I Love Real Estate: Recent Episodes
Dymphna Boholt
From a farm in Central Queensland to downtown Bangkok, to Canberra University and a career as an accountant and economist; to being one of Australia’s most successful property investors, and leading real estate strategist and educator specialising in tax, asset protection and international investment, it’s no wonder Dymphna Boholt is known by many professional and personal contacts as Dymphna the Dynamo!
Check out this amazing ILRE Journey of success from Ryan.
This is our new ILRE Success Stories Podcast Series. These are everyday people who have decided to change their lives and educate themselves with Dymphna’s training and then implement this in their own lives.
If you’d like to know more and how to change your current financial situation, just like what you have seen, then Dymphna can provide a FREE 60 minute Real Estate Breakthrough session with one of her advisors.
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Truth Bomb Tuesday: You probably care too much
A little while ago I was hauling the boat down the highway.
Not to brag or anything but it’s a big boat. A lovely big boat.
And you’d think that a boat should be designed with aerodynamics in mind, but the drag is pretty substantial, and there were definitely periods where we are going a good way under the speed limit.
And with that, there were times where we had half a dozen or so cars lined up behind us on the single-lane stretches.
I started to get uncomfortable.
“Those people are going to be so annoyed. They’re going to be angry with us.”
But I’m familiar with this thought pattern. And I don’t fall for it anymore.
And so I corrected myself.
“Those people, who we don’t know and who don’t know us, and who we will never actually meet and who will never have even the smallest influence on our lives – they might, possibly, if they’re in a bad mood, be annoyed, for a small, practically insignificant time in their lives.”
There. Fixed it.
I’m long enough in the tooth now to recognise that when I worry about the consequences, and when I worry about how someone else might possibly react, 99 times out of a 100, it never comes to anything.
We spend so much time worrying about what total strangers are going to think about us.
And now this isn’t a license to just go out and be a douche bag and do whatever you want.
I’m not saying that.
But what I am saying is that our care-factor is over-calibrated.
Our sense of shame evolved out of a time where we interreacted with maybe 100 other humans in our entire lives. We knew the people we were in contact with.
Not only that, but we also had clear feedback mechanisms for when we did something wrong by the group.
The alpha-mumma would pull us into line. A village council would be called. Someone would speak to our mother.
We didn’t have to wonder if we had offended someone. We knew.
And so this is a psychological system that is just completely out of whack with our day-to-day reality.
These days, especially if you live in the city, 90% of the people you come into proximity with have absolutely no impact on your life.
And if they are people we interact with, we often might have no idea if we’ve offended them. Aussies are hopelessly polite.
“Am I imagining it, or did he grit his teeth a little when he said, ‘Have a good day, mate.’? Is he angry? I can’t tell?”
And so we have a system trying to track 1000s of interactions every day, with no clear metrics to guide us.
It’s no wonder we feel anxious.
So look, it’s a good system. It’s doing its best. And I’m certainly not saying just discard it and do whatever you want.
But just be a little compassionate with yourself. Accept that you are most likely just going to care too much.
Sit back. Relax. We’ll be at the top of the hill soon.
DB.
Truth Bomb Tuesday: You’ve got to get free of the old paradigm
One of the girls got up from lunch the other day,
“Gotta go. Time is money.”
And I sat there. I thought, maybe I’ll have another coffee. It’s a nice day, maybe I’ll have a champers. The sun is out (finally!) I can’t think of anywhere else I’d like to be.
And as I sat there, drinking that coffee (responsible choice), I made some money. Good money.
That’s what happens when you have a performance portfolio – a number of cashflow positive assets that are putting money in your pocket. Assets that are giving you a passive income stream – that are putting money in your pocket – no matter what you’re doing.
Maybe you’re asleep. Maybe you’re just passing some time in your favourite café. Maybe you’re on holidays with your family. And the money just keeps coming in.
(Honey, you gotta love that.)
But the point is, for me, time stopped being money some years ago.
I’m one of the lucky ones.
For many people, time is still literally money. Maybe they’re working a steady job on an hourly wage, literally selling time for money.
Or maybe they’re a sole-trader. They might not be working an hourly wage as such, but when they’re working they’re making money. When they’re not working, they’re not making money.
Their time is still money.
Or maybe they run a small business – a business that is still reliant on them to keep the whole show afloat. They haven’t figured out a way to work themselves out of the equation.
Time is money for them too.
But for me, time is not money. Time is time. My time.
I can still spend my time making money. I often do. (It’d be criminal to waste talent like this.)
But for me, money comes whether I’m dedicating time to making money or not.
(Did I say how awesome this is already? So awesome.)
And this is what you should be aiming for. You should be aiming to disentangle your time from your money.
And the key to that is assets. Assets are the key to cashflow, and the key to freedom.
The name of the game is building up an asset base that pays you the income that you want.
This isn’t about wealth, necessarily, though they go hand in hand. This isn’t about what your net worth is.
It’s not about what assets you ‘own’. It’s about what assets you control.
I mean, for most of your investing career the banks are going to own more of your properties than you do. You own them on paper only.
However, you control the rent, and you control the income stream.
And if you build up enough income-producing assets, even if you’ve haven’t turned those assets into wealth just yet, then you’re free.
Then your time becomes your time again. You get to decide what you’re going to spend it on. It’s yours.
I realise I’m explaining a journey that may be a little hard to get your head around if you’re fresh to the game.
But that’s really because no one ever explains what the game actually is. They don’t teach this stuff in schools.
Many of us take the idea that ‘time is money’ as gospel truth. It’s what we all were told.
But it’s not the truth.
There are roads to freedom, and they’re closer than you think.
DB.
Truth Bomb Tuesday: unpacking the tyranny of expectations
One of the big challenges with breaking free and living life on your own terms is making peace with other people’s expectations.
Many of us will feel like we’re constantly ‘dimming our light’ to keep the peace and keep other people feeling comfortable.
We might feel that we need to keep ourselves poor, because our parents were poor their whole live, and they would resent us if we showed them that freedom was available all along.
Or our partner might resent our emotional side, and we might feel a need that we need to ‘tone it down’ around them.
Or your boss might feel like your unique creative flair isn’t really appropriate for the office he wants to run like a battle-cruiser. “Don’t you have any white or grey shirts?”
We dim our lights – become a less fully-expressed version of ourselves – in order to keep the peace and not rock the boat.
This is not a strategy for the long run.
Because over time, resentments build.
If we feel that our partner can’t handle us at our most loose and fun-loving, and that’s how we want to live, then we begin to resent them.
But there’s a piece of the puzzle missing in this story, and this is not where the first work of repair starts.
Because the truth is that we dim our own lights.
And sure, we’re doing it for others and for the peace. But at some point, we are making the choice to do X to achieve Y – dim our lights to achieve peace.
That’s a choice that we make. No one else.
And look, that can be ok. Sometimes it’s a rational choice – a sensible evaluation of the realities.
But if we do not acknowledge to ourselves that this choice has an expense – that there can be a sense of sadness with not feeling fully welcome in the world, then we can start to resent ourselves.
AND, if it stops being a choice, and just gets hard-coded into pattern – a default way of being in the world – then we have given up our agency, and resentment builds.
And so the first work of repair is with ourselves.
It’s with acknowledging that we have had to / are having to make choices that do not align with our highest happiness.
It’s with caring for the part of us that feels like it’s missing out – “I’m really sorry you have to give up your rainbow work shorts. I know how happy they make you.”
And it’s about bringing your strategic power to bear on working collaboratively towards a solution. “Let’s just stick it out in grey-town for six more months, and I’ll find us a new job, or enrol in one of Dymphna’s programs and fast track retirement.”
It’s about caring for yourself.
If you can do this, my experience is that you will feel better about the whole situation, and will then be able to act from a place of strategic clarity, rather than reactive resentment.
And that’s a good thing.
DB.
Truth Bomb Tuesday: There’s two ways to find the edge of your comfort zone.
There’s two ways you can push yourself to be your most awesome version possible.
The way I think about it, it’s a bit like having a shower. Imagine you are trying to find the perfect temperature – not too hot not too cold. How do you do that?
Well, there’s two ways to do that. One way is to turn the cold tap on, and then turn the hot tap on gradually adding more and more hot until you get to the temperature you want.
The other way is obviously to start with the hot tap on full and then start adding cold until you get to the temperature that you want.
Both will lead you to the temperature that you want, in theory.
In the same way, there are two ways to get to find your edge – the place where you are pushing yourself, but not so much that you’re burning out your adrenals and giving yourself stress disorders.
Not everyone is born to ride mountain bikes out the back of an aircraft carrier. And that’s ok. We are all different.
We all have different ideas about where our edge is.
But it is important to not let yourself get to soft. You do need a bit of push to reach your potential.
And so the way I see it, there’s two ways to find your sweet-spot edge.
The first is to start our timid, and then slowly start adding acts of courage and heroism into your life, slowly expanding the frontiers of what you feel you are brave enough to do.
The other way is just to embrace full-power, free-fall courage right from the beginning. That is, you try to embody the most courageous version of yourself possible.
Having done that you can then start walking it back. You can see where your limits are. You can learn where you are out of your depth. You can learn where the line is between courage and foolishness.
Now theoretically both of these parts should lead you towards your innate courage. But it doesn’t work that way.
I think we are just very bad at learning where our limits are. Our instincts for survival mean that we are hardwired to play it safe. We might think that we are at our limits, operating on our edge, but sometimes we just never know what we are capable of until we are pushed.
And so if we take the path of timidly expanding into our courage, I just don’t think we will ever reach our full potential. We will never find what the actual limits of our courage are. We will always underestimate it.
But sadly, this is the road that I see most people choosing. We play it safe. We stick to our comfort zone’s. And we only expand the frontiers of what we think we are capable of after we have already proved it to ourselves.
And in this way we never really know what we are fully capable of.
So I reckon it’s much better to go to the hot water route. See yourself as courageous and incredibly capable. Assume that you are Hercules in a Armani suit.
Once you have done that, you will learn where your limits are. You will recognise your edge. But you will know that these limits are real, and not just some figment of your timid imagination.
So these are the two roads to courage. Almost everyone takes the first, and almost everyone under shoots their potential as a result.
So be the hero you never thought you could be. Your true courage and the life you want to be living is there waiting for you.
DB.
From the Caribbean to Australia: A Big LeapSeamus’ journey to success begins in 2001, with a leap of faith from the warm shores of the Caribbean to the bustling opportunities of Australia. “I came to Australia in 2001. I’m originally from the Caribbean. Work brought me over,” he explained during his heartfelt presentation.
With a big corporate opportunity calling his name, Seamus embraced the challenge and started climbing the corporate ladder.
The transition wasn’t without its challenges.
Moving to a new country meant adapting to unfamiliar systems, cultures, and environments. Yet, Seamus approached each hurdle with determination.
“We had to start from scratch,” he shared. “Everything was new, and there was so much to learn, but I was excited about the possibilities.”
His hard work paid off as he steadily advanced in his career, gaining respect and recognition in the corporate world.
Back then, life was about achieving what society called success. Seamus shared how he and his wife worked diligently to build their careers, following the conventional path of securing promotions and financial stability.
“We were just, you know, doing the right thing, building our careers, thinking the rest will take care of itself,”
Despite their success, Seamus began to notice cracks in the plan.
The long hours and corporate pressures left little room for family or personal exploration.
Beneath the surface, he sensed that something was missing. This realization would set the stage for a life-changing discovery.
A Roof Over Our Heads: The First Property StepsWhen Seamus and his wife first arrived in Australia, they needed a place to call home. Renting was their first step, but soon the question arose: should they buy their own property?
By 2007, they took the plunge and purchased their principal place of residence (PPR).
Seamus reflected, “Back then, property was just a roof over our heads. We needed somewhere to live.”
The process of buying their first home wasn’t as straightforward as they had imagined. They navigated the complexities of the real estate market, learning about mortgages, inspections, and the importance of location.
For Seamus and his wife, the house represented more than shelter; it was a symbol of their hard work and new life in Australia.
However, their story took an interesting twist. They made the unusual decision to keep their apartment in London.
“We weren’t sure if we were going to go back [to the UK] or stay, so we held on to the apartment,” he explained.
This decision, made more out of uncertainty than strategy, would later prove to be one of their most significant financial moves.
At the time, terms like equity and cash flow were unfamiliar. The London apartment was simply an anchor to their past life.
But as the value of their London property began to rise dramatically over the next six years, Seamus and his wife started to realise they might be sitting on untapped potential.
Discovering “Funny Money”: The Equity Revelation“I had no idea what equity was,” Seamus admitted with a laugh. But life has a funny way of teaching lessons when the time is right.
As he looked into the numbers, Seamus discovered that the value of their London property had surged by 30-40% in just six years.
“All of a sudden, there was money sitting in that property,” he said.
Curiosity piqued, Seamus asked the crucial question: “How can I access that?” This moment was the beginning of a new understanding of wealth and how property could serve as more than a home.
By leveraging the equity in their London apartment, they were able to secure a deposit for their PPR in Australia.
It was a revelation that turned their view of property ownership on its head.
“This funny money equity thing,” as Seamus called it, became a game changer.
He began to see property not just as a necessity but as a tool for financial growth. Suddenly, the idea of buying and holding property to build wealth became crystal clear.
This newfound understanding planted the seeds for what would grow into a thriving investment portfolio.
The realisation also came with challenges. Seamus had to learn how to navigate the financial systems that allowed equity access, understand the risks involved, and ensure the decisions they made were sustainable.
Despite the steep learning curve, Seamus embraced the challenge, eager to unlock the potential he had discovered. This pivotal moment marked the start of a journey that would completely transform his life and mindset.
Stumbling Upon I Love Real EstateSeamus’ journey into property investment took a significant turn one evening as he sat on the sofa, scrolling through Google.
“I just started looking up property investment ideas,” he said, explaining how his curiosity led him down an unexpected path.
As he explored articles and forums, one thing became clear: there was so much he didn’t know.
“You don’t get trained in this stuff at school, which is a whole different conversation,” he quipped.
Then, as if by fate, an ad popped up on his Facebook feed.
It was for a one-day free event hosted by a community called “I Love Real Estate.” Intrigued, Seamus decided to attend.
“I thought, well, it’s free. What have I got to lose?” he recalled. That decision would prove to be transformative.
At the event, Seamus was introduced to concepts that were completely new to him. One of the terms that stuck with him was “SMSF,” or Self-Managed Super Fund.
“I remember someone mentioning SMSFs, and I thought, wait a minute. There’s this funny money thing turning up again,” he said, laughing at the memory.
The event didn’t just provide information; it opened Seamus’ eyes to the possibilities of using tools and strategies that were previously unknown to him.
By the end of the day, he was hooked. “I realized I needed to learn more,” he said. That initial event planted the seeds of what would become a full-fledged passion for property investment.
The First Deals: Learning by DoingArmed with new knowledge, Seamus began to explore how he could apply what he’d learned. His first step was to look into his SMSF.
“We had this super fund just sitting there, doing nothing,” he said. Realising its potential, Seamus decided to use it to make his first investment.
His initial ventures were straightforward: buying townhouses.
“We kept it simple,” he explained. “I didn’t want to overcomplicate things while I was still learning.” These early deals taught him the importance of research and due diligence.
“I spent hours looking into locations, developers, and market trends,” he said. “I wanted to make sure every decision was based on solid information.”
Though the process was intimidating at first, Seamus’ confidence grew with each deal. He learned to navigate the intricacies of contracts, financing, and property management.
“Every mistake was a lesson,” he said. “And every success was motivation to keep going.”
The townhouses provided steady cash flow and a sense of accomplishment. But Seamus knew he was just scratching the surface.
He began to realise that there was much more potential if he expanded his approach.
“I started thinking, what’s next? How can I take this to the next level?”
The Game Changer: Building for Cash Flow and EquityAs Seamus gained experience, he decided to step out of his comfort zone. Instead of simply buying existing properties, he began to explore land purchases and construction.
“I realised that by building, I could manufacture equity and create better cash flow,” he explained.
His first foray into this new approach was a small piece of land in Newcastle. Seamus spent months researching builders and learning about the feasibility of constructing a home.
“I wanted to understand every step of the process,” he said. From selecting materials to negotiating contracts, he immersed himself in the details.
The project was a success. Seamus built a house and handed it over to a property manager, generating positive cash flow of $10,000 annually.
“That was a turning point,” he said. “It showed me what was possible when you combine strategy with action.”
Encouraged by the results, Seamus decided to try something more ambitious: a duplex development.
He found a parcel of land near the beach and envisioned a project that would not only provide cash flow but also significant equity growth.
“This was when I realised the value of having a clear plan,” he said.
By this point, Seamus had joined the Ultimate Real Estate Success Coaching and Mentoring Program and the I Love Real Estate community, gaining access to mentors and resources that helped him refine his approach.
The duplex project was another success, and it solidified Seamus’ belief in the power of strategic property investment.
“I had the bug now,” he admitted with a smile. “I wanted to keep going, to see how far I could take this.”
With each new project, Seamus honed his skills, balancing risk and reward while building a portfolio that would change his life forever.
Joining the Community: Learning and Scaling UpFor Seamus, joining I Love Real Estate wasn’t just a decision — it was a commitment to taking his property investment journey to the next level.
“I’d been dabbling on my own, but I realized I needed structured guidance,” he said.
By officially becoming part of the community, Seamus gained access to invaluable resources, courses, and mentors who shared proven strategies.
One of the first lessons he learned was the importance of structuring deals correctly.
“It’s not just about buying property. It’s about buying well and setting yourself up for long-term success,” he explained.
Through workshops and networking with other investors, Seamus learned how to leverage trusts, manage risks, and optimise his tax strategies.
Being part of a like-minded community also gave Seamus a new level of confidence.
“The support was incredible,” he shared. “Whenever I had questions, there was always someone who’d been through it before. It felt like having a team in my corner.” This camaraderie motivated him to think bigger and aim higher.
With the tools and knowledge he gained, Seamus began to scale his portfolio. He transitioned from smaller projects, like townhouses, to more complex ventures such as subdivisions and multi-dwelling developments.
“It was like a lightbulb moment. Everything I’d learned started to come together, and I could see the bigger picture.”
The Magic Formula: Rinse and Repeat SuccessSeamus quickly found his stride with a strategy that worked: micro-apartments and rooming houses. This approach not only provided strong cash flow but also allowed him to manufacture equity with every project.
“It was the perfect balance,” he explained. “I could hold onto properties for long-term growth while still enjoying immediate financial benefits.”
One of his most challenging yet rewarding projects took place during the COVID-19 pandemic. Seamus developed a property with 15 micro-apartments in Queensland — all while managing the project remotely from New South Wales.
“The borders were closed, and we had to figure out how to keep everything moving,” he recalled. Despite rising construction costs and supply chain issues, the project was completed successfully. “It taught me how to adapt and negotiate under pressure,” he said.
