Property Hub - Investment Insights & Inspiration - Get Invested: Part 1: Luke Harris on getting property fit

Starting point is 00:00:00 There was also the other lesson in there of, hey, you can pay professionals to do certain work. They'll do it a lot quicker than you. They'll probably do a better job than you. And you get all of your time back. And I think one of the things that people don't do with investing is they value their own time. Welcome to the Get Invested Podcast, where we share great conversations with experts from all walks of life to uncover their secret know-how on where they invest their time, their skills, and their money, and the benefits that this has created. You see, the truth is that everyone invests every minute of every day.

Starting point is 00:00:34 We're investing our time, our skills, our energy and our money in something. Some of us are investing consciously, some unconsciously, sometimes for good, sometimes for bad, sometimes for no impact. Get Invested will help you to start living by design, not by default. I'm going to help you to make it happen, not let it happen. You'll hear the top tips on how you can live with conscious intent so that you can live more, work less, and leave a living legacy by investing now. Listen to the show to discover the top tips on how to get started,

Starting point is 00:01:09 make the most of your investment journey, and ultimately to be living your dream, not someone else's. More episodes can be found on iTunes or at bushymartin.com.au forward slash getinvested. Thanks for listening, and now, let's get invested. Hi, Fred and Fighters. Are you fit? Do you work out daily and have a regular exercise regime

Starting point is 00:01:36 that ensures that you have the strength and resilience to go the distance and enjoy a long and healthy quality of life? Or do you start out with good intentions, but the pressures and urgencies of life get in the way and before you know it, the only signs of your gym membership are the monthly debit on your credit card. and what about your property investment are you property fit with a similar dedicated plan and process supported by daily disciplines or are you more of a slap happy occasional part-time investor

Starting point is 00:02:06 that fits things in around the demands of your work and your family commitments being property fit is a good description of what it takes to be a successful investor and it also happens to be the title of today's special guest luke harris's second book Now, one of the things I'd love to do here on Get Invested is to dig into our guests' past and impact their own investment journeys to uncover what they've done, what's worked, what hasn't worked, what they've learned, and how has this impacted on what they're now doing today. And today's special guest is a great example of exactly this. he's an active investor who like yours truly has made a lot of investment mistakes along the way but these have become the greatest source of learning and improvement that has ultimately been documented in books that you can learn from and this is a key point because many investors

Starting point is 00:03:03 make a mistake and then rather learning from it they throw their hands up in the air at the first problem or issue and then walk away from investing and write it off as a bad thing rather than heed the lesson and become a better investor as a result of it. So to get you in the mood, let me share a brief modified extract from chapter two of Luke's second book, Property Fit, that actually recaps key elements of his first book, Let's Get Real, on why most investors fail. All day, people tell me I have my goals documented.

Starting point is 00:03:38 I know my dreams, dates, and dollars, as Luke outlined in his first book, but what property should I be looking at? How do I know what to do next? What I'm actually hearing is that investors want to try to fast track the process. They want to go from A to Z without doing B, C, D, E, and all the other steps. People come in and say, oh, I've got $100,000 in equity and I want to be a developer, or I've done this course to do flips and wraps and whatever other strategies are out there. Or I'm 58 years old and I've done a course in renovations and that's what I want to do. I don't even own a hammer, but that's what I want to do. Hold up. There are a lot of people who think they've got a silver bullet for property

Starting point is 00:04:23 success. It reminds me of when I was starting out and I felt that people needed someone to put all these ideas into context. They're reading pages and pages of literature about it and watching investors on television talk up the market, and then trying to find out what suits them, all the while getting sucked in by spruikers. Of course, there are lots of weird and wonderful tactics out there for people to try their hand at, but which ones actually work? And what do most investors actually need? The thing is, most people investing in property in Australia start out the same way. They collect some money in cash, equity, or a self-managed superannuation fund, and head out looking for a deal,

Starting point is 00:05:07 that perfect property that will help them to build wealth and achieve all their goals. This short-sighted vision is often why many investors fail to get the results that they actually desire. When challenged by things out of their control, they simply forget about the end goal and never reach point B. Often, that's because their point B was never clearly articulated in the first place.

Starting point is 00:05:32 This pivotal concept provided the premise for Luke's first book, Let's Get Real. In this book, the focus was on you as the investor, clarifying your goals and working out your why, just as Luke and I did. As mentors, we also work on your plans and your mindset, which can each influence your success as a property investor. So most investors plan to fail because they fail to plan. Luke's book recognised that we all have different dreams, desires and goals in life and that to achieve those exceptional results, you need to apply different pathways

Starting point is 00:06:10 rather than a single right way. Not everyone needs a $10 million property portfolio, so why aim for it? Remember, it's the result you're ultimately after, not the property itself. When you let your emotions get in the way, that's where you become unstuck. after 20 years of buying property luke's message is that there are there are no silver bullets

Starting point is 00:06:36 i mean some silver bullet strategies do work for some people some of the time but it's more about doing it the right way with the right processes in place and creating a pathway to profit that is slower and steadier rather than reactive and rushed we can tell you that the magic unicorn property simply doesn't exist either. And this fundamental fact is what separates professional property investors with long-term sustainable wealth from those who are simply out dabbling in property investments and hoping that it all works out. Remember, we're here to talk about investing, not speculating. We're here to talk about long-term wealth creation, not making a quick buck or trying to buy low and sell high and pick the market.

Starting point is 00:07:24 So let's go back a step. The key message from Luke's first book was to work out your why and why your why actually matters. Essentially, your why is everything. Luke encourages you to think about his first book as a why-to guide so that your investment success is more about good planning and tactical execution rather than a lack of access to technical information. He also wrote the book to give you a chance to learn about your emotional self and to master all of those emotions that may hold you back from achieving your goals. Because if you're going to become a property investor, you'll need to strap yourself in and ask yourself some tough questions first.

Starting point is 00:08:05 So let's do that. So before you skip to the part where you consider the best property fit for you, you'll need to work out your property investment profile. Think of it as a self-assessment exercise that you must fill out to see which strategies are actually going to suit you best. now Luke highly advises you to think carefully about where you sit because these responses will help to guide your best fit in property investing so firstly what's your risk profile how risky is an investment based on your age financial position and knowledge as well as your actual understanding

Starting point is 00:08:42 of the strategy remember that what suits one investor can be a complete disaster for another and your risk profile will likely change as you increase your education and your experience. Next, what's your asset position? Depending on the strategy, you'll likely need some sort of security door for a lender. This doesn't always have to be another property, but this is typically the most attractive to lenders.

