Property Hub - Investment Insights & Inspiration - Get Invested: Part 1 - Property Investor Q and A

Episode Date: September 30, 2023

Let's get in to the really practical side of property investing and creating financial freedom. We’ve got another special episode this week, where Bushy Martin sat down with Jef Miles and Joe Tucker from Aus Property Investors, one of Australia’s largest Facebook communities dedicated to Property Investing.  This was a live stream recorded with the investor community, so there was a stack of great and very practical questions about Australian property, investing insights and also lessons from Bushy’s personal story. This week we bring you part one of the discussion, with part two to follow … and if you like the community vibe, links to request to join the Facebook group here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/Auspropertyinvestorsgroup  NEW - Join the Property Hub community on Substack! Sign up to get Australian property news, opinion and episodes in your inbox: https://propertyhubau.substack.com/  Three easy ways to Get Invested right now: Subscribe to this podcast now, if you haven’t already, and get the inspiration delivered to your podcast feed each week Get a copy of my book, Get Invested, for FREE, and find out what it takes for you to invest in living more, working less. Go to: https://knowhowproperty.com.au/get-invested-free-ebook Join the Get Invested community. Each month Bushy sends a free and exclusive monthly email full of practical ‘Self, Health and Wealth’ wisdom that our current Freedom Fighter subscribers can’t wait to get each month. Just visit bushymartin.com.au, scroll to the bottom of the page and sign up. About Get Invested, a Property Hub show Get Invested is the leading weekly podcast for Australians who want to learn how to unlock their full ‘self, health and wealth’ potential. Hosted by Bushy Martin, an award winning property investor, founder, author and media commentator who is recognised as one of Australia’s most trusted experts in property, investment and lifestyle, Get Invested reveals the secrets of the high performers who invest for success in every aspect of their lives and the world around them. Get Invested is part of the Property Hub podcast channel, your home for property investment insights, inspiration and stories from Australia’s top property experts, investors, leaders and analysts. Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Google Podcasts to get every Get Invested episode each week for free, and also get full access to RealtyTalk, Australia’s top online property show for red hot property investing news and insights direct from property industry leaders and influencers. Property Hub is a collaboration between Bushy Martin from KnowHow Property, Kevin Turner from Realty, show producer Andrew Montesi from Apiro Marketing and Apiro Media, and Australia’s largest independent podcast network DM Media.  For business enquiries, email [e-mail]. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to Get Invested on the Property Hub podcast channel, the leading weekly show to help you unlock your full self-health and wealth potential. I'm your host, Bushy Martin, and each week I go deep with the best investors, experts, leaders and founders to find out what it takes to break free from the grind, discover freedom and live by design. Subscribe now and join me and get invested in the life you really want. Let's get started. Welcome to Get Invested on the Property Hub podcast channel. I'm Andrew Montessi, producer of the show. And we've got another special episode this week where Bushy Martin

sat down with Jeff Miles and Joe Tucker from Oz Property Investors, which is one of Australia's largest Facebook communities dedicated to property investing. Now, this was a live stream recorded with the investor community. So there was a stack of great and very practical questions about australian property investing insights and also lessons from bushy's personal story this week we bring you part one of the discussion with part two to follow and if you like the community vibe links to request to join the facebook group are in our show notes enjoy and we are live and i was property investors we bring the big names and we have the big fun and tonight's going to be huge the audience is 150 people plus registered and bushy people wanted more bush after last

Last Friday, Wednesday night, I butchered that opening, so I've got to get through it again. How are you going, Bushy? I'm very good, guys. I really enjoyed catching up with Joe last week because we get to talk to each other virtually like this, but it takes it to a different level. We can actually press the flesh.

We specifically made the effort just to go to the Geelong exercise so that I could shake Joe's hand. I'm sorry, Bushy. I will get to one of these events and maybe we'll do another one. I love meeting friends online, like meeting friends that you've virtually met because as soon as it's you meet face to face, it's just like, Oh cool. How's it going? Like nothing has changed. It's like, Oh wait, actually we've never met before.

This is, we've never actually met in, in real life. But yeah, thank you very much for coming out and thanks for everyone else that came out because it was an awesome session and you shared a lot of great and interesting points in the in the q a at the end um that i uh i even took note of i'm like oh actually i need to i need to start i need to think about that a little bit more it was good i think there was really good sharings all around and the crew that actually hosted that uh sophie the property manager she was really impressive i thought i thought she'd clearly done a lot of work to get the the crew there in person and i thought conducted a great event guys so way i mean

Just as a bit of reflection, I mean, when we first spoke, I reckon it was about three years ago when we first spoke to us. I'd say so. It was roughly that, and I think at that time the membership community was around about 12,000 or something like that. Joe was telling me last week we're now talking 40-odd thousand. Well, I absolutely take my hat off to you guys because you're only able to create a community like that if one the information you're sharing is really good

two you're creating a community of of people who are learning from each other which is actually pretty rare in the property space because as you guys know there's a lot of bs artists in this whole industry uh so it's a real credit to you guys it's you know it's not easy uh having done similar sorts of things in the past but not for the level you're doing uh i can imagine there's an enormous amount of work you guys are doing behind the scenes to make this all happen. It's almost like a second job for you guys, I would have thought. So full credit to you both, guys.