What made the strategy so effective was its scalability. Seamus could replicate the process repeatedly, each time refining his approach.
“We’d find a property, subdivide it, and build multiple units,” he explained.
The consistent results gave him the confidence to continue investing, even in uncertain times.
The numbers spoke for themselves. Seamus’ projects consistently delivered both cash flow and equity growth, allowing him to expand his portfolio rapidly.
“It’s all about sticking to what works,” he said. “When you find a formula that delivers, you just rinse and repeat.”
Freedom Achieved: Life in Barcelona and BeyondBy the time Seamus reached his mid-fifties, he had achieved a level of financial freedom that many only dream of. With a thriving property portfolio generating passive income, he and his wife decided to embrace a new chapter in life.
“We realised we could live anywhere,” he said.
In 2023, the couple moved to Barcelona, a city they had always dreamed of experiencing.
“My wife had an opportunity to study at the Academy of Art, and we thought, why not?” Seamus explained.
From their base in Spain, they’ve traveled extensively, visiting Belgium, France, and the UK. “It’s been incredible to explore new cultures and make memories together,” he said.
Despite being thousands of miles away from his properties, Seamus has managed to keep everything running smoothly.
“The systems we put in place allow us to manage everything remotely,” he said. Technology and a strong team back in Australia have been key to maintaining his portfolio’s success.
For Seamus, the greatest reward isn’t just financial independence but the freedom to live life on his terms.
“We’ve broken free from the 9-to-5 grind,” he said. “Now we get to focus on what truly matters: family, experiences, and giving back.”
Through his journey, Seamus has become a beacon of inspiration for others in the I Love Real Estate community.
“If I can do it, anyone can. You just need the right mindset, the right education, and the courage to take that first step.”
A Community of Impact and GratitudeSeamus’ story is not just one of personal success but also of contribution and impact.
Over the years, he has become a vocal advocate within the I Love Real Estate community, sharing his experiences and offering guidance to others starting their journeys.
“I’ve always believed in giving back,” he said. “When I was climbing the corporate ladder, my focus was on developing others, and that hasn’t changed.”
Seamus is particularly proud of the role he’s played in addressing Australia’s housing crisis. By transforming underutilised properties into modern micro-apartments and rooming houses, he’s provided affordable, high-quality housing for many.
“It’s not just about making money, it’s about creating spaces where people feel at home.”
He’s also made a point of focusing on tenant experience. “We design these spaces with care,” he said. “Each unit has its own zone—a bedroom, a living area, a kitchen, and even a patio. It’s not just a place to stay; it’s a place to live.”
The connections Seamus has built through the community have been another source of joy.
“Some of my closest friends are people I’ve met through I Love Real Estate,” he said. “It’s such a supportive environment. You ask a question, and you get thoughtful, detailed answers from people who genuinely want to help.”
Seamus’ gratitude for the community is evident in everything he does. Whether it’s answering questions in Facebook groups, mentoring new investors, or sharing his story at events, he’s committed to helping others achieve their goals.
“This journey has given me so much,” he said. “The least I can do is pay it forward.”
Looking ahead, Seamus is excited about continuing to grow his portfolio while supporting others in the community.
“We’re all in this together,” he said. “When one of us succeeds, we all do. That’s the beauty of this community.”
As he reflects on his journey, Seamus is filled with pride and gratitude.
“It’s amazing to think about how far we’ve come from that first property in London to where we are now. It’s been an incredible ride. And the best part? The journey isn’t over yet.”
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These stories and the results in them were captured at a specific point in time. The real estate market and the investing strategies used to succeed are constantly changing. The achievements and results of these investors may have changed since these stories were recorded. Each of these investors engaged in in-depth training, coaching and mentoring to be able to achieve these results. Their results are not typical and should not be taken as a guarantee of the results you may achieve. Your personal results will be in-line with the training, education and hard work that you personally conduct.
Truth Bomb Tuesday: How to free up energy in your mind
We are not designed to make peace with our past.
Exactly the opposite actually. We are designed to learn from it.
It’s part of our basic programming. We make a mistake (we put a sharp thing in our mouth), and then we learn from it (don’t put sharp things in your mouth.)
We take the process for granted, but it’s actually pretty miraculous. There’s a part of our brain that takes the incredible complexity of our lived experience, and distils it down into generalised life lessons.
So impressive.
However, sometimes there just isn’t a reason for things, and there is no life-lesson to learn.
Sometimes bad things happen to us, and there’s just no explaining them.
Our mother was absent and uncaring. Our brother was violent. Our boss had temper issues and took it out on people. You’re loved one just wasn’t ready to be in a commited relationship.
Bad stuff happens. All the time.
But then I think we can find ourselves spending a lot time trying to figure out these experiences, and learn from them.
That’s a noble thing to do, but what happens if there just isn’t anything to learn? What if it was just a random piece of bad luck? What if you were just in the wrong place at the wrong time, in the wrong bed with the wrong person?
We end up twisting ourselves in knots, trying to figure it out.
And then there’s two traps that I think we can fall into here.
The first is that when there isn’t a readily available external logic to go to (my boss was a bully because his boss was bullying him), the lesson-learner teams up with the self-reflective part of the mind.
What was my part is this story? Did I call this in somehow? Is it my fault?
Having a strong instinct for self-reflection is a good thing – a great thing. But we have to be careful it’s not blaming us for things that are just not ours.
But this can happen. When there’s not an obvious external explanation, we can go looking for internal explanations.
You don’t have to do that.
The second thing that can happen, I think, is that when we can’t draw a clear lesson from the experience immediately, we let our conscious mind move on.
BUT!! We also cleave off a part of our mind and say to it, “You stay here, in the past, and try and figure out what this experience was all about. Get back to me when you’ve got an answer.”
And so there’s always a part of you ‘living in the past’ tyring to learn from these painful experiences, in order to help you avoid them in the future.
But when there is no rhyme or reason, then that part of your mind just gets stuck there, rolling it over and over.
If you opened up the Activity Monitor of your mind, how many of these lesson learners would there be, just running as a back-ground task, chewing up memory and energy?
And how good would it be if we could just switch them off, and give more of our mind to our present?
I think it is possible.
And I think it starts with acceptance. It starts with just telling yourself. “It’s ok. That was just some random stuff that happened. I don’t have to learn from it. I don’t have to blame myself. It’s just what it was. I can accept it and move on.”
(This is a process that is probably best done in therapy.)
But I guess I just want to say that is it is possible to let these lesson-learners come home, and move a little more lightly in the world.
Not everything is a lesson.
And its not your fault.
DB.
This is how to fix housing, if you think the problem is prices are too low
There’s a common property trap that my students never fall into.
(Or if they do, they don’t tell me, because they know I’d get angry.)
Underquoting was back in the news last week.
This is one of those perennial issues in the property market – the idea that agents deliberately underquote on a property that’s going to auction in order to hype up the auction day.
When there’s only a couple of registered bidders, the bidders feel like they have the upper hand. But when there’s dozens, the advantage goes to the seller – even if most of those bidders aren’t even close to the running.
So it’s a thing. I can’t tell you how common it is, but it’s definitely a thing.
And it’s an annoying thing. You might spend close to a grand on pest and building and conveyancing, only for the bidding to blow through your budget in the first five minutes.
The AFR is pointing the finger at agents:
On any given weekend in Australia, the hopes of thousands of home buyers are dashed when properties are sold well above the so-called “guide” price.
Take the “bright” two-bedroom apartment in inner-Sydney’s Surry Hills listed for $1.3 million before it sold for $1.56 million in March.
In nearby Darlington a flat that guided at $1.1 million sold for $1.536 million.
And in Melbourne, an “inviting” Vermont house was listed at $1.2 million and sold for $1.45 million last month.
The question is, did those properties attract emotional buyers ready to pay whatever it takes? Or was there underquoting, the illegal practice whereby agents – sometimes directed by the vendors – set an unrealistically low guide price to bring more would-be buyers into the net to stoke bidding at auction.
Brendan Dixon of Pure Finance says his clients frequently see properties sells for as much as 40 per cent above the guide price.
But my students don’t get caught out with this.
Because by the time they get to auction, they have a very clear idea of what a property is going to sell for.
There are very VERY few surprising sales at auction. There are very few instances where only one bidder shows up, and the property sells for 30% below the market median.
Sure. It does happen. Sometimes.
But you can’t build a portfolio strategy around consistently finding those incredible gems.
You’d have to waste hours and thousands of dollars attending dozens of auctions every weekend.
And you don’t need to.
Lasting property wealth is built on a consistent disciplined approach to numbers. Not on wild flukes.
And by the time you’re buying you should be what we call ‘a local area expert’.
You should know what suburb you’re interested in, based on suburb-by-suburb comparisons.
Then you should have a very clear idea of what particular price points in that particular suburb buy you.
And you should have a very clear idea of where the market is currently at. You should know what properties are selling for, and how properties are performing at auction.
All of this research is available to you.
At the end of that, you should be able to pick it a mile away when a property is quoted at 30% below the suburb median.
There shouldn’t be any surprises.
These are the disciplines that we train our students in. We take the luck out of it, and bring it back to numbers we can rely on.
We have tried and tested formulas.
Even real estate agents can’t mess with them.
DB
See the world through the eyes of an economist.
Bringing Boys to the Political Party
Polls currently have Saturday’s election going to Labor, but polls have been a bit fallable in recent years. I thought this chart from the Australian Election Study was interesting. It shows that the global trend for young men to tilt conservative is evident in Australia too. I don’t think this will be as big a factor in Australia as it was in the recent US election, but it’s a trend to watch.
Is America about to sneeze?
Economists have a saying: “When America sneezes, Australia catches a cold.” If that’s true, things are looking a little dicey.
Prices facing American consumers have already started to rise. Many products on Shien.com, for example, have doubled. Some have quadrupled.
As a result (well, not just as a result of Shien’s pricing), consumer sentiment has collapsed:
While inflation expectations have soared to historic levels:
At the same time as American economists, according to Bloomberg’s survey, have dropped their forecasts for GDP growth dramatically:
… on the back of tanking consumption growth:
… and rock-bottom export growth:
There’s a lot of uncertainty around these forecasts – who knows how the tariff drama will unfold eventually. However, uncertainty in itself is economically damaging – it makes it hard for firms to plan investment, households to plan for major purchases etc.
There’s some stiff headwinds heading Australia’s way.
Ladies, Stop Apologising
Finally, researchers at Stanford University have found that women are far more likely to apologise in the workplace than men. Participants in a study were given a ten-question test, and then given the opportunity to explain to their results to their hypothetical boss. Women were far more likely to be apologetic. Even when they got 8 out of 10 questions right, 50% of women still apologised!
Stop apologising for being a boss, ladies!
And that’s how the world looked through the eyes of an economist this week.
DB.
Truth Bomb Tuesday: Sorrow has a meaning
I’ve found that I’ve become a bit of a collector of quotes. It started as a way to break up presentations – just flick to a screen with an interesting quote on it, let it sink in, give myself a moment to have a drink and recover my breath.
But now I find I do love the distillation of a good quote – the way it takes some big idea and distils it down into a single digestible truth. It’s the process of distillation that’s interesting for me, as much as the end result.
Anyway, I’ve had this quote in my bank for a while now. I enjoy it every time I read it:
“You do not have to sit outside in the dark. If, however, you want to look at the stars, you will find that darkness is necessary. But the stars neither require nor demand it.”
— Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk
But this week it brought together a few themes I’ve been wrestling with.
The central idea is something I’ve thought a lot about. That the reason why there is so much suffering in the world is so that we can fully appreciate the beauty that the world does have to offer.
Sometimes, and most times, this beauty is small and almost insignificant. It’s in the way neighbourhoods come together in crisis. It’s the small kindness to the stranger in Woolies having a bad day. It’s little acts of charity and care.
Balanced against wars and violence and the cruelty of the world, on their own they are tiny – barely pin-pricks of light.
(That said, like stars, there are a lot of them. Millions of them, every day. People are, on the whole, profoundly good. The centre-point of humanity is a balance of sincere beauty.)
But, these daily miracles are small, and we wouldn’t appreciate them at all if it weren’t for the contrast the world’s sorrows provide. We understand that helping an old ladies across the street is beautiful, because we know that violence, even to our elderly, is a thing.
We need the darkness to be able to appreciate how beautiful they are.
I like this idea.
But then there’s a couple of things that Dillard adds either side to that.
First, we don’t have to participate in star-gazing.
We don’t have to engage with the world’s darkness – not in our comfortable western lives. It’s possible, if we’re lucky, to keep our eyes buried in the sofa – to wilfully ignore the worst the world has to offer. Don’t watch the news. Curate your social feed. Pass your time with RomComs and cooking shows.
And that’s ok. For some sensitive people, this is probably the optimal life strategy. It’s valid.
All it means is that you’ll never have enough contrast to appreciate the small miracles of the world, in all their beauty.
And then the third idea, tacked on the end, is that these miracles, like the stars, don’t need witness. They will exist – the world will keep generating moments of wonder and goodness – whether you are there to watch it or not.
Beauty exists for its own sake.
There is no requirement to engage, support or even witness and record it. It’s got nothing to do with you all at.
But there is still an invitation – to be present to the world’s sorrow, and to savour those small moments of beauty where you find them.
What a beautiful distillation.
DB
Money can still be a force for good.
The price tag is a short cut we use to understand value.
“Ohh. Nice car. How much did it cost?”
It’s a mental framework we carry around, and like any mindset, it can be a little sticky when we use it a lot.
And it’s a common critique of economics – the current system has no way of valuing things that don’t have a price tag. Clean air and oxygen is obviously incredibly valuable. But since you can’t put a price tag on it, it can fall through the cracks in our economic paradigm.
And so it’s good to remember that many valuable things don’t have a price tag.
However (and this is a mistake I see advanced students of mine make), this doesn’t mean that the only truly valuable things are things that don’t have a price tag.
We spend a lot of time encouraging students to find their ‘Why’.
Your why – your reason for getting out of bed in the morning – is an incredibly important piece of the puzzle. It’s your gateway to motivation – for creativity and drive. And it’s your gateway to grit – to your ability to dig deep when things get tough.
Having a why is a powerful source of momentum.
And it’s also powerful navigational tool. It helps you understand in detail where you want to go, and what things are worth your time and energy, and which things are not.
So we turn our why into drive and our why into direction.
It’s essential.
But then I still see a lot of students bring a sort of virtue-signalling to their why.
They want to start an orphanage in Indonesia. They want to invest in clean water programs in Africa. Some people want to build women’s refuges closer to home.
These are all wonderful, wonderful things to do. These are all things that ILRE students have actually gone on to do.
But too often they have the flavour of a ‘should’.
“I’ve never spent too much time thinking about the plight of orphans in Asia, but I probably should make that my why.”
Your why can’t be a should. It can’t be something externally generated – with an eye on whether other people are going to respect your why or not.
You why has to be born out of your own authentic desires and joys.
But the thing that I notice in this co-opting of why, is that there seems to be a rush to escape the money system.
It’s like the idea is that the only virtuous why is one divorced from money and price.
This is just not true.
Many wonderful things can and do happen within the money system.
Like right now, we’re in a housing shortage. If you’re excited to find innovative (and profitable!) ways to bring more housing to the market, people are going to thank you for it.
Not only that, the profit-motive can be a wonderful disciplining force. It forces you to spend your resources wisely, and to create things that people actually value.
My sense is that the best social enterprises are built by people who have been disciplined by the challenges of for-profit enterprises.
Anyway, it’s all to say, don’t be in a rush to escape the money system. You might get there eventually. Great.
But in the meantime, there’s a lot of good you can do right now.
DB
Leanne’s story begins with a spark of determination that refused to dim, even as she approached her 60s.“Hi, everybody. I’m Leanne. I’m 66, and I have one adult son,” she shared proudly at the ILRE Super Conference.
For most of her life, Leanne felt stuck in a routine, working for local government and feeling that her dreams of financial freedom were out of reach. But Leanne had a secret weapon: her unwavering belief that it’s never too late to change.
Her son’s playful skepticism (“He thinks we’re a cult!” she joked) didn’t deter her. What fueled her was the desire for a better future, free from financial stress and filled with the independence to make her own choices.
As Leanne explored various investment opportunities, she realized property could be the key. But taking the first step? That was the challenge.
“I was looking for something to change my life. I tried share trading and currency trading, but they were just little steps. I needed something bigger,” she said.
After years of watching from the sidelines, she stumbled upon the I Love Real Estate (ILRE) community and was intrigued by Dymphna Boholt’s Facebook posts.
At first, Leanne hesitated. Years went by, and her doubts grew. But as time ticked away, she had a powerful epiphany: waiting wouldn’t change her situation.
In 2019, Leanne finally joined the Ultimate Real Estate Success Coaching and Mentoring Program and the ILRE community, stepping into a new world of learning, growth, and action.
She may have started late, but Leanne was determined to catch up. Her story is proof that age is no barrier when dreams and determination align.
Stuck in a Rut: The Apartment TrapBefore joining the Ultimate Real Estate Success Coaching and Mentoring Program, Leanne’s first ventures into property investment were far from smooth sailing.
She’d invested in two apartments in Queensland through a marketing group, using her equity and serviceability to secure the properties.
Unfortunately, these deals quickly turned sour. “They very quickly turned negative,” Leanne explained. She learned the hard way about the importance of due diligence.
“I used all my equity in my PPR,” she recounted, referring to her principal place of residence.
Instead of growing her wealth, the properties drained her resources, with one apartment’s value plummeting from $248,000 to just $130,000. Unable to sell or refinance, she was stuck with assets that brought in negative cash flow and sinking equity.
Worse, the additional expenses like levies and sinking funds swallowed up any potential profits.
Leanne’s experience with these apartments became a turning point in her education. “I learned about doing my own due diligence. Don’t trust them,” she shared with a knowing laugh.
The ordeal taught her to dig deeper, ask more questions, and avoid relying solely on others’ recommendations.
By the time she joined the Ultimate Real Estate Success Coaching and Mentoring Program in 2019, Leanne was ready to rewrite her property investment journey.
She brought with her a keen awareness of what not to do and a determination to never fall into the same traps again. The lessons she learned in those early, painful experiences would later guide her to smarter, more informed decisions.
The Turning Point: Taking the Leap2019 was a pivotal year for Leanne. After six years of watching from the sidelines, she finally joined Ultimate Real Estate Success Coaching and Mentoring Program and the ILRE community.
Why now? “I’m 61,” she reflected. “If I don’t do this now, in five years’ time, I’ll be in the same place, but I’ll be five years older.”
That realization was the nudge she needed to take the plunge.
Leanne’s first step was attending a bootcamp, where she immediately felt the energy and support of the ILRE community.
“It was fantastic. I met someone there, and we decided to share accommodation at the Super Conference,” she shared.
Surrounded by like-minded individuals, Leanne began to see a path forward.
