Property Hub - Investment Insights & Inspiration - Get Invested: Part 1: Scott Aggett on investing in transparency

Starting point is 00:00:00 So, while I was an estate agent, I thought, there's got to be a better way. And the thing that is the issue is transparency. That's the problem that everyone has. All the buyers hate the lack of transparency. The sellers hate the lack of transparency as well. So, deliberately left being a real estate agent of over 20 years, both in London and Sydney, and focused really on that niche skill of negotiation, which I had honed over probably 3,000 plus property deals to bring transparency to a market that I think is really murky both on the buyer's agent side and the real estate agent side. Welcome to the Get Invested podcast where we share great conversations with experts from all walks of life to uncover their secret know-how

Starting point is 00:00:41 and where they invest their time, their skills and their money and the benefits that this has created. You see, the truth is that everyone invests every minute of every day. We're investing our time our skills our energy and our money in something some of us are investing consciously some unconsciously sometimes for good sometimes for bad sometimes for no impact get invested will help you to start living by design not by default i'm going to help you to make it happen not let it happen you'll hear the top tips on how you can live with conscious intent 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, make the most of your investment journey, and ultimately

Starting point is 00:01:28 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 freedom fighters i hope you're enjoying the new bi-weekly get invested by its format where you get to listen to me early in the week on topics of interest that are actually sparked by our great guest comments and then you get to hear the deep dive conversations with these great guests separately in this first guest interview edition this week i start with part one of a great conversation with professional property negotiator Scott Agate from Hello House. And as you heard earlier in the week on my thoughts on transparency, Scott has disrupted the property

Starting point is 00:02:18 industry by becoming the first dedicated property negotiator to cost-effectively help you get the best price for the property that you want to buy. Scott and his Hello House team, and that's Hello House with a H-E-L-L-O and house spent H-A-U-S, which you can find at hellohouse.com.au. Scott and his Hello House team are professional property negotiators who have successfully negotiated over 3,000 property purchases and they charge you a comparatively low results-based fee to do all of the negotiating on a property that you want to purchase. And he continues to achieve great results for property buyers.

Starting point is 00:02:57 Scott and his team save you and other property buyers and sellers money, stress and time with transparent processes that are orientated to work for you. Leveraging over two decades of real estate agent experience and having operated on all sides of property transactions as a vendor, purchaser, agent and investor, Scott understands all sides of the property purchase equation. And Scott gets you exceptional results.

Starting point is 00:03:24 And in the process, he's turning the property industry on its head. And it's important to stress from the outset that Scott is not a buyer's agent. He's a professional property negotiator. This means that once you find the home you want, he then works with you by providing advice and negotiating strategies, as well as engaging directly with a selling agent on your behalf. In this way, Hello House is pioneering a new model for buying property

Starting point is 00:03:54 and is the only completely transparent performance-based property negotiation service in the country exclusively for home buyers and investors in Australia. Now, given recent PropTech advancements, buying property in the 21st century has changed forever. In this new brave world, most buyers will never outsmart or outperform a well-trained agent in controlling the sale or negotiating the price.

Starting point is 00:04:25 And during the negotiation stage, most buyers will therefore pay an emotional premium and more than the property is worth or miss out completely and then end up settling for something less out of absolute sheer frustration. So Hello House insulates today's information age buyer from the selling agent

Starting point is 00:04:46 and steps in to expertly control the agent and the buying process to negotiate the lowest price on the best possible terms. In this fashion Scott does two things brilliantly. For buyers, he negotiates your best purchase price. And for sellers, he selects the right agent to manage your sale

Starting point is 00:05:07 because that can make all the difference. You get more money in your pocket, some frank and transparent advice, and the outcome you want. Hello House's ability to influence a result is your competitive advantage. And they work with investors, owner-occupiers, and first home buyers. Scott and his team negotiate to win because negotiation is a

Starting point is 00:05:31 combined art and science that very few master and the quality of the negotiation will make or break your immediate and long-term outcomes. Scott and the Haller House team have created their unique property buying framework crafted from 25 years of on-the-job experience to ensure that you have the peace of mind of paying the lowest price every time. Now, during part one of our engaging conversation with Scott today, you get to learn from his own property journey and what has led him to the creation of Hello House and his unique property negotiation solution. In addition to discussing the need for transparency in the property industry, Scott outlines his

Starting point is 00:06:13 personal and professional property journey and the learnings that have come from it. He shares his biggest property mistakes and his biggest wins. He raises the interesting concept of back-ending your life, so listen out for that. But most of all, he shares his vision to see others thrive in the market as he has. He's an absolute wealth of knowledge about how to strike a deal and what it takes to be successful in property. And our great conversation today will get you excited about all the property buying and negotiating tips, tricks and traps that he shares in detail in part two the following week.