Starting point is 00:09:09 Often, the more risk involved in the strategy, the more security the lender requires. Thirdly, what's your cash position? you're going to need some skin in the game so depending on the strategy you'll either need a small amount of capital to get started or you might need access to lots of capital regardless luke always recommends having good buffers in place for a rainy day because we promise you that it does rain and you will need access to cash fourthly what's your exit strategy successful investing takes time, energy, and patience, but you need to have a very clear idea of your exit

Starting point is 00:09:50 strategy before parting with your money in any investment. Of course, for most people, this is one of the hardest things to calculate because there are many unknowns. However, this is a crucial component to successful investing. And lastly, how much time do you have? Property investing can be an almost entirely passive investment, partly hands-on or an all hands-on bet game. How much time you have available will be an important factor to determine which strategies are best for your personal situation. As for time, this is not something you should try to squeeze into your current lifestyle. Investing in property is something that needs clear and focused time if you're looking for the best results. You either have the time to do it properly

Starting point is 00:10:37 or you don't. So as you can hear, Luke and I have a very similar approach to property because property is just the vehicle and the means to your end, as it's more about the principles, the processes, and the people that you need to embrace to achieve sustainable success over the long term. So if you're serious about achieving financial freedom through property, grab yourself a copy of Luke's book, Property Fit, at www.propertyfitbook.com.au. And to get you in the mood, part one of my great chat with Luke unpacks his own personal property investment journey. As you're about to hear, with big dreams, persistence, and a can-do attitude, Luke Harris now has over two decades of property investment experience and success, and he's built

Starting point is 00:11:25 an enviable property portfolio and acquired an extraordinary depth and breadth of experience across business, property, and investing along the way. Now successfully established, again, like yours truly, Luke and I share an ambition to help you and other investors to grow significant wealth through property, helping you to fulfill your own dreams and your ambitions. And Luke does this through his business of Property Mentors, a Melbourne-based agency that helps you develop the skills, mindset, and knowledge to grow your property portfolio. and in a similar vein if you'd like an hour of power to talk with me personally on any questions

Starting point is 00:12:02 queries or issues you'd like to discuss about your investment strategy finance or property portfolio delivery whether you're an aspiring investor or an experienced investor with a substantial property portfolio just jump on knowhowproperty.com.au hit the purple book appointment button in the top right hand corner then click on the let's zoom deep dive meeting with bushy one-hour option to book in your preferred time and for a small investment of just 295 bucks, you can ask me anything you want about property for a full 60 minutes. In the meantime, enjoy part one of my great conversation with Luke Harris. Hi Freedom Fighters. Now at the time of this recording, the property market's enjoying a

Starting point is 00:12:49 once in a 30-year boom and for investors there's never been a better time to supercharge your portfolio. But just like we approach our personal fitness, there's a proven process to getting your property investments into shape to achieve peak performance. So to discuss this, we're joined by Luke Harris, author of his recently released second book, Property Fit, that shows you how to get your property portfolio in shape for financial freedom. So welcome and let's get invested, Luke. Thanks, Bushy. Great to have you on board, mate. Yeah, really enjoyed your most recent book, which we'll get into shortly. But for those amongst the listeners who don't know who you are, mate, can you start by telling us who you are, what you do, and most importantly,

Starting point is 00:13:36 why you do what you do? Yeah, absolutely. Look, I started a business called The Property Mentors about eight years ago now to teach people about investing in property, I guess, with a bit of a twist. There's a lot of investors out there that are trying to make a quick buck. So I went through my own property journey and realised that there's a lot of different ways to do property, as you understand, Bushy, a lot of people trying to do property. And really, I was looking for a way to get out there and get the results, but really have a bit more structure around what I was doing. So after investing for 21 years I've now got a system and a process that I follow and really to get people to understand how to do it for the long term rather than just trying to go out there and

Starting point is 00:14:19 hope for the best yeah yeah now brilliant which is something sadly missing given that 95% of investors focus on the property and what they ignore at their own peril is the the principles the process and the people they need to surround themselves with to really achieve any level of sustainable success but mate we'll dig into that in some depth as we get going but where I'd love to start if you can is just to take us through your life journey so far and sort of take us through where you've invested your time energy and money what have been the highs the lows the learnings and how's that taking you to where where you are today well look I can give you a long story or a short story but yeah we'll go somewhere give us a little yeah um look yeah look i i from

Starting point is 00:15:07 a very young age i was always uh i guess quite entrepreneurial if you ask my parents um uh bless them they uh they've put up with quite a bit over the years um i was out there as a as a 10 or 12 year old uh selling stuff from mom and dad's kitchen out on the street uh it was the equivalent of having having an 11-8 stand i guess well you're flogging the stuff out of the kitchen to sell it Yeah, selling whatever I could. Dad's got a really good story of me digging up Australian grass trees out of the backyard and I sold them in the local newspaper. And he'd come home from work one day and there were people digging them up

Starting point is 00:15:42 and I'd actually sold them in the local newspaper. I think I was about nine or ten years old. So from a very young age, I think I kind of, I guess I was always looking at other ways of doing things. Since pocket money wasn't given to us, we had to work for it. So I was out there washing the cars, mowing the lawns, doing what I could and, you know, always sort of pretty active in trying to make money because then I could buy more lollies. We walked down the street and got lollies or we'd go and buy fish and chips.

Starting point is 00:16:08 You get $2 worth of chips, minimum chips. You get quite a lot of chips for $2 back then. Mate, I'm with you. It's amazing how parallel I'm a little bit older than you and I don't want to declare but same thing at my age. had no no um pocket money whatsoever so we used to ride around the neighborhood finding empty bottles and and wetting gardens and all the rest of it but here's the thing man i've got to share this with you i used to be able to buy a bag of lollies for a cent so that gives you a bit of a

Starting point is 00:16:40 hint of how long ago it was mate but uh i interrupt the story keep going mate it's uh roughly the same age but maybe a year or two in between um but uh my uh my pop one of my granddads um lived down in bunbury two hours south of perth and um every time we'd go down to bunbury to see them uh he would have all of his coke bottles saved up we get 15 cents for every single one and i think i used to get money for the brown beer bottles as well and there was certainly quite a lot of those and uh when the grandkids would come down i was the oldest of all the grandkids so we'd all pack all four of us in the car we'd drive down to trade all the bottles and he had a really old rusty Gemini and we put them in every nook and cranny of that car and cash them in and we'd get $20

Starting point is 00:17:23 to split between four of us we'd go shopping and buy a new toy so that was that was a lot of fun as kids and I think that you know without really knowing it uh taught me you know about other ways to make money other than just just uh working for it and uh I remember also going into the equivalent of Harvey Norman I think it was a retrovision or something back then yeah and he he said he was buying a toaster or kettle I think it was and he said look do you realize you don't have to pay the price on the shelf you can actually ask them for a discount and he said I'll give you $30 for the the kettle instead of $35 and he actually got it and I thought geez that's pretty good you don't have to pay the price on the on the shelf so little things like that that I don't I

Starting point is 00:18:03 didn't take much notice of at the time but I realized that the world of money is is not as black and white as people think yeah um so i guess from from a young age i i did things like paper rounds and um as soon as i was allowed to uh being 14 years and six months old i got a job at hungry jacks and uh i actually caught the train from the local train station into perth cbd and i remember the train ticket was a dollar 10 each way and because mum and dad wouldn't drive me into work a little bit rude but uh they wouldn't drive me into the city um and um dollar 10 on the train and then it was probably about a 25, 30-minute train trip into town for a three-hour shift, earning $5.21 an hour.

