Property Hub - Investment Insights & Inspiration - Get Invested: Part 1 - Kylie Davis on the power of tech for success in property

Starting point is 00:00:00 I am really passionate about ideas and I'm really passionate about curiosity and I did have 25 years in media and a good, probably 10, 12 of those were actually in mainstream media, the rest were in my own media company that I had. And I, look, if it bleeds, it leads. That was absolutely the mantra. but I found myself constantly at odds with the thinking of the news. Very early on, I set up my own newspaper company and my entire business model, because I was only 24 when I set it up, was what would News Corp do? And I would do the opposite. Welcome to Get Invested on the

Starting point is 00:00:41 Property Hub podcast channel, the leading weekly show for Australians who want to learn how to unlock their 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 to live by design. Subscribe now and join me and get invested in the life that you really want. Let's get started. Hi Freedom Fighters, are you driven by fear or abundance? Chances are if you're immersed in our continuously connected and always on instant everything digital world, you're going to be driven by fear as you're drowning in the sea of it. Because sadly, much of our mainstream media is fighting a desperate and losing struggle to

Starting point is 00:01:28 survive. In the space of just a couple of decades, our level and sources of information have shifted dramatically from a mere handful of free-to-air TV channels, newspapers and radio stations that concentrated advertising and funded production of quality investigative journalism into a diverse hedonistic free-for-all where everyone on the iPhone thinks they're a journalist and we're bombarded 24-7 with an endless stream of opinions across multiple platforms from social media to YouTube to podcasts to pay-as-you-go TV channels and subscription services, you name it. There are an increasingly endless array of non-stop mediums that are spreading and diluting our attention and consequently the old bastions of journalistic integrity and information based

Starting point is 00:02:14 on truths and verified facts are under attack from a plethora of fake news. As media revenue from supporting sponsorship and advertising has been eroded and spread way too thin. Combine this with the frantic busy pace of our lives where we no longer have the time or headspace to enjoy a healthy diet of in-depth investigations on subjects that matter and we're forced to survive on a fast food diet of clickbait headlines and soundbites. The result? The shrinking attention and hyper competitive information world means we're drowning in a fear-driven narrative where everything seems to have dramatic negative consequences. Why? Because fear sells and it mesmerises and it galvanises. It's the easiest emotion to trigger as it grabs our attention and focus. The fear of

Starting point is 00:03:01 loss outweighs the hope of gain and fear feeds coercive power where we're more likely to run of the herd than have the courage to stand our ground on our own. As H.B. Lovecraft noted over a century ago, the oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown, because our survival as a species in prehistoric times depended on reacting instantly to our highly tuned fears. So fear is a powerful and is very easy to trigger by instantly alerting our nervous system and flooding us with stressful loans as our blood pressure and heart rate rises and all of our senses become hotly engaged and in the final ingredient that's added of rapid exponential change it's about every field of

Starting point is 00:03:50 endeavor comes into play where the future is unknown and uncertain and everything is under threat and we've got the perfect recipe then to breed and escalate fear this quite caustic cocktail of constant change in the media's feudal narrative means that we've been conditioned to expect and fear change because in order to survive the media is always associating it with negative consequences and outcomes. Is it any wonder that our anxiety is rising through the roof? But if we look at history we find that those that grow and prosper are always those few that have the courage to swim against the tide and embrace change as an opportunity not a threat. As US President Franklin D Roosevelt was famous for saying the only thing we have to fear is fear itself that

Starting point is 00:04:38 nameless unreasoning unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat to convert retreat into an advance and his wife Eleanor Roosevelt went on to say that you gain strength courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear fear in the face you're able to say yourself I've lived through this fear and I can take the next thing that comes along you must do the thing that you cannot think that you can do and celebrate a brighter Mark Twain further balance equation when he said that I've had a lot of worries in my life most of which never happened so it's your reactionary response to fear that can turn threat into opportunity and it's your fear response that Zig Ziglar said separates the

Starting point is 00:05:25 2% that succeed from the 98% that don't. Because he said fear, as in F-E-A-R, has two meanings. You can forget everything and run, or you can face everything and rise. The choice is yours. The 98% run from fear, but the 2% face their fears and overcome them. That's how you can experience explosive personal growth and enjoy the fruits of property prosperity. And someone who exemplifies these successful 2% by embracing change as opportunity and swimming against the fear-filled media tide to adopt the message of positive hope and reward is today's special guest, Kylie Davis. After a 25-year-plus career in media and big data, holding senior editorial and marketing