Starting point is 00:06:50 And if you're fired up about taking your property investment to the next level, no matter where you're at, whether you're a beginner or a seasoned investor that's struggling with your portfolio, I'd like to personally invite you to join me on our unique know-how property freedom formula flight program, where I'll personally guide you through my proven process for property investment success, and or complete a review of your current portfolio to see how you can improve it, how you can reduce your costs, and how you can increase your property purchasing capacity. And the first part of that program is absolutely for free, so you can get a taste of what it's

Starting point is 00:07:26 about and whether it's going to be of value to you. So to book your free ticket or to find out more, just click on knowhowproperty.com.au forward slash freedom fighters. In the meantime, please enjoy part one of this very engaging conversation with Scott Haggart. Hi Freedom Fighters. Now, there's no doubt that at the time of this recording, Australian residential property has been enjoying once-in-a-generation boom time conditions, with strong average rises of between 20% and 30% in property values,

Starting point is 00:08:04 are occurring in over 94% of regions across the country in the last 12 months, according to CoreLogic. Now, given the limited supply of properties compared to the massive current demand, finding good quality properties and then being able to actually outsmart the competing hordes to get the property, many of whom are still prepared to pay way beyond expectations,

Starting point is 00:08:24 is proven to be slow, painstaking, stressful and very frustrating hard work. So how do you separate yourself from the FOMO buying pack? How do you successfully outsmart your competition and level the playing field with selling agents to find, negotiate and secure a property in hyper-competitive conditions? And how can you position yourself to ensure that your offer is more appealing to the selling agent and the property seller than anyone else? What should and shouldn't you be doing to best position yourself in these highly contested

Starting point is 00:08:56 conditions? Well, these are all questions that our know-how finance breakers are getting from property buyers all the time at the moment. So to answer them and much more, we're joined by professional property purchase negotiator Scott Aggett, whose unique team at Hello House negotiate with selling agents on your behalf to secure the best price. Now, this is going to be a very timely and engaging chat, so welcome and let's get invested, Scott.

Starting point is 00:09:23 G'day, Bushy. How are you doing? Really good, mate. I've been looking forward to catching up with you for a while. A negotiation is something that's near and dear to my heart and something that, unfortunately, most people don't do very well because they don't do it very often. True. Mate, to sort of get into the exercise, just to kick things off, I'll start off by getting

Starting point is 00:09:43 you to tell us who you are, what you do, and most importantly, why you do what you do. Sure. Okay. Well, my name, as you said, Scott Agate, and my business that I founded three and a half years ago is Hello House, which is Australia's only negotiation as a service business. So I work with property buyers and sellers. On the buyer side, I work with the buyers that have got the ability to find their own properties before I effectively stand in their shoes to out-negotiate the agent. And I work on the basis that the client sets me a target price and I charge them a portion

Starting point is 00:10:18 of the savings that I make them. So very unique model in Australia. It hasn't been done before, or even globally. And I've deliberately positioned myself differently to what a traditional buyer's agent does. So I can really stand apart there and offer a unique service and focus on my unique and unique, unique is not the word, niche skill, I should say, of property negotiation. So that's on the buy side. On the sell side, I work with clients that are looking to offload an investment property or their principal place of residence. Again, I work nationwide at any price point and I help agents select for them. Basically what I'm doing, Bushy, is finding the three leading agents for them locally. I handle all the negotiations in terms of commissions and things and sales

Starting point is 00:10:59 proposals before I help choose the right agent for them and then negotiate them down to the lowest possible price. And that service is free for my clients. So deliberately left being a real estate agent of over 20 years, both in London and Sydney, and focused really on that niche skill of negotiation, which I had honed over probably 3,000 plus property deals to bring transparency to a market that I think is really murky, both on the buyer's agent side and the real estate agent side, and somewhere that I was really passionate about making a difference for Australian consumers. Love it.

Starting point is 00:11:32 Love it. It is a very specialised niche, and I love the fact that you are truly sitting on the buyer's side or the seller's side, depending on who you're actually representing, without a vested interest in doing so, and you're all paid for effort, not for just going through the motions, which is also something fairly unique. So the better you do, the better you get paid and the better result the buyer gets. I love that model and we'll go a little bit more into that shortly. But what I'd love to do to start off with so that the listeners have got a really good appreciation of the journey you've been on is to go back as far as you'd like to go and focus on where you've invested your time, energy and money, what you've learned along that journey,

Starting point is 00:12:19 what have been the ups and the downs and how has that got you to where you are currently now? Sure, love to. Where should we start? Well, probably kick off, you know, most people don't even start thinking about property until they're about to leave school. That might be different for you. I'd love to just start there with, you know, where did the initial interest in property go and how did you then end up getting into the game as a real estate agent in the first place? Yeah, sure. Well, I think a lot of it is by osmosis really from my parents.