Starting point is 00:18:45 So that was my first job, but I was over the moon to get that job. I didn't care if it was flipping burgers or whatever it was, but it was a job. Awesome. I did that for some time and then I relocated out to the suburban Hungry Jacks and then continued to work there for some time. Had an amazing time there because everyone at Hungry Jacks was my age and, you know, give or take a year or two

Starting point is 00:19:06 and it was just a fun place to be. We worked hard, but we had a lot of fun at the same time. But I guess from that age, I didn't really enjoy school. I hated school, actually. I got into detention and, you know, got expelled and I was always in the naughty corner for wearing the wrong school uniform or just being a brat, basically. Not a huge immense change, but I certainly wasn't the academic type.

Starting point is 00:19:33 Never enjoyed really sitting in a classroom and been told to learn something I didn't want to learn. I didn't know the reasons why at the time, but I just didn't want to learn stuff that I didn't care about. I do believe that the education system is a little bit outdated for the world that we're in now, but that's a whole other podcast, I'm sure. I agree.

Starting point is 00:19:54 But, yeah, look, so I did that and I left school at 16 because I wanted to go and get a job as an electrician. I thought, well, that looks like something fun and I wrote about 80 or 85 letters to local electricians trying to find a job. As an apprentice, I was willing to do anything to get a job and unfortunately the mining boom in WA hadn't started yet, not to the extent that it did in the mid-2000s

Starting point is 00:20:18 and nobody got back to me. I couldn't get a job. I did a trial for one day. The guy was not a pleasant man to be around so I certainly didn't follow through on that. We just didn't get along and, you know, from that point I found a job with a local security company doing electronic security and I thought, well, if I can do that for a little while,

Starting point is 00:20:40 maybe an electrician will hire me. So I left school to do that and I actually got a traineeship at the time, which was a full-time job, but slightly lower rates than Hungry Jack's and I was getting $4.71 per hour. Good grief. This was back in 1996, 1997. So I did that for a little while, quickly changed jobs and got a job with another security company, a slightly higher pay.

Starting point is 00:21:06 I think my total salary package was $11,000 a year. But, again, I was over the moon because it meant that I could afford a car and, you know, got my first car and really, you know, got out there in the real world, as they say. And then it wasn't long after that I had a really good relationship with my boss at my company. And I said to him, look, Peter, I want to make more money. What do I do?

Starting point is 00:21:29 And he says, well, if you want to, you can go and install some security alarms on the weekend and we'll pay you the same rate we pay our subcontractors and I thought that's a pretty good deal I'll put some roof racks on the car and go and do that on the weekend I'll work during the week at the office and then you know I can I can go out and make some more money and I did that and after a few months of doing that I thought I'm making almost half my paycheck just by working on a Saturday yeah so I went up to Peter and said mate can I do this full-time I want to become a contractor and he said look if you really want to you just have to hire somebody to do your job in the company and

Starting point is 00:21:59 we'll let you go and do that so very accommodating i think he realized that i wasn't going to stick around if he didn't let me do what i wanted to do so he thought might as well keep him in the company so i did that and then it wasn't long after that that i i thought well why am i why am i subcontracting for this company i'm earning some good money now but why don't i go and get my own customers you're smart enough all you have to do is get some people that want some security and then you know all of a sudden you've got your own customers so i turned that into a brand and at 19 I set up a business called A1 Secure Solutions purely because I couldn't register the name without sticking A1 in front of it.

Starting point is 00:22:35 So it's the top of the yellow pages or something. Is that the idea? It's the top of the yellow pages. That's it. Back when you had to pay for yellow pages ads. I don't think I ever got a phone call from yellow pages. Well, before Google really took off. So, yeah, look, after that, I thought I'm going to go and get my own customers.

Starting point is 00:22:53 So I ran some ads in the local paper. and in between contracting to this company I started getting my own customers and very quickly realized that I had a little business there and I started hiring some staff and bought some some extra vehicles and you know in my 1920 you know I was a young teenager turning into a 20 year old I had a company and I was out there running my own business so it sort of wasn't really much by design but it was more the fact that I didn't want to do certain things so I took the alternative route and uh i think for me really that was uh i guess a defining moment in in uh in my life moving out of the the full-time workforce as a 19 year old and starting a business

Starting point is 00:23:35 at 19 without really having any experience on how to run a business how to structure it how to fund it yeah whether the uh because there's a lot of confidence i'm hearing in just just encourage or maybe a mix of naivety thrown in there as well, perhaps. But where did that sort of self-confidence come from to say, right, I'm just going to go and have a crack? I don't know if there's a specific thing that I could link that back to, but I know that one of the other things that I was doing while I was at the front of mum and dad's, you know,

Starting point is 00:24:07 selling stuff out of their kitchen, I would also drive around, I would walk around the streets when they had the local rubbish collections and I thought mum and dad will drive us to the shops and wherever we went in the car and I'd see more of the suburb or I'd get on my bike and just ride around as you did as a kid. And I thought there's perfectly good chairs there, there's a perfectly good table, why are they throwing that away? Because we're a family of six, mum and dad had four kids

Starting point is 00:24:34 and we didn't have a luxury lifestyle. We had a modest house in the suburbs, it was a nice place. uh you know we didn't have a pool like everyone else did I always thought mum and dad were were you know really mean and you know why didn't we have a pool um very spoiled some of our friends were but you know I went around the suburbs and I thought why are people throwing these things away so I started collecting it all and filling up the garage with it and after a while I um mum and dad just thought oh this is just Luke he's just crazy let him do what he does I think they just they just gave up after a while and um and uh i eventually borrowed a trailer from my auntie

Starting point is 00:25:12 and she let me take it to the local swap meet and i think i was 12 when i first started doing that dad would get up dad was a marathon runner he always um ran marathon runs and perfect fun run and a lot of things so he's very committed in in his uh i guess vision for what he wanted for his his running career yeah and um really dad just got up at five o'clock in the morning drove me to the to the swap mart at the local shopping center unloaded the the trailer and all my gear and i was literally standing there as a 12 year old on my own negotiating with people on how much they were going to pay for chairs and various other bits and pieces that i picked up so i would walk away from a swap mart with a couple of hundred bucks you know as a 12 year old you know and and