Initially, she hesitated to invest in the Platinum Coaching program, citing financial constraints. “I thought, ‘This is fantastic, but I can’t do this now. I’ll wait until I’ve done my first deal.’” But after reflecting on her limited options, Leanne made a bold decision. She knew she needed guidance and accountability to succeed. “I needed a push,” she admitted, and joining Platinum gave her just that.
Taking the leap was not just about signing up for a program; it was a declaration of commitment to her future. For Leanne, this was her moment to break free from the cycle of doubt and take charge of her destiny.
“I wasn’t going to stay stuck forever,” she declared. And she didn’t.
First Steps: Learning the RopesOnce in the Platinum program, Leanne dove headfirst into learning. The first boot camp was an eye-opener, filled with practical lessons and invaluable networking opportunities.
But what stood out most to her was the unwavering support of the ILRE community.
“I spoke to a Platinum advisor and thought, ‘This is fantastic,’” Leanne recalled. The structured guidance helped her feel less overwhelmed and more equipped to tackle her challenges.
Despite initial doubts about her lack of funds and experience, Leanne embraced the educational journey with enthusiasm.
Her first major takeaway was the importance of mindset. Leanne realized that fear and hesitation had held her back for years.
Through workshops and coaching sessions, she began to see herself not just as someone trying to invest, but as an investor. The distinction was subtle yet transformative.
She also formed close bonds with others in the program, who inspired and motivated her.
“The people around me were commenting on the changes in me. It was just amazing,” she said. This newfound sense of belonging was key to building her confidence.
With her knowledge growing and her mindset shifting, Leanne felt ready to take on her first project.
The road ahead wasn’t easy, but she now had the tools and support to succeed.
Leanne was officially in the game, and there was no turning back.
Flipping Adventures: From Despair to SuccessLeanne’s first house-flipping project was a bold leap into the unknown.
“The market in Perth was getting a bit crazy,” she shared.
Desperate to take action, she bought an “as is” property within her price range. The house was far from livable, but it represented her first real chance to turn things around.
Determined to make it work, Leanne rolled up her sleeves and got to work—literally.
“I spent a lot of time staying there with my bedroll, bringing it out at night and only going home when I had to go to work the next morning,” she recounted.
The property had major electrical issues, and the process was far from glamorous. At one point, Leanne attempted to pull down a ceiling, only to find herself stuck in the room with debris everywhere.
Despite these challenges, she transformed the house into a beautiful, sellable property.
The highlight came when she sold it for a profit of $55,000.
“It was just so exciting,” Leanne said, beaming with pride.
This first success gave her not only the financial boost she needed but also the confidence to keep going.
“It felt amazing to move forward,” she reflected.
The experience cemented her belief that taking action, no matter how daunting, was the key to achieving her goals.
With one successful flip under her belt, Leanne’s journey was just beginning.
Building Confidence: The Next Big WinLeanne’s second flip was a testament to her growing confidence and skill. The property had its quirks, including a bright orange fireplace that one of her workers jokingly decorated with teeth.
“When I walked in, I just fell in love with it,” she admitted, proving that her intuition was sharpening with experience.
This time, Leanne’s process was more streamlined. She had learned from her first project and approached this flip with a clearer strategy.
The property required significant renovations, but Leanne’s determination didn’t waver. She worked closely with her team, even embracing the chaos of unexpected demolitions.
When the dust settled, Leanne sold the property for a profit of $61,000.
“It was so exciting!” she said.
More than the financial gain, this project reinforced her identity as a house flipper.
“It’s scary and exciting and stressful and fun,” she told her peers.
With two successful flips completed, Leanne’s confidence soared. She was no longer the hesitant newcomer from 2019. Instead, she was a skilled investor, ready to tackle bigger and more challenging projects.
Each success built upon the last, propelling her closer to her ultimate goals.
A Life Transformed: Selling the Family HomeFor years, Leanne’s principal place of residence (PPR) had been both her home and her anchor. However, she realized that selling it could be the key to unlocking new opportunities.
“I’d had it for 19 years,” she shared. When the time came, Leanne tackled the renovation with the same drive and focus she brought to her flips.
“You know, when you live in a house, you never do the work it needs until it’s time to sell it,” she laughed.
The transformation was remarkable. With fresh floor coverings and a coat of paint, the house sold for $620,000—a massive win for Leanne.
“I was over the moon,” she said. The sale gave her the financial freedom to invest further and reduced the stress of juggling multiple properties.
Moving out of her long-time home was bittersweet, but Leanne approached it with a clear-eyed focus on her goals.
“This is business,” she explained, emphasizing her commitment to her financial future.
Selling her PPR also meant she could reinvest in projects with even greater potential.
The decision wasn’t just about money; it was about taking control of her life. “I’m not stuck anymore,” she said.
For Leanne, selling her family home marked the start of a new chapter—one where she was in the driver’s seat, confidently steering her way toward financial independence.
Big Moves: From House Flipping to Worker AccommodationLeanne’s journey took an exciting turn when she transitioned from house flipping to investing in worker accommodation.
It began with the sale of her remaining Queensland property, which had been a financial drain for years. “I lost $33,500 on that one,” she admitted.
But with the equity unlocked from the sale, she was ready for her next move.
Leanne found a rural property with two houses and seven transportable units—perfect for worker accommodation. “It has 18 rooms with en suites,” she explained.
The property was a former railway accommodation, and while it needed significant work, Leanne saw its potential.
“When I was there, I realized it had been five years since I joined ILRE,” she reflected.
“And I wasn’t in the same place.” The realization brought a wave of pride and excitement.
Leanne set to work renovating the units, clearing overgrown trees, and upgrading the communal facilities. Her goal was to have the first tenants move in by January.
Despite the challenges, she remained optimistic. “Even worst-case scenario, I’m looking at $100,000 a year in income,” she said, beaming.
This project marked a significant step forward for Leanne. It wasn’t just about the money; it was about creating something sustainable and impactful.
Her ability to pivot from flipping to long-term investment showed her growth as an investor and her determination to succeed.
Leanne’s Secret Sauce: Tribe, Tenacity, and TransformationOne of the most impactful elements of Leanne’s journey has been the support and guidance she received from the I Love Real Estate (ILRE) community.
From day one, she found herself surrounded by like-minded individuals who shared her goals and celebrated her victories.
Leanne’s Platinum Coach, played a pivotal role in her transformation. “She’s wonderful. Her personal experience makes her the perfect coach for me,” Leanne said with gratitude.
The Platinum Coach’s expertise and encouragement gave Leanne the confidence to take on challenges she once thought impossible.
But it wasn’t just about professional guidance. The friendships Leanne formed within the ILRE community became a source of strength and inspiration.
“I found my tribe,” she said. “This tribe is just amazing.” Whether it was managing properties, brainstorming ideas, or simply sharing a laugh, Leanne always had someone in her corner.
The Platinum program also introduced Leanne to concepts that went beyond property investment.
“The change to my mindset has been incredible,” she explained. Practices like visualization and goal-setting helped her stay focused and optimistic, even when things got tough.
Leanne’s journey is a testament to the power of community.
By surrounding herself with supportive, motivated people, she was able to overcome her fears and achieve goals she once thought were out of reach.
For Leanne, the Ultimate Real Estate Success and Platinum Coaching Program wasn’t just a program—it was a lifeline.
From Negative Cash Flow to Millionaire DreamsLeanne’s financial transformation is nothing short of remarkable.
When she joined ILRE, she was facing a bleak reality: $24,000 in negative cash flow and only $45,000 in total equity.
Fast forward to today, and the numbers tell a completely different story.
“I had no idea how much progress I’d made until I stopped to look,” Leanne admitted.
Now, she’s enjoying positive cash flow exceeding $100,000 annually and has built over $850,000 in equity.
“I’m a millionaire,” she said, almost in disbelief.
For Leanne, the journey wasn’t just about the money. It was about reclaiming her life.
She reduced her workdays and no longer feels stuck in a job she didn’t love. “I’m not stuck anymore. Life is exciting,” she shared, her voice filled with pride.
Leanne’s story is proof that it’s never too late to change your life. From struggling with negative cash flow to achieving financial freedom, she turned her dreams into reality through hard work, determination, and the unwavering support of her ILRE community.
As she looks to the future, Leanne is more confident than ever. “This is just the beginning,” she said. With her sights set on even greater success, there’s no doubt that Leanne will continue to inspire others with her incredible journey.
“I’m not stuck anymore. Life is exciting.”
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These stories and the results in them were captured at a specific point in time. The real estate market and the investing strategies used to succeed are constantly changing. The achievements and results of these investors may have changed since these stories were recorded. Each of these investors engaged in in-depth training, coaching and mentoring to be able to achieve these results. Their results are not typical and should not be taken as a guarantee of the results you may achieve. Your personal results will be in-line with the training, education and hard work that you personally conduct.
See the world through the eyes of an economist.
Tariffs and a new world order
It’s all about the Trump Tariffs and the meltdown in markets they’ve caused this week. Final numbers are yet to be confirmed, but on current estimates, the US now has the highest effective tariff rate since 1904!
The shock that this was actually happening triggered the biggest sell off in the US market since Covid – though it has now bounced back, and then down, and then back.. since then.
The only thing I would note here is that just takes us back to where the US market was in August last year, so it’s possible the market is just blowing off a bit of froth, rather than crashing.
What does it mean for Australia?
The direct impacts of the US tariffs on Australia are likely to be small. Only around 4% of Australia’s exports are to the US, so a 10% tariff won’t hurt too much.
But our major trading partners are facing some pretty stiff tariffs. China is now looking at 104%!!!
That might start to hurt our exports.
But petrol will be cheaper
But as the world downgrades its growth outlook for the coming year, oil prices are coming off in a big way.
And where the price of brent-crude goes, so do bowser prices:
And rate cuts!
And with the global growth outlook falling, markets are now pricing in four rate cuts by December. Some economists say we’ll get an oversized 50bips in May! This is the chart of current market pricing.
If that happens, we’ll see a substantial fall in household interest payments, which will probably be very welcome.
But uncertainty reigns
But at the end of the day, uncertainty is the real killer here. Nobody really knows how this is going to play out. Business confidence and consumer confidence are both tanking.
The media is adjusting. Are you worried about the cost-of-living? Have you tried buying nothing but turnips?
That’s how to survive the coming economic meltdown. Cook smarter!
And that’s how the world looked through the eyes of an economist this week.
DB.
Truth Bomb Tuesday: I don’t want to be ‘resilient’
“I should be able to do it myself, shouldn’t I?”
I feel like I hear this a lot. Especially as someone who coaches people into success through property investing, I hear it all the time.
“Sure, Dymphna. You could coach me into property investing. But I should be able to do it myself.”
But it’s not just in property investing. People carry this idea into everything they do. Every plumber has a war-story about some DIY project that’s gone pear shaped.
“It’s just installing a toilet. I should be able to do it myself.”
It’s part of our hyper-individuated, glorifying-resilience culture. You should be able to do it yourself… while carrying your wounded mate through the trenches… with a broken knee… while wearing linen and doing beautiful bespoke craft candles with your children.
All of it. You should be able to do it all yourself.
And resilience is the buzz word of the moment. But too often resilience just seems to be another word for the ability to keep doing it all yourself, just now you’re dealing with flood and fire as well.
Screw resilience, I want a cuddle.
And partly this is about pushing back on the pressure to be a totally independent super-human.
But it’s also about reclaiming our super-power.
Think about what it is that makes humans special.
It’s not our size. It’s not our claws. It’s not our teeth. It’s not our ability to hibernate for 9 months at a time beneath the desert sands.
It’s our ability to coordinate.
A single human in the Savanah is easy pickings. But a group of humans, coordinated through language – that’s a force to be reckoned with.
And with the invention of the written word, our ability to coordinate was liberated from the confines of time and space.
The sum total of everything Sir Isaac Newtown ever knew is now only a single Chat-GPT prompt away.
We are the uncontested apex predator of the world because we know how to coordinate.
But when we try to be resilient and go it alone, we’re turning our back on the only thing that makes us special.
We’re giving up the only competitive advantage we have.
May as well just go ahead and cut off our opposable thumbs while we’re at it.
We are powerful when we work together.
And when I met a new cohort of students, I can tell you right away which ones who are going to be successful.
It’s not the smart ones. It’s not the ones who can drive a spreadsheet like a Ferrari. It’s not the ones who have a keen eye interior design.
It’s not even the ones who work well in a team.
It’s the ones whose first instinct is to be part of a team – to find others they can work with – rather than going it alone.
It’s the ones who aren’t afraid to harness the superpower of the human.
So yes, independence and resiliency is great. Awesome. If you can do it yourself, fantastic.
But this is not where you start.
Start in your power.
Start in together.
DB.
See the world through the eyes of an economist.
Property Market Still Tight
Australia house prices edged up to new record highs in March, as the market remains chronically undersupplied. This is about the number of houses – reflected in the vacancy rate which fell in the month and remains around record lows…
But it’s also about the number of homes for sale at any given time. New listings are trending lower, and total listings remains around record lows.
The upward movement in prices may encourage more homes to market, as price movements and new listings tend to be pretty closely correlated.
Inflation is Dead
The inflation data continues to surprise to the downside, and the trimmed mean measure is tracking below the RBA forecasts. This should give them encouragement to cut.
Housing inflation continues to ease as well. In good news for builders, new dwelling cost inflation is back in normal ranges.
Retail sales softening
The retail sales data continues to come in soft. Excluding food and eating out, sales have now fallen for two months in a row.
On that, I thought the chart on food was super interesting. There was a boom in liquor sales during Covid, but it never corrected. For some reason, Covid convinced us that we just needed to drink more. Since then, liquor sales have been flat while other sales have caught up. I don’t understand this.
Frenemies
Finally, with the US going all-in on tariffs, Republican voters have been following their president in reassessing their views on their traditional allies. 27% of Republican voters now see Canada as unfriendly or as ‘an enemy’. It’s a similar level for EU. That’s pretty wild.
And that’s how the world looked through the eyes of an economist this week.
DB.
The first cracks are starting to appear…
The post-Covid economy has thrown up a few puzzles.
The first was how the biggest barrage of rate hikes in history barely knocked the property market from its stride. I’ve talked about that before.
But the second is how the biggest barrage of rate hikes in history has left the labour market almost completely unscathed.
The unemployment rate got down to a 50-year low of 3.5%. It’s only a smidgen higher than that now at 4.1%.
Economists weren’t expecting that.
And we keep waiting for the economy and the labour market to break.
The RBA in particular has been waiting very keenly for that. With the unemployment remaining at record lows, they have been in very little rush to offer the economy interest rate relief.
But that might be about to change.
Because I get the sense that we’re seeing the first signs of the labour market starting to break. Cracks are starting to show.
The key data point here is the Roy Morgan survey of the labour market. They have a measure of unemployment that is much more realistic than the ABS one. To be counted as unemployed by the ABS, you need to be actively looking for work, ready to start, and not working more than 5 hours a week currently.
If you’re working six hours a week, you’re not counted as unemployed.
Anyway, Roy Morgan’s shadow measure of unemployment and has spiked in recent months. Their underutilisation rate is the highest-level outside of the pandemic.
Roy Morgan’s underutilisation rate is the highest on record outside of the pandemic.
Roy Morgan CEO Michelle Levine describes the surge in labour market underutilisation as “calamitous”.
I don’t know it’s a calamity just yet, but its certainly concerning. Especially when other labour market measures, outside the headline unemployment rate, are starting to look a little soft.
Like job ads for example. Job ads have fallen substantially over the last two years, and suggest that the unemployment rate should be a lot higher than it is.
Hiring intentions in the NAB survey also continue to trend lower, with fewer firms expecting to increase staff levels.
As I’ve written about before, the surge in public sector jobs has masked the weakness in the market economy. Over the past year, almost the entirety of jobs growth has come from the public sector (red bars).
Most of that is in health care and the NDIS. In consumer-facing sectors, jobs growth is negative.
So far this public sector jobs growth has made the overall numbers look good.
But at some point, that’s going to stop, and we’re going to see the jobs market for what it is – pretty weak.
Once that happens, rate cuts should come thick and fast.
DB
Truth Bomb Tuesday: It’s a common tendency. Is it holding you back?
There are a few glitches in the psyche that work as wealth repellents – belief systems that we inherited or picked up that undermine our efforts to build wealth for ourselves.
A good-chunk of my work feels like pest-extermination.
One of the common ones is a perceived trade-off between wealth and happiness. People buy into the idea that not only can wealth not buy happiness, being wealthy actively makes you sad.
Hot tip: the belief system was sold to you to make you feel less bad about being poor. “I may not be able to afford groceries, but at least I’m not rich and unhappy. Dodged a bullet there.”
But today I wanted to look at one of this bug’s cousins – the idea that there is a trade-off between wealth and other people’s happiness!
I see this system of belief take root in people who have that ‘people-pleaser’ tendency.
Remember that ‘people pleasing’ – which we can define here as the tendency to put other people’s needs above your own, if you even listen to your own needs at all! – remember that people pleasing is a survival strategy.
Humans are a herd species. In the old days, we didn’t survive on our own. Banishment was death.
And so we developed a large neo-frontal cortex in order to help us navigate fitting in and belonging with another group of beings who also had large neo-frontal cortexes.
We are hard-wired to fit in and belong. We are hard-wired to please people.
To a point. But the way I see it, that faculty developed to modulate belonging, either side of an intrinsic baseline level of belonging. Little bit more, little bit less.
Not to generate a functional sense of belonging to begin with.
(It’s one of the reasons so many people feel so stressed.)
Anyway, where this lands today, is that people want to please people in order to generate a sense of belonging.
But we also see that people can resent you if you have nice things.
Envy is as old as time. We envy people’s cars, their spouses, their houses… everything. Anything that can be owned can be envied.
But you know who never attracts envy? Ever? From anyone?
The one who has nothing.
If you don’t have a thing, then no one is going to envy you or resent you.
And so the drive to people-pleasing can translate into a subconscious desire to have nothing – to be poor.
To have nice things – even a bare minimum of life’s essentials – can be difficult for people-pleasers.
They feel more comfortable having nothing, and knowing that nobody out there resents them for their nice stuff.
And the biggest obstacle to escaping poverty (however you define it) is how perversely comfortable poverty often is!
Anyway, if you or someone you know has this people-pleasing tendency, maybe check in and see how this relates to the idea of having stuff. How comfortable or uncomfortable are you having a nicer car than your friends, for example.
Poverty can be a people-pleasing strategy.
But you can find a way around it
DB.
Rental price growth is coming off the boil, but rents keep going up.
The rental market remains incredibly tight.
After exploding during Covid, rental inflation has started to return to more normal levels recently, but rental prices are still going up.
It’s worth noting here that this is a global phenomenon. The Economist magazine noted that across the rich developed world, rental inflation is at record highs:
Rich-world rents are growing at an annual pace of 5% or so, the fastest sustained increase in decades—presenting a huge challenge for the quarter of rich-world households that rent.