Starting point is 00:06:12 roles at Fairfax News Corp and CoreLogic, Kylie's a PropTech entrepreneur, commentator and speaker on prop tech innovation and real estate based on the personal experience of her own startups real content and her content marketing project home preso which have both been successfully acquired to free up her time as the founding president of the prop tech association of australia where she's recognized as the leading global expert on the australian prop tech landscape and she's an entrepreneur in residence at reach australia part of the largest prop tech accelerator in the world. Along with her focus on human-centric real estate and driving the real estate mental wellness charity, the RISE Initiative, and in all of her spare time, joke, she's on a number of

Starting point is 00:06:58 property advisory boards and consults to a range of tech companies. I'm just exhausted in saying all this, let alone doing it. So if you want to overcome your fears and achieve sustainable success in property by embracing innovation and technology adoption to improve mental wellness and the customer experience for all as an industry-leading disruptor and crowded catalyst, there's no one better to show you the way through our own example than Kylie Davis. So welcome and let's get invested, Kylie. Thanks, Bushy.

Starting point is 00:07:30 That was quite an intro. Well, I sort of want to set the scene because I guess I get a little bit frustrated with a lot of the negative bias that's attached to just about everything in this day and age. and you're a breath of fresh air. Oh, yeah. Every child I've had an opportunity to see and hear you. It's all about the opportunity that's in front of us,

Starting point is 00:07:52 which is obviously something that's in build and something that they're going to unpack. But I guess just to sort of kick off the conversation, Kylie, for those that don't know you, can you talk to us about what you do differently and why you do what you do? uh why i do energy um i love i am really passionate about ideas and i'm really passionate about curiosity and i did have 25 years in media and a good uh probably 10 12 of

Starting point is 00:08:26 those were actually in mainstream media the other the rest were in my own media company that i had and I look if it bleeds it leads that was absolutely the mantra but I found myself constantly at odds with the uh with the thinking of the the news I was always curious I wanted to be a journalist because I was curious about people because I wanted to hear people's stories because I was really passionate about uncovering stories that needed to be shared and um and I've I found media kind of got close, you know, became smaller and smaller and smaller in its focus and its thinking. And so very early on, I set up my own newspaper company because, and my entire business model, because I was only 24 when I set it up, was what would News Corp do? And I would

Starting point is 00:09:15 do the opposite because I had been trained at News Corp. And that was the depth and extent of my business model. I don't necessarily recommend that as a business model. However, we did manage to make it work across 10 years and that was the Village Voice and in the end News Corp ironically bought it. But for me it's always been about the ability to, what I'm really curious about is understanding people's motivation and their stories, bringing them to life and building community around really great ideas, whether that is, I've been doing that,

Starting point is 00:09:51 whether it's a local newspaper, trying to understand what makes a community tick, whether it is mainstream sections of big newspaper companies to understand how we create really strong businesses behind the journalism, or whether it is in the prop tech or the data space, helping people understand what's really going on. How do you make it work for your business? How do you actually understand it in a way that doesn't feel like adulting homework you know because nobody wants to do that and that's a lot of the things that we also see in property investing spot on beautifully said i i think um uh i actually like the idea of uh whatever news corp did you did the opposite because uh there's certainly yeah

Starting point is 00:10:36 it's been an interesting approach to life uh in that context but i guess to circle circle right back Kylie I'd love for you to share how your upbringing has actually affected your core values and beliefs and how has this actually influenced you and and who you've become do you think? So I grew up you know typical a really typical nuclear family my dad was always an entrepreneur he always ran his own businesses and I used to help him from a very early age go into the office and answer the phones. I learned to answer the phones and wrap Christmas presents at Christmastime. And I'd always go out on the road with him when he was doing sales calls, I think for the promise of a raspberry lemonade and a pie and a custard tart or a pub lunch. But

Starting point is 00:11:28 during school holidays, that was kind of my thing as the eldest daughter. And I was always really interested in how, in the relationships that he had and the helping of people that he did and how he you know would how he would my dad always had in his head like the whole favor ledger it's like well i'll do so and so a favor because you never know when you might need you might need his help down the track and it was never it was never it was never sort of um it was always in a really positive framework like if i can help a bloke out i'll help him out because then i'll be then i will be able to ask for help when i when i need it so i grew up in that kind of of an environment and very much a small as you know small business environment my dad was always really curious