You're building an amazing community, which is going to make a big impact on Australia's future because those who take the advice and do the work are going to be a lot better off down the track directly as a result of what you've created and what you're sharing. Thank you, mate. Well, it's people like you that jump on and share the valuable insights. Like I don't think – I think people underestimate how easy it is

to just ask questions, and that's all me and Jeff do here. It's just – we're just juicing the brains that come on into the live session. So, mate, you're a part of that. Get ready to get juiced. I've got my blinds on, cigarette guy, so I'm ready to get shot at far away. So how are you going, Joe? let's let's get on track on track i am i am ready i'm ready for tonight um we have the freedom formula uh uh author mr bushy martin i was doing i was catching up and reflecting on some of the

uh and some of the insights that we're about to share tonight um but you're in for it if you really i think what you do incredibly well bushy is you create frameworks for thinking around wealth knowledge expertise um in the financial space so it really helps people just capture encapsulate all of the because this is the hardest thing about property investing is what i found when i started my journey what happens is the spruikers the big companies that have hundreds of thousands of dollars do all of the you know education so everyone gets hopped up on that they're like yeah depreciation off the plans house and land that's how i make my money and it's only when you start unravel that that you start to see the bs but you do really well in in this book and um what's the

other i've got the freedom formula what's the what the other yes get invested is the intro so we we basically give that away for free in fact for anyone listening tonight who wants a copy but they just jump on the website you can just plug in your details and you'll you can download a copy straight away or if you want a hard copy you just pay for the postage and and you've got it there But that's the appetite weather, really. I'm really just wanting to wake up and shake up people to the need to invest. It's not all about property either, by the way,

because I just want Australians to invest in something other than just work and super and the mistake of thinking that paying off your home is going to get you to where you want to because it's a pretty sad story if that's what you rely on. So the Get Invested thing is really just to get you excited about it. then the step-by-step process is really detailed in the full volume of the Freedom Formula, guys. Well, we'll go deep into that.

We'll put it in the little show notes and stuff. Jeff, how are you, mate? How are you today? I feel very relaxed, Joe. I mean, hearing about the deck, you had a busy one. I've been loading a lot of things to do, but I'm really good and was digging into some of the stuff that you've put out there in the last couple of months, Bushy,

And just I reflected upon that whole 200K passive income and just that generated so many people just asking a lot of questions and sort of saying, well, why has he stopped? Like, how did he get there? How long did it take him? And just like it's a very click-baity sort of, but I'm very well. But I was reflecting on that and I was just thinking, yes, it is super impressive. at the same time i was i was i was reflecting on even like toddy sloan and how he says you shouldn't you shouldn't idolize normalize like not to say that what you've achieved isn't fantastic and amazing but it's like you've actually just created the process and just followed the process

like one foot uh one like you put your leg in how do you put your pants in one leg at a time so it's as we want to sort of demystify some of that sort of stuff because you are an amazing individual and very talented, but at the same time, I think you are, yeah. I'm going to make me blush now, Jeff. He's going to dispel that myth today. Dan, I'm going to be going really fast. I'm excited for this session as well.

So shall we get into quotes? Should we talk about what we're going to talk about before we do quotes? Quote of the week. Nah, what's the quote of the week? Bushy, what have you got? What is your quote? Well, mate, as you know, guys, you know me pretty well.

I can't stop at one quote because... No, we need three. I'll put three together that sort of complement each other. So the first one I reckon you all would have heard before and it's a Warren Buffett classic, and that is wealth is a transfer of money from the inpatient to the patient. And I used that one tonight because it's pretty relevant

to what I'm going to talk about because, you know, what you've just said there, Jeff, uh the the exercise has been 15 to 20 years in the making right so it's not overnight stuff it's just doing the do and sticking to the knitting that's key and i'll unpack a lot of that tonight the second quote is that uh and this is more inspirational uh and you again probably heard this before but if you don't go after what you want you'll never have it if you don't ask the answer is always going to be no and if you don't step forward you'll always be in the same place. So again, that's what I'm saying there. And what I think is relevant tonight is that

people need to actually take action. I see a lot of people in the property space who are gunner, gunner, gunner, and they end up being, well, we could have, should have, would have, but they don't actually do anything because they analyze things to death and then actually don't make the move. And there's no such thing as a perfect property. You just need to get in there and learn as you go. I'm not saying be stupid about it and just buy the first property that comes across the board but but take some action is the key and then the third one which i think is relevant as well is that a wise person does it once what a fool does at last both do the same things they just do them at different times and it folds back onto what i was saying there in

relation to you know those that say they're going to do something but never get around to it versus though that take the action and then reap the rewards so so yeah that's my point they're solid they are some there's some solid quotes you got a whole heap of quotes in your book as well all my favorites are in the book mate because they are there people that are alive though because did you get copy copyright for that oh no i've referenced them i've referenced them whoever said they're in there but i i don't know about you guys but i'd like to start my day with a really good quote it sets the tone for the day for me and i used to do a motivational monday quote i did it for probably three or four years on monday on facebook and i'd maybe actually get

back into it but on to that point about people sort of not taking action and just sort of sitting back i think the other thing is people sort of dwell on what they hadn't done and what the opportunity they missed out on and by dwelling on that they've actually then missed out on the next opportunity because the sydney boom for example 2012 joe and i kind of missed out a little bit and and then we well we did miss it we kind of did this and then and we said well okay cool well we missed that now so what do we we're not going to sort of sit around twiddling our thumbs to wait till the next one we actually went and took a bit of action and bought a few properties and made a few mistakes here and there and trusted the keys to our financial future with some some decisions

that weren't fantastic but we learn a lot from it so i think yeah that's another yeah that's a very that's a very good point because that's a boom we've just seen if anyone thinks that we're going to have the past two years in the next two years it's not necessarily going to be the case you need to not maybe start stop looking for these hot spots and start looking at some more of the fundamentals in in my opinion um but anyway quote of the week quote of the week time um my quote actually ties in very nicely with what you were talking about bushy and i thought this one would be very relevant for you it is um if you think trying is risky wait until you see the bill for not trying if you think is investing is risky wait until you get the tab for not investing

um that's by zig ziglar and i saw that the other day and i'm like perfect that is so that is a crack i i uh just just feeding off that one joe uh in in the freedom formula we had a client years ago who came came to see us who was all keen to guess she was a doctor she was well healed she had good income great equity we got her all set up she was good to go and uh and then she sort of drifted off i didn't hear from her for a long time and i bumped into her uh about 10 years later i said margaret how did you go she said uh well bushy um you know life got a bit busy and uh and anyway i'm spending the money that you set up on renovating the house and uh but but but now we're ready we're ready to invest now we're ready uh so i actually sat down and i i calculated