Starting point is 00:12:50 We weren't a wealthy family. I was born in Sydney but raised from three till nine on the Gold Coast. My dad had a service station at Mermaid Beach and I remember trawling up and down the Palm Beach shops where we lived looking at all the old photos in the windows of the real estate agencies. Mum and dad also tried their hand at building a duplex which didn't go particularly well and I think that was the end of their property development days. but i think for me that was probably the start of it um you know you fast forward then through

Starting point is 00:13:20 to the age of 14 or 15 and i was very lucky um to have some family influence i guess on my sister married into a family and um one of the guys there was peter matthews who's now the head of um i think he's the ceo of the real estate institute in new south wales yep so pete's kind of grown up i've kind of grown up like a cousin with pete he went to school a few years ahead of me at the same school. When I did my work experience when I was 14 or 15, I did it as a real estate agent with Pete at Ray White in Bankstown. And then, yeah, Pete kind of just, he was at head office at Ray White. And as I left school, I didn't have any other dreams other than being really in real estate and property. So I went and did the full-time TAFE course, which was all that

Starting point is 00:14:04 was available at that point at Crow's Nest TAFE for a year straight after school. And then Pete moved me around a couple of different Ray White offices, working on the northern beaches and the upper north shore. And that was really kind of setting the scene for me to start out long term in a real estate career, both working sales and also learning the property management business from the inside out. Yeah, great. So was the interest in property something that came first or was it just purely by the association that you had with Peter and Co that sort of led you into a growing appreciation of what what property is and your interest in it I think it was sales that was the

Starting point is 00:14:42 real driver for me and not property sales it was just in in terms of working with people talking building relationships I really enjoyed that so the whole way from school I worked at a local sports store which I absolutely loved and I was obsessed with sport and that gave me the ability to hone all those skills working with people in a sales capacity so I think that was the start of it wasn't really property-based and probably wasn't until I was 17, 18 that I thought I had an interest in that. And Bushy, if I'm honest, it was probably born out of the fact that I wasn't very good at school. I got 33.05% in the HSC. I absolutely hated most days of school. All I wanted to do was kick a footy around with my mates. It wasn't that I'm a bad learner or I'm

Starting point is 00:15:25 thick. It was just a case of I just didn't apply myself and I wasn't engaged at that level at that age. And it wasn't until I got a little bit older that that kind of blossomed and I found something that I was passionate about and then I drove into the property arena. Yeah, awesome. Okay, well, let's go on that property journey a bit because you had a lengthy period of time in different places and in different offices in that selling agent sphere. Tell us about the good, the bad and the ugly of that experience for you, mate. Well, I think the best part about it is that I went and had a wide variety of experiences. That was a really good learning curve for me. So I worked with a strong sales office, I worked with a strong property manager, and I was kind

Starting point is 00:16:06 of side by side at different times with those people. So definitely took what I could from those experiences and from those individuals. I think the theme that I've worked out looking back now, Bushy, over my career is really almost a series of life hacks that I worked out from an early age of which I attached myself to people that were higher up the food chain and tried to be a sponge, tried to learn as much as I possibly could from these people that were doing better than me and had been more exposed to different markets. And then from that, I've been able to kind of fast track into the goals that I wanted to hit and achieve myself. Yeah, awesome. So talk to us about the highs and lows of that time that you spent as a selling

Starting point is 00:16:48 agent, mate. And why was it that you became disillusioned at some point to then start transitioning into what you're doing now? Yeah, there's probably a good lesson in this in terms of what you do if you could start over all again now in 2022 versus what I was doing in 1994, probably 1996. And that was, I very much was just doing the hard slog, right? So I was doing the property management inspection reports, the check-in checkouts. I was doing the door knocking for apartment sales in Linfield and Roseville when I was barely able to even fill out a suit and no chance of getting a listing really at that age. So just those types of things, I think if you look back at it and go, they definitely make you thick skinned and they give you a taste

Starting point is 00:17:35 of what it's like to really fend for yourself and be in a really big pool and you're not the you know alpha male or the shark um so i think that was a really good learning curve for me but i think if i could do that again in retrospect um i'd probably attack it from a different way but there was definitely some highs and lows that i think make you the person that you are today and give you that resilience to move forward yeah any in particular that stand out in that regard wise and wise oh i think low wise for me was just the door knocking right like just the non-stop verbal rejection face to face second thing would be cold calling you know just dialing for dollars and just being shut down non-stop um that's soul crushing as well at the best of time