Starting point is 00:12:13 I'm very grateful to News Corp because I I was a cadet in the back in the day when you didn't need to go to university to do a degree in media and you could go straight out of high school and and I was the sole cadet at the Australian newspaper in Melbourne they took one a year and I was lucky enough to get that role um and i learned an awful lot during my time there but i um and my dad was actually my what my dad had taught me about helping people and doing favors and getting to know what everyone's up to so that you could ask people for help when you needed it he was actually often my very best contact because we've got to remember this is before the days of the internet where you could google things um but your role as a journalist back in the we're talking late 80s

Starting point is 00:13:01 early 90s so your role as a journalist was to find people to talk to about a topic and um and my dad was often the very first person i ever went to just say hey dad do you know someone who's done xyz and he goes oh yeah you should bring you know bloody flower you know joe blogs up in bendigo he knows he's done that and so i got a really good reputation for being able to find random people on obscure topics yeah i love that uh it sounds like a pretty good grounding in terms of just being quite um uh not unintuitive but uh showing some initiative to actually okay well we need to talk to someone about this uh let's go out and find them uh which it's so is that sort of the intuition uh and the initiative that you bring to the table because it's clear with the number

Starting point is 00:13:50 of activities you're involved in there's a lot of initiative and drive behind that is that something that you got from your dad or is it just something that's inbuilt or a bit of both? Oh, I think it's something definitely that I learned from my dad, but I think I have always been quite curious and he encouraged that in me. I mean, my dad, he would always chat to people in the pub and he would meet work colleagues in the pub. We're talking sort of he ran businesses in the 70s and the 80s

Starting point is 00:14:21 and in the finance industry. So, you know, obviously there was a lot of pub meetings and I would sit in the corner with a raspberry lemonade and be a good girl, eat chips. And just this being exposed to that language, just how they spoke to each other, that kind of subtle thing that was going on underneath of information gathering and swapping. I remember when I became a cadet at the Australian and because this this was really I was really familiar with this kind of doing this thing and and you've got to think too like in the late 80s early 90s women in the front bar was not you know really a thing or we would have to go to the ladies land but when I would go out with the photographers at the Australian because as a young journalist you were always paired with a senior photographer to make sure you didn't get into too

Starting point is 00:15:11 much trouble. And I was, I would often be sent out to regional areas with a photographer and just told, look, I think because they wanted to get rid of you, but they wanted to give you something useful to do. So they would say like, just go off for a couple of days, you know, head towards Lake's entrance and find some stories and bring them back. Like no brief, except just find some stories. So I remember the first time I went out with one of the senior photographers and he said, well where do you want to go to find some stories and I said well I think we should go to the pub and he was like well I think that's an excellent idea but where do you want to go to find some stories and I was like no no these things are mutually inclusive they're not not one or the

Starting point is 00:15:53 other let's do both um and in fact we went to the um we went to the tourist information to go and find out what was going on locally and then we took that out in our newspapers from the local area to the pub read them and started to talk to the bartender and and that was always that was always my secret weapon that my dad taught me love it love it and just by i don't know whether it's by coincidence or otherwise but i'm talking to you from lake's entrance right now that's that's where i am actually so there you go no it's true that was the interesting thing but it's a beautiful part of the world and hence why i'm spending some time here as well but uh i guess flipping to the other side, if you look back on your journey so far, Kylie, what challenging event in your life

Starting point is 00:16:34 has brought about your greatest learnings and best changes, do you think? Oh, so one of the pros and cons with having a father who's an entrepreneur, we lost our house. He had a business go bad when I was 15, well, when I was 16. At the time, I was overseas as an exchange student um in Denmark so you know I had reached the pinnacle of success as a as his eldest daughter I basically won a scholarship I was overseas for 12 months uh he and my mum were going and I have two sisters two younger sisters so a lot of this stuff was going on while I was away which was really obviously very hard on my parents um so but I think by being away I was able to play a different role for both my mum and my dad. So my dad used to write me very beautiful letters

Starting point is 00:17:28 about the things that he was going through and we would talk about that. So I was quite privileged to see a lot of that. And my grandmother stepped in and sort of supported me financially while I was away. And she was a very strong lady. So I got a lot of, not tough love, that's not the right word for it i got some very strident perspective your word i like that strident perspective that's the best way to describe it that's strident perspective from my from my grandmother who was my dad's mum uh and also um i think i grew up pretty quick as a result of that because when i came home the dynamic at home was very changed we had to um we had to sell our family home and and my parents were sort of you know were not able to manage that together so dad