what she'd missed out on uh by waiting 10 years to do it uh she she'd missed 2.4 million dollars in nest egg growth over that period. And if you amortise that back, for every week she actually delayed investing, it cost her over $4,600 a week. Wow. The growth is exponential. There's not many like that. But just to put some meaning around the exercise, the cost of delay

and the impact of time on your investing, as I'll reveal more tonight, is a big one. love it yeah love it okay jeff what have you got what's your quote mate and then we'll start once fairly i wouldn't say unremarkable i i really um i think this guy's an amazing individual or was an amazing individual um it's by nelson medela and he said it's always impossible until it's done so that's very much nearly my quote of the week so could you i i picked mine probably before yours i picked mine this afternoon so maybe not maybe i've given you not enough credit but no i think that that i was trying to link it back to that 200k income and just the the trials and tribulations

that that nelson went through and mandela's a a kind of polarized somewhat polarizing figure in south african history but um having studied and been studied the the bloke and been out to robin island like i just i can't fathom how much kind of trial um how much challenge he went through and how much sacrifice as well but he got there in the end became the president of south africa and got a lot of what he was seeking for or looking for well it's definitely not as hard as property investing is that's for sure trying to buy a property in perth and geez but anyway yeah exactly try buying a property in perth um no uh we're not no comparison um so tonight what are we going to talk about we are speaking with bushy martin the man the myth the legend of know how

property and get invested podcast awesome podcast um go back to some of the uh the the oldest series and you have an awesome massive long intro that that bushy used to do and they've he's shortened them down he's shortened them down a little bit i used to listen to the first part your intro for 40 minutes and then i like cool you know i've got off the train now i'm going to listen to the next 40 minutes on the way back home for the interview of the people but um so i want to yeah let's unpack this gentleman's property investing journey and jeff is going to do a great intro for his shortly, so you guys can have a bit more context to it. But we're going to unpack how do you get to a $200,000 passive income portfolio and what that actually looks like and the trials and

tribulations and fun stuff along the way. So I'm excited for that. What I was going to say as well is if anybody has any questions, drop them in and we'll get to them throughout the show. And drop a like, drop a comment, give us a review on Spotify as well, people, or YouTube, do all that sort of stuff but to to bushy that the person of the person the hour or two hours depending on how long you want to chat for so who who is who is sitting in front of us today so as joe's mentioned a couple of times there's a couple of books that bushy's written and they are i remember reading this back when i was living in sydney and and they just i've read a lot of books but it really resonates if you've not read a lot of property investing or finance and mindset books this is

like almost a gateway drug to i'd almost say it as the australian version maybe a big call here of rich dad poor dad the freedom formula um and get invested is probably the one that i think i read so maybe it's a big call i hope it's okay to say that um mentor of the year in south australia the better business awards of 2019 um and you won some awards for that as well the um the freedom formula and you're a top 10 property investment specialist as well you've got got a whole bunch of qualifications but the thing i love most about you bushy is you've with your know-how you've helped over 1700 so over a thousand sort of people secure over 600 million dollars in property so i mean how how good is that 600 million like you might even that might be a bit

old so have you cracked the billion yet uh not quite pretty close to it actually that is old those facts and figures we're just under 2000 that we've helped and just a just a whisker under it under a billion but uh yeah and it's it's been a lot of fun guys and and that's spread over a long period of time by the way uh so uh you know i i i don't take compliments very well i i blush and and and feel feel pretty uneasy about it but uh it's just it's just doing the do guys it's just uh and you know that uh i really appreciate your thoughts on the book jeff uh that that's that that's probably overstated uh but the the reality is uh i'd just like to get good uh truthful down to earth information out there in a way that everyone can understand because it's not rocket

science the whole property so a lot of people try and jargonize it to the point where it sounds like it is but if you break it down and keep it pretty simple yes there's some intricacies and some details that you need to learn along the way but but beyond that it's just communicating it out there in a way that people can actually make use of it and then then most importantly do something about it yeah yeah the other thing i wanted to say is i wanted to give some credit to your your wife uh sonia as well i don't i don't sort of think that you would have been able to necessarily do it without her i mean i'm not not saying that you um yeah but i just wanted yeah because oftentimes people yeah underestimate the the impact of partners and why absolutely one and

thank you jeff that that i will make some noise about it because there's absolutely no question uh that uh the power of two uh with sonja and i and again i'll unpack a bit of this tonight but i this is my second crack at a live partnership i absolutely stuffed it up the first time and i've got no one else to blame but myself for that uh but gee whiz i struck gold with sonja and uh what she brings to the table the yin and the yang when when it comes to how we combine as a team uh we're on the same page and and what she comes out with and some of the stuff she's able to do uh and i'll share a couple of those things tonight it's been absolutely amazing mate so i absolutely kissed on the backside with uh my life partner and uh she she she's very humble she she runs from the limelight

she she's very uncomfortable when the spotlight's on her so i'm the peacock and she's the she she makes it happen behind the scenes but that that comment i there's no way i'd be sitting here talking to you if it wasn't for a massive contribution and partnership that i have with sonja she she is a living legend yeah she's amazing i met um you know i met you and sonja as well and and a lot of the the back end stuff of what goes on i see the sonya's touches every single piece of that um which is which is awesome um so thank you thanks sonya thank you people are saying sonya on your sonya on your sonya yeah good john to the aussie uh bushy let's let's wheel this sucker all the way back all the way back so how did you give us a bit

of a rundown of how you got into the the property investment sphere or or how did the kind of journey begin for you yeah well i i will go right back because as i sort of spoke to you in the in the green room before we kicked off guys uh and you know i interview a lot of investors as well and if we just focus on the property piece that's okay but what we're not sort of getting a handle in is the evolution and the progression of our knowledge, understanding, skills, capacity, the network that we improve, that all has a massive impact on the eventual growth of your portfolio. So I would really like to unpack some of that tonight right from the get-go, and I'll weave