Starting point is 00:26:00 i would spend five or six hours there i'd be exhausted by the end of it covered in dust and who knows whatever else from the underground car park but i had people that i remember there was a vietnamese guy that came up to me and they know how to negotiate and he uh he was negotiating with me and i remember almost having an argument with this guy about the price of something i'm like no five dollars and he's like no three dollars and i'm having these negotiations as a 12 year old and really i just threw myself into it i don't think there was any real planning behind it but i don't know whether that had anything to do with it but from a young age i guess i wanted to to get out there and make some money and one of the reasons i i did that is

Starting point is 00:26:38 because dad was in into running did the perth fun run a number of times and um perth marathon and so forth and um a lot of people that we would see there had video cameras yeah you know this is we're talking 1992 uh 1993 right this was well before any digital stuff came out and they were still expensive um and i remember a catalog came out the local newspaper and it was 999 dollars i want this thing cut it out stuck it on the wall now i hadn't read any books about goal setting or anything i just thought i want that i'm going to see it every day and eventually that's what i did i i used my um my savings from that to go and buy a video camera and so i could film dad at his racist so you know very you know not not very planned um you know but like i was a very very

Starting point is 00:27:28 strange kid i think looking back um if i met somebody like me now i mean when i was that age as well i had a little book a little a4 book and i would record every bit of money that i made and every bit of money that i spent so i'd never heard of a spreadsheet didn't didn't understand any of that but i wanted to know where my money was going so i recorded it all and um i couldn't care less about maths in school hated maths but as far as budgeting and looking after my own money i i had every every line every i had lollies in there i had like literally everything was documented in there you know i've still got these books it's quite embarrassing to to to look back at it at the time i hid them i didn't want anyone to read them i didn't want anyone to know i thought it

Starting point is 00:28:11 was embarrassing um it's anyway so i was very much into sort of managing my finances from a young age without really any training or knowing why i was doing it i just wanted to know how much i'd made each month yeah uh so look i guess that's where the business business sort of confidence came from in that i thought i've already done negotiations with people i was very good at negotiating with mum and dad um you know they'd give me two dollars to go and wash the car and i'd negotiate to two dollars fifty um you know and mum wanted something from the shops and i said well, only if I can buy 50 cents worth of lollies. And I don't know how I managed to get away with what I did.

Starting point is 00:28:48 As you said before, mate, I think they saw in you who you were and there's no point getting in the way of that. It's just keeping a loose leash on you so that you didn't get too out of control. I think so, yeah. They always supported me in what I did. But, I mean, sure, they pulled the reins in every now and then. But, you know, I think they had a big sigh every now and then and thought, well, let's just let him do his thing.

Starting point is 00:29:08 um let's swing back to uh sort of back to sort of 1920 i think that's roughly when you you'd started to dip your toe in the property arena yeah sort of in parallel with what you're doing professionally yeah take us through yeah your property journey because again uh getting your first property at 20 not there's not too many that stump up to do that so i'd love you to talk us through what why property in the first place what was what was the interest there and then take us on the journey in terms of what you did from the ny yeah okay well i'll just i'll just rewind a couple of years before that actually happened to link that in i think from about 16 onwards um and when i'd started working full-time i had my parents had actually been invited by a

Starting point is 00:29:53 friend of theirs to join amway okay and you know people on the call might be cringing right now and some people may have never heard of it but um amway was this multi-level marketing business but wasn't really focused on in in my in hindsight it wasn't really focused on making money uh not for the not for the people joining the business at least yeah i'm sure someone was making money but i joined it and part of that process was they had motivational tapes every week that you would have to buy they were six dollars each um and a lot of books as part of the process because they wanted to have a i guess a system in place for you to improve your mindset on various things so they have i think book of the week or book of the month and they would have tape of the week that you would

Starting point is 00:30:35 listen to and essentially they were motivational and educational at the same time yeah and i got a lot of lessons from that because i read a lot of books um like the magic of thinking big which is one of my favorite uh favorite books i ever written and the millionaire next door and a few of those you know old books that have been around for a long time how to win friends and influence people um and i think i've got a lot of lessons from that that i just would never have learned at school yeah and the stuff that i learned from that as a 16 and 17 year old didn't make any money out of amway i i sold my family a vacuum cleaner i sold my auntie a vacuum cleaner she messaged me a couple of years ago so she still got it so it must have been a good investment it was 20 years

Starting point is 00:31:14 ago um and i bought one for myself because i could get more points in my amway business um so i didn't make any money but i learned a lot of a lot of a lot of business skills out of that um and really how to influence and influence people was really a a way of how to deal with people as such very old book but still a lot of concepts in there that are relevant timeless oh that's it it is timeless it's something you can you can use in any market a lot of the language is a bit out of date but you can you get the message uh through through reading that but um really to to get into my my first property uh i was out there sort of they had this thing with van wave called dream building uh about going out there and looking and feeling

Starting point is 00:31:55 and touching the things that you want to buy or want you know that you want out of life now the thing that was missing from that is all of the stuff that you can't look and feel and touch you know having good health care and having you know being healthy and and um you know having a healthy mind and having a healthy body um that stuff they can't motivate you with so they said go and look at yachts go look at your supercars go look at fancy houses because that's what will motivate you all and to a certain extent it did i mean i was 16 17 i got my driver's license and here's me as a 17 year old using my spare time driving around peppermint grove in perth adderdale all these really expensive suburbs along the river mosman park and looking at

Starting point is 00:32:37 multi-million dollar homes you know back then you know a two million dollar house wow who can afford that yeah now it's almost the median price in perth um but you know looking back at that i got a lot of motivation by looking at these expensive houses uh and and looking at you know these beautiful pools and these beautiful cars and you know just the the suburbs themselves were were really nice um not that we lived in a bad suburb but we certainly didn't live in the best suburbs yeah and uh you know for me that was that was motivating and you know for me to get into property i couldn't wait from the minute i i started earning an income i wanted a property you know and I loved renovating and pulling the parents bathrooms apart ripping the tiles off

Starting point is 00:33:19 they came home from work one day and I was pulling tiles off the bathroom saying we've we've got why have we got blue tiles they're ugly let's put new ones on and that's yeah we can do that but we need money to do those things again that's a that's a whole nother story but I think you know getting into property was a big thing so I just worked my butt off as as a 19 year old just running the business I was working seven days a week and just doing everything I could to save to get that deposit together and I'd been speaking to mortgage brokers since I was about 17 or 18 and they'd said no no you can't you you know you're not making enough money and then when I turned 19 I thought well I've run my own business now and look at look at my figures I'm making good numbers

Starting point is 00:33:58 and they said no banks don't want to talk to you because you're self-employed and so I sort of worked worked around that and I said look what if I can get my parents involved what if they go guarantor on the loan and they said look if you can save up a little bit extra we can potentially do it that way and eventually i was able to i was able to uh get a bank to lend to me with my parents as guarantor and uh that's how i got started i i saved up enough for my my deposit and saved up enough for my stamp duty and unfortunately around 2000 when i bought the property that's when the first homebuyers grants had just started and i missed out on the seven thousand dollars for my first home because my parents had to go guarantor on the loan

Starting point is 00:34:40 so that was a bit of a shame but at the end of the day like i tell people now you don't make all your decisions based on one yeah uh one government grant so that's that's really how i got started yeah i love it so talk us through your because i you know obviously i've got an interest in the property journey i'd love for you to take us through uh your thinking your strategy and how your portfolio then rolled out and the learnings as you went through and where that led you to property-wise? Yeah, for sure.