In some places, rental markets have gone truly bananas. French rental inflation is 2.5% year on year—not much at first glance, but a world away from the 0.3%-a-year rate before the pandemic. Australian rental inflation is eight times higher than in the late 2010s. In Portugal rents are rising by 7% a year.
So we’re not alone in the rental crisis boat, not that that will be much comfort to renters.
There just aren’t enough homes.
SQM reckon the vacancy rate ticked up a little in February, but at 1.3%, there is precious little stock available on the market.
And in some cities, the vacancy rate is still well below 1%. That’s incredibly tight.
SQM’s Louis Christopher reckons the rental crisis remains in full effect:
“National rental vacancy rates rose somewhat in February… But I don’t regard that as a material increase. I would not be surprised to see vacancy rates fall again in March which typically records the stronger rental demand”.
“Advertised rents continued to rise over the month for the capital cities, but not at the extreme pace that was recorded over 2021 to 2023. This suggests there has been an easing in rental growth expectations by landlords but nevertheless advertised rents are still rising faster than the overall inflation rate”.
“Overall, the data we have released today still suggests the country remains in a rental crisis, driven by a combination of excess population growth and multi-year lows in dwelling completions”.
And on the street, it’s still a blood bath. The Real Property Report 2025 found that many renters are having to offer above market prices to secure a home:
New research has revealed many renters are offering more money than what’s advertised to push their application to the top of the pile.
The Real Property Report 2025 found one in seven Aussies have added an extra $125 per week or more in the hope that that will get them across the line.
Melbourne renter Drew Baker told Yahoo Finance that it felt impossible to get a place without offering more money.
“We had quite strict budgets that we established ourselves, but that went up massively…it was incredibly frustrating,” he said.
I feel for you Drew. Everyone deserves a roof over their heads. But to be honest, if three blokes with meth-mullets rocked up to inspect one of my properties, they’d struggle to make it to the top of the short-list too.
But the broader point here is that rental prices will continue to grow ahead of inflation, and will probably hold at their current pace of 5-6% for the foreseeable future.
There just aren’t enough homes.
DB
Truth Bomb Tuesday: Most motivated people aren’t doing it well.
Motivating yourself is easy. Motivating yourself well is hard.
I was talking to one of my students about this after a session a little while ago. She was talking about how she never feels like she gets enough help around the house, and it stresses her out.
It gets into her, and she becomes cranky and scratchy. She doesn’t want to be that person, especially around the kids, but when you feel abandoned and unseen in your work, it’s hard to be squishy and loving.
There’s two things you need to do to fix this. First is, put your foot down and get some help. You deserve it. The kids and the hubby will hide behind the expectation that you’re going to do everything, and the more you let them, the more entrenched that expectation becomes.
So sit down and get systematic about it. Give everyone their chores. Change the expectations.
But the key to doing this well is coming at it from a clear and loving space.
And to do that you have to defuse the catastrophe bomb you’ve set for yourself.
Because when we started unpacking it, I asked her what would happen if she just didn’t do it?
A bolt of fear shot through her. Something close to panic.
Well, the dishes would pile up…
So..?
And the floors would be filthy…
And..?
And… the house would fall over!
No it wouldn’t.
Long story short, she had attached a sense of self-worth to having a clean house. If the house was clean, she was allowed to believe that she was a good person.
Don’t laugh. A lot of people have this idea. I think we get it from our mothers… who got it from theirs… and so on.
But what it meant was that if the house wasn’t clean, she was a bad person!
It’s a shame that we internalise this story, but it doesn’t happen on its own. We enable it.
We lean into this catastrophising, in order to motivate ourselves. The conversation goes something like this.
“We need to do the dishes.”
“But I don’t want to do the dishes.”
“Well if you don’t do the dishes, you will be a bad person and nobody will love you and people will probably throw stones at you.”
“Oh sh!t. I better do the dishes.”
The catastrophising creates urgency.
But then when we look around and see that no one else shares of sense of impending doom, we feel abandoned and unseen.
So we need to defuse this complex.
So before you start a task do 3 things.
First, stop and affirm to yourself that you are a wonderful person, deserving of love, and whether this task gets completed or not has absolutely no impact on that.
Second, find a joyful motivation for the task. I want clean dishes because I like to be in an orderly kitchen. I like to eat off clean plates. I value our health etc.
And three, if you can’t find a joyful motivation, then just don’t do it. It’s not worth it. There are long-term consequences to flooding your system with catastrophe and stress. And they’re not good.
Motivating yourself with catastrophe and stress is easy. Anyone can do it.
But motivating yourself with joy, is an art and an art you have to learn.
But once you do, the whole flavour of your life will change.
DB.
See the world through the eyes of an economist.
Building Back Normal
Building approvals continue to trend higher, with another significant gain in January. We’re still short of the 20,000 a month run rate required for the government’s target, but it’s an improvement.
Consumers welcome rate cut
In more good news, consumer confidence continues to trend higher as well, with the rate cut last month putting an extra spring in our step.
Inflation down too
And at the risk of sounding too glass-half-full, the Westpac-MI measuring of inflation has broken below the target band, suggesting inflation is well and truly beaten now.
Lots of Government Jobs, but not Too Many
I have noted a few times recently that the recent strength in the jobs market is perhaps a bit of a mirage, since the lion’s share of jobs growth recently has been in the public sector.
However, when you look at Australia’s public sector employment relative to other countries, it’s not all that high, even with the recent gains. So maybe its ok.
Romance is dead
Finally, ‘Romance’ as a movie genre seems to be dying. Less than 10% of all films last year were Romance. What’s going on? Are girls turning to Marvel? Or is Netflix and Bridgerton eating the film industries turf?
And that’s how the world looked through the eyes of an economist this week.
DB.
Truth Bomb Tuesday: You don’t have to do it alone. You don’t want to.
We all want the same things:
Good friends, someone to love, decent wifi, and the time to do whatever we want.
The first three are free (my local café has excellent wifi if you buy a muffin.) But unfortunately, time is not. Time is money. And if you want control of your time, you’re going to have to come up with the money first.
One way or another.
If you were lucky, you were born rich. If you are wealthy enough to never have to work, then you have control of your time, and it’s all “Set a course for the Caribbean, James.”
But if you weren’t born rich (like me, and most people on the planet), then you’re going have to come up with some sort of system that generates income, without putting a drain on your time and energy.
You’re going to have to come up with a way to generate “passive income.”
In my experience, property investing is the easiest and most effective way to generate passive income. Stocks and bonds are slow, and building a business is hard (I thought it was easy until my business partner ran off with all the money!).
But anyone can find freedom through property investing.
But! (There’s always a ‘but’ isn’t there?)
But not everyone’s property investing journey ends in passive income and freedom.
For some people the road ends in just one investment property that barely covers their expenses, while the bank tells them that they’re not going to lend them anymore money.
The journey ends in a dead end.
For some people, they take the hand of their accountant who tells them that negative gearing is the best way to save on tax, only to realise that negative gearing is a fancy
word for ‘losing money’, and no system of passive income I’ve ever heard of was built on ‘losing money.’
And for some people, the journey takes them in over their heads. Their properties are bleeding cash, they’re up to the eyeballs in debt, and they’re hocking off everything they own just to stay solvent.
And sadly, for some people, the journey ends in bankruptcy.
And so this is what they don’t tell you: there’s a secret to getting property investing right.
It’s not rocket science. You don’t need a degree from Harvard Business School to make it work.
But it is a well-worn path. People have been there. (I’ve been there.) They’ve figured out what works and what doesn’t. They’ve figured out what strategies end in passive income and pińa coladas; and what strategies end in bankruptcy and bitter tears.
Over the past 30 years I have perfected what I think are the simplest, most-applicable strategies for building wealth and financial freedom through property investing.
And I haven’t done it alone.
I have trained thousands of students over the years through the I Love Real Estate community. And those students, once they reach the top of their game, are constantly innovating. They are constantly coming up with ways to increase the yield or increase the cashflow on every deal.
Or they’re coming up with entirely new deals altogether!
And so what I’m able to teach is the result of thousands of wonderful minds putting hundreds of thousands of hours of thought into how to do property investing right.
If you’re looking for a magic bullet, I’ve got nothing to offer you.
Yes, you have to put in the work. You have to be focused and committed.
And yes, sometimes that involves growing as a person – moving beyond limiting beliefs, and telling a new story.
But you don’t have to do it alone.
There is a formula that works.
It took us thirty years, and it’s constantly evolving, but we get how the game works.
Is it time to make it work for you?
DB.
The big parties’ solution to the housing crisis will shock you.
The brain farts are coming thick and fast now.
It’s an election year after all. And the housing crisis is the top voter concern, alongside the cost-of-living crisis.
But if housing is too expensive, how do you fix that?
D’uh. You make houses more expensive. Obviously.
And so the bidding war begins. Labour says $95,000. The Coalition says 9%.
In the labour corner we have the move to allow banks to ignore HECS debts in mortgage serviceability calculations, in certain situations.
In exactly what situations wasn’t exactly clear (and no media reporting that I saw bothered to make it exactly clear.) The idea seems to be student debt will be excluded from mortgage serviceability tests where a bank anticipates the borrower to pay off the amount in “the near term”.
(Pretty vague.)
But there are millions of Aussies out there with student debts, so it could be substantial.
According to Compare the Market, a tertiary-educated single professional earning $125,000 would be able to borrow an additional $95,900 under the announced policy.
Someone earning $100,000 would have an extra borrowing capacity of $56,000, whereas someone earning $75,000 would be able to borrow an additional $26,800.
I don’t really see the logic here. Unless the government is saying that it’s going to let people pause their HECS repayments if they get into trouble with their mortgage, I don’t see why they should be excluded from serviceability calculations. It’s still debt you have to pay.
Otherwise, what’s the point of the serviceability calculations.
But, logic is probably only a secondary concern, and what we’re saying here is that people in their prime buying age, now have an extra $90,000 in their pocket.
And since everyone in a HECS debt is in the same boat, this will add competition to entry-level homes, and push up prices.
… probably by about $95,000.
Not to be outdone though, the Coalition is pushing ahead with their plan to let young people raid their super to help them buy a house.
The current plan is to let them access $50,000 of their super for a house.
For a couple, that gets us quite close to Labor’s $95,000.
And since this too applies to everyone, the net effect is a more competitive market, and higher prices:
Modelling by the Australian Super Members Council (SMC) suggests that Australian home values could rise by an average of $75,000 (9%) in the five major capital cities if the super-for-housing policy went ahead.
“There is broad consensus among the overwhelming majority of leading economists, and policymakers, that demand-side measures such as allowing super to be used to purchase a home are poorly targeted and won’t arrest the systemic decline in home ownership for younger Australians”, the SMC report says.
According to SMC’s analysis, New Zealand, which implemented a similar policy 15 years ago via its KiwiSaver scheme, experienced a sharp increase in prices and falling home ownership.
“This data shows starkly that KiwiSaver withdrawals have failed to achieve any improvement in home ownership rates for New Zealanders and, instead, have contributed to making housing more unaffordable”, SMC said.
SMC is talking their own book here. They’d prefer to keep the super in the super accounts where they’re earning fees on it, but still, the logic is sound.
But as I said, logic is only a secondary concern.
The primary concern is making sure house prices find new and innovative ways to go up.
That’s how you fix a housing crisis.
Got to love an election year.
DB
See the world through the eyes of an economist.
Jobs Market still a headache for RBA
The Aussie unemployment rate edged a small notch higher to 4.1% in January. It’s been holding around 4% for over a year now, and on the face of it, is still much tighter than the RBA would like.
Especially since jobs growth is strong too, now well clear of the pre-Covid trend.
And breaking that jobs growth down, it’s largely in full-time employment.
But wages growth remains tame
Despite the strength in the jobs market, wages growth remains very tame, falling from 3.5% to 3.2% in the December quarter. That’s soft, and coming off pretty quickly.
Part of that softness comes from the fact that people are not trading up to better paying jobs. The share of workers with their employer for less than six months continues to fall.
But households still feel the pain
That softness in the wages data will be little comfort to households. While annual inflation is coming down, prices in Australia are up a cumulative 19% on where they were pre-Covid.
Which means that real wages have collapsed close to 10%. And on the RBA’s current projections, are not set to recover until 2040! Ouch!
Owning the pipes
Finally, Amazon now reports that over 75% of Americans were using Amazon Prime in 2024. That dominance should be a little scary. Remember, Bezos said the aim was never to sell stuff. The aim was to own the pipes of commerce themselves.
And if one company owns all the pipes, you have a problem.
And that’s how the world looked through the eyes of an economist this week.
DB.
I’m not sure we can take the RBA at face value right now.
So the RBA cut rates a stock-standard 25 basis points last week. It was probably the most anticipated cut in living memory.
The whole nation was hanging out for it.
And remember most of the world started cutting rates six to nine months ago, so we were well over-due.
And so the rate cutting cycle began.
… and ended.
At least that’s what the RBA wants you to believe. Even though markets had given it a 93% probability just a day before the meeting, the RBA wanted to stress that it was a line-ball call, and the argument was finely balanced.
More than a few on the board thought the RBA should have held.
And then the Governor came out in her presser and said that she thought markets were getting ahead of themselves. Going into the meeting markets had positioned themselves for a solid four rate cuts this year.
Those markets were more “optimistic” than they should be, according to the Governor.
In fact, there’s a good chance we’ll get no more cuts this year, she reckons.
And so that was the message. Yes, here’s a rate cut. But don’t come to us like some sort of financial Oliver Twist looking for more. There might not be any.
And the papers were quick to parrot the message. It was a very ‘hawkish cut’. Maybe there were no more rate cuts coming.
But not everyone believed her.
The big money certainly didn’t. Bond traders thought she was ‘talking rubbish’:
“Somehow the RBA is debating whether one’s enough,” said Rob Mead, the head of Pimco in Australia which is among the world’s largest bond managers.
“Don’t listen to that, it’s rubbish,” he told The Portfolio Construction Forum in Sydney on Wednesday. “They’re doing another three in 2025 so if you’re going to keep waiting [to buy bonds] it’s on you. But please be aware that this economy needs rate cuts, and so they are coming.”
He said that without the government sector, Australia’s economy was “already in a recession”.
“If you look at the economy without immigration, retail sales are per capita already negative. Households are hurting. They need more relief, and one cuts just not going to do it. There’s a lot more required.”
He’s not wrong. The Aussie economy is a one-trick pony right now, and it’s all the public sector. The private economy is already in recession and begging for rate cuts.
So why is the RBA selling us on “one and done”?
Angus Coote at Jamieson Coote Bonds nails it:
“The market is right I think,” he said. “[The RBA] will see the first quarter inflation report by May and that will give them another chance to cut.”
“They don’t want to signal more rate cuts and then see the property market in particular take off like it has in the past at the start of cutting cycles and create wealth effect and see inflation increase,” he said.
Yep. The RBA doesn’t want to be seen to be creating another boom in the property market, and making unaffordability worse.
So they’re ‘talking rubbish’ to try and stop the coming boom in property prices.
But look through it.
It’s already on.
DB
Truth Bomb Tuesday: You’ve got to start putting up a fight.
I was reading one of Professor Scott Galloway’s posts the other day. He noted that the wealthy people he knew all had one thing in common.
They REALLY wanted to be wealthy.
Wealth was a focus and they had focus in spades.
Wealthy people, as a group, have the same distribution of lucky people and unlucky people as the general population, he reckons. The same distribution of talented and untalented.
What sets them apart is focus.
But think about that for a second. What is focus?
Well, I’d say a pretty good definition is that focus is the ability to control and direct our attention for long periods of time.
Focus is about controlling where our attention goes.
But this sets up a bit of a funny problem.
Because we live in an attention economy. There is an epic war for our attention going on right now.
I mean, I literally have someone in my team calibrating the subject headings of these emails to increase the odds that you’ll actually open them and give me a precious slice of your attention.
I’m not trying to trick you or anything. I’m not trying to deceive you into opening up something that’s not going to have any value for you.
It’s more that I do believe I have some useful insights to offer, and if I don’t put a bit of thought into catching your attention, I will lose the war, and some other email will win. I mean, Bunnings has a two for one offer on garden plants this weekend. I can’t compete with that.
It’s an arms race in a sense. A very competitive arms race.
And now you might sit back and think that’s nice. “All of these entities out there warring for my attention, like I’m a strategically important piece of Normandy or something. I’m special.”
But you’re not a bystander in this process.
Because you know who else needs your attention?
You do.
Or your future self does.
If you want to change your story, you’re going to need to learn new things, expose yourself to new ideas, inoculate yourself with new belief systems.
All of that requires attention.
And that leaves you out on the battlefield with your little water-pistol, staring down the panzer divisions of Facebook and Youtube and Coke and the Office of the Road Safety Commission and whoever it is that is buying ad space this week trying to get in your head.
It’s a hell of a battle.
But most people don’t even realise that they’re in this war. They’re happy to let their attention be auctioned off to the highest bidder.
And in the process, they end up selling out their future, all for the sake of a few beans of dopamine.
It’s a terrible story.
No. You need to know that your attention is precious.
You need to be able to clearly articulate what it is your attention is going to this week and why.
And you need to follow through. You need to actively make sure that your attention flows where you want it to flow, and that it doesn’t get hijacked by Facebook’s snipers.
This is a new human skill. We’ve never had to face this problem before.
But it’s the skill that in the coming years, is going to separate life’s winners from life’s losers.
Get. Focused.
DB.
See the world through the eyes of an economist.
RBA finally cuts
In what was probably the most anticipated rate-cut in Australian history, the RBA finally cut rates this week, by your stock-standard 25 basis points.
However, the accompanying statement and the Governor’s press conference were more bullish that people expected, with the Governor throwing cold water over hopes for three rate cuts this year. As a result, markets have pared back their bets for rate cuts at the coming meetings:
The key factor here is the jobs market, which continues to remain stronger than expected. The RBA lowered their forecast for the unemployment rate, down from 4.5% at year end, to 4.1%.
HECS Debt to go from mortgage calcs
The government announced that they want banks to exclude HECS debts from mortgage serviceability calculations. If you’re on a pre-tax income of $125,000 it lifts your borrowing power by as much as $95,000. So, it’s a move that’s price-positive for housing.
Exports lifting again
Australia’s goods exports lifted again in January, which will be good news for the government’s budget outlook.
The Deepfake boom
The number of deepfake videos has been doubling every year since 2018. That is, it’s going exponential. Soon, you won’t be able to trust a single thing you see online.
And that’s how the world looked through the eyes of an economist this week.
DB.
See the world through the eyes of an economist.
Rate Cuts are Go!
Bond markets are currently pricing a 93% chance of a rate cut at next week’s RBA Board meeting. Sounds about right.