in the personal with the professional with the property side, and I think it'll be a lot more meaningful to those people listening in, because if you isolate the property from what they're doing in life and and what perhaps you need to be doing in life to make that journey happen you're going to miss some of the key learnings i think so so i appreciate the um the opportunity to to do that uh because in reality guys my life has actually been in two halves if i if i look back on it uh it's a bit of a jack on the hide type of exercise if uh if you're old enough to know who jack on hide is and i and i jokingly refer to it as the bc in the ad so the BC is before my crisis when I was 33 and AB is after the divorce when I really got serious

about the whole whole property piece because in the BC piece uh if I look back I did have a crack at some property in the BC piece when I was in my 20s uh but I I was really more a trader speculator which is code for gambler, if you're being honest about it. And I was much more driven by ego and emotion than I was on a lot of hard-driven stuff around the property side, whereas once I got serious about the investment piece, there was a lot more head stuff that started to work it through. So let's go right back.

I mean, with a name like Jesse, I'm a boy from the bush very clearly. that's fairly obvious so is that on the birth certificate like it's it's the no well well i i uh my my good father was the original bushy so uh he he had long hair uh back in the 1930s when it was all short back and side so everyone called him bushy tail and it became bushy and uh dad was a living legend i i you know i sometimes get blessed with the family to get born into he was an absolute cracker and uh so i was always bushy junior as a kid as you as you do and when he passed and to sort of maintain his legacy to be quite quite honest because i'm quite proud of of uh what he what he did and and the opportunities that he's given us

uh i just dropped the junior and and kept the bushy tag and now every time someone calls me bushy i think of that so so i'm very blessed with that guys uh but yeah so uh country boy born in the country town i've gone in a tiny little spot called groke in western victoria uh you know population of about 300 i think i think the town almost closed when the family family left uh but uh the uh i guess i i and i know why i mentioned this it becomes obvious how this influenced things later on because in reality I was a punch-dressed and flat-faced runt of a kid so I had a hair lip and you can still see a bit of the scar there I can claim it was a boxing scar went on with the boys but it's actually born with a hair lip and I had

really bad asthma so I used to spend all my time in bed you know four out of seven days I'd be in bed with asthma struggling to breathe so what I did to amuse myself I used just a drawer I always had a pen in my hand I was drawing designing creating and I was in one of those typical Aussie families the old man was a stock agent for a group and so we moved around country towns all through my childhood you know by by the age of 40 I'd lived in 40 different places and it became a sort of a gypsy type of an exercise because we're always moving and that that's that hasn't left me by the way. I love travelling. I love living in different places to meet new people and enjoy new experiences. But where that led to and where the property piece comes in, during my teens,

my good father, he became a land speculator. So he didn't earn much coin in those days. It was pretty tough. But I remember spending a lot of my weekends sitting in the car, driving around the place with him and he was buying blocks of land and then assigning the contracts and selling them before he had to settle on them so that he could he could take the uh improvement and then he'd roll that over so he did a whole heap of these in a fairly short space of time and that that sowed a little bit of a seed uh it was sort of well i wasn't it wasn't uh really active on it but i was exposed to it and uh but i because i used to draw all the time and and design things all the time i remember him saying well you know that's all really good son but at some stage you're

gonna have to go and get a real job uh so i was like okay well how do i combine my love of drawing and designing with something that's real i became an architect i'll become an architect and i'm not saying that that's about how simple it was so uh you know it's i had no background in architecture whatsoever absolute greenhorn didn't have a clue uh that's the truth of it but did the five-year course uh was uh probably smart enough to work with a few builders and put on the overalls and the nail bag and actually learn how stuff was actually done during during the process i became a fairly fairly useful uh rather than a lot of architects who are great at drawing things but when it comes to building it they're always referred to as effing architects

because it's almost impossible to do what they're suggesting. So that was pretty much the start of the exercise. And during that sort of BC piece, the before crisis exercise, I was pretty much like most Australians. I was living for the Australian dream. I went through uni, got a job. I travelled a lot as an architect, so I couldn't get any work in Adelaide at the time when I finished uni.

The only things that were being built then at the, and this is at the end of the 70s, early 80s, so I'm showing my vintage now, guys. But the only thing that was happening then was Bravestones, pretty much. It was a dying population in Adelaide at the time. They stopped building churches in Adelaide by that time? Well, they needed more churches.

Funerals, mate, that was about it. But I went and worked. In fact, I worked for free for a stretch in Adelaide just to get some experience. But I got a job with a crocodile skin farmer up in New Guinea who decided that he was making big money and he wanted to get into property development and he's sick of paying architectural firms,

so he thought he'd employ his own in-house architect to do his work. So I went up there, I call it my Indiana Jones days because the only people that go to P&G, and this is in the 80s, were mercenaries, missionaries or maven, and I'm still trying to work out which category I fit it into. But I spent a couple of years up there and this guy made a fortune

selling crocodile skins to the French and Japanese and then pouring all the money into property development. So I did a heap of residential development in Port Moresby and we did a tourism safari lodge and a beautiful spot called Toofy. Once I'd finished there, I went to Darwin and it was boom time in Darwin. There was a lot of work happening at that point in time. Was this the late 80s, was it, or early 90s?

you know this is still in the 80s and and it's when i hit our springs that i i actually got into a property for the first time so you were already seeing people profiting and benefiting from from property investing and property developing and you were pretty much putting together the plans and the structures and like yeah this one make this one works this one looks good it's super affordable and you can build it and and here it is i've saved you you know 100k and then they're Like, great, thanks, here's your pennies and I'll go build it and make my money. Spot on.

