just one that comes to mind yeah i love it love it my good father traced the family tree back and it was really interesting yeah uh we'd learned stuff that we never would have known and and some of my grandmother uh didn't like some of the history because she had this vision that we were sort of English purists in the aristocracy where we're actually at the opposite end. No, it's never the case, is it? Everyone's a mix of everything.

It gives you a bit of an appreciation for humanity as well, that you realise that if you go up far enough, we're all cousins at the end of the day. Exactly. Exactly. I love that. This one, the last one's a bit of an interesting one. What would be the title of the book about you

if your worst enemy wrote it? oh uh uh my worst enemy it'd be something like the disingenuous pretend leftist fake alt right something like that so i get criticized from the left and the right on social media so if you're on twitter at dr cameron murray dr cameron murray and uh the left hates me because during covid i thought well you know what locking everyone down doesn't seem like a medical intervention and we should look at the economic costs and of course people thought that meant we wanted to kill grannies but you know the economics as i said earlier it's not about the money it's about the thing that you get from being in a rich functioning society and that thing is well-being happiness

longevity all those things and so if it wasn't the case we wouldn't have to go to work every day and we'd still be rich and still be happy but that's not true yeah so the left uh left and right i think don't have any meaning but people hate me for that okay call me the right and then the right thinks i'm a crazy lefty because i think we should have a public housing system and that it's okay for the government to do things and build things um and we really like it when they do right when the government fixes up your street or there's a new thing going on the city everyone loves it um yet people think i'm a crazy lefty communist for that so that the book well yeah that's it that's good because i and i i guess uh you know again i agree with

everything you just shared but there's a propensity for people particularly nowadays given we're siloed on our social media platforms to to put people into boxes very quickly and i'm not a big believer in boxes uh personally uh because just because you have a view in in one area doesn't make you that uh it's if you've got a diverse view of the world then uh but but i guess the good thing is cameron that does mean that uh people are sitting up and taking notice of what what you've got to say and that's a that's a really good thing so sort of closing off this this sort of personal journey section is there anything that i haven't asked you that you would block me to and and if so what what is it and what would you have said uh geez that's a tough

one i don't know if anything's coming into mind right now uh what would you have asked about the personal journey and what would i have said um i can see my head's super focused on property right now yeah and you've shared you've shared most of it anyway i always sort of just in case there's something you're bursting to share with us that i i haven't got the opportunity i might just tease the audience yeah i might just tease the audience that um you should have asked me why do you think we should scrap the superannuation system and give everyone their money back that's what probably maybe i can not answer it and just leave it okay well i'll tell you what let's sow the seed in this episode and then we'll talk a little bit

about the superannuation system in part two to put a bit more colour on it. So look, I'm really enjoying the conversation. I really want to thank you for taking the time to share the ins and outs of your journey so far. And I just want to mention to anyone watching or listening in, if you'd like to ask any further questions or leave your thoughts on our great chat so far,

just join and jump into the Property Hub Collective interactive Facebook community where you can keep the conversation going with other like-minded, hardworking Aussies. and we now look forward to continuing the conversation in next week's episode where we're going to deep dive into the wonderful world of property and housing economics. So I look forward to seeing you again

and thanks for your time today, Cameron. Stay tuned for part two of this interview next episode. Thanks for tuning in to Get Invested on the Property Hub podcast channel, your home for property investment insights and inspiration. And don't leave yet until you've taken the next step towards living by design by getting my award-winning book get invested absolutely free when you sign up at knowhowproperty.com.au or bushymartin.com.au and finally make sure you

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