… especially since the war on inflation has largely been run. This chart from CBA shows that when you focus in on recent inflation results, Australia is doing well. Looking at the last six months (and annualising the number), inflation is running at 2.7% – well inside the RBA’s 2-3% target band. And just looking at the last quarter it’s just 2%.
Housing is still too hard!
The dwelling approvals data came in week again in December. Australia just approved 15,378 homes in the month, well below the 20,000 run rate required to hit the government’s target.
For calendar year 2024, we approved just 170,719 homes – 40% below the government’s annual target. Housing is just too hard.
But in a tiny piece of good news, construction costs are finally coming down, after running rampant for several years post-Covid. New housing construction costs for detached housing fell a tiny bit in the December quarter CPI data.
Less cash, less robberies?
Finally, I thought this chart was interesting. There’s been a long-run decline in bank robberies in America. There were around 10,000 a year in 1990. Last year there were just 1300. That’s still a lot, but I wonder if the decreased use of cash in transactions is having an impact here. How much cash are you going to get out of your local bank branch these days anyway.
And that’s how the world looked through the eyes of an economist this week.
DB.
Brisbane is at a cross-roads.
At the start of last year I predicted that 2024 would be a two-horse race between Brisbane and Perth.
In the end, Perth had more staying power, and dominated the house price league table quite handsomely (although Brisbane still had a blinder of a year.)
Coming into 2025, Perth is still leading the way, but Brisbane and Adelaide are still in touch… for now.
It’s why some people were a bit surprised to see that KPMG had a pretty ordinary forecast for Brisbane in their latest analysis.
(Adelaide is pencilled to do worse, but Adelaide has been a wild card these last few years. 2023 and 2024 were phenomenal… could it pull another rabbit out the hat?)
But is true that the general consensus among property forecasters is that Brisbane is losing momentum.
House values are dropping in one in seven suburbs across Brisbane, the highest level in almost two years as the number of owners trying to sell rises but prospective buyers fall away.
“The Brisbane housing market is clearly losing momentum across both houses and units, so there’s a potential for values to drift lower based on the growth trend,” said Tim Lawless, research director at property data company CoreLogic.
“Listings have increased compared to a year ago, while lower interstate migration and worsening affordability had also reduced demand.”
“The market is likely to continue to ease, and we could see prices moving into a subtle decline before interest rates come down,” he said.
You can see this loss of momentum in the rolling three-month growth numbers. Growth rates have been falling since the middle of last year, and for houses are only a notch above zero now.
On current trends, prices in Brisbane could start falling in the next couple of months.
This sets up a crucial race for Brisbane.
Because momentum matters. And once property values start falling, buyers start to hold off, wanting to see if prices will fall further.
It creates a bit of a vicious cycle, where price falls put buyers off, and the absence of buyers has prices fall even further.
So… what could save the day?
Rate cuts.
Rate cuts are expected in the very near future, and the sense that the rate cycle has finally turned should pull more buyers into the market.
So that’s the crucial juncture that Brisbane faces right now.
Will rate cuts head price falls off at the pass, and turn momentum around?
My guess is that if we get cuts at the next RBA meeting in a few weeks, that should be enough to do it.
But if the RBA sits on its hands and waits for say, April or May, that might leave prices vulnerable.
Watch this space.
DB
Truth Bomb Tuesday: Why are we surprised people hate their job.
Getting your first job is a milestone moment in life. You’re standing on your own two feet. You’re going it alone. This is where adulthood finally begins.
Getting a job is wonderful.
And society wants to celebrate you. You’re not a free-loader anymore. You’re not a bum. You’re pulling your weight. You’re doing your bit. It’s a wonder someone doesn’t give you a medal really.
And so having a job is how you tell the world that you’re an adult now and a ready to contribute to society.
How glorious.
But then after a few years we look up and go, “Hang on. I’m not having all that much fun here.
“I spend most of my week doing what someone else tells me to do. There so much I want to do with my life, and its way more than I can pack into a weekend or a few weeks off a year.”
And that’s when we’re young and still full of beans.
As we get older, it starts to take more of a toll. You’re muscles ache from too much time on the tools. Or your eyes hurt from too many screens. You’re tired all the time, and it’s hard to stay away from the drink each night.
Your relationships suffer. Your eyes lose their sparkle. You’re lust for life is on the couch watching re-runs of Friends.
And now you start to think, maybe having a job isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. And you start to hear stories of people who don’t have jobs. They’ve nutted out how the system works, and they’ve made it work for them.
They’re doing what they want, when they want. Their lust for life is a raging fire, and they’re full of vitality.
Even their skin looks better.
What’s their secret?
Now you find yourself wondering about it regularly. You tell people that maybe you too want to not have a job. Maybe you too want to build systems of passive income. Maybe you too want to have the financial freedom to do whatever you want.
And the response is baffling.
People tell you things like “money can’t buy you happiness,” even though they have neither money nor happiness.
Or they tell you that it’s all a scam, and every system out there is designed purely to rip you off, and if you try, you’re going to end up bankrupt.
Or they that it won’t work, because “Port Headland is one of the biggest shipping ports in the country,” and that doesn’t even make sense, and you wonder what on earth people are talking about.
You begin to think that people don’t have reasons.
They have fears.
(I’m not wrong, am I?)
The ‘cult of job’ has inertia.
People have invested their whole lives in the belief that having a job makes you a productive and valuable member of society. They have given all their energy to it.
When you tell them you want to walk away from it all, it threatens everything.
And that’s why you get so much push-back on it.
But this is the secret they don’t want you to know. It is totally possible to not have a job. It is totally possible to not work 9 to 5 and to still live a meaningful and rich life, full of experience and service.
And how do I know it’s possible?
Because I’ve seen it done. A thousand times over. (Closer to ten-thousand actually.)
I’ve coached thousands of students on exactly this journey – from having a job to having a system of passive income.
From wage-slavery to financial freedom.
You’re not crazy for wanting it too.
It is possible.
DB.
This is the wrong way to do it.
How do you make money in property?
If you listen to the media, or your uber driver, or the flashy marketers selling over-priced off-the-plan apartments, making money in property is easy.
Buy a property. Wait for the market to go up. Sell for a profit.
So easy.
But as someone who effectively runs a property investing university, I’m here to tell you that this is the kindergarten-level view of property investing.
It’s not wrong exactly. But it misses a lot.
And what it misses is important.
The thing about this strategy – we call it the ‘buy and hold’ strategy – is that it is completely dependent on the market.
That is, once you buy, there is literally nothing you can do but sit back and hope – and I want to stress that “hope” – that the market goes up.
More often than not the market does go up – in Australia over the past 30 odd years or so at least.
But not all the time. Markets will often go through soggy patches. Some specific suburbs will get overbought and fall. (Some sea-change suburbs are still 40% down on their post-pandemic highs.)
And maybe that’s ok. Maybe you just ride it out and wait patiently for the market to go up.
But if you’re over-leveraged and negatively geared, you’re bleeding cashflow and you just might not be able to ride it out.
You are forced to sell and usually forced to sell at a loss.
“Buy and hold” is definitely the easiest way to lose money in property.
So if that’s the kindergarten view of property investing, what do I teach at university?
The key take away is that there are dozens if not hundreds of ways to make money in property, and almost all of them give you more control over your investment than a simple ‘buy and hold’.
Maybe you change the nature of the land by getting a rezoning through. Maybe you get more yield out of a parcel by subdividing it.
Maybe you add value by building a granny flat, or maybe a dual occ.
Maybe you bundle a few parcels of land together and go for a full 24-lot subdivision and development.
In all of these strategies, you’re in control. How much profit you make isn’t up to some faceless ‘market’. It’s up to you.
Perhaps this is why people don’t want to know about it. When your profit is your responsibility, that’s a little bit scary.
It’s easier to throw up your hands and just leave in the hands of God… or the market.
But this is not the way to build wealth through property. And it’s definitely not the way to replace your income and create financial freedom.
To do that, you have to take charge.
You have to make things happen.
You have to make great things happen.
DB
Truth Bomb Tuesday: You can’t run from your past.
“Cancel culture” is one the more interesting trends to emerge in the past decade or so.
Not that I think it’s that new. People have been tossed out of jobs for all sorts of things in the past – being a woman for example!
But it seems to have become weaponised in the social media era.
But it makes me think there’s an underlying idea in ‘cancel culture’ I’ve seen play out time and time again in the personal development space.
I don’t have a lot of experience with the nuances of politics and history, but I have helped a lot of people achieve their best.
And it’s one thing I’ve noticed is that once people have identified where they’re going, they want to turn around and destroy, or “cancel”, where they’ve been.
They want to burn up all the photos of who they used to be. Delete all their social posts from that time in their life.
So maybe you’ve realised that you need to have greater faith in abundance, and be less driven by scarcity and lack.
So you feel that to destroy that fearful and anxious part of yourself so a more courageous and open version of you can take its place.
Or maybe you’ve realised you need to fill your own cup more, and stop relying on the affirmation of others for self-worth.
That makes you want to destroy that part of you that needs to be loved and that was seen as a “bit needy.”
Or maybe you just want to be successful and wealthy. That makes you want to erase that part of you that skipped meals and bought clothes from op-shops.
We want to live in the future, and we think we can do that by cancelling the past.
We think of ourselves like a garden. Destroy the weeds that don’t belong and that will leave room for the things that do.
But it doesn’t work like that.
We can only move forward by accepting our past – by really facing it and accepting what it truly is – and by letting it be the compost that feeds our roots going forward.
Because what we’re ultimately seeking to do here is to put things in ‘right relationship’.
So that part of you that was always hyper-alert for threats and who wanted to play it small? That just wanted to protect you and wanted you to be safe.
That version of you that needed love a little too much? It just wanted to feel safe in its place in the pack.
And that version of you could décor a home entirely out of a $2 shop? That was an ingenious and creative version of you that was just doing what it could to get by.
Maybe these tendencies got out of balance. Maybe that started presenting in problematic ways. Maybe, truth be told, they were actually making you miserable.
Fair enough.
But the answer is not to destroy them. The answer is to face them, embrace them, and let them be part of who you are, only in a more healthy way.
I get cancel culture. I get destroy culture. I get where it comes from.
But it is not how we grow.
Growth is harder. It’s not about destroying. It’s about loving and consciously relating.
And our history, however hard it was, has to have its place in our future.
DB.
See the world through the eyes of an economist.
Housing market slowing into Christmas
Corelogic data for November saw house prices growing just 0.1% over the month across the nation. Sydney and Melbourne are slipping backwards, and growth in the other capitals is coming off recent highs.
There’s a similar story happening with rental price growth. Perth is still running hot, but every city is settling down from their recent (and very elevated!) peaks.
GDP is barely moving
Economic growth came in slower than expected for the September quarter, lifting just 0.3% in the quarter:
Private demand remains weak, while public demand continues to prop the growth numbers up. This chart below shows that there’s been a massive difference between government spending and private spending post-Covid.
But there may be a little hope on the horizon. Retail sales were stronger than expected in the month of October. This is the first month in the December quarter, suggesting that December quarter GDP numbers might look a little better.
America is (still) the land of the free
With everyone wondering what Trump is going to do on tariffs, it’s worth remembering that tariff revenue, as a percent of total imports, remains very low, in a longer run historical context. That said, Trump might look at this and think that he has plenty of upside to work with!
And that’s how the world looked through the eyes of an economist this week.
DB.
Truth Bomb Tuesday: It’s ok to need a little down time.
“I just seem to need more down time than I used to. Am I just getting old?”
The answer to that is obviously yes, but also yes.
As you get older, you need more time to digest the immensity of life. You need more time to just sit down and let your psyche process everything in your experience.
More quiet time. More cups of tea. More just staring aimlessly out of windows.
I think digestion is the right metaphor here. If you knock back half a dozen pies, that’s a big load you’ve just placed on your stomach. You need to digest all that before you’re ready to deal with anything else.
And if you’ve been doom-scrolling footage from conflict zones around the planet – that’s a big load that you’ve just placed on your psyche. You need time to digest it. To process it.
And we’re tricked into thinking that it’s something light because it comes to us so trivially. We don’t need to seek it out. We don’t need to engage with a single human and all that human messiness. We just pick up our phones and it’s right there.
But just because it comes to us lightly, doesn’t mean it isn’t massively heavy. Sometimes it is hugely heavy. Sometimes we. just. can’t. even.
We are being asked to process and comprehend things that no human in history ever had to. 1000 years ago, maybe you heard about a war that was happening over the mountain range. Maybe you heard a few stories.
You weren’t live streamed directly into the conflict, or served up a montage of horrifying images, each one chosen to be more shocking than the last.
You didn’t have to deal with that.
But today, we do.
And it’s heavy. We need time to digest it. And we need more time as we get older and older.
And that’s not because our digestive system is breaking down. It’s that the membrane of our psyche is getting thinner.
I remember when I first came to Brisbane as a teenager. It was all so exciting and wonderful. I felt like one of the kids visiting Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory.
I was literally twirling around lamp posts.
But I was young. I was blissfully naive. My psyche was insulated by inexperience.
These days when I got to Brisbane – and it’s still a great city – but I see the heaviness too. I see people in poverty. I see the homeless. I see the people slowly going mad in slow moving traffic.
It’s hard and it’s heavy.
And these days, I just need time to digest it all. And the more experienced you become – the more you understand how the world actually works – the more digestion and processing time you’ll need.
And in that sense, it’s a sign that things are going right – that you are maturing as you are supposed to.
So it’s ok. You need more time to digest. You need more cups of tea and rain-soaked window panes.
It’s ok. Let yourself have. Let yourself rest and digest.
The world becomes unmanageable if you don’t.
DB.
See the world through the eyes of an economist.
Homes sales lift… tiny bit
Detached home sales picked up again in October. Sales are still at a low level, but over the past two years, the trend seems to be upward… sorta… kinda.
For some reason, the gain this month was entirely driven by Victoria. Best time of year down there, I guess.
Jobs market still the envy of the world
The jobs market continues to out-perform with the unemployment rate holding at a low 4.1%, and a record percentage of the population in work.
The unemployment rate is tracking nicely in line with RBA forecasts.
While most of the gain in employment has been in full-time work. Nothing to complain about here.
Who has control of immigration?
Immigration is shaping as a hot-button topic again. Treasury supposedly sets the immigration numbers, but there’s a huge gap between what Treasury forecast, and what ended up happening? If Treasury sets the numbers, and treasury can’t get the forecast right, does that mean that nobody is in control of the immigration numbers?
There’s an interesting trend world-wide where residents of a place tend to massively over-estimate how much of the population is foreign-born.
There’s a huge gap in America, but I would note that Australia’s actual percentage is very close to America’s perceived percentage. That tells me that the issue would be easy to weaponize politically if somebody wanted to.
All I want for Xmas is… cash!
Finally, the percentage of adults who say they’d prefer to receive a gift card this year is up three percentage points from last year and a pretty substantial six points from 2022. The share who want gift cards is also now bigger than the share who want physical gifts. Economists have known this all along. Gifts are economically inefficient.
And that’s how the world looked through the eyes of an economist this week.
DB.
Truth Bomb Tuesday: I don’t think we have the right handle on what this means.
“Slow and steady wins the race.”
That’s the moral from the parable from the hare and the tortoise, right?
Only, that’s not really the take-away.
The turtle didn’t win because it was ‘slow and steady’. The turtle didn’t win. The hare lost. The hare lost because it just decided to goof off and lost sight of the race.
That should be the lesson.
Don’t goof off and stay focused, kids.
But I actually wonder if we’re supposed to zoom out, and look at this parable not as a lesson in how to win races, but in how to win life.
I sometimes think I’m lucky that I wasn’t a particularly brilliant child. I had a lot more interest in horses than in history or hypotenuses, so I was never top of my class.
Same story in my early professional life. I was a competent accountant, but not brilliant. I wasn’t being head-hunted by the big accounting firms.
But what that all meant was that when things really hit the fan – when I woke up and found myself a single mum with a tonne of debt and a failed business – I didn’t have brilliance I could fall back on.
I didn’t ask myself “How can I apply my exceptional talents to get me out of this mess?”
No, I had to ask myself, “How can an ordinary mum, with nothing but a bit of time and perseverance make herself several hundred thousand dollars in a few short years.”
(Little secret: The answer was property.)
And so I think talent can be a trap.
And I think we all know a couple of people from school who were particularly brilliant, or beautiful, and they had the world at their feet.
They seemed to be winning life at an early age. They were the hare.
But they feel into believing that their talents would see them through, and they stopped investing in themselves. They had learnt that you could win life without any particular effort, and so they became allergic to effort. (The hare having a rest.)
But at some point, the captain of the footy team realises that footy doesn’t pay the bills. The captain of the netball team realises that female sport is still woefully underfunded.
The smartest guy in my school, who topped every exam without doing an hour of study, flunked out of university.
And what they see when they look around, is that in the race of life, they begin to get overtaken by the turtles.
The turtles didn’t start strong. But they learnt the power of consistency. They learnt the power of hard work. The learnt the power of grind.
Slow and steady.
And so they became life-long learners. They invested in themselves and their education. The kept at it.
They realised these things were gold. And they look up one day and realise that they’re winning at life.
That’s me. I’m the turtle.
And the beautiful lesson?
You can be a turtle too.
See the world through the eyes of an economist.
America is a weird place
With Trump taking the White House, I thought I’d share my favourite charts from Planet America.
First up, there was a huge surge in Google Searches for “change my vote.” (100 here means the most ever for that search term.) Too late kids, too late.
Speaking of Google Searches, there was also a spike in searches for “Did Joe Biden drop out?” on the day of the election. It kinda blows my mind how you could miss that.
There was also a surge in searches for “moving to Canada”. Just remember, be careful. If you die in Canada you die in real life.
In terms of the Trump vote, Trump made up ground – sometimes significant ground – in almost every demographic. The only two demographics where Trump lost ground was with Men 65+, and with college educated women, and even then, not by all that much.
That said, this might not be the endorsement Trump probably thinks it is. With a global cost-of-living crisis, there is a lot of anger directed at incumbent parties, wherever they sit on the political spectrum.
As the Financial Times’ chief data reporter, John Burn-Murdoch, points out, nine other major global democracies had already gone to the polls in 2024 – including the United Kingdom, France, India and Japan. In all of them, the incumbent party lost support – the first time this has happened in more than a century of election tracking!
This is also the third election in a row where the incumbent lost (or had it stolen from them if you believe Trump.) That’s the biggest streak since the 1800s.
What will a Trump economy look like?
The general vibe is that Trump policies will be inflationary – especially trade tariffs and “mass deportations”, which reduces the available labour pool. Hedge Fund managers, for example, were expecting lower global inflation going forward. After Trump’s win, they now expect higher.
What Trump says and what Trump does are different things, but he did bring in a lot of protectionist measures last time he was in office. And the general flow of things lately has been strongly in favour of more tariffs and trade restrictions, so it’s likely we will see some action here.