Starting point is 00:18:17 so i think those two things are real standouts in my life where you think okay there's got to be a better way how do i hack this system um i don't want to do this i want to avoid this at all costs so i'm either going to get really good at it really fast or find another solution to this because this isn't way long term that you're going to be in the industry and make a success of it so definitely that on the low side on the high side at that age it was probably um getting exposure and getting opportunities that I just didn't think were possible to me at that point I remember in particular you know listing my first home which at that point was probably a you know a million dollar house in Linfield which was a very expensive suburb at the time

Starting point is 00:18:53 still is in Sydney um you know at the age of 18 when you're out there and someone's giving you the trust to sell their family home that was a really big boost for me personally and that definitely gave me the confidence to go forward from there yeah okay so um and we'll get into this more in a little bit of detail shortly but while we're talking around that experience in the sales environment on the selling agent front there are a number of psychological and other techniques that uh because let's face it the the playing field in relation to the purchase of property is absolutely well and truly slanted in the favor of a selling agent and and deliberately so uh to enable them to have more power in the negotiation on that front what what are some of

Starting point is 00:19:41 the ticks uh tips and i can't even say it mate the tips and tricks that you've picked up along the journey uh that you you either you directly used or you've seen other sellers agents used to really enforce that position of power and get the best result for their their vendor oh god this is a big um rabbit hole bushy really isn't it in terms of what you you've learned over the years and the tricks and tips we could probably do an episode just on that in terms of scripts and dialogues and things that agents apply to get an upper hand but i think it's understanding the power of positioning price is a big thing that a lot of consumers wouldn't really understand but is a very deliberate tactic from a selling agent on behalf of their vendor so where to position

Starting point is 00:20:29 the property in the marketplace how to use comparable sales to your advantage and then you know controlling things like and these are probably obvious to you and me and other sellers sellers you know or agents that have done this job over the years but you know controlling the time of day that you show it from a traffic flow perspective from a natural light perspective all those different things that that um go hand in hand with making sure that you get the best possible result but bushy these are all things that really drove me to leave the industry if i'm honest you know the deep down um i guess not disgust but that's probably too harsh a word but just real hatred of of these tactics and things against consumers just never made me really feel

Starting point is 00:21:12 that comfortable. So I definitely learnt them, definitely applied them, definitely benefited from them and so did my clients, but never felt particularly comfortable with them. And I guess that's what's put me in the position today where I've gone off and gone in a completely different tangent. Yeah, and I guess it's the way the actual industry operates in Australia drives that type of situation because as an agent, you're only as good as your last sale and you're always trying to qualify sellers to accept less and buyers to pay more so you can sort of reach a mid-round where you actually get paid, which is probably a hidden agenda that neither the sellers nor the buyers actually get their head around quite often.

Starting point is 00:21:56 I'd love for you to share with us, at the time when you go, no, I've had enough of this, there's got to be a different way, I'm going to explore a different model that's ended up being Hello House. Talk us through that time and how you ended up driving that new business model. Yeah, well, it was born out of a lack of enjoyment from working in the industry as a real estate agent. And I was a real estate principal at that stage. I had the first three franchises of Bell Property in the eastern suburbs of Sydney. So it wasn't as if I wasn't a, I guess, a high-performing agent. I was a selling principal the whole way through. But it just really didn't give me any enjoyment and what was frustrating me was the amount of lying that you had to do

Starting point is 00:22:39 to win business whether that's selling houses or winning listings and the amount of lying that the buyers were doing to you because they felt they had to and the amount of lying that the sellers were doing to you when they didn't want to use you and they wanted to use someone else or they weren't ready to sell or whatever it might have been it just felt like it was a vicious cycle of negativity and it wasn't great. So that really kind of what spawned me into moving away from the industry. But it was probably the last franchise I did. Like I really remember leaving the Potts Point franchise. And that was about four or five years before I got out of being an estate agent. And I went from selling the Potts Point franchise to opening up the Surrey Hills

Starting point is 00:23:20 franchise. And I shouldn't have at that point. And looking back at it now, it was probably based on a financial decision it was very lucrative to be in that game as you know if you're doing well um but it really was a hollow feeling for me i was just chasing the money and and and uh that never ends up being a long-term sustainable business model so that was what kind of drove me to the edge and then i guess the thing that um was the the real driver for the idea of hollow house was and i'd had this idea probably for 10 or 12 years now maybe even more maybe more than 12 of you. So while I was an estate agent, I thought there's got to be a better way. And the thing that is the issue is transparency. That's the problem that everyone has. All the buyers hate the lack

Starting point is 00:24:04 of transparency. The sellers hate the lack of transparency as well. So how do I build a model that is completely open? Everybody can see what you're earning, when you're earning it, and how you're earning it, most importantly, to show the value. And what I had noticed as I sat in that seat servicing property sellers of mine and working with buyers and buyers agents is that when we would list a property the first people that we would call would be buyers agents and they would literally pay what we told them to pay with a cherry on top so there was just there was no negotiation or very little negotiation and I didn't think there was much duty of care in terms of looking after their client they were really focused on just getting a deal done and they were