Starting point is 00:35:10 Look, I sort of split my property journey into two sections in that the first section is between ages 20 and 30 and then the ages of 30, let's just say 30 plus. So ages 20 to 30 was really my learning years and I bought a lot of property, made a lot of mistakes and did a lot of things the wrong way during my 20s and I guess that's part of that naivety that I was just going out there to give it a go, wanted to make money in property,

Starting point is 00:35:44 had made money in property but really looking back at it, I could have done things a lot differently and I guess the process that I went through, So like how I teach people now is that I very much took a zigzag approach and the reason I did that was very reactive. I would go out there, like a lot of investors, they're trying to make money out of property. Everyone's got good intentions.

Starting point is 00:36:09 But the issue that I found was that I was going, jumping from one thing to the next and I was doing that because I didn't have any advisor around me. I didn't have any guidance to really direct me as to what to do next and in what order. And like a lot of people, to a certain extent, I relied on my advisors to tell me what to do when they weren't really engaged for that purpose. So I relied on my mortgage broker, who I found on an internet chat room. And apparently he was a guru, but it turns out that he'd changed his career halfway through and didn't want to do finance anymore.

Starting point is 00:36:45 So maybe he wasn't. But he decided he wanted to be a lawyer. and so you know through the journey i would i would do one thing based on what the media was saying based on what property books and and uh or webinars weren't around and podcasts certainly weren't around but anything that i could get my hands on i was reading and soaking up and that's not a bad thing to do but the problem is is there's so much information out there these days and obviously 20 years ago you know a lot less information but now information is everywhere there's so much information out there yeah and so i was zigzagging through my portfolio making

Starting point is 00:37:19 decisions what i thought was the best at the time discussing with my mortgage broker with my accountant and hoping that they would build wealth for me but that wasn't their job and a lot of people assume wrongly that their accountant is there to help them build wealth really your accountants there so they're technically called tax accountants yeah right we've we've shortened that to accountant but really it's tax accountant they're going to look after your tax affairs yeah um and even a financial planner uh bless them um they're uh they're there to to give you advice uh predominantly around super and to talk about your insurances and financial products yeah and for some reason the financial planning industry doesn't talk about nine trillion dollars worth of

Starting point is 00:38:01 of property they're not allowed yeah the biggest asset class in the whole country so that's a whole again that's a whole another podcast but uh i think the um the thing is i was trying to rely on expert advice when I was really not talking to the right experts and I guess the first decade of my investing was really around zigzagging and trying to find stuff that I thought was a good investment but didn't really fit into a long-term plan yeah so can you can you sort of break that down a bit for us so put some color around uh you know the the properties you bought during that time and and what you thought and then why why they didn't quite fit the bill and and where that talk you to i'd love you to put some uh shape around that if you don't mind yeah for sure so

Starting point is 00:38:41 in in my 20s i'll give a brief summary and then come back but essentially in my 20s i did pretty much everything out of the box and in in my latest book property fit i talk about uh the um the different property um investor types and we've covered that in in let's get real as well in i want to try everything at the buffet and the portfolio very much looked like this i bought my first property, which was a house. Then I went and bought an apartment. Then I went and bought in a mining town. Then I bought a development site. Then I did a unit development. Then I bought off the plan. So the whole portfolio was literally taking a stab at everything. And whilst I've never lost money on a property, I could have done it a lot differently. So really, the second

Starting point is 00:39:27 property that I bought was after I moved to Sydney. So in 2003, I sold my security company. we had three cars on the road and a bunch of stuff and i realized that you know i was sort of outgrowing perth as a 23 year old getting itchy feet um mum will mum would say that i'm a gemini and i get bored easily uh maybe i was maybe i was bored who knows if you followed the star science but essentially uh i'd always wanted to move to sydney to have the flashy lights i feel like you know i'm in my early 20s i need to go and have a bit of a social life as well because i was working seven eight or nine days a week uh running my own business i thought i'm i'm too young for this right i don't need this i've made made a bit of money i was driving a brand new holden monaro

Starting point is 00:40:08 you know happy days everything's good uh bright bright yellow car you know um i thought i was pretty cool but um yeah look i i thought i need to balance my stress out i'm just going to go crazy and yeah and you know get old too quick so i did that moved to sydney and the part of the reason for moving to Sydney was that I went to go and get a loan for a second property and they said, no, you can't, you're self-employed, we're not interested in you, you've already got one property, that's enough. And me not taking no for an answer, I thought, well, screw you then,

Starting point is 00:40:40 I'm going to sell my business and get a job then, take that. And that's what I did. I was interviewed over in Sydney, flew over there a couple of times, got a job, moved house, moved the dog, the cat, the other cat and the car and that was it. I was in Sydney and less than 12 months after that, they relocated me to Melbourne. They said, look, we realise you're not really enjoying Sydney like you should be. I made that pretty clear to them.

Starting point is 00:41:06 And then they said, look, we're opening up a branch in Melbourne. Would you like to move? And so I did that. And around that time that I arrived in Melbourne, I bought my second property in a suburb called Wembley in WA. Again, I was buying in the city that I knew. And like a lot of investors, I know the area, so I'm going to buy there. and um it is good to a certain extent because you do feel like you've got your finger on the pulse a little bit more uh but at the same time there were there were other areas around the

Starting point is 00:41:32 country that i could have invested in had i known how to do that research yeah so uh anyway i did that and a friend of mine who's now passed away unfortunately he was a carpenter he flew over with me from melbourne we've we packed up our toolboxes we organized a renovation uh to be done on that apartment in seven days now it didn't take seven days we did it in 11 days but from from getting the keys uh to moving the the skanky old couch out of the place that the tenant left behind and the carpet uh the whole lot start to finish took us 11 days and i'll tell you i will never do an 11 day renovation ever again in my life uh we were there two o'clock in the morning oh amazing But anyway, that's what you do as a 24-year-old.