And there's a danger. I thought I knew more than I actually did because there's a lot of difference between drawing it and designing it and building it and making a coin. And so my first entourage into the property space from a personal perspective, and this was early 80s, uh we did a one into four redevelopment in uh Alice Springs uh we there was myself and and and

just start listening to this because this is a combination from hell so I had myself and two others plus a developer come builder uh we all went into in it together uh we didn't sit down and really think about exit strategies in any detail uh we we uh because we were good architects and there's some pretty average stuff being done in Alice Springs. Our view was that we would build this Taj Mahal that was going to be so much better than everything else and stand out and win all sorts of awards that people would fall over themselves to pay lots of money for.

Dumb idea. So that was our first mistake. And again, talk about 18 months for these things to go from inception to completion and the market had completely changed over that time. So the asking price of what we needed to get out of them wasn't even close to what people would appear to pay. And this is your first foray into actually owning your...

How did you decide to actually do that? It just seemed like a good idea at the time. As you said, Joe, how hard can this be? I'm seeing all these guys doing it and we're drawing and designing it and project managing it. Gee whiz, this can't be that difficult. Why should we make these guys all this money? We'll go out and have a crack.

uh gee whiz that was a a baptism of fire because not only have we misread the market you know and i'm talking curved roofs and i mean we went to town on this thing it was a thing of beauty there's no question over capitalized a little bit it would have won the awards if it got up what a disaster i mean it got finished and it's i'll actually have a look today uh it's still still going pretty well uh it's at number one mill street in uh in uh the east end of alice springs still looks good it looks good but in terms of its property performance it's a dog so uh and then so we couldn't sell it so we we had to put tenants in uh to rent it to try and bridge the bleeding hole that was developing because you know because it's a bomb we borrowed every cent uh to do this thing

because you couldn't those days well at least you had four people to spread the load with you know wait for it wait for it because we had no no definitive exit strategy other than we'll build them and sell them that was the exit strategy mistake number one so uh then once that once it got ugly uh one of the other partners got divorced and uh of course that created uh a lot of issues because we then were forced to sell a couple of the properties and the developer that we went into bed with went bankrupt so uh it was uh it was a absolute it was an absolute disaster there's no doubt about it it's interesting like this story was talking about in the 80s this story could be happening today like it's it's the same it's human nature right it's it's

it's people that that should be and shouldn't be uh doing things um and we just we we really didn't do our due diligence we didn't do any risk assessment we just thought we knew it and and that sort of an ego i've said earlier that was ego driven to some degree and emotionally driven because we we weren't really running the numbers we missed the boat by a mile so we we didn't read what sort of accommodation the market needed we therefore didn't price it the right way we didn't deliver it in the right way it was it was doomed before it started to be perfectly honest uh so So massive learning early on, and this might sound silly, but my biggest mistakes have created my biggest learnings.

And it might sound crazy, but mistakes are actually big lessons in the making. So I don't mind making mistakes because you're forced to have to learn. The mistake that a lot of people make, though, I think, is they'll make a mistake like that and they'll never go back. They'll wash their hands of property, walk away and never do it again. rather than go, well, okay, what did we do wrong? What do we need to do differently?

I've seen it with generational. I've seen generations of people that did that exact situation. Oh, no, no, my parents had a terrible experience with property investing. I'm like, have you tried it? Because you've got excess capital and you're putting all this money and it's just sitting in the bank account. Like, what are you doing?

Well, property is not for me. I say, well, you're just looking at that and it's not. I've actually seen it. I've seen it with a good friend of mine. He sort of, because his dad invested in sort of town, like some vacation sort of stay places and just absolutely destroyed him financially. And then he decided the property wasn't for him.

But through chatting to him, yeah, he's decided to get back on the property bandwagon and has done okay. Probably done even better than me, actually. Well, it's very compelling. If you do your homework on what property can do and given the incentives we enjoy in this country, there's no better asset vehicle to build wealth.

There's no question about that. Have you got any tips for like partnerships, like some of the key learnings that you got from the partnerships that didn't work out? 100%. Have a watertight shareholders agreement right from the get-go that spells out what all the potential exit strategies are and all the what-ifs.

What are the what-ifs? If I get hit by a bus, what do we do? if if uh there's a crash in the property market and they're vacant for months what do we do if the properties are damaged what do we do uh inculcate all of those into a jv come uh shareholders agreement and do that while you're friends and while you still love each other before you've done anything because then when it gets ugly then you can pull it off the shelf and and all the hard decisions are made and and that that paid dividends later on too by the way because uh in in one of my my future business exercise which i'll talk a little bit about uh we we did exactly that and

when it got to the point where we decided we're going to go separate ways we just pulled dusted it off pulled it down uh executed and we're all still mates and all still catch up so very very different scenario so it's it's the old story build stuff on paper first before you do anything at all and and this applies not only to the arrangements you have with other parties but the way you do property as well. You know, if I look back now, everything we do now, we'll build it on paper right down to the last dollar and work out what the cash flow is going to be in year one,

three, five, 10, 15 and beyond before we even get serious about making offers on properties. You got us to the end part of the journey, Joe. You got us to that stage. Yeah, well, I'm going to bounce around a fair bit here. So that was number one. And I was what you'd call a rent investor now. There was no such term in those days, of course, because I was just renting in Alice Springs.

But not long after that, I went down to Adelaide to open an architectural practice in partnership with a guy from Alice Springs because we couldn't get staff in Alice Springs, but it was easy to get architects in Adelaide and do work in Alice Springs. So I went to Adelaide. I got married in a massive hurry, as you do when you're young and stupid, and I ended up buying my first home not long after that. uh that was in glind in in adelaide and i'm just trying to remember numbers there i reckon i i i picked up that property and again this was an emotionally driven purchase so yes yep it was

it didn't become that by the way because i ended up bouncing around so we we live in it for three months i think and then then i got posted back to alice alice springs uh so we use the six-year rule uh where it can still be your ppor but we we uh lived in alice and then managed to sell it without capital gains because of so it was the northern territory booming this much where the the majority like the majority of your work as an architect was happening up there yeah i mean it it appealed to me uh yes there was a lot of work i mean alice springs was going through a massive boom uh during the 80s uh you know post cyclone tracy in darwin and then the flow through to So there was a lot happening.