Starting point is 00:24:44 only getting paid if they got a deal closed and of course it's very easy Bushy as you would know haven't been in the industry to show a buyer that they're paying the right price if it's not on the open market so if they could close it down off market or they could close it down in the first couple of days of it being on market it was reasonably easy for them to convince the seller a buyer sorry their client that they were getting them the right deal and they weren't overpaying for it because they couldn't see transparently like auction conditions and where the rest of the market was so I thought there was a big issue there with the transparency of buyers agents with their clients um and i thought that's where there's a opportunity for me to build a business

Starting point is 00:25:20 there in that niche space and just focus on negotiation because it's such a honed skill that it was built over 25 years of my career yeah love it love it and that that is the core piece it's the and it's something that uh as i've mentioned in the open uh negotiation i believe is one of the critical skills that are going to separate you and and you'll either be successful or not based on how good you are at negotiation because we negotiate with our family, we negotiate at work, we're always negotiating whether we realise it or not. That sort of focus on negotiation,

Starting point is 00:25:55 was that something that was in the front of your mind at the time or was that something that emerged as you started to look at this as a different way of approaching the property market? I was about to say I'm very good at negotiation but I'm just thinking as you talk that I get out-negotiated by my seven-year-old daughter all the time, Bushy, So I need to work on my scripts and dialogue or I've taught her too much. I think the reality for me is having done – actually, I knew that I was really good at negotiation.

Starting point is 00:26:23 Like I felt that I was great negotiating with buyers and I was great negotiating with sellers and I could put deals together. I was also doing my own deals on the side. I'm addicted to flipping property and I just bought really well every time and I made, you know, quite a lot of money on the side doing that, which is a passion project. So I knew that that was something that I was good at, but I also knew that I absolutely thoroughly enjoyed it. And that's key to having success long term and longevity in whatever you do, is that it becomes more of a passion than work for me. And I get up every day.

Starting point is 00:26:54 I probably work seven days a week, much to the annoyance of my beautiful wife, who's a great support to me. But I'm constantly on, but I don't feel like I'm working. I absolutely love it. I just float around and take my phone calls wherever we are in the world, and I thrive on it. I love just doing the deal. And I often say to my clients that it doesn't bother me if it's at $20,000 or $20 million. It makes absolutely zero difference to me how many zeros are on the end of it.

Starting point is 00:27:21 I just love the thrill of the deal. Yeah, where did that love come from, though? Because a lot of people find negotiation quite confronting, quite stressful, actually. and it's a very rare individual who quite openly goes into a potentially conflicting situation to try and get the best outcome. Where does that sort of love and negotiation emerge from? Is that something that's just in your DNA or something that's been nurtured over your time in the industry do you think? Yeah, it's interesting. I definitely call it a contact sport when I talk to clients about it. So I agree with you. It's very confrontational and can be in your face and

Starting point is 00:27:58 it's highly emotionally charged. I don't know. It's really weird. My family often talk about this, that I'm really different to my mum and dad. I'm different to my sisters in that regard as well. I'm kind of the black sheep of the family in terms of this skill set, if you like. They're very much not driven in this same way that I am. They've got their own unique skills that are fantastic traits, but yeah, I'm completely different. So I'm not sure where it comes from even within the family but I think it started at a reasonably early age for me so I guess it's just in in the DNA right like I um I had a burning ambition I used to play tennis a lot competitive when I was younger and I had a burning ambition to go to America to play tennis um so when I was 14

Starting point is 00:28:40 mum and dad said look you know go out and raise some money yourself however you want to do it um find the money and we'll we'll match it and then you'll go to America and you can play these tennis tournaments so um i got those um you know those raffle chocolates uh you know that you go around and sell for two dollars a box or whatever it might have been i can't remember how much it was these days but i would just go and door knock and sell boxes of chocolates um that was one way that i did it the second thing i did was car wash so i'd take a bucket and door knock and wash people's cars i think i raised like you know 1500 bucks two grand at 13 or 14 um in a short period and then mum and dad matched that

Starting point is 00:29:17 and I went off and played tennis in Canada and America. So I think that was the start of it for me. It's like, actually, I can do this. If I hustle, I can raise the money and if I can raise the money, that can change my life. I can do whatever I want to. So I was really focused on that from a pretty early age. Yeah, I guess clearly the tennis was a big enough driver

Starting point is 00:29:35 for you to do what it took and you realised that by selling the choccies and polishing the cars that, hey, this isn't that difficult and at such a formative age that would have started to embed pretty deeply in the psyche, I would have thought. So, mate, jumping forward because, as you know, we spoke about just off air, I'm a big believer in living by design and that is living with intention in the context of being clear