Starting point is 00:42:18 You do. Bit of a false economy there to some degree as well. It's the old, I'll do it myself, but then there's the cost of doing so. And I'm imagining there was probably quite a bit of carton currency going on. Yep, there absolutely was, along with paying for his flights and accommodation. But he'd never been to Perth before, and it was a good chance for him. I didn't give him much time to go out. I think I gave him half an hour a day to go and explore Perth.

Starting point is 00:42:41 But, you know, really, really amazing guy and, you know, it really helped me to do that. And, yeah, I think there's a better story for a renovation, which I can cover afterwards. But I did that and then I guess one of the things that I was doing at the same time, like I said earlier, was reading lots of books and magazines and everything I could get my hands on. And one of the books that I read around that time was Steve McKnight's book,

Starting point is 00:43:06 Zero to 100 Big Properties in 15 Minutes or around that time frame. And, you know, fantastic book and I got a lot out of that and it wasn't so much about the specific properties that he'd bought. It was more about the concept even of cash flow investing and I've not really heard about that before. So for me, really learning about that strategy really opened up my eyes saying, oh, well, if you can buy lots of cheap properties that rent for more than the mortgage, you can just keep buying them.

Starting point is 00:43:38 That sounds great. problem is i think the actual title is uh zero to 130 in three and a half years yeah sort of joking around about 15 minutes because a lot of people want to get rich quick stuff but and and i did too of course um now three and a half years uh meant that three and a half years before he wrote the book that's when he was buying the property so all the prices that he listed in the book for 65 000 in bendigo and ballarat yes three and a half years before he bought the book i wrote the book and then i bought it a year after it came out so we're talking about numbers that were four and a half years out of date yeah and so i got online and started looking

Starting point is 00:44:15 around for these areas i thought what are you talking about you can't buy anything for less than 150 000 yeah and i thought well i'm gonna have to explore other areas so i went down to tassie and i thought well i can buy a house down there for 79 500 which i did yeah in queenstown and you mentioned queenstown to anyone in australia they think about snowing and uh you know ski resorts and all of the fun stuff and oh wow you bought in queenstown no no not queenstown new zealand queenstown it's like a ghost town mining town in tassie mate i know i've driven through it very much very much so and look it's a very strange part of the world um it looks like it looks like a place after the apocalypse mate but after the apocalypse

Starting point is 00:44:54 exactly and it did back then and it still does now and uh i bought that property because it was cheap and it was renting for 120 a week so i figured well property number three that's really cool bought that the contract in in tasmania i think was two pages and i was shocked i said to the agent where's the rest of the contract and she said that's it um you know no such thing as a section 32 like you see in victoria you know 100 pages so anyway it was very much buyer beware and uh i did that and i held that property for 10 or 12 years uh and and got rid of it purely because it was it's more of a hassle than anything else yeah and um you know like a lot of investors i bought that property in my own name and i've since sold down a number of properties in my own

Starting point is 00:45:38 name and put them in different structures again it's probably another another conversation altogether on that as well but um you know that was the that was the next one and then after that i went and bought in melbourne um because melbourne's property market in 2005 wasn't doing a great deal at all it was actually quite dead yeah no no real media attention on melbourne it wasn't really doing much perth and meanwhile was picking up and mine was really starting to ramp up and uh property was uh you know perth perth property was the golden child in australia back then and so melbourne was sitting there quiet doing its thing so that gave me an opportunity to go and explore melbourne and being from beachside wa i started looking down the coast in in melbourne

Starting point is 00:46:19 and said, what can I buy for $200,000 or $300,000? And you think back now, what could you ever buy in Melbourne for that price? But back then, there were plenty of suburbs and I've still got a piece of paper that I wrote down a list of suburbs and those suburbs back then were, you know, $250,000 to $300,000 and now they're million-dollar suburbs. And I went and bought a really old house in a suburb called Bond Beach. Oh, yeah.

Starting point is 00:46:45 Beautiful part of Melbourne, sort of heading down towards the peninsula there. Yeah, it is. And I found this house that the agent wouldn't even walk through with me. That's how bad it was. Looking for a poor preface or something, were you, mate? Well, not so much for that reason, but it was more rats, mice, and who knows what else. And the front door didn't open.

Starting point is 00:47:06 That's why she said, look, I can't take you through because I don't have a key for it. And if I did, it probably wouldn't open. Went to the back of the place through all of the lawn and everything else to get there. and the back pergola had fallen down above the back door. But if you kind of squeezed through, you could get in there and it wasn't – the door was open.

Starting point is 00:47:24 She just said, I'm going to wait out here because for health and safety reasons, I don't think I want to risk my life. So I said, that's fine. I'll go through and had a look through. It was a very small Californian bungalow type home, two bedrooms, one lounge room and a kitchen, just four principal rooms and a sort of a half-finished bathroom. So I'd been tired but there were no showers or anything

Starting point is 00:47:46 in there installed and then the uh there was a like an old really old uh wash house type room where the uh where the washing machine should go and that room absolutely stank um so i bought that property for 255 000 um i paid it was the contract was written up for 260 000 the bank went out and said we're not going to give you that money because um it's got no kitchen and bathroom and so i went back to went back to the agent and said look i can't get a loan for this because the bank said it's uninhabitable and they're not going to land on it so i said i'm going to go back and put a bathroom and kitchen in there you need to give me access to do that and i want five grand off the price so that i can do that and they accepted it i didn't think they would so you

Starting point is 00:48:32 know i went on ebay and bought a bunch of stuff um for less than a thousand dollars i had a second hand kitchen in there and a you know vanity unit and we literally got it finished in a couple of weeks for a thousand bucks love it got the valuation done again valued at contract price and we're all happy days and managed to settle on that property uh went through the process of subdividing that block and ended up selling it in uh 2010 uh and made you know a few hundred thousand dollars on that melbourne's market had absolutely picked up we'd been through the gfc and things were getting back to normal again so that was a good little good little investment i did plan on developing two townhouses on that block and living there um but uh plans changed

Starting point is 00:49:10 as they do and, you know, I change my plans like a lot of investors do. Geez, there's a few more after that. I can keep going. Yeah, no, I'm sort of liking the learning and what's becoming evident here is that you're as good as the next book that you read and so you're sort of chasing a number of different types of approach to the exercise but all the time building your knowledge which eventually your knowledge is going to get to a stage where you're getting clear on what the strategy needs to be so yes i think it needed some reflection i think that's what that's what

Starting point is 00:49:44 didn't happen along the way yeah because what i was doing was working i wasn't losing money yeah and the properties were going up in value and i was meeting the mortgage repayments and i was going through the process so i thought what i was doing was working and to a certain extent it was working it certainly wasn't failing yeah but you know there could have been better ways of doing it but you know like you said reading books and magazines and and sort of learning as you go type of approach is what a lot of investors do because there's really no other option they don't have somebody they're offering to to guide them and mentor them through the process so my next purchase just happened to be uh while i was in um in vegas actually um

Starting point is 00:50:23 now i'll just skip back a few steps before i discuss vegas but um when i was uh relocated to melbourne for the security company that i work for in sydney um they relocated me to help open their branch office in uh Doncaster and I traveled from South Yarra to Doncaster every day and after a while I said look guys I'm putting in a lot of hours here I'm trying to help you to establish the brand in Melbourne but head office wasn't supporting the branch office that that opened up I said we need some marketing help we need admin support we can't I'm literally not here to do all of the admin work and at the same time they weren't spending any money on marketing So I had to go around door knocking trying to get business from commercial customers.