Starting point is 00:18:26 and i went off and found the the rental place that we were going to move into to kind of kind of calm things down a bit and then um yeah so so but the importance of a roof over your head and the security of that absolutely that was the big lesson of that that's what turned me into a uh a property investor okay well we're going to get to that in a second and i can see why that would happen. But I guess before we do that, Kylie, I mean, you clearly can handle an amazing amount of weight. You've got a lot of spinning plates going on across a whole series of areas and different, quite a diverse activity base. But what do you struggle with, Kylie, if anything? What do I struggle with? Look, I think the, so I do, I do love a lot of spinning plates.

Starting point is 00:19:16 my eldest, my youngest son's just been diagnosed with ADHD and he said, Mum, where do you think I got it from? And I said, oh, gee, oh, that could be me. I don't have any problem with focus though. Look, my biggest struggle is because this curiosity and interest in everything kind of makes me always want to be able to help or makes me always really able to um see what could be done so my biggest struggle is sort of both saying no and keeping my attention kind of quite focused and uh the on the on a sort of daily basis it doesn't matter what i focus on i probably there's always something else that wants my attention so that's my that's my my regular drama yeah and it's certainly saying no is that my biggest challenge actually it's something

Starting point is 00:20:11 that thankfully I've got a partner who's able to lasso me at times and sort of keep it under control, but not difficult to get into that position. Let's jump straight into your property journey then, because as you just mentioned, I guess that early event when you're overseas and seeing the family lose the home

Starting point is 00:20:31 would change your perspective on the sense of security and safety that comes from where you live. Can you sort of run us through, uh you know what started your interest in in property uh before you got into it um well look i think i think um well it really was just the the stress of the stress of that and seeing how you know going from a home that we owned to a rental home um and look we had a perfectly lovely rental we found a perfectly lovely rental place it was

Starting point is 00:21:09 It made life easier in lots of ways because we were closer to school. Myself and my sisters all went to school at Kew in Melbourne. And we had been living out in Glen Waverley, so it removed the commute. So there was a couple of things I learned. I learned the value of position. I learned the value of ownership. It was back in the, we're sort of talking 86, 87, that this was going on. So we moved from Glen Waverley to Kew.

Starting point is 00:21:37 we were in a rental property and then suddenly the market took off in in the late 80s and so properties that you know well so my dad my dad um before he passed mentioned to me he said you know it's a bugger we never bought that rental property in queue right at the time when we were renting because it would have cost us 330 grand and it would be worth something like 7 million now so it was it was watching the market just take off while we weren't in it and and yearning to be in it and uh and when i got my when i got my first when i got my job at the australian and and dad was really proud of me being a journalist and earning money and he he was urging me the whole time save up for a deposit save up for a deposit get your first unit like let's get you

Starting point is 00:22:27 settled let's get you organized um no i didn't i actually blew it all on a holiday with an overseas holiday with a boyfriend but that's a different story and after that was over i did i didn't start again because obviously the relationship didn't work and got and got into yeah got my first got got onto the first property ladder love it love it uh it sounds like that the heart overweighted bricks and mortar which is pretty understandable but uh take us through your property journey then kyle in terms of what you did when and why what challenges did you overcome what worked and what hasn't and what have been the learnings from all that if you could please oh okay so um look it's not it's not very heroic um because uh after that after that incidence of

Starting point is 00:23:14 um of blowing my property deposit on a on an overseas holiday on a relationship that didn't work um I I came back to Melbourne but I ended up um I fell in love with somebody else and he was a bit older than me and you know and Rita I think I married him and I married quite well um because while I was um flapping off around Europe he uh had used that period in sort of 88 to grab a property in Balmain uh just like a little two-bedroom miner's cottage in Balmain and uh when we moved in together it was full of rising damp it was you know it was quite gross in lots of ways um and it had lime green laminate benchtops and a jerry-built kitchen in a lean-to out the back it was just the full Balmain catastrophe of the late 80s um but that that set both of us

Starting point is 00:24:10 uh you know and I was talking about getting married he was talking about having a baby so we had a baby first and um and and um but that set that set both of us up on on on property ownership and he had a similar background in um lack of security in his home things in his home life as a child so the idea of home and the idea of building wealth through property we were both very aligned on uh and so we used that first property in Balmain to uh I mean to to basically then buy land on the south coast which the intention was we were going to raise our family down there um you know have a brood of children and get them all talking to the kangaroos um and it was always a five-year plan but then five years happened and five years happened and five years