Starting point is 00:30:05 on how you want to live, looking at the gap between where you are now and what that looks like and then investing your time, energy your money in a way that's going to get you there sooner rather than later. Talk to us about what your ideal lifestyle looks like, what that sort of lifestyle entails and what are you investing in and both have you and will continue to invest in to make that happen, mate? Yeah, I won't be cliched enough to say that I'm living the perfect life or the ideal life because I don't think, I don't know that you ever are and maybe that's the frustration that is just inside my own head that I'll never be 100% happy with where my life's at because I just

Starting point is 00:30:46 always want for more things. And I don't know if that comes to the detriment of me. But I went through this stage when I left my Bell franchises. So at the end of 2015, and I got out of it with nothing in front of me in terms of the next career, I had squirreled away enough money that I could afford, I guess, that luxury of time to think about it. So, we really wanted to change our lifestyle. My wife's from Christchurch. She's got no affiliation with Sydney where we were and I was over Sydney at that point. I'd done five years in London, six months in America before that and then 15 years back in Sydney where I did all the work with Bell Property. So, I really, I said to my wife at the time, I'm over Sydney, I'm over this life and I want to change. We just

Starting point is 00:31:33 had our first child at that point as well so it probably comes along with um being a new father and i asked uh bridget or bids as i call her i asked bids if we could go to italy learn a language live in the countryside not talk to any other humans that we know and um just have a great family year off together and she was all about that but she asked me to move to gold coast or stop on the way to gold coast for four to six weeks to see her brother who lived here with his family so um i thought well okay well i want to be a property developer i love architecture and design. That's a big passion of mine. I want to learn how to do this and flip houses because I think I can do that and make a living out of it. So I flew up. I took the red eye every Saturday

Starting point is 00:32:16 and just went by myself, did 15 to 20 open for inspections a day and would fly home on a Saturday night. I identified the area that I wanted to buy in, bought a property, renovated it from Sydney for the nine months before we left and we moved into a house on the Gold Coast. So I thought, I'll just do this as a trial run and then we'll go off to Italy. That's five and a half years later and we haven't left the Gold Coast. So yeah, I mean, we've been to Italy a few times, but I think the dream of living there in the country is probably gone for a little while as we've gone on and expanded on the family. But I think that's kind of that you can see the pattern of my drive. There was something there that was burning inside me and I just thought, well, I'll just give it a

Starting point is 00:32:55 go and give it a crack and see if I can make it work. And that did, which was great. But having the time off, having, you know, effectively three years off and probably four years off really made a huge difference to me, like just being able to take a big step back, a wide-eyed view of the world and what I wanted to do next. And then I could build, you know, Hello House was one of many ideas that I had. I'm constantly coming up with new business ideas, which is probably a negative in some ways, but shiny object syndrome. But it gave me time to flesh out how it would look, how it would work, and how I could create a business to supplement the lifestyle that I wanted. And the lifestyle that I wanted was to be with the kids until they went to

Starting point is 00:33:38 school every day, all day, with my wife all day, and in board shorts with no shoes and not meeting any clients or seeing any property of theirs. So I built Hello House to be the lifestyle that I wanted um and i to this day i'm very lucky that i'm standing here on the canal front where my office is and on the water and um yeah i can i can work nationally from from my office without living home and i get to see the kids non-stop and enjoy the fruits of that labor love it love it and you said lucky i don't think it's lucky at all mate uh it's only you only get lucky when you work hard enough or you're smart enough and uh clearly you've had a uh an emerging and crystallizing vision exactly how you want to live and then you just set up your business around that

Starting point is 00:34:21 which is you know my wife sonny and i have done exactly the same uh and it's it's actually not that difficult if you get off the rat race and and the the big benefit you've had there is you've had that sort of three years where you did jump off the treadmill and you had time to reflect on well what's really important to me how do i want to live let's let's set up a a business and an income stream that's going to allow that to happen so i fully commend you for doing that mate mate i'd also love you to dive into a bit more of your own property investment journey if you can you talked about your love of architecture and design and flipping houses which is it sounds like reading between the lines it's almost an addiction uh yeah talk us through uh when you started that

Starting point is 00:35:09 and how that's evolved and what your portfolio currently looks like and, most importantly, why are you doing it? You've got an hour, Bushy? Give us the Reader's Digest. I'll do the very short timeline version of the same thing, but I'll jump into it. But I guess it started for me in London. So I'll give you a brief timeline.

Starting point is 00:35:33 So I worked as a snowboard instructor in Colorado in 1998-99 and I wrapped myself around a tree snowboarding and that put me back on my sofa in Australia with surgery to rectify those injuries. And I was always planning to go to London and try and play a bit of rugby and just do a bit of travelling with mates and things like that as well.