Men, this is what women really want
A survey asked women what hobbies they found most attractive in men. Reading topped the list, but shout out to the 88% of women who found blacksmithing sexy. A good blacksmith is hard to find these days.
At the other end of the spectrum, the least attractive hobbies were hanging out in the manosphere, gambling and porn. But shout out to the 30% of women who find men who nominate “drinking” as a hobby attractive. I hear you. We all need a drinking buddy sometimes.
And that’s how the world looked through the eyes of an economist this week.
DB.
What’s driving this fall?
Why is the number of property investors in Australia falling?
Read the papers and it still feels like property investment is the only game in town, but the truth is, property investors are starting to sell up.
It is true that over the past 40-odd years there was an explosion in the number of property investors.
The share of taxpayers with at least one investment property quadrupled from just 5% in 1980, to 21% in 2014 – according to the latest analysis from the ATO.
But that 21% figure in 2014 represented the peak. History will regard that year as ‘peak property investor.”
Since then, the proportion of taxpayers declaring rental income has been falling gradually, hitting a 12-year low of 19.4 per cent in 2022.
Even the absolute number of property investors is falling, dropping to 2.29 million in 2021-22 from a peak of 2.39 million in 2019-20.
So the big question is why?
And should you be nervous? Is it like when you’re out the back of the breakers and you notice that everyone else is getting out of the water? Do they know something that you don’t?
I’m afraid the truth is probably not that dramatic.
Partly it’s regulation. Partly it’s demographics.
Grattan Institute housing expert Brendan Coates reckons that tougher lending rules imposed by the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority in 2014 kicked the trend off.
With the housing market looking a bit frothy, APRA told banks in December 2014 to keep growth in loans to property investors below 10 per cent a year. Property price growth soon recovered, and so the APRA followed up with a new edict in March 2017, forcing banks to make sure that interest-only loans were no more than 30 per cent of all new loans issued.
All of this threw a bucket of water on investors. The share of new home loans going to investors rather than owner-occupiers declined from about 45 per cent in 2014 to about 30 per cent by the time both measures were removed in 2018.
So that’s probably part of the story.
But the other story here is demographics.
Right now, Boomers, born between 1946 and 1965, are Australia’s most avid investors.
As the above chart shows, they got in early, and stayed in for most of their working lives.
And even though they’ve retired, surveys suggest that they’re hanging on to their properties as part of their retirement portfolio.
But they won’t hang on to them forever.
At some point, they’ll want to sell down their portfolios to fund their retirement.
And my guess is that this process has already started.
And with owner-occupiers outgunning investors in recent years, we’re seeing a bit of a fall in the number of investors in the market.
So this is what’s driving it. Regulation and demographics.
But with the regulation mothballed, and Boomers starting to sell up, that’s opening a door for a younger generation of investors.
Their time has come.
DB
Truth Bomb Tuesday: Make time for an abundant future
Are you able to zoom out right now?
I mean, imagine you were an alien that lived for thousands of years. Could you zoom out and hold that perspective?
Could you see this moment of time – everything that’s going on in the world and in your life right now – within the broader sweep of history?
And look, it’s totally fine if you can’t.
Zooming out doesn’t actually help you ‘achieve’ anything. It’s not going to help you pay the bills. It’s not going to pay-down the mortgage. It’s not going to get you a promotion.
But it could – it could – give you greater peace of mind…
… AND it could key you into an abundance mindset – the mindset that’s required for exceptional results.
And how?
Well, first, find a way to connect with how amazing the now right now actually is.
Yes, things are hard. Interest rates are high. Bombs are falling. The worst of us seem to be rewarded with riches and power. You’re priming the kids for less presents than usual this Christmas.
It sucks. I get it.
But, thanks to our brilliant, the-pinnacle-of-evolution-so-far brains we can imagine what it’s like if we zoom out.
We can imagine what it was like to be a cave dweller – what it was like to eat once or twice a week if we were lucky, and to spend our entire lives infested with nits and intestinal worms, only to drop dead at 30.
Or we can imagine what it was like a thousand years ago. Where we worked our guts out every day just to have a chance to survive winter, only to have a
neighbouring army come through and slaughter everyone anyway. Boom. Dead at 30.
Or we can imagine what life is like right now, in the hundreds of countries that have barely a fraction of the wealth that Australia has. We can imagine what it would be like to walk several kilometres to fill an old oil tin with dirty water, or to spend our childhoods begging outside tourist hot-spots in the capital.
We can imagine all this, and from that perspective, we can look at our lives again.
From that perspective, things are pretty bloody amazing. Flawed as it is, our democracy is stable and functional, and we enjoy a freedom previous generations could only have dreamed of.
We can turn on the tap and run ourselves a hot bath, luxuriating in an abundance of water and the energy required to make that water hot.
Or we could, for a mildly inconvenient expense, go to Woolies and fill a trolley with so many fancy delicacies that our feast would make the famous kings of history blush with its decadence.
We can do that. You can do that right now.
The abundance available to you right now is staggering. It should feel staggering.
And that feeling is key.
As much as possible, as often as possible, you should go into that feeling. You should let your mind be blown with just how amazing your life is right now.
(Not to deny your hard times. You need to be honest with that. But that’s a different mindset for a different time.)
But as much as you can, you should anchor your experience in the feeling of staggering abundance.
Because the more you do that, and the more grateful you feel for it… well, two things will happen.
First, it changes how you feel about your life overall. It will make you feel more grateful and happy about your life in total. It is mood lifting.
But second, it’s a powerful input into life’s attractor mechanism. It’s an input that says, I like this, I’d like more of this.
And that in turn, creates more abundance. (More abundance! Can you imagine? How is that even possible?!)
So look, do this as much and as often as possible.
And I know it gets hard to find the motivation sometimes. It’s not going to help you pay the bills today.
But this will set you up for the future.
And abundant future.
DB.
See the world through the eyes of an economist.
House Prices hitting pause
Corelogic house price data for October showed a median gain of 0.3% across the nation. Historically, that’s a fairly normal result.
However, there’s a wide spread across the capitals, with Melbourne, Sydney and Canberra posting falls.
This is reflected in the listings data. Listings are up substantially in Sydney and Melbourne. Supply and Demand 101.
Retail Sales Lift on population numbers
Nominal retail trade held on to the strong gains made in August, with a small 0.1% gain in September. They’re now 2.3% higher over the year.
However, this positive number is largely driven by prices and population. Retail trade volumes continue to slide, having peaked all the way back in 2022. While on a per capita basis, trade volumes have fallen for 11 consecutive quarters now. That’s the cost-of-living crisis writ large.
That said, retail trade is holding up a lot better here than in other countries around the world.
Do we have enough homes?
Finally, some data on the housing shortage. The Economist Magazine reports that Australia has relatively few homes per 1,000 inhabitants, coming well down the list, below all of Europe, and even the US and Canada. The only ray of hope is that we have slightly more homes now per person than we did in 2011.
And that’s how the world looked through the eyes of an economist this week.
DB.
Truth Bomb Tuesday: Don’t wait until you know
I caught a quote from the comedian Conan O’Brien I really like the other day:
“Nobody knows really what they’re doing. And there are two ways to go with that information. One is to be afraid, and the other is to be liberated, and I choose to be liberated by it.”
I like this a lot.
I know a lot of people tying themselves in knots right now, trying to get a read on where the market is going, and figuring out where they should put their money.
Does the stock market boom have legs? Should I pile in to AI Stocks?
Or should I just put it all into cash, a military-grade bunker and some tinned food?
Is Donald Trump going to win this week and become a tin-pot dictator? Or is Harris going to win and paint everything woke?
And of course, since I’ve got a reputation for being good with money, everyone wants to know what I reckon.
I really wish I could tell them. I really wish I knew how this was all going to play out.
But I don’t. Like O’Brien says, I don’t know what I’m doing. I have systems that work across a range of probably outcomes, but I don’t “know” how it’s going to play out. Nobody does.
But there’s this pressure out there that we should know what we’re doing.
Especially when it comes to money. And especially when we’re trying something new.
I see it with first time property investors all the time. They often wait and wait and wait – holding out for that deal that’s going to deliver good profits 100% guaranteed, no risk.
(It never happens. Investing is not like that.)
Of course, in 18 months when we look back at this period, it will all seem so crystal clear in hindsight.
Of course the stock market was going to boom. I mean, of course the stock market was going to crash.
The signs were everywhere.
And the people who happened to find themselves on the right side of the trade, whatever it is, will pat themselves on the back, and tell anyone who’ll listen that the reason they made so much money was because the signs were everywhere, and they were smart, and anyone who didn’t do what they did was an idiot.
It will be painful to listen to.
But the reality is that nobody knows.
And as Conan says, there’s something very liberating about this. You don’t know. You’re not supposed to know.
You’ve just got do your best.
And in practice, that means positioning yourself well. Working with uncertainty is being able to roll with all the probable scenarios.
For example, I might have a hunch that a particular area is about to boom. But if I’m going to buy into that area, I’m also going to be looking for cashflow, and I’m going to be looking for potential to renovate or subdivide for example.
So if the area booms, I do well. If it doesn’t boom as much as I’d hoped, well then I might have enough cashflow to still make the deal worthwhile. Or I might go ahead with a renovation and manufacture growth that way.
I “position” myself to be able to roll with different scenarios.
I don’t “know”. You never “know.” You just position yourself well and see where the cards land.
Anyway, the point is, take some of the pressure off.
You don’t know. You’re not supposed to know. Nobody knows.
Let yourself be liberated by that.
DB.
CBA roll the numbers forward on the rental market
CBA now reckon that “the worst of the rental squeeze is now behind us,” and rents will return to more regular rates of growth.
Not that they will start falling necessarily. Just that we’re not going to see the explosive rates of rental growth that we’ve seen post-Covid.
So less like 10%, and more like 2-3%.
If you’re investing on the assumption that rents are going to keep up their recent pace of growth, you might find yourself getting into trouble.
CBA note that rents were flat in September, and the annual rate of growth is slowing:
In September, asking rents were flat in the month and 6.7% higher through the year. The annual rate of growth is down from a recent high of 10.0% in March this year.
8-city rents
Annual growth rates are trending lower across all of the five largest cities in Australia.
In Sydney, the largest rental market in the country, asking rents fell by 0.1% in the September quarter. Over the last few months, the rate of growth looks to have stepped down more materially.
CBA reckon there’s two main drivers of the easing in rental market conditions.
First, Aussie are ‘economising on housing costs’ by increasing average household size – putting more people in together.
Second, population growth is slowing, which also helps ease pressure on the demand side.
There was a bit of a stretch out during Covid, as people added home offices, and the average number of people per dwelling fell. That now seems to be reversing:
Given high costs, household behaviours are changing to economise on housing: more people are living in share houses, and fewer are living with just their partner, based on data from the monthly labour force survey.
The RBA also recently commented that average household size is increasing, supporting this view.
We’re still some ways off returning to pre-Covid levels, so to my mind, that does open up the possibility that a soft patch in rental growth could continue for some time.
On the population side of the equation, CBA note that net overseas migration (NOM) continues to ease.
CBA note that there is “a strong historical correlation between the deviation from the mean of ratio of population change to multi-unit dwelling completions and rents inflation.”
That’s kind of a fancy way of saying that when we don’t build enough apartments, relative to population growth, rents go up. Rolling the correlation forward, this is what it looks like:
That is, rental growth is likely to return to a more historically normal 3% in the years ahead.
But a key point here is that this easing of conditions is coming through the demand side, which has the potential to be more fickle (immigration could rebound at any moment, for example.)
On the supply-side, conditions remain very tight.
Anyway, that’s CBA’s outlook for the rental market, and it seems pretty sound to me.
Normal times are set to return (as they always do.)
DB
Truth Bomb Tuesday: I don’t need you to be consistent.
One of the great tortures of life is the pressure to be consistent.
We feel we must have consistent opinions and a consistent world-view.
Contradict yourself and people will think you are weak-minded, if not crazy.
And so we feel a lot of pressure to be consistent.
That’s not all that helpful because we are not consistent beings.
At the very least our outlooks evolve as we get older – or at least they should, if we’re getting wiser!
But even one moment to the next, it’s not always clear that there’s a singular “I” having opinions about things.
As Walt Whitman said, we contain multitudes.
To offer a simple example, I can both want to smash an entire packet of Tim Tams in a single sitting, and I can not want to do that.
“Part of me” wants to indulge and live in the moment. “Part of me” recognises that I’ll feel a lot better tomorrow if I don’t do that.
This often gets set up as a conflict between our base instincts and our higher selves. But I’m not sure that’s not just a value statement layered over the fact that different parts of ourselves want different things at any given point in time.
I can find someone irritating and irresistibly attractive at the same time.
I can want to spend time developing my art practice, and I can want to spend time learning about quantum physics.
I can be terrified of public speaking, and find it incredibly exhilarating and alluring at the same time.
There are just different versions of me that want different things.
And sometimes I contradict myself. Very well, I contradict myself.
But we’re terrified of contradicting ourselves because people will judge us.
Worse yet, there’s like this assumption that if we contradict ourselves, then our opinions and desires are not valid.
“You said that you wanted to eat healthy this year, but now I find you stuffing your face with TimTams. I just don’t know what to believe any more. I can’t believe anything you say.”
Worse still, we can do this to ourselves. “Last year I wanted to do art. Today I want to study science. I can trust anything I want.”
And so we feel a pressure to present to the world in a consistent way.
Which becomes a pressure to be a consistent person.
Which is just another way we try to deny our actual lived experience in order to “fit in” with social expectations.
It’s a pressure that’s crazy making.
Much better to just accept that different parts of you want different things at different times. That is just how humans work.
There’s no point pretending otherwise.
DB.
Nope. Rates don’t matter.
One thing you’ve been hearing a bit lately is that the reason why rents are so high is because interest rates are high.
Higher interest rates affect the borrowing costs of investors, and so investors will pass those costs through to renters.
I can see the logic here, but this is not how the market works.
Rental prices are set by supply and demand, with most of the action on the demand side – how many homes people want and how much they’re willing to pay for them.
Rates make a difference at the margin, but most investors will just set rents at market prices – whatever they can get in the market – regardless of what they’re borrowing expenses are.
The RBA released a report last week that was making this point (effectively saying, please don’t blame us for higher rental prices!)
They do note that there is a correlation between rates and rental inflation:
But correlation is not causation:
Property investors cop the brunt of rising interest rates, according to new Reserve Bank research that debunks the idea that greedy landlords simply pass on higher mortgage costs to their tenants via rent increases.
For every $1 increase in home loan interest repayments, property investors raised rents by just 1¢, the RBA found after analysing 13 years of investor tax returns from 2006-07 to 2018-19.
“To put this effect in context, the median monthly interest payment for leveraged investors increased by around $850 between April 2022 and January 2024,” RBA economists Declan Twohig, Anirudh Yadav and Jonathan Hambur said in research released on Thursday.
“Our estimate suggests that this $850 increase in interest costs would have raised rents by less than $10 per month, or just over $2 per week.”
Under the RBA’s largest estimate, investors raised rents by just 3¢ for every $1 increase in mortgage interest repayments.
To look at what’s driving rental prices, you are much better off looking at the vacancy rate, which is also tightly correlated with rents.
The tighter the rental market, the higher rental prices will go.
And look, as an investors, I’d love to say that when my borrowing costs go up, I just pass that on to my tenants. I wish it were that easy!
But it’s not. I’m a price taker in the market. My tenants pay market rates.
And if that doesn’t cover my costs, well that’s on me. That’s part of the art of investing – making sure you’re not losing money!
But this is what determines rents. It’s the market.
Interest rates have very little to do with it.
DB
Truth Bomb Tuesday: Boats are like life.
I’ve spent quite a bit of time messing about on boats in recent years. It’s one of my great joys in life.
Boats are a terrible financial investment. You may as well just pull together a massive pile of money and set fire to it.
But, I’m at a stage in my financial journey that I can afford to make bad financial decisions – if they bring me enough joy. And boats bring me a lot of joy.
Anyway, there’s three things that have occurred to me recently. Three lessons of the boat.
1. It’s easier to steer a moving boat than one that’s still.
I think you can get what this point is about. A boat sits heavy in the water. You can change the position of the rudder, but if the boat’s not under motor or under sail, nothing is going to change.
To change course, you need to be moving.
Life is like this. We sit heavy in our habits and our comforts. And we will often sit on our hands and do nothing, rather than do something we might find out later was wrong.
This is almost always a mistake. It is almost always better to do something – anything! – and get the boat moving.
It’s unlikely you’ll get it exactly right first go. It’s almost impossible. But once you’re moving – once you’re in the habit of action – it will be much easier to change course and end up where you want to go.
2. Steer from the back of the boat
Cars and boats are different. Cars steer from the front – from the front two wheels. Most boats steer from the back – think about an outboard motor on a basic tinny, and the way you change the angle of the propellor to change direction.
It’s a very different way of moving.
With a car, you’re always moving into new territory. With a boat, you first have to drive through where you are right now. You have to sit back and be more patient, moving through and with everything you have right now.
There’s no sudden changes. There’s no abandoning your current position and current trajectory. You have to work with it.
Have a feel into it. Feel what it’s like to be driving from the front of your life vs what its like to drive from the back.
It’s a subtle thing. But I think we all want to be steering from back in our deep selves.
3. The seas are always changing
When we sailed around Europe we became very tuned in with the weather. (It was actually one of the best things about it.)
Some days were great for sailing. Some days were terrible.
You could always fight the sea if you wanted to. You could go out on a bad day and just muscle through it.
But it was always better to wait for smooth seas. It was just so much nicer and easier.
And smooth seas were always just around the corner. (Yes, it was summer but let’s not get caught up on the details.)
You will have phases in your life where it’s just easier to get stuff done. And there will be phases where it will be harder.
You will want to make ‘steady’ progress, but it’s better to meet the seas where they’re at. Some days you will be quick. Some days you won’t’ move at all.
And that’s ok.
Don’t fight the seas!
Anyway, that’s it. Three things I’ve learnt on the boat.
I hope you get to a stage where you can enjoy messing about on boats on a regular basis. There’s nothing better.
DB.
Truth Bomb Tuesday: There’s free energy waiting for you.
So imagine you go into an ice-cream shop with a 6-year-old boy. He tells you he wants the cookies and cream in a waffle cone. He’s very clear about that.
Then the girl behind the counter asks you what the little boy wants.
And then you say, “Oh it doesn’t matter. Whatever’s easiest.”
Maybe you put getting an A+ in customer above getting the kid what he wants.
Or maybe you say, “Oh, I don’t really remember now. It was something about ice-cream. Maybe caramel?”
You don’t hold a clear picture in your mind. You think near enough is good enough.
Or maybe you say, “He’d like a kale salad,” because you’ve heard that people admire people who order kale salads.
The point is there are a number of ways that you could betray that child’s desires, just as there are hundreds of ways that we betray our own desires every day.