And I ended up being the project architect for Ayers Rock Resort. I actually lived out of Ayers Rock Resort for about two and a half years. Is that Yallara, was it? Yeah, Yallara. Yeah. Yeah. So I created all of the... Yeah, I've been there.

Yeah, Desert Sails, the Outback Pioneer, the Desert Gardens. You know, I know that place like the back of my hand. That's really good. As a consequence of basically being in the red dirt for a couple of years. But we bought this little property in Adelaide. And again, an emotionally driven exercise. And actually, I'm going to step back. I'm going to step back before I do that because I've forgotten one important piece in the

property journey that thanks to my good father, because my father had been very involved in the land exercise, after that disaster with the Sturt Apartments exercise, he encouraged me together with my brothers to set up a trust and buy some land. So we bought some land. It was about 1984, I think, we bought this land. And it was bare earth, basically, on the edge of a little town called Wollonga, south of Adelaide. Wollonga?

Yeah. Yeah, it was quite big. There was, I think we had around about 150 hectares or thereabouts. It was a big piece of dirt. But agricultural land at that time, it was dirt cheap. i mean it was dirt cheap and it had a number of titles on it so the idea was because dad had just seen what i'd done uh on my own and burnt a heap of cash so he said son it's about time you wake up to yourself let's land banks and stuff that you can eventually when you get yourself in the

right position build build a home on down the track so so and i'm going to come back to this because uh i was a bit reluctant to get involved with that exercise to be honest after what i'd just been through 150 hectares is massive as well it was big and and and we just ran a few cows and sheep on to keep uh keep it down uh we managed to secure some heretic grants and we actually planted 110 000 trees to re-green the whole thing because it was it was pretty much bare earth uh so we we absolutely re-grain the exercise but it was it wasn't really much of a an income uh operation because we ran a few cows and sheep and adjusted a bit of stuff just to just to pay the council rates basically uh but it was a sleeper it was a sleeper and and

again i'm going to just just park that one because we'll come back to that because i'd pretty much forgotten about it to be perfectly honest uh and then so i fell in love got married in a hurry uh we bought this little place uh in glend uh it was on a 568 square meter block so tiny it It had actually been carved off one of the Italian garden farmers' blocks. It was a 1950 build. It was beautiful. It was a little cosy cottage. You know, it was a very romantic purchase.

But, you know, as you know, you don't buy pretty properties because they're generally not profitable. And I think we bought that. I bought it after auction. So I went to the auction and I waited to get passed in. And then I went and negotiated after the event. We picked it up for $98,000. This was back in 1987.

And then, of course, when my life went to poo in the early 90s, we sold it. We were forced to sell it because I got divorced at that stage. And I think we only sold it for $120,000. So we didn't make much out of that exercise. But again, it was an emotional buy. So I'm going to reinforce some of the mistakes you make. You don't go for what looks good. You don't go for what feels good.

you start to look at the numbers and what what what else is driving this exercise so a bit of a mistake we managed to get out of it we well i reckon we probably would have lost money with with the buying cost and the selling costs 98 to 120 grand it was no matter yeah there's no question about that uh so uh so that was the uh the third property and then uh i continued to travel so i ended up back in alice for a stretch then i went to uh bangkok and i opened an office for an international design firm over there. Then I came back to Perth and ran the office for the crowd there. I got very busy, but I was pretty much living the Australian dream

of that stage. So I work hard, focus on your career, earn a decent income, worked on some great projects. I mean, it looked great. No dramas about that. What was Perth like in the 90s? Yeah, I loved Perth. I mean, when you're coming from Alice Springs and Asia,

Perth, it looks like a palace. I actually love Perth. I think it's a great city, actually. I've still never been, but I'll get there one of these days. Yeah. I've been to six continents and I haven't been to Perth. Make sure you go. It is a great city.

It's a very positive. That resource culture, the mining culture, is a very gung-ho, let's get it done culture. If I compare that with Adelaide, Adelaide's a very conservative, old-school gentry exercise versus Victoria, where I was born, which is very much a convict place. There is still the old signs of that.

Adelaide's very much about which school you went to, where Perth is more about let's get it done and we'll talk about it afterwards. Adelaide, let's talk about it forever and then maybe we'll do something. There is a difference. I definitely see that about Perth. I can remember that.

Yeah, yeah. So I love Perth. And my brother's still over there. He lives down at Margaret River. So we get over there reasonably often and great climate. Yeah, I love Perth. It's a great spot. But reality was I was a workaholic by that stage.

I'm a closet perfectionist anyway, which is my biggest challenge, to be honest. And it's good to a point, but it has its downsides. And the downside for me was that I was working seven days a week, 14 hours a day, and I did that for years on end. And then, no surprise, I burnt my marriage. and then the whole house of cards fell over because i i ended up losing my career uh i ended up losing my marriage i had a had my son at that stage so that was a a massive wake-up call for me

because like being a country boy you're sort of brought up with one church one wife and one bank that's that's pretty much the way i'm into the world and when your marriage goes that that was pretty shameful for me to be perfectly honest and i couldn't blame anyone but myself so i i you know I often joke, but I spent the next two years doing my Masters in business, but that was an excuse to hide from the world where I did a lot of mirror time. And I really started to think about, well, what do I need to be doing differently from this point on?

Because the model was very much work hard, stick money in the super, have a nice house, and then tick off the bucket list when you retire. And that's a fairly common thing. I hadn't thought about it too much, to be honest. But when the whole thing fell over, I was like, righto, well, what are you going to do differently? And I was determined to make a massive change.

Now, about the same time as this, by the way, my old man, who'd always been my role model, I always looked up to that, his health started to fall to bits and he had a bunch of strokes, he had bowel cancer. He was one of those Aussies that, she'll be right, mate, just blunder on, don't worry about it. I'll never forget him looking me in the eye not long before he passed and he said, son, it's about time you learnt from me.