Starting point is 00:25:05 happened and we never got down down there um we would holiday down there and uh but we never actually got to got to move down there permanently um and then we always wanted a for at one period when we were first looking to invest in property after after having bought the the land um my mum and dad went through um had moved to the south coast as well and they had a few um my dad had sold his business and and had his second business and um had some issues around that and so we ended up buying their property and had been then renting it back to them as part of that as our first investment property and that happened that went on for about 10 years and then And I, as part of my role at the Australian, sorry, when I went back to News Corp as head of real estate across all of the News Corp papers, I got to, every year I would go to the Gold Coast to see the Ray White Surfers Paradise big auctions that they would have every year.

Starting point is 00:26:14 So every year, Andrew and his team host this amazing auction at the end of January, where they just, lots of Gold Coast property goes on the market. And of course, we're talking sort of around GFC time in this period. And so the market was pretty, had pretty much tanked, like it was completely, and there was no, apart from like Perth and the Gold Coast were probably the worst affected in the GFC for property. And the Gold Coast was the market where the banks realised that if they were going to put people into receivership, they were not going to get anything back. So the Gold Coast was the market that actually was where the rubber really, really, really hit the road, I reckon. And so I was watching this as a journalist. I was watching this as a senior editor in a big newspaper company. And I was working with the sales teams and the publishers of the local, you know, the Gold Coast Bulletin. And they're like, how do we get people's confidence back in this market? So I was kind of watching that market really closely.

Starting point is 00:27:18 And I went to the auctions the first year, and it was like a train wreck. It was, you know, there was a lot of property for sale, hardly anyone bidding, things passing in left, right and centre. You couldn't not watch, but you couldn't watch either. It was kind of terrifying. yeah but there was just a few little things happening here and there that kind of flagged and so i went home from that um and i was watching the data at the same time because we were because news corp had a deal with rp data slash cool logic and i was watching the data and getting coached by tim lawless so you know you can't get better coaching them from tim lawless about when

Starting point is 00:28:04 the data turns like when what are the signals in the data that indicate that the market's about to turn and I'm thinking all right so I remember going home from that that year and having a chat to Mark who's my husband and saying that like that was it was that was quite an experience because I don't think I've ever seen a market behave like so bad I said but I reckon I reckon we're at the bottom I can't see how much how it could fall any further so we've we've always talked about having a unit on the Gold Coast we should maybe think about this now and he's like oh i don't know about that well you know you know the you know doom gloom you know the markers and i was like yeah but babes this is when you act right this is we don't want to wait until it's

Starting point is 00:28:47 picking up so i think this is now when we act and so look we hummed and hard about it didn't do anything about it and then um at the following year like a year goes by and and we are absolutely in recession mode um but you know i start to learn about the the new um light rail that they're putting it on the Gold Coast and we go to this the following one and it's like a it's like the I'm watching people at and I wrote an article at the time for the Australian which um which became quite well known but it was like watching buyers at a shoot at a post Christmas shoe sale like Boxing Day shoe sale like um I was listening to people basically saying well I just bought five apartments what you know four apartments one for you one for your brother one for Uncle John and

Starting point is 00:29:34 and one for mum because they were picking up water well they were picking up oceanfront in little 60s you know boxes but they were picking them up for like 140 grand like it was ridiculous and so um I remember getting a going up to the auctioneer's desk and grabbing a number and putting putting my paddle up for a few of them and um and i hadn't really sounded my husband we'd had it we'd talked about it we agreed it was a great strategy cuddle on story short i might have come home with one and love it uh and and uh yeah and um and um my and i remember phoning my husband uh in the back of a taxi and he himself was at work um uh where he was himself traveling for work in an airport lounge

Starting point is 00:30:33 with a mate from work a colleague at work and i said to him so you know that plan that we had about buying an investment property on the gold coast and he was like yeah i said so yeah i've done that i bought a swing that box and he's like he's like oh shit he's like can't you be like normal wives and just buy shoes when you go on holidays no i can't i can't sorry that's now we're now the proud owner of a place in southport yeah yes well you remind me my father used to buy a loaf of bread and come back on the property, Kylie. So words, very similar approach. Tell me, and again, I don't want to encroach on confidentiality, but you touched, given you're immersed in the core