We never own them. We skirt around the edges at best. We outright deny they exist at worst.
At any rate, whatever you do, imagine how betrayed that little boy feels now. He was relying on you to speak up for his desires. He was relying on you to help make them happen.
But you didn’t. And now he’s hurt and angry.
Now imagine trying to get that boy to help you on a project.
Imagine asking him to help you stay up and research deals. Imagine asking him to put the time in and get your taxes sorted. Imagine asking him to put in some over time so you can save up a deposit that little bit quicker.
How much cooperation are you going to get?
How much sulking are you going to get?
If you want buy-in from that little boy (or girl) – and I’m talking about your own inner child here, the one who holds the keys to free emotional power – if you want buy-in from that child they need to know that there’s desires are faithfully represented.
They need to know that if they’re being asked to work hard, there’s at least a theoretical chance that they’ll get what they want and that they’ll be allowed to be happy.
They need to know they’re desires are understood. (Can you articulate clearly and specifically what it is that you want and what makes you happy?)
And they need to know that you will go into bat for their desires when the time comes. (What are you doing this week to make yourself happy?)
Without that, the child gets resentful.
And try getting a resentful child to do anything, let alone anything hard like taxes or researching deals.
Connect with your desires. Own your desires. Advocate for your desires.
This is what unlocks energy in your life.
DB.
Truth Bomb Tuesday: We’re here for a good time, not a long time.
If it’s one thing I’ve learnt it’s that life is short.
So short.
It’s one of the great tragedies of life is that you just don’t appreciate how short life is until you’re most the way through it.
When I was young, the rest of my life was a road that seemed to stretch of forever. There was no end in sight.
Even by the end of my twenties it still felt like I had oodles and oodles of time.
What did it matter if I wasted a day? Or a month? Or a year?
There was plenty more.
I can’t tell you what I’d give to have those days back again. With all that energy and optimism and effortlessly fabulous hair.
But those days are gone. And now I have more dreams than I probably have days left.
Life is just short.
Now some of us will push back against this idea. We refuse to accept that our end is coming down the line. Or we tell ourselves that there’s still time to do the things we want to do. Or we somehow hold on to hope that scientist might cure death at some point, just around the corner.
Denial is always easier than facing the fact that we’re running out of time.
But then others of us will take the knowledge of how short life is and work ourselves into a mild panic. We get a sense that curtain is coming down, and we work ourselves into a tizz.
It’s not easy to accept that life is short and that you’ll be shuffling off to join your ancestors wherever they are at some point, probably sooner than you’d like. It takes a tough mind. And for the most part, in our society, we just like to politely ignore death and pretend it isn’t a thing.
We never build that mental toughness and resiliency.
But that’s a shame. Because if we can, something wonderful happens.
We go into savour-mode.
We start savouring our days and our experiences, because we know they’re limited. Even something as simple as feeling the sun on your face can be a profound experience.
And then feeling the sun on your face on your own private boat bobbing about the Whitsundays is positively ecstatic.
Life is short.
This should be a rallying call to action but it should also invitation to savour everything life has to offer.
And I don’t mean that kind of numb consumption that most of us fall into. I mean really savour it.
Drink it in. Soak it up. Get involved.
Take it from an old girl.
Life is short.
DB.
Truth Bomb Tuesday: It’s as simple and as difficult as that.
There is only one thing you have to do. You only have one job.
To be successful, to live a fantastic life, it all hinges on one simple task.
I know that sounds strange. To most people success feels like building a massive sandcastle – you’ve got to layer grain of sand on grain of sand until you have finally built something worth admiring.
You have to fight against gravity. You have to fight against the qualities of the sand. You have to fight against little kids who think jumping on sandcastles is fun. (I mean that metaphorically. We all know those ‘little kids.’ Ex-hubby, looking at you.)
And success, if it comes, is a victory of a million minor achievements.
But I don’t think that is what it is like. Or at least, it doesn’t have to be like that.
Personally, I like to think that there is just one thing I need to do.
My job is to make sure nothing gets in the way of my own destiny.
My job is just to clear the road.
You know that there is a greatness inside of you.
We all do. It’s why the whole “princess who thinks she is a peasant girl but is actually a princess” trope is so universal.
We all know there is a greatness inside. We all feel that. We all feel that we were ‘meant for something more’.
And we are.
And your destiny has its own momentum – it’s own drive. It has its own intelligence. It also has its own humour and heart-warming tenderness.
It is a story that wants to be told.
And in that sense, it’s not something you have to make happen on your own.
Your job, and your only job, is just to make sure nothing gets in its way.
I don’t want to make that sound trivial. The challenges here are substantial.
You have to overcome your own fears and insecurities – your own tendency to sabotage yourself.
You have to overcome a lifetime of conditioning – conditioning that tells you that you are actually a peasant girl, and parties in the castle are meant for other people.
And you have to overcome the weight of expectation that others put on you – to just do what you are told and muck out the stables.
The list goes on and on.
But despite all the challenges here, the important point is that we’re not creating something out of nothing.
We’re not piling up grains of sand – we’re not fighting against the sand’s nature and the sand’s desire to be a flat pile of uninteresting.
The drive for our life comes from somewhere else. The energy is already there. It’s already moving.
We just need to run ahead of it, making sure that nothing gets in its way or derails it.
Do the work. Clear the road.
And then just let your life unfold of its own accord.
This is the only job you have.
DB.
Truth Bomb Tuesday: This is not universal, but it’s common.
Having worked with tens of thousands of students over the years, there is really one fact that’s jumped out at me.
No two people are the same. Our psyches are as unique as fingerprints.
But that doesn’t really help me much if my mission is to give people I haven’t met yet actionable hacks for personal growth and self-improvement.
(Though my guess is you should probably drink more water.)
But while tailored, bespoke insights are behind the paywall, there are still patterns that play out across the human spectrum.
One of those patterns, which I’m going to start talking about now, is often called people-pleasing, though I don’t really love that label, and I think the phenomenon is broader than what that term generally captures.
What I think happens is that if you don’t develop and inherent sense of safety as a little one, you connect your sense of safety to your place in the tribe.
This is a natural instinct for a herd species like the human, but in some people – many people actually – it becomes over-worked. We rely on it too much – sometimes exclusively.
That means we become fixated on our place in the tribe. We want to please the adults and caregivers around us because we believe that if they’re happy with us, they’ll keep us safe.
It’s kind of transactional.
This people-pleasing pattern becomes established early – and it’s not the only pattern we can be working with. We are complex beings. But our sense of safety in our nervous system becomes tied to ‘doing the right thing’ and ‘being a good person’ and doing things that make others happy.
In the extreme, we don’t even bother to see if we’re making anyone else happy. We just think that if we’re working against our own needs and interests, that’s enough.
At any rate, the net effect is that if we’re stuck in this pattern, we feel safe if we’re making other people happy – if we are putting other people’s needs above our own.
Now of course, this is one of those things that quickly stops making any sense if we look at it. Our safety can’t be bought with the happiness of others. Putting other people’s needs ahead of our own doesn’t make us any safer – if anything it makes us less safe.
But that doesn’t matter. If we have trained our nervous system to draw a sense of safety from the tribe at a young age, that’s a pattern that sticks. It’s carved deep in the psyche.
And it’s not something that we can just walk away from.
I mean, I could tell you that there are no adults. There are no caregivers who feel a responsibility to keep you safe, just as there are no adults that even could keep you safe in this crazy old world.
All your people-pleasing and self-sacrificing is for nothing.
“Your worst sin is that you have destroyed and betrayed yourself for nothing.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment
And you might hear that and agree with me. It makes perfect sense.
But that doesn’t help you.
Because now you have to face the reality that one of your primary sources of safety is an illusion.
That leaves you feeling unsafe. That leaves your nervous system feeling very nervous.
And so while you might accept it at a superficial level, at a deeper level, you just reject it. You refuse to update your mental models, and just keep meeting the world as you have been – sacrificing yourself in the belief that at some point your Fairy Godmother is surely going to show up and reward you with safety and blessings.
It doesn’t happen.
You have to accept that there are no adults.
But to do that, you have to find another way to ok being a fragile little organism in a sharp and spiky world.
That’s a whole blog in itself… at least!
I guess I’m just outlining the sketches of a work-program here.
But I just wanted to unpack this pattern a bit, because I see it all the time.
So many people instinctively put other people’s needs ahead of their own…
… and then end up bitter that they never receive the care and the safety they were craving.
It’s a sad story.
But it’s an avoidable one too.
DB.
Jenni’s journey with real estate began in when she attended her first I Love Real Estate bootcamp on the Gold Coast.At that moment, she knew her life was about to change.
What drew her in was not just the promise of property investment but the wealth of knowledge and support offered by the ILRE community.
Dymphna provided valuable insights that no one else had ever shared with Jenni. She felt empowered and eager to learn more.
Overcoming Personal ChallengesDespite the initial excitement, Jenni faced numerous hurdles that stalled her progress until she revisited ILRE four years later.
She had endured a toxic, narcissistic relationship that left her feeling inadequate and broken. The constant belittlement took a toll on her self-esteem, making her journey all the more challenging.
However, she was determined to take control of her life and prove to herself that she was capable of much more.
Committing Fully: The Platinum ExperienceIn 2019, Jenni decided to go all-in by joining the Platinum program. At 59, she was ready to make significant changes.
The first few months were overwhelming, filled with confronting and challenging moments. Jenni’s coach and mentor played a crucial role in helping her navigate these turbulent times.
Their guidance and support were instrumental in Jenni’s progress, helping her set realistic goals and develop a clear strategy.
Achieving Early SuccessJenni’s plan was to recoup her Platinum investment within a year, a goal she surpassed.
Her first two successful deals were in Bundaberg, QLD. Initially, her real estate agent predicted a $20,000 loss on each property.
Refusing to accept this, Jenni implemented strategies involving renovation and relocatable homes, turning potential losses into a $100,000 profit.
These successes not only validated her decision to join ILRE but also boosted her confidence significantly.
Family and Personal GrowthJenni’s transformation didn’t stop at financial success.
She also experienced profound personal growth. The positive changes in her life began to inspire her children and grandchildren, who have now joined her in the real estate journey.
This intergenerational involvement is a source of immense pride and joy for Jenni.
A Major MilestoneOne of Jenni’s most significant achievements was selling her family home in Pelican Waters. This house held a mix of beautiful memories and painful reminders of her past.
After transforming it into a successful Airbnb, Jenni sold the property for $2.95 million, the highest price in the area at that time.
This sale marked a turning point, allowing her to let go of the past and embrace a bright future.
Embracing New Ventures: Wellness RetreatJenni’s passion extends beyond traditional real estate.
She is now developing a 40-acre property into a wellness retreat, complete with cottages and various facilities.
This project, which is expected to be worth $4-5 million, combines her love for real estate with her desire to give back to the community.
It’s a testament to her vision and commitment to creating a legacy.
A New Chapter: Exciting Prospects AheadJenni’s story is far from over. She continues to explore new opportunities and expand her portfolio.
Her latest venture involves a joint venture (JV) for building six new cottages on her wellness retreat property.
With the help of a builder partner, this project is set to enhance her financial stability and fulfill her passion for creating a serene and healing environment for others.
An Inspirational JourneyJenni’s journey from self-doubt to success is a powerful reminder of the transformative power of determination and support.
Her story highlights the importance of believing in oneself, setting clear goals, and seeking the right guidance.
Jenni’s achievements in real estate and personal growth are not just a testament to her resilience but also an inspiration to anyone looking to take control of their destiny.
Jenni’s message to others is clear: believe in yourself, pursue your vision with passion, and create a life you can be proud of.
Her journey with ILRE has not only transformed her financial situation but also enriched her personal life, proving that it’s never too late to rewrite your story.
“I take ownership and responsibility for all my decisions. I am so happy with how and where my life is going.”
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These stories and the results in them were captured at a specific point in time. The real estate market and the investing strategies used to succeed are constantly changing. The achievements and results of these investors may have changed since these stories were recorded. Each of these investors engaged in in-depth training, coaching and mentoring to be able to achieve these results. Their results are not typical and should not be taken as a guarantee of the results you may achieve. Your personal results will be in-line with the training, education and hard work that you personally conduct.
See the world through the eyes of an economist.
Rental vacancies lifting… a little
Data from SQM show that rental vacancy rates across the country are starting to lift… a little. We used to think of a vacancy rate of 3% being consistent with a balanced market, so we’re still well below that.
Home sales still sluggish
In more news that’s not great for the rental market, detached home sales fell again in the month. There’s a slight upward trend evident there from the trough at beginning of 2023, but it’s still pretty sluggish.
Part of the problem is that houses are expensive to build. This chart looks at construction costs in the Producer Price Index. They lifted sharply with Covid, and haven’t come back at all yet.
Immigration still running strong
Despite promises to rein in student numbers (which may be happening), net overseas immigration continues to post solid numbers. I’d be surprised if these numbers fall too much further from here.
Inflation fears give way to recession fears
Bank of America’s survey of global fund managers suggests that they’re more relxed about inflation and geopolitical risks, but much more concerned about a US recession – which would impact all markets. So far the soft landing seems on track, but there’s a lot of time left on the clock.
Why are kids so difficult?
A survey of managers from ResumeBuilder.com shows that there’s a range of reasons why managers find Gen Z employees difficult. Almost as many managers cited a lack of technical skills as there were managers complaining about Gen Z getting easily offended.
Whatever. Generational divides have been around for generations. We’ve always struggled to understand each other.
And that’s how the world looked through the eyes of an economist this week.
DB.
Here’s another reason why we can’t build enough homes.
There’s too many suits in the construction sector, apparently.
Independent economist Tarric Brooker noted last week that there’s a bit of a puzzle in the construction industry.
We often hear how there’s a shortage of construction workers. The big developers are saying that it’s really hard to get enough workers right now.
And it’s one of the reasons why everyone was scratching their heads a few months back when the government added yoga teachers to the skilled migration list, but excluded construction tradies.
So there’s a famous shortage of construction workers.
But as Brooker notes, when you look at the data, we actually have quite a lot of workers in the construction industry.
Growth in the number of construction sector workers has been running well ahead of the population for decades.
“Since 1994 the construction sector has expanded at a much faster rate than the population, with the sector growing by 126.3% compared with 49.6% for the broader population”.
And that has left as with one of the largest construction sector workforces in the world (as a share of the population):
So how does that worker? Is there a shortage of construction sector workers or not?
Well, Michael Bleby at the AFR reckons the problem is that there’s too many suits – the construction sector workforce has seen big growth in office professionals, at the expense of tradies:
The industry as a whole is suffering from an imbalance of too few workers on the ground and too many in the office.
In 2003, professional workers accounted for 28% of the construction workforce. By 2023, this had risen to 38%.
The growth in professional employees – professionals with tertiary degrees and building technicians with advanced diplomas – surged, rising 125% over the two decades from 242,900 to 547,300.
But the annual output per professional worker fell 17.2% to $470,900 from $568,900.
“The rapid rise in the number of professional workers that are now required to deliver projects across the country is at odds with the number of workers ‘on the tools’”, RLB’s Oceania director of research, Domenic Schiafone, noted.
Lol. It’d be easy to say that the construction industry has gone soft.
But developers aren’t employing suits for the fun of it.
And the truth is, construction is a more complex beast these days. The regulatory burden has gone up across the board, and the low-hanging fruit (simple projects on well-suited land) is all gone.
Which is all why we keep failing to meet our housing targets and the housing shortage just goes from bad to worse.
We need more workers – both blue and white collar – per project now.
And that’s why you can have strong growth in the construction sector workforce AND still have a worker shortage.
Man, the housing crisis is just such a tough nut to crack, hey?
DB
See the world through the eyes of an economist.
Is the rental boom over?
After increasing 30-40% on pre-Covid levels, rents have now posted two months in a row of zero growth. Is the rental boom over?
Possibly, but I wouldn’t be betting on it. The annual growth rate, despite two months of zero growth, is still miles above long run averages. It’s been a wild ride, especially for units.
GDP: Poorer households, but more of them
A couple of interesting extras from last week’s GDP data. First up, this chart neatly shows how we are completely reliant on population growth for economic growth right now. Without population growth, we’d be going backwards.
The per capita recession is now the longest on record, though not as deep as the 90s recession.
Which all explains why households at the individual level are feeling poorer. They have eaten into their savings buffers, and if it weren’t for the mandatory savings of super and principal mortgage payments, savings would be falling.
When you look at real household income per capita, it’s now far and away the worst crash in history. No wonder households are struggling.
And not to rub salt in the wounds, but it’s also far and away the worst outcome in the world too.
Stay married, stay rich
I’ve seen this data a few times, but this chart neatly lays out what happens to your net worth if you get divorced, for women:
And men:
Staying married is one of the key indicators of wealth. Though I’d also note that the correlation runs both ways. It’s easier to work through your issues when the wolf of financial stress isn’t howling at your door.
And that’s how the world looked through the eyes of an economist this week.
DB.
Trudi’s story is a testament to the power of taking action and stepping out of one’s comfort zone.As a retired registered nurse, Trudi initially attended three of Dymphna’s free seminars in 2013 and 2016, but she remained on the sidelines, not fully committing to the advice given.
It wasn’t until her third seminar in March 2020, just before COVID-19, that Trudi decided to dive in and transform her passive interest in real estate into active investments.
Hesitation and Missed OpportunitiesTrudi’s journey with real estate began with hesitation.
Despite Dymphna’s urging to invest in Sydney, Trudi believed the market was already too expensive. This mindset led to years of inactivity, where she continued working as a nurse without taking significant steps towards real estate investment.
It was a comfortable life, but it lacked the financial growth and security that real estate could provide.
Taking the PlungeIn 2020, Trudi finally decided to join I Love Real Estate.
The pandemic lockdowns provided her with the time and focus needed to immerse herself in the coursework.
With previous property experience but no substantial progress, she saw this as an opportunity to make real changes.
Trudi joined Platinum, and with the support of her coach, she began to take concrete steps towards building her real estate portfolio.
Deal Number One: A Strategic AcquisitionTrudi’s first major deal after fully committing to ILRE was a commercial property rented to FedEx.
Purchased for $15,000 less than its previous sale price, this property provided a stable passive income of $41,000.
This strategic acquisition demonstrated the value of buying smart and the importance of having a national tenant.
Deal Number Two: Relocating for GrowthRealising the limitations of her current residence, Trudi decided to sell her “comfy couch” home and invest in a property with more potential for manufactured growth.
She bought a poorly designed house that had been on the market for two years, offering significantly less than the asking price.
This move not only provided her with a new project but also capitalised on the natural uplift in the market.
Deal Number Three: A JV SuccessTrudi then ventured into a joint venture (JV) with a real estate colleague, purchasing a neglected property for $195,000 in regional New South Wales.
Despite its poor condition, Trudi and her partner transformed it into a beautiful rental, generating $31,000 in positive cash flow annually.