Stop following my example. Stop working for money and start getting money to work for you. It was like the lightbulb moment. It really shook me up perfectly. It really shook me to the core. And that stayed with me. And it's funny how these things happen in threes, but a mate of mine from Alice Springs who'd come down to Adelaide

dragged me along to a Robert Kiyosaki conference in Adelaide. Robert Kiyosaki was actually there. I was like, okay, I'll come along. I don't really have much interest, but, yeah, if you'll shout me a ticket, I'll go and have a listen. And, again, massive penny drop moment because he said the moment the passive income becomes part of your life, your life will change forever.

and it was almost like I'd taken off a set of glasses and I could see the world completely differently from that point on. So I grabbed his book, I grabbed his board game, the cash flow game. I've just immersed myself in this stuff. And the good thing about that experience was that the way we approach everything now

from that point on, everything we did in investing, everything we did in terms of our work, career and business was based on three key things. so everything we did had to create an income stream it had to uh grow in value and it had to be saleable so so if those three things weren't present in in everything we looked at then we walked away so that that got us really thinking and i'd i'd uh i'd met sonja by the stage uh and And being the architect, I was very good at visualising what the future looks like and then working out what steps we need to take to get from where we are to where we want to be. So we sat down at a little restaurant in Clarendon, it's a beautiful spot just south of Adelaide, on a Sunday afternoon with a burning fire in the background.

And I said, okay, we're going to paint out our future. uh so uh i i wrote down uh what life was going to look like in 10 years and i wrote my perfect day she wrote a letter to a mother based on what we were doing at that time and then then we compared notes uh and we got really crystal clear about exactly how we wanted to live uh and and and again by coincidence really or serendipity whatever you want to call it the guy who ran in the restaurant was an accountant and he only opened this restaurant when he liked he'd set himself up he'd been an active investor himself this guy which I didn't realize at the time but we found out later and he was putting his head over all the time as he was pouring wine saying

yeah what are you guys up to and so he explained what we're up to and he said look I can help you monetize that I can help you work out how much that lifestyle costs so he did exactly that we actually worked that out and then he'd had a little bit of financial planning background as well so he said look to get to that income you're going to need to create this level of income producing assets and and that pretty much became the seeds of what we now help others do with the what i call the freedom forecast or the freedom numbers so uh just just to share those numbers with you uh totally open and this is what you wrote down on the table like all those years ago Brilliant stuff.

I mean, you can actually, on the back wall behind me, you can probably see my vision board. Oh, yeah. Just near the duck on my screen. I can see it. Yeah, yeah. But I'm a very visual person, so I had everything down there. Every wall was important to me.

Singing with Sting is still up there. I haven't ticked that box, but I've ticked most of the others because I'm a closet muso. But the income levels, the types of properties we're living in, the travel all of that stuff was a big part of that and and where we got to was 200 grand a year now i know one of the one of the questions that uh uh came through on the q a that you put out for the the session tonight jeff was why why stop at 200 i want to ask i want to pose a question to those listening how much is enough if you get clear on how much is enough we'd worked it out

we've worked out and we live pretty simply by the way guys a country boy i've enjoyed a simple fear i like like a coffee in the morning we walk our dogs i do a bit of exercise i might like to go out uh for for feed once a week and we like to travel that that's a minute that's that's not an expensive every now and then yeah yeah yeah exactly but it's not an expensive lifestyle i don't think it needs to be that lavish if you if you if you really spend some time working out how much you need to live comfortably the way you want to then it's not a not generally a massive number so yeah especially when you factor out like how much transport cost is you know like how like you're buying all this nice clothes for work do you actually enjoy a three-piece suit or whatever

it is you can really start to look at the reduction of costs that you can have if you're just and living and i suppose i suppose the other thing when when you sort of say 200k like that's some of that's from property sort of income i don't know how much of it is but a good majority is from property investments so you'd sort of say that rents are going to increase so yeah rents have gone up by 10 to 15 percent or whatever i mean generally um so that's not going to stay at 200k yeah it's following it's exactly right so so lifestyle the inflation over time affects that number there's no question but but i i do want to challenge the listeners to to spend some time working out exactly how you want to live and then then put a budget around that fear you'll be very

pleasantly surprised i suggest because because i see a lot of investors chasing property for the sake of money and when you say well how much money what for you often get crickets so i was determined to get really crystal clear on this is how we want to live how we're going to fund that how much do we need to fund that and and that then transposes into the other freedom numbers so if our i call it our lifestyle income if our lifestyle income is 20 grand a year that means you know the five percent net return we need to create a income producing nest egg of around four million dollars at that stage that that was our thinking and our plan was to do that in 15 years i just i you know i thought well 15 years is a reasonable period i now know uh from from uh years of experience

that uh you should be investing for a minimum of 15 years anyway i believe and if you know there's a lot of people smarter than me that have done the same research that confirms that if you look at property cycles uh going back 45 years uh then the average time to go through a full property cycle is 15 years so if you're invested for any less than that then you you might hit your goals but it's probably going to be more by good luck than good management okay can i can i ask you um we're sort of going a little bit off the story track here maybe joe might have asked as well but how um how much do you look at sort of the property cycle sort of side of things when you're buying or when people are buying assets like do you look at it much or you focus more on

the deal yeah well it's a factor to consider i think there's a whole uh heaps of pieces to the jigsaw here uh and we'll get to my approach to the whole research piece in in detail later on uh but but i think i think and here's here's an important thing about that because uh i'm guessing that part of your thinking around this is the timing of the market piece, Jeff. Yeah, because, for example, if somebody bought in Perth in 2010, for example, there's sort of people that have bought there that are only just now, like, looking at some myself,

they're only just now starting to get to where they were worth then. So imagine that's close to 15 years, like 10, 12 years. Spot on. Spot on. Absolutely. So I think one of the key things, and I'm glad you raised this, Jeff, because this is a very valid point for me. I see a lot of investors, whether it be in equities or property, trying to time the market. I think there's a bit of folly in that.