Starting point is 00:31:24 logic world for a period, and you mentioned Tim Lawless being able to identify the crossover points. Are you able to share what the key data was that was telling you that it was close to the bottom oh yeah sure there's that there's no there's nothing proprietary in this um so the thing to look for is to watch for um i've got to get it's right um so time on market how long and this is hard in queensland right because there's no auction the auction system isn't extensive across all of queensland there's only really gold coast and bits of brissy yep um so time on so time on market as time on market gets longer and discounting gets higher that is all indicators that you are or as as time on market has gone right up so that's taking a

Starting point is 00:32:19 really long time to sell and um discounting is starting to really get high and they start to then flatten like so they're not like really shooting up anymore and they just start to flatten that's when the market's at the bottom and then from there you'll start to see discounting starts to reduce so people are not discounting as much and the time on market time on market usually comes down first during the during that during that um the last recession or whatever what we were calling it, Queensland was really impacted because unlike Melbourne and Sydney that had really strong auction markets, and it talks to what is the role of auctions in the Australian property system, which we don't really have in any other country of the world,

Starting point is 00:33:09 but auctions are the spectator sport of real estate. And they're not just that. They're not just about the pageantry and the theatricality of the whole thing, but they actually provide a really useful service for giving the market a weekly update on sentiment. And so even if you decide to sell under just a vendor negotiated sale, the fact that you know that the auction clearance rate on Saturday was low means that you're going to look at the offer you got through that lens. Whereas if the sentiment's really hot and you get an early offer, you're probably going to look at the offer through that, you know, the market's hot at the moment, maybe we should hold out a bit longer. In Queensland during that time, because there wasn't that feedback to market all

Starting point is 00:34:01 the time, we saw time on market go for weeks, like for just months, like it was over 140 days at one point for like three or four months because vendors weren't getting that feedback and they were going, well, I'm not selling for that much. I think it's worth X, Y, Z. It's like, but there are no buyers at that point. There is no buyers. You're not going to get it. And even if you do get a buyer at that point, the bank's not going to loan off it. So you need to find a cash buyer at that point, which means the number of people who are out there that are going to buy it is really low. So you have to bring your expectations down. And so that was the dynamic that we were seeing in the market. Love it. Love it. Thanks for sharing that because for a lot of people

Starting point is 00:34:45 listening in, everyone talks about data and there's so much data now that people get lost about, but being able to crystallise some of the key... Oh, too much, yeah. Yeah, that's really good. And sort of bringing it all to a close then, Kylie, if you look back on your life so far, and I'm not just talking about property here, what has been your best and worst investment and what have you learned from each of those? Oh, I think all of our investments have been good investments. They've all had really interesting learnings from them though so um and and I think the the learning was like you know

Starting point is 00:35:19 I tell the story about buying off you know buying at a off by impulse in on the Gold Coast that's not strictly true because I was in the data all day every day and I was sort of constantly monitoring Queensland data so I knew that I knew about the the light rail going through I knew I wanted to be in Southport because I wanted to be close to the hospital and I wanted to be closer to the to the new university and I wanted to be close to the to shopping so I knew my suburb I knew what the yields were I knew out of that auction period which properties I was going to be interested I wasn't just kind of window shopping um I I had an idea of to what I had necessarily shared all of that with my husband but I you know in my head I had it all really

Starting point is 00:35:59 clear and straightforward um what I didn't do though didn't check council rates didn't check water rates and in Queensland they're very very different to New South Wales in fact they're four times the size of them so I might have been slightly out on the numbers that I had been so careful on yeah yeah and um and that didn't make it impossible but it didn't mean that it quite yielded what I thought it was going to and you know um but the capital gains have been quite strong on it so you know we've been okay on it um we built our property during the um during during that period too we built the house on the coast on the on the block of way on the acres down on the south coast we went counter cyclical again and at a time when there was no property nothing

Starting point is 00:36:48 being you know a lot of job shortages on the south coast we got our our house built in record time on budget with and I had I had tradies and suppliers ringing me asking if they could supply to our job i've never had a more glorious period of tradie like that never like tradie's ringing me saying would you like us to do your plumbing i'm like sure oh my god i haven't had to find someone this is awesome um because work was so short so i think that i think the lesson out of it was don't be scared to go if you've got if you know your plan if you know your strategy and you can see markets in decline don't like warren buffett it right because warren warren buffett was always count is a counter cyclical investor as well he just does it with shares but

Starting point is 00:37:37 don't be and if you've got your money organized don't be frightened to go in um because you you know it works it usually works really well you buy you know you're doing these things when when they're affordable when there's not much work going you know maybe not much work going on and you stand to make really good capital gains, you don't have to try to time it to the absolute bottom of the market. That's just crazy. But if you feel that the market's on the move, take the breath and stress test your plan and jump in.