Starting point is 00:35:55 But the rugby dream and that side of things was over. So I did the rehabilitation in Sydney at home and then thought I'll stuff it. I'm just going to go to London to find a job anyway and I'll get into the real estate world. So landed a great job at Foxton's, which at the time was a real market leader in sort of global property in terms of their marketing and branding and things and their training systems and things as well. So great learning curve for me to land there. And at that time, I made some really great English mates and they had a similar kind of addiction to property, if you will, two of them in particular, who I'm still great mates with right now.

Starting point is 00:36:34 and I found a property kind of trailing one of my mates to replicate what he was doing, found a cheap property, didn't have any money at all, was backpacking and kind of sleeping on a fold-out bed at this time at age 21 and rang Alex and said, look, I want to buy this property but I've got no money, can you give me the money? And he did. He gave me I think 4,000 pounds which is what I needed

Starting point is 00:36:58 as the deposit to buy this property which I think was 120,000 pounds and then I gutted it and sold it five weeks later and I think I made about 40,000 pounds, which was a huge amount of money to a 21 year old at that time. And that was really the start of it. So I went on and bought another property that I gutted and lived in over the five years that I was there. So I did two in London, came back with my girlfriend at the time and who was Australian and we bought a little freestanding house in Elizabeth Bay, which was just an unbelievably lucky find and was really tired and run down and we lived there and just tried to make as best as possible as we could

Starting point is 00:37:35 over a couple of years um and then started kind of trading from there so sold that one um bought multiple apartments in elizabeth bay potts point rush gutters bay a couple of houses that i flipped in paddington um and surrey hills uh darlinghurst i did a couple um yeah so the kind of the the love affair of it was really born i'd say in the mid to late 2000s and i was doing some crazy things as well like i would buy properties um never through any of my own channels was always through other agents or off market so i never did anything through my own clients i never took advantage of anyone which i think is really important um but it got a you know bought a property and flipped it between exchange and settlement for i think 35 percent more than i

Starting point is 00:38:23 paid for it untouched, just by watching the market, analysing things that were being sold under value, and then knowing what the real value of it was worth and how to find that buy very quickly. So just utilised all my real estate skills, basically, and my contacts to find these deals and build my wealth through that. And the wealth, Bushy was just really paying for my love of travel. So all I did was put that straight back into the travel fund and just explored the world as much as possible, which went hand in hand together. And I loved it. Love it. So I'm reading here that your version of flipping is really the secret I'm picking up on here is you're actually buying properties below market value and not having to do much to them

Starting point is 00:39:06 to then turn them over. Am I reading that right? Yeah, I think I'm very good at focusing on one particular area and then learning that area incredibly fast in terms of property prices. and then I would say that I am a ninja level on realestate.com in terms of I just I'm on that app all day every day and looking at every single property that comes in that matches my search criteria and I'm looking at you know the high value of what it's worth at you know when it's done and the low value of what I might be able to pick it up for today and I just really have a good gauge of what the market's doing at any given time and I'm not watching the market broadly so right now that means um mermaid waters broad beach waters is my sweet spot where we live and

Starting point is 00:39:49 where i develop um but that ability to really understand a market intimately has um given me the ability to identify these opportunities and then yeah often flipping them really quickly some of them i held for longer um often they were my principal place of residence i'd live there for a year or two and then sell it on so they weren't necessarily always bought to flip um they were bought for home, but I bought them really well and then took advantage of the right conditions to sell for a profit and roll into the next one. Yeah. So that was kind of up until I got out of the real estate game. So that was kind of up until 2015. And then I had a really random phone call from a mate of mine in November 2015, which kind of changed my life again in a completely random

Starting point is 00:40:36 and different direction and that took me to japan and uh buying a ski lodge hotel in japan um and then when i sold my bell franchises a month later and i had nothing to do i set up and renovated that hotel set up a business for it from the gold coast um ran that business from the gold coast together with with one of my mates who was doing all the accounts for it and built that into three hotels which we currently have we actually we've currently got two we've just flipped one of the hotels um so i guess there's a theme here that whether it's in london in sydney the gold coast or japan i've been able to um yeah take advantage of those opportunities and and thrive in it really enjoy it love it and that the it sounds to me like

Starting point is 00:41:18 there's a bit of an approach to life that's limitless and fearless uh and and which sort of gives you the courage to have a crack at things that you know that aren't too many people i know scott that would uh do a reno and a flip on a hotel in japan from the gold coast yeah smarter people than me bushy where is it where do you think that sort of the innate courage fearlessness and limitlessness has has come from mate um again this is not a family trait at all my family is super conservative in that regard um so they look at me constantly going what are you doing you're stupid you're crazy um and so does my wife to be fair half the time but i don't know i think for me i just feel