Starting point is 00:51:06 I think I'd already done that back when I was about 16 or 17. I was like, I'm not going to do that. I'm too good for that. But it really is grunt work for really not a lot of return. So it's a very slow burn, and especially if I was trying to earn a commission, not the sort of business that I wanted to do. So I thought if I'm going to have to be doing that sort of work, I'm going to do it for myself. And I actually told them this time. I said, look, I'm going to go and start my own business unless you guys support this one.

Starting point is 00:51:31 Yeah. And you can imagine what they said. They said, no, we're going to do it our way. You don't know what you're talking about. So that's fine. I've started my own business again. So at 25, I started a business called Monitored Alarms. So the joys of running your own business were that you could go

Starting point is 00:51:48 to security conferences in Vegas. And I think when I was not long after I'd started the business, there just happened to be an annual conference in Vegas and conveniently I was still single and got the opportunity to go and, you know, explore Vegas for the first time. So I flew over there and had an amazing, very educational experience over in Vegas and I learnt a lot about what not to put money on

Starting point is 00:52:11 and I learnt what not to drink, what drinks not to mix with each other. And I learnt that, you know, you can lose track of time in Vegas. As far as security is concerned, I'm sure it helped the business in some way, but I don't know exactly what, at what way. But one of the things – funny how things work out. I was actually very late, very, very late at night.

Starting point is 00:52:35 I got home from a night out and I put on late-night cable TV in the hotel. I stayed at the Luxor Hotel and put on these late-night American TV shows. And you see all the ads and everything else that go for 20 minutes. And then they had this thing on Donald Trump. And I thought, oh, wow, look at this guy. He's, like, super successful. and, you know, now we've learnt a little bit more. I'm not going to go into detail but, you know, as a 25-year-old,

Starting point is 00:53:03 I thought, geez, this guy's done really well. He's developed this and developed that and, you know, I kind of looked up to him to a certain extent. After that, I didn't really hear of the guy. I didn't have anything to do with him but I remember watching that late at night but after that show finished, there was a show on Americans that were flipping property and I thought these people are going out there

Starting point is 00:53:23 and they're flipping, renovating and flipping them and all this sort of thing, and they don't have the same tax system that we do, so I thought maybe that's a good idea. You know, don't worry about capital gains tax. We'll deal with that later. And one of the things that they were doing was that they were going out there and they were building on the backyard of houses and putting another house out the back.

Starting point is 00:53:46 About three or four weeks before I went to Vegas, I just put an offer in which had been accepted on a property in Seaford in Victoria because I thought if I bought, and this area was definitely, you know, an up-and-coming area close to the train station and the beach and so forth, and I thought I wanted to buy a development site. So knowing that I'd done it on Bond Beach, which is a couple of suburbs away, I bought a block of land

Starting point is 00:54:11 with a house on it with a view to knock it down and put two townhouses on it. But when I was in Vegas on my little work trip, I watched this late-night documentary and had this little aha moment going, Luke, you're an idiot. why are you going to knock down that perfectly good house when you can keep it renovate it and just build a new one out the back yeah but i quickly got online and i'll tell you wi-fi internet was not a thing back then you had to plug in a cable and it was about twenty dollars an hour and

Starting point is 00:54:39 it was you know and you certainly know iphones to just jump in and have a look but i made it work somehow and i looked it up and i thought that property it's 600 square meters it needs to be 630 square meters as a minimum to be able to do that. Otherwise, I've got to relocate the whole house at the front to make it work. So I emailed the agent and said, can you get me out of the contract? He said, no, I can't. But if you settle on it, I can probably get you an extra $30,000 or $40,000. So I ended up settling on that property, paid the $15,000 or $16,000 stamp duty, listed it with the agent again straight away. And I think he got an extra $35,000 for me. Came out even when Once you look at your selling costs.

Starting point is 00:55:20 Yeah, all because the market was doing so well and he managed to find me what I wanted, whereas something you can build in the backyard and renovate the front house. So that was a big lesson. And once again, I didn't lose any money on that deal, but geez, if I'd been to Vegas sooner, maybe I could have learnt a few things.

Starting point is 00:55:41 So there's a lesson in there. Travel more often. Love it, love it. So did you end up doing that development? Yes, I did and kept those for a number of years, kept the old house and this is another lesson I learned through renovating when you mentioned before, 11 days doing a renovation and factoring in your time and all of the other costs involved in travelling there. There was another aha moment that happened when I was about 26 or so and I bought that property in Seaford and I was going

Starting point is 00:56:10 down there, I was living in Paran at the same time in Melbourne's inner east and I was literally loading up the car mind you a two-door bmw that i just bought um loading up the bmw every weekend with painting equipment tools um lawnmowers whippersnippers you know you name it and i was spending my whole weekend down there and even some evenings i was down there at the front house renovating it and because i'm a bit of a perfectionist when it comes to things i think you know dad taught me from a very young age if you're going to do something do it properly yeah it's definitely one of the things that's been instilled in me from a very young age and that came about because when I washed the car quickly and for my two bucks if it wasn't

Starting point is 00:56:51 done properly they would say look if you're going to go to the trouble of washing our car and you're putting your hand out for money do it properly so I only had to do that a couple of times it was the same with same thing with the lawn mowing you know you skipped a bit here so you know very much so with painting and things like that I'm very much a perfectionist and I thought you know if you want something done to it yourself and uh so i did that and then it took me another year or so afterwards to realize look if you just paid a painter to come in yeah first of all you would have got your weekends back but you've just lost six months worth of mortgage payments yeah so the same money that you've spent on mortgage payments you could have spent on a painter had it had it