Starting point is 00:38:15 Yeah, I love it. I'm a closet contrarian myself, Kylie, so totally ascribed to everything you're saying there. I want to jump now into what I affectionately referred to as the ambush bushfire lightning round where I'm just going to ask you a couple of quick questions that everyone likes to glean your words of wisdom on. The first of those is what's both the worst and the best piece of an investment advice that you've ever received? Oh, I'm not very lightning round on this. um the the i think the best piece of advice is to you know create you know plan your plan and then execute your plan and and be mindful of what's going on around it but stick to the plan

Starting point is 00:38:59 like don't don't be don't be um swayed by the noise around what you know around what everyone else is doing what the crowd's doing like if you've got a like plan create a plan that's long term that achieves your financial goals and that you know that you've got the money to cover and that you can that you can cope with a few slings and arrows around it and and then stick to the plan that's that's the that's the best piece of advice I've ever been given um and yeah and and I think the other thing is don't try to you don't have to you don't have to invest at the bottom of the market and sell at the top of the market to make money in property, right? You just have to sell for more than you bought for. So this anxiety around, oh my God, is now the right

Starting point is 00:39:49 time to act or should we wait a bit longer or should we or shouldn't we? I'm a lot more kind of, no, well, this is the market that we've got. What's the best decision that we can make in this market. Spot on. Great words of wisdom there. Kylie, as a prop tech guru, if you could wave a magic wand and change anything, what would you change about property? I would change how siloed it is and how deconstructed it is in Australia. So property is both a, it is our single biggest asset class in Australia and it is our most deeply important psychological class, in asset class. So, you know, the need for shelter is a basic human right. And the way we have structured it in Australia is all wrong because, you know, we have some laws at the top at federal

Starting point is 00:40:46 level, but really it's all devolved down into state and then local government area. And so what that means is that all of our data is siloed, all of the visibility of what property is coming onto the market in terms of new build, what's in planning, what's being renovated, what we actually need. All of this stuff is happening in opaque silos. And for us to fix this and to get supply back on track, we absolutely need to have visibility across all of the entire property universe in Australia, not just in the little bits that do or don't talk to each other. It's crazy. 100% agree and for a population of 26 odd million to have so many stratas and various hurdles

Starting point is 00:41:35 and distinctions between one place and another and then the various levels of government it just makes no sense to me whatsoever to be honest but some great insights there Kylie I'd love to talk to you in more depth on this but I know you're under some time pressure So I really want to thank you for taking the time to share your inspiring personal journey so far, Kylie.

Starting point is 00:41:59 And if anyone would like to ask questions of myself or other property professionals about their property approach, or you'd like to further discuss anything that Kylie and I have chatted about with other like-minded investors in a very safe, relaxed, and no pressure environment, feel free to join us on the Property Hub Collective Facebook group by clicking the link in the show notes. So we look forward to connecting with you and continuing the conversation there. In addition, if you'd like to confidentially delve deeper into your specific property needs or challenges in a confidential environment, then book in with me for a personal solution session by clicking the link in the show notes, and you'll get an opportunity to get my dedicated time, my 40 years of experience for a full 60 minutes. We now look forward to continuing our great conversation with Kylie in next week's episode,

Starting point is 00:42:43 where we're going to unpack the exciting and fast emerging world of the prop tech opportunity that will help us all to achieve and enjoy much better property outcomes. So remember to always get invested in your knowledge and your network, and we look forward to getting invested with you again then, Kylie. Thanks, Bushy. Thanks for tuning in to Get Invested on the Property Hub podcast channel, your home for property investment insights and inspiration. Make sure you subscribe to Property Hub for free. Get your weekly dose of Get Investing Inspiration along with every episode of Realty Talk, Australia's top online property show for red hot property investing news and insights direct from industry leaders and influencers. And finally, I'll see you next time.

Property Hub - Investment Insights & Inspiration - Get Invested: Part 1 - Kylie Davis on the power of tech for success in property

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