Again, you can try and tilt the deck in your favour by looking at some leading edge indicators in terms of infrastructure, industry and growing incomes that are going to at least give you a better chance. But there's no guarantees because you don't know it's the bottom until after the event. You don't know it's at the top until after the event. But the important thing here, and this is something I want to really emphasise, if you're investing for the long-term horizon of 15 years plus, then the timing doesn't matter so much because if an area is going to go through its full cycle over that 15 years, then you're going to be okay.

It desensitises the need to have to buy at the bottom and sell at the top. so did you know did when you were writing down this this kind of freedom number and freedom well maybe not the formula that because you created that afterwards did you know the how you were going to get there or were you saying no this is the dream lifestyle that we are wanting to create this is what we want this is where we want to be and then let's go figure out the how is that kind of how absolutely it's you know again this is probably uh subliminally the the architect in me it's it's uh uh really get vivid and clear on what the end end exercise looks like and then work out how we're going to bridge the gap so but but the starting point

given what i've just been through and and and guys to to emphasize this at 33 i was on the bones of my backside i i got out of the marriage with a beaten up old toyota and a bunch of cassettes that was it at 33 what were the cassettes were they were they like pirates from bali anyway but but they were yeah it was uh it was it was a ground zero moment for me so i wanted to get motivated again i want to get excited around what the future looks like because i've just seen the seen the uh house of cards collapse and it's like i've just been through a car crash i need to pick myself up here and really get inspired and motivated uh so you know so and again that the important piece here sonia and i did this together and one of the other uh small messages

i want to impart here is that i get to see a lot of investors who one part is gung-ho the other one couldn't care less or worse is scared the hell out of it that's a recipe for disaster because it will self-sabotage down the track if you're not both both on the same pathway i got a couple of questions off the back of this um sorry just so many things are popping through my head um so we've um with that sort of step with that thing where you had that sort of crisis point do you think it would be where you are today if that had not have happened i mean it's hard to have that counterfactual no i guarantee i wouldn't be absolutely guarantee i wouldn't be because the the reflection uh and the work that i did both on myself and what i need to change at that point

I hadn't had the reason to do that up until then. I would have just kept on keeping on. I'm sure I would have. I might have come to a realisation down the track, but probably too late. I had to get off my backside. I mean, this is at 33 starting again, absolutely starting again. When I thought I was going to be a hero by the time I was 30,

that was a massive wake-up call for me. And, you know, I joke about it now, But I did more work with psychologists and counselling after my marriage went belly up than I did before because it was like, well, what do I need to do differently? Because the unfortunate reality with life, guys, is it doesn't matter what we do and where we go. We take ourselves with us, which means that we're at least 50% of the problem and probably more at times. So if we're not prepared to have a really good look at ourselves in the mirror and look at, okay, what do we need to be doing differently in terms of our thought, our actions, then we're just going to keep repeating the same mistakes. So that reflection was really important. And I'm an avid reader.

So, you know, one of the take-homes that I really want to encourage people to do, the first thing you need to invest in, which everyone listening to this is doing right now, is investing in their knowledge. Because here's the simple equation. the more you know the less fear you have the more comfortable you are and the more you're able to take on so invest in your knowledge at every time talk to as many people as you possibly can read as much stuff as you possibly can there is no one size fits all with property as we all know there's a thousand different pathways to get to the end destination but part of that exercise is is at least experiencing enough of them to go this is the one that feels right for me where i'm at what my risk profile is and what my capacity is yeah and it's great to learn from people's mistakes

as well you i mean you've gone through a number of mistakes that you've made and it's just like great that you know you've you've taken the bullet for us so we don't have to go down that journey and that path of hey we now have to let's do a development with four friends and that's going to be great you know one yeah one does this one owns a pet farm the other one does something else And it's like, this doesn't, we're not adding value to this situation and we haven't got it structured correctly. But if you do get it structured correctly, like I've, I've got partnerships where I've got, you know, we find the deal, he runs a deal.

I find the deal, he runs a deal. I find that it's like, great. That's that synergy that works because everyone has their piece of the puzzle, but it's, it's written down. We know exactly Joe, you do this, your job is this, you, you do this, you do this. And, um, it's, it, it, it makes a lot more sense. So, yeah, you can learn from people's amazing results, but I love to learn from the lessons because they're the ones

that trip you up. You don't learn much from, hey, I did this thing and I did really well. You learn a lot from mess this up and this is how I learned from it so you don't have to do it again. Spot on. It's the wounds that leave the scars that remind you of the things you need to do differently.

There's no question about that. And they're much more poignant when that occurs. So I totally agree. And picking up on your point there, Joe, given the environment we're now moving into, where for some period of time now, the lending environment is going to be pretty tight. And again, we'll talk about this more during the Q&A.

But people are going to have to get creative. The same old, same old isn't going to necessarily perform moving forward. So you need to think outside the square. You need to get creative. You still need to do all that due diligence. And, you know, going back to the shareholders agreements that we now, everything I've done since then, every time we go into any form of joint activity with someone, it's documented within an intubus life. Because that way, when the what ifs do occur, and they inevitably do, you know, the one thing that we all know about property, it's not a matter of if a problem is going to occur, it's just a matter of when and how bad it's going to be. That's as simple as it gets.

thanks for tuning in to get invested on the property hub podcast channel your home for property investment insights and inspiration and don't leave yet until you've taken the next step towards living by design by getting my award-winning book get invested absolutely free when you sign up at knowhowproperty.com.au or bushymartin.com.au and finally make sure you subscribe to Property Hub to get your weekly dose of get invested inspiration along with every episode of Realty Talk, Australia's leading property show for red hot property investing news and insights direct from industry leaders and influencers. Remember to always get invested in your knowledge and I look forward to seeing you next time.