Starting point is 00:57:28 done six months earlier had a tenant in there and you could have actually had all of your weekends back yeah false economy it's not unusual not unusual myself on pat myself gently on the on the forehead and said you're an idiot what have you done so i think that was the last time i'll ever do that but um you know that was a that was a good lesson in there as well with that whole seaford project is understanding i guess you know that the whole planning and strategy was to build two townhouses and then weeks later i realized hey i can probably keep the front house and not have to build a whole nother building yeah and then there was also the other lesson in there of how you can you can pay professionals to do certain work that are a lot quicker than you

Starting point is 00:58:08 they'll probably do a better job than you and uh you know you get all of your time back and i think one of the things that uh people don't do with investing is they value their own time yeah um and this is one of the big things with with renovating i did another couple of renovations on properties after that and flipped them and I did another renovation with a friend on a property and we kept that but going through the renovation process a lot of people wrongly assumed that oh well I've gone and bought it for $300,000 we spent $10,000 on it and sold it for $360,000 they think they've made $50,000 but then when you take all your selling costs your stamp duty costs to get into it your holding costs your renovation costs then you've got capital gains

Starting point is 00:58:53 in fact you've got capital gains tax if there's anything left yeah but then you've got to factor in what's your time worth yeah you know how much do you get paid in your job if you're on fifty thousand dollars a year calculate your hourly rate yeah and count all of the hours that you spent going to bunnings all of the hours you spent putting petrol in the lawnmower all of the all of the extra little things that have to be done that aren't even on site you know all of the paperwork you've got to get done for getting permits or accounts or all of those things you've got to put an hourly rate on and i think there's there is that false economy with people wrongly assuming they're making lots of money when they're not and even if you make a hundred thousand dollars

Starting point is 00:59:29 then you pay your capital gains tax yeah really the whole thing can be pointless it's a big risk for a very small return and and it's the old story i mean you probably say the same thing but i always say yeah if you're going to invest you don't create a second job in the process because what are you actually achieving if time is your most important asset and you're actually loading up your time to do something that then stops you from doing other things then what are you actually achieving yeah yeah and i think a lot of people uh sort of their comment back to that is oh but i love property and i'm happy to do it and that's fine i love doing that as well but i also like having a social life i'm not i'm not the most social person i'm quite a private person in my

Starting point is 01:00:11 in my own time but at the same time you know there's only so many hours you've got and there's only so many years that you've got and this is one of my learnings that I got when I was 30 and I took this little mini retirement was you're not getting any younger Luke you know and your 20s just goes like that my teenage years just just went in a flash and then all of a sudden I'm turning 30 and I thought my 20s just just gone just like that and your 30s just disappeared and I think the the key thing it sort of hit me at some point was just saying look you can't get this time back you can always make money but you can't get the time back yeah yeah so true mate so let's talk about the post 30 uh so the the that was bc let's talk about ad mate but what happened

Starting point is 01:00:57 post 30 that you bring all those learnings together what was different about the 30s it did well as I was approaching 30 and you know thinking that I'm going to die soon because of old age um i um i uh i thought that uh you know during my 20s i was sort of one of those kids that sort of thought i wanted supercars i wanted yachts i wanted fancy houses on the beach that are six levels you know i want these massive pools i don't like i don't have kids i don't need that um but i wanted these big houses i wanted five-star travel and a lot of people think that that's what they want yeah and i wanted all that by 30 i wanted to retire at 30 yeah but all of these big dreams weren't really goals they were they were sort of pie in the sky things without

Starting point is 01:01:43 any real strategy of getting there and it didn't mean anything to me they're things that i thought i wanted but that didn't mean anything i couldn't connect emotionally to that goal yes and i think that that was a that was a big learning and so what happened as i started approaching 30 i said look i've been doing security for a long time when i moved to sydney to get a job that was so that i could get loans for property. No other reason, right? I didn't want to do that. But I did it because I thought property is more important than the job. My approach to going to work every day, well, this is a temporary measure whilst I become a multimillionaire before 30. That's what I was actually thinking. Without any roadmap to get there, I just thought that's what's going to

Starting point is 01:02:26 happen and um so when i started my business at 25 monitored alarms i really uh didn't have a long-term view on that i didn't think i'd be doing it at 35 or 40 or 50 i figured it's a means to an end until i can do some other things in property so i started uh putting the feelers out there when i was about 29 about selling the business uh eventually uh went through the process of doing that i actually had a i had a first class quantus ticket to london on my 30th birthday booked and around the middle of may the sale that i had for my business fell over and i was i was devastated um and so the sale fell over it took us a few more months and we ended up selling it to somebody else i had to cancel my my flight to london and eventually

Starting point is 01:03:18 that whole trip just got cancelled um these things happen not the end of the world at the time i was a bit devastated but you know i was i was getting a chunk of money for selling my business so i thought hey you know i'm happy to wait for that so i sold the business and that's that's where i really sort of said look i've been through a pretty stressful time running a business is stressful no matter how small or big the business is it's stressful at different levels yeah and so i needed a break um and especially given that the deal fell over and you know most of my um most of 2010 was stress for me i needed i needed an actual break so i actually went back to perth for a little while uh spent some time with family and um explored a few other options

Starting point is 01:03:58 one of the things that i was looking at doing was opening up a grilled burger franchise oh yeah and i went through the process of meeting with simon crowe the founder of grilled and uh had meetings back and forth about that and i thought that was a good model because it had really started picking up here in victoria and i they had one store over in wa and you know i thought this is a great option to go back to wa for a bit and maybe do that yeah um after many months of back and forth doing site tests and various other things uh going through all my financials showing them that i had the money to open the franchise they essentially came back and said no didn't give me a reason and then i was out so they kind of threw me for six a little bit i thought oh that's

Starting point is 01:04:36 what i wanted to do i was really invested in burgers oh well maybe that's not the way i'm supposed to go might have been a blessing in disguise though mate it absolutely was uh you know and i'm very grateful for them to saying no to me and um i think the the key thing is um you know like maybe i've done my burgee years at 16 but uh you know i think uh for me that was really a good point to say okay well what am i going to do next we'll pause part one here before luke starts to unpack his journey into the formation of his property advisory business the property mentors and how he can help you on your property journey. So listen out for this in next week's part two of my great chat with Luke Harris, where he takes you through his property approach and

Starting point is 01:05:16 unpacks the key components of his new book, Property Fit. Have a great week and we'll see you then. To get a summary of all this investment gold in the show notes, just email me on hello at khgroup.com.au That's H-E-L-L-O at khgroup.com.au Or check us out at www.bushymartin.com.au forward slash GetInvested. I look forward to joining you next week for another episode of the Get Invested podcast.

Starting point is 01:05:50 So thanks for listening. And as always, dream as if you live forever and live as if you die tomorrow. Thank you.

Property Hub - Investment Insights & Inspiration - Get Invested: Part 1: Luke Harris on getting property fit

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