Starting point is 00:42:05 like um i actually i'll dial it back to answer the question i think a lot of it is to do with the fact that my dad had parkinson's for 35 years so from pretty much when i was born until he passed away in 2016 that you know dad struggled with parkinson's it controlled his life it um you know effectively ruined his life and he didn't have a retirement his whole life was spent basically in full care so I grew up with that and that's all I saw so you know beyond what dad was going through that affected me greatly because I think it was like well who knows what's going to happen at 40 who knows what's going to happen at 60 like you can't plan all these things to back end your life full of all these experiences when you can do them all when you're 20 you're 25 30 35 enjoy

Starting point is 00:42:53 it the whole time so i think a lot of it is to do with dad's health um and me watching that journey and being part of that growing up um and from a very early age i just rolled the dice i was like i you know i want to be a snowboard instructor in colorado so um i did it i made it happen and and i wasn't a very good snowboarder i probably snowboarded 10 days in my life and i was absolutely terrible and i'd never had a lesson and i became a snowboard instructor in the you know the heart of ski territory globally um and the way that i did it was probably um you know illegal and would get me in trouble if i explained how i did it here but it um it revolved around um changing someone else's university results into my name and um yeah and anyway you do what you got to do

Starting point is 00:43:39 sometimes in life and maybe i was a bit stupid at that age but um you know i was i was super passionate about it and i really wanted it and i went after it and got it and uh and then you know going to london and realizing oh my god this is a big wide world the boy from epping is um out of his depths here and um but what a depth what a pool it is how exciting and you know just constantly on plane rides into europe non-stop traveling and just thrived in that environment and and from then on i've just like well whatever i want i'm just going to go after it and i've always felt that I could back myself and earn the money later. I said this to my mom, which she doesn't understand lots of times. And she'd say, how are you spending that much money on doing this? And

Starting point is 00:44:17 I'd be like, whether it works or whether it doesn't work, I know that I can earn back that money if I just focus and get back into what I need to do to repay that debt or rebuild that business or whatever else. So I'm just going to roll the dice and back my own talent later if i have to and that's that's kind of um voted really well for me i think in my career love it love it it's a an approach that unfortunately i think a lot of us we've grown up too comfortable and as a result of that there's a reticence to actually have a crack at times uh and we and we become our own worst enemies it's what's between our ears that holds us back more than anything that happens externally but i love the way you've uh you know i love that

Starting point is 00:45:02 term uh you're not uh back ending your life it's a term i haven't heard actually but i think it's a very good one and don't don't put off until tomorrow what you can do today uh because you're dead right mate who knows what tomorrow brings and you may not get to tomorrow so it's a it's a great way of looking at life that i think um it's it's only by going seeing the hardship that your old man went through that it probably uh woke you up to the point of going well gee whiz let's not put it off let's let's get in and have a go on and totally totally i just i just read the book winning by tim grover and tim grover was michael jordan and kobe bryant's um fitness and mental coach and one of the things that he talks about with the best winners in any industry whether

Starting point is 00:45:48 it's in business or sport is that no the best winners aren't worried about um losing they're worried about running out of time so they can back themselves in any situation they're not worried about losing the game they're not worried about losing the deal they're just worried about there's not enough time to make everything happen so they're just going at it as fast as they possibly can and i love that philosophy that you you know you don't know what's coming and you know unfortunately for kobe he died in a helicopter crash right and he achieved so much in that short term that he was on earth and i'm sure had grand ambitions to do a lot more but you just don't know when your number's going to be up so yeah rolling the dice and and having a crack is being good fun

Starting point is 00:46:25 and also these experiences are fun right it's not like you're going off to do something that's not a fun experience and it's not going to add to your stories while you're having a few beers with your mates like buying a ski lodge in japan with no idea in a foreign country you can't speak the language don't know anyone you know what could go wrong heaps but what could go right so much like it's just so much fun like and we just have it's been the best five years or six years that we've had with friends and family owning the ski lodges in Japan it's just been something that we never I had never thought was ever going to happen but it's just turned into a really wonderful life experience and something that all of our friends and family are really passionate about now and

Starting point is 00:47:04 yeah we just love sharing that with people so I think you know what's the worst that could happen you know we might have lost 150 grand or whatever we put up in the first instance but in the grand scheme of things you know I thought I could win that back over over the course of my career so it wasn't much of a risk. Hi, Freedom Fighters. Now, we're going to break part one of Scott's great conversation here. So now that you've got to know Scott and his highly credentialed property background, listen out for next week's concluding part two, where he jumps into the nitty gritties of property buyer negotiation and gives a wealth of tips and tricks and things to watch out for that will make or break your success in your future property purchases.

Starting point is 00:47:42 so enjoy the rest of your week and we'll get invested together very soon 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. 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: Scott Aggett on investing in transparency

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