Their efforts didn’t stop there; they also acquired the neighbouring property, turning it into a rental despite initial doubts about its condition.
Diversifying Strategies: From Renovations to SubdivisionsTrudi’s journey didn’t stop at renovations.
She bought an industrial property off-market, which required significant renovation but resulted in a lucrative investment.
Additionally, she embarked on a subdivision project in Jacobs Well, promoting it as a potential NDIS (National Disability Insurance Scheme) development.
This project is set to generate a substantial profit of $1.4 million.
Personal Growth and Future PlansTrudi’s journey is not just about financial growth but also personal development.
She has moved from a passive observer to an active participant in the real estate market, with a diversified portfolio and substantial passive income of $237,000.
Her net worth has significantly increased, showcasing the transformative power of taking action.
Words of WisdomTrudi’s advice is clear: “Don’t wait.” She emphasises the importance of not letting comfort hinder growth.
Her story is a powerful reminder that it’s never too late to take action and that the support of a community like ILRE can be invaluable in achieving financial success.
Trudi’s journey from hesitancy to commitment, from comfort to proactive investment, serves as an inspiration to all who are looking to transform their financial future through real estate.
Her story underscores the importance of stepping out of one’s comfort zone, taking action, and leveraging the support and knowledge of a dedicated community.
“I‘ve looked at my figures and I’m amazed at what I’ve achieved in a very short time… Three years!”
Book A FREE Blueprint Call With One Of My AdvisorsDiscover how YOU could create a new and exciting life with our unique real estate system to create passive income forever.
Schedule your exclusive, personal Property Genius Blueprint Call today and create a customised plan to potentially never worry about money ever again.
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These stories and the results in them were captured at a specific point in time. The real estate market and the investing strategies used to succeed are constantly changing. The achievements and results of these investors may have changed since these stories were recorded. Each of these investors engaged in in-depth training, coaching and mentoring to be able to achieve these results. Their results are not typical and should not be taken as a guarantee of the results you may achieve. Your personal results will be in-line with the training, education and hard work that you personally conduct.
Meet one of the unluckiest women in Australia.
Imagine having a contract with a builder to build a new home. Maybe you put down a deposit. Maybe there’s milestone payments.
And then poof. The builder goes bankrupt.
So you find another builder. And poof. They go bankrupt too.
No way.
That’s exactly what happened to Karishma Seechurn when Grandeur Homes in Victoria collapsed last week.
A lot of people were caught out by it. On the 21st of August Grandeur Homes told news.com.au that “we are thriving.”
“Grandeur Homes is solvent and is not in financial difficulty. The suggestion that it is in financial difficulty is false and, if published, would cause substantial and unjustified damage to its trading reputation.”
Turns out they weren’t. Just nine days later they were in administration.
That’s left over 100 projects in limbo.
That sucks.
But it’s an increasingly common story in Australia right now.
Are for Karishma Seechurn, it’s the second time it’s happened in a few years.
She originally tried to build with Snowdon Developments in 2020 before the company collapsed. She then signed with Grandeur Homes in 2023, but now they’re bankrupt, and she’s left paying a mortgage on a half-built house.
“I’m super stressed and upset”, she told news.com.au in tears. “The stress of having two builders going under is just unimaginable”.
“I’m really worried about the situation of the house as I just have scaffolding all around and the top is frames. They don’t look good anymore, they have been weathered badly”.
“The company said the roof tiles were going to be on site but it never came, so now it will be over a year that the frames have been exposed”, she said.
Meanwhile, the homeowner is stuck paying a mortgage on a home that she cannot occupy. It is a financial disaster in the making.
“Even though they have gone under I still have to pay my mortgage”, she added.
Oh poor love. What a drama. Having one builder go bust on you would be bad enough? But two?
And now she’s got to find another builder to take it on, which must feel like another gamble.
Because it is a roll of the dice right now. There is still a massive shake-out going on in the construction industry.
Fixed-price contracts, a surge in building costs during Covid, and a surge in demand through the Homebuilder program created a perfect storm.
Builders have been holding on as long as they can, but the storm’s not over yet, and each week, more of them just pull the plug.
Over 3,000 builders have gone bust in the past 12 months.
There’s been a huge surge in construction industry bankruptcies. And it’s not clear to me that we’re out of the woods yet. That number could push higher still.
Which all begs the question, how are we going to build our way out of the housing shortage if there’s no builders to do it?
The housing shortage will take decades to unwind.
DB
Truth Bomb Tuesday: Jobs suck. Let’s not pretend otherwise.
What can you do if you hate your day job?
Well, the obvious thing to do is quit, but then that lead you to having an awkward conversation with your bank manager… and your power company, and the school fees administrator… and now your kids are wondering why they can’t have new shoes.
So let me let you in on a little hack.
First up, if you hate your job, good. Some people love their jobs, but it’s not a natural state of affairs.
Most jobs involve you trading your time for money. You give someone the best hours of your life each week, and in return, they give you money.
This is the world we’ve set up for ourselves, but we need to get as far away from that kind of nonsense as possible.
(This is the central teaching of Rich Dad, Poor Dad, right? Don’t work on your income. Work on your assets to create passive income and real freedom.)
Anyway, the point is, if you hate your job, that’s ok. You’re not broken. It’s generally a terrible arrangement, and it’s perfectly natural to dream of something more.
“Ok, thanks Dymphna. I’m no longer anxious about being depressed. Now I’m just depressed.”
Ok, so you’ve owned the fact that you hate your job. Now what?
Well, the advice I give my students is “Make it mean something.”
The problem most people have with their jobs is that they feel like a forever solution. This is the job I’ll be working in for the next 10 years, if not til retirement.
But jobs don’t have to be like that.
A job can be a central part of your financial plan.
If someone came to me with no assets and nothing to their name, the first thing I would tell them is to get a job.
Get an income stream coming in so you can start building towards something.
Often, a job is a wonderful and important stepping stone in the journey towards financial freedom.
And we can feel an awful lot better about our jobs when we understand how they fit into our plan – when they have meaning.
We need to make them mean something. Then we can deal with them.
But the key here is actually having a plan.
You need to know how having a job helps you with your goals. You need to have a long-run game-plan, and understand where your job fits in that game plan.
If you can do that, suddenly you’re not just working for somebody else – you’re working for yourself, working towards your own financial goals.
And that can feel completely different.
So that’s my advice. If you hate your job and you’re not in a position to quit, then you need to make it mean something. You need to make it part of a plan.
Now… about that plan…
DB.
The finance industry involves many talented people trying to get money out of people for nothing.
At the risk of getting expelled (again) from the Finance Industry Insider’s Club, I won’t to expose one of the most common scams in the finance industry:
Performance Fees.
This isn’t so much a property thing. It’s a money management thing. It’s what happens when you pay someone to invest in the share market for you.
And since I know a lot of people reading these emails are in the early stages of their financial journey, I thought it’s worth highlighting this scam as something to watch out for.
So you pay a fund manager to invest in the market for you. You pay them a fee to do that – normally a percentage of how much money they’re managing for you.
Sometimes – and they don’t all do this – you also have to pay them a performance fee. If they beat a certain benchmark – say the ASX200 – then they get a cut of that outperformance.
The idea – supposedly – is that this aligns your and their incentives. The more money they make for you, the more money they make for themselves.
It’s a scam.
First up, note that it’s not symmetrical. I’ve never heard of a fee structure where if they underperform the market they give you some of your management fee back.
It’s all carrot and no stick. Are we really aligning incentives then? Are we really on a ‘shared journey together’?
Second, isn’t this just what you’re paying for anyway? Aren’t you paying them to beat the market?
Because hitting a benchmark like the ASX200 is actually dead easy… and cheap. You just buy a publicly listed exchanged traded fund (ETF) – like any other share. Done.
And these days, with so many accessible ways for ordinary people to invest in the market, a money manager needs to be bringing some special sauce.
So the whole point of a money manager to get more than what you would get if you just stuck it in an ETF.
But if they do the thing that’s the whole point of what they do? Extra performance fee.
Finally, because there’s no downside for them, it incentivises risk taking. If they take a big gamble and it pays off, they make good money (though so do you.)
But if it falls over, as risky bets are prone to do, well, sucks for you.
So the way I see it, performance fees are just another way for the finance industry to fleece investors too lazy or too naive to know what’s going on.
So watch out for them on your financial journey. I’ve never seen one that was a good deal for the consumer.
DB
See the world through the eyes of an economist.
Capitals march to their own drum
After marching in lockstep into and out of Covid, the capital city property markets are starting to do very different things. Perth is still growing strongly, while Melbourne is going backwards. What happens next? The capitals tend to move together, so which one is the bellwether?
Unemployment rate lifts with strong jobs growth
There was another tick up in the unemployment rate last week to 4.2%. That was despite a strong than expected increase in employment, so overall it’s a strong result. The employment to population ratio remains at record highs.
The rise in the unemployment rate still has us on track with the RBA’s forecasts.
Meanwhile, Seek Job Ads bounced off the bottom in July, but remain weakest of all the job ad indicators.
But they all suggest that unemployment should still move higher from here.
Interestingly, the job ads data is weakest in Victoria and the ACT. Is that connected to the property market’s fortunes?
Air fares are cheap (or reasonable) again!
Finally, after spiking in 2022, domestic airfares have returned to their pre-covid levels.
Internationally though, the picture is clouded by the no-fly zones over Russia, which apply to Western airlines, but not to Chinese ones. Going around Russia adds two and a half hours to an Asia to Europe flight.
And that’s how the world looked through the eyes of an economist this week.
DB.
See the world through the eyes of an economist.
Rents topping out?
Corelogic data on rents showed that rental prices might finally be starting to top out. Rents grew just 0.1% in July, the lowest rate of growth since the pandemic.
Year on year, the annual growth rate is coming down from its insane highs, but still remains elevated.
Perth remains the hottest rental market in the country, while Melbourne is softening fastest.
Changing the way we live
The explosion in rental costs post Covid is changing the way we live. There has been a big pick up in the share of people living in sharehouses, though we are returning to pre-Covid averages.
This seems to have come at the expense of households with a couple and no kids. That doesn’t bode well for the birth rate going forward.
The share of the population living alone is back at it’s pre-Covid record.
How young people spend their time:
Finally, data from America suggests that young people are spending a lot less time socialising and a lot more time on games and social media. It’s hard to imagine anything good coming of this.
And that’s how the world looked through the eyes of an economist this week.
DB.
Don’t believe the hype. A barrage of rate cuts is coming.
Markets have been all over the shop the past few weeks. Less than two weeks ago, markets were looking for a rate hike at the RBA’s meeting in August.
Now, it’s nothing but cuts, with four rate cuts priced in out to the end of 2025.
That has us lagging the rest of the developed world (apart from Japan who hiked last week – though they still had official interest rates at 0%!)
You can probably blame most of that on the ongoing energy shock, as we continue to create an artificial gas shortage at home by exporting gas to China and Japan. Talk about an own goal!)
But with the energy shock rolling on, and rents remaining elevated, markets think the RBA has less room to move than other central banks.
And that might be true. But while inflation might be a bit sticky, our economy is slowing just as fast, if not faster, than our developed economy peers.
And this is why the economists at the Commonwealth Bank are looking for even more rate cuts out of the RBA.
They’re currently expecting the first rate cut to come in November, and for the RBA to then deliver five rate cuts out to the end of 2025.
The argument the CBA is making is that the economy is much weaker than the headline figures suggest. Central to that argument is the chart here, showing that Australia’s economy remains stuck firmly in a per capita recession following five consecutive quarterly declines to Q1 2024:
The amount of economic stuff we’re producing over all is increasing – the pie is getting bigger. But the population is growing even more quickly, which means that everyone’s slice of the pie is shrinking.
CBA also reckon with that weakness as a backdrop, all the indicators suggest that unemployment should lift quickly in the months ahead.
I don’t think you can argue with much of that. The only thing keeping rates up at the moment is the prospect that inflation might not be as dead as the RBA likes.
But if inflation were taken out of the picture, the economic outlook is screaming rate cuts.
Alex Joiner at IFM makes a similar argument, noting that the private sectors of the economy are already going backwards. Right now, the public sector is the only thing keeping the economy afloat:
It’s the same story with employment. The private sector has already started shedding jobs. Employment growth is entirely down to the public sector, and most of that down to the NDIS.
That’s not an economy that needs a restrictive level of interest rates. It’s not an economy that needs the current level of interest rates.
It’s an economy begging for rate cuts.
The only thing staying the RBA’s hand is that pesky inflation outlook.
That’s still uncertain.
But once that outlook clears, look out. Rate cuts will come quick and fast.
DB
Truth Bomb Tuesday: This is how to unlock this mind-blowing productivity hack
There’s this idea that I see pop up in popular media all that time that bugs the bug-poo out of me. And it’s this idea that we can achieve change in our life through conscious thought and action.
“Remember to keep you back straight and your shoulders back. Remember to breathe from your belly. Remember to have a positive and loving mindset.”
What a crock.
Do you have any idea how many things are on my to-do list? You want me to ‘remember’ to keep my shoulders back? Every hour of every day?
I literally do not have the RAM for that task. Nobody does.
The best we can hope for is to sit at our desk for 15 minutes with good posture before we get a terse email from a customer that draws all our attention, and every thing we were trying to do with our posture goes out the window.
If your strategy for change – for any change – involves you ‘remembering’ to do it, then it’s doomed to failure.
No. When we’re building something new into our lives, we need to make doing it easier than not doing it. We need to make it a habit.
Like brushing your teeth. No body consciously remembers to brush their teeth. You have built a habit out of it, so when it comes time for bed, it’s just easier to go through the routine than not doing it and going to bed with furry teeth.
Same story with posture. If you want to keep your shoulders back you need to tonify your back muscles so sitting with your shoulders back is just easier and more natural than slouching.
So this is the golden rule. Any change that is built on ‘remembering’ over the long run will fail.
I’m thinking about this in the context of last week’s post about the power of self-compassion. What the studies are showing us now is that people who are more compassionate with themselves are more able to try new things, and just generally enjoy life. Oh, and they get more done.
It’s a pretty amazing result. And it’s a wake-up call for a culture that glorifies self-criticism.
But the question then is, how do we make ourselves more self-compassionate?
Well, we can try to remember to be more self-compassionate. Every waking moment we can try and hold the thought that we should be more compassionate to ourselves.
And obviously that’s not going to work.
Rather, we need to make being self-compassionate more natural than not being self-compassionate.
To me that sounds like a job for affirmations.
Repeating phrases of loving self-acceptance over and over to yourself starts to carve the feeling of those phrases into your brain.
In time, it will start to feel natural for your thoughts to follow those neural pathways. It will start to feel odd to follow the old ways of thinking.
It’s a practice that works. But it’s going to take some time.
There’s a saying in Kung-fu, that if you practice a move the wrong way a 1,000 times, you have to do it 2,000 times the right way for it to stick.
That is, we have to undo all our training and conditioning.
So it’s not a practice for immediate results. But trust me, in the end, you do have the capacity to rewire your brain. You do have the ability to love yourself.
Now, the affirmations that are going to work for you will depend on your own particular circumstances and life experiences.
But to get you started, PositivePsychology.com has a few suggestions:
- I accept the best and worst aspects of who I am.
- Changing is never simple but it’s easier if I stop being hard on myself.
- It’s okay to make mistakes and forgive myself.
- I am free to let go of others’ judgments.
- It’s safe for me to show kindness to myself.
- I deserve compassion, tenderness, and empathy from myself.
There’s more. But hopefully this gives you an idea.
But get started on it. Self-compassion just might be the key to getting more done AND having more fun.
DB.
It’s good politics to fight against the inevitable.
This story made me roll my eyes a little bit. San Francisco – which is the global heart of the AI industry – has just banned AI software from the rent-setting process.
San Francisco, one of the priciest US housing markets and a global centre of artificial intelligence, is set to become the nation’s first city to ban algorithmic software used to recommend rents.
Such AI housing tools enable price fixing by large corporate landlords, Aaron Peskin, president of San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors, said this week. The board voted unanimously to block the products this week.
The San Francisco ban, which will go before the board for final approval on September 3, opens a new front in a long-running controversy over the role of software in setting rents as an affordability crisis worsens in many American cities.
Mr Peskin said he introduced the ordinance after observing that residential rents were going up during and after the pandemic even as people moved out of the city and downtown office vacancies climbed.
“This collusive price-fixing, price-gouging software will be determined to be illegal,” said Peskin, who’s running for mayor of San Francisco. “Meanwhile, we are leading the nation in saying ‘can’t do it here’.”
I mean seriously. You have one of the best documented housing shortages in the entire world, and you’re blaming rising rents on AI?
I mean, it’s good politics. AI is freaking everybody out, so it’s plausible in people’s (simple) minds that it’s behind the lift in rents. AI is taking our jobs. It’s interfering in our elections. It’s lifting our rents.
You could ride that ticket all the way into the Mayor’s office.
But if the problem is collusion, then before there was AI, there were telephone calls.
“Hey Chuck, what are you planning to set rents at this quarter?”
“Hi Chad, I was thinking $900 a month, what about you?”
(Everyone in America is called either Chuck or Chad.)
Collusion will happen, and we should try to stop it happening, but I don’t think this is a software issue.
They key issue is the shortage of housing, and unless you address that, you’re never dealing with the real problem.
Someone should tell the Australian Greens that too.
They welcomed the new housing minister with more calls for rent freeze.
In a letter to the incoming minister shared with this masthead, Chandler-Mather argued that O’Neil now oversaw one of the most expensive and overheated housing and rental markets in the world and that “all the Albanese Labor government has done is tinker around the edges”.
Chandler-Mather again called for negative gearing and the capital gains discount to be phased out, a two-year national rent freeze and a suite of other Greens policies to be implemented.
But the current suite of Greens policies directly makes the housing shortage worse. On the demand side, they fight limits to bring immigration back to more normal levels. And on the supply side, they oppose the densification of the inner cities.
Now, there might be good arguments for both of those policies. Maybe they align with your values.
But together they make the housing shortage worse, and a rental freeze doesn’t address the underlying problem.
(And to the extent that it disincentives more housing, could actually make it worse.)
But that’s politics for you. Crocodile tears for the symptoms, nothing for the causes.
DB
This is a terrible idea.
ANZ boss Shayne Elliott has a vision for Australia. He wants to make house more affordable for young people by… wait for it… making them more expensive.
There’s a range of things he wants to do to shake up the mortgage market, but among them is the idea of 50-year mortgages.
Elliott said “little things” like the 3% buffer the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA) imposes on mortgagees through lenders to ensure they could service their loans if interest rates increased was perhaps “too high”.
Mr Elliott added that reducing the typical deposit requirement on a home to avoid paying lender’s mortgage insurance (LMI) from 20% to 15% “should also be on the table”…
“All those things should be thought about; how long mortgages are, what’s the actual deposit we do, what buffers we put in place, what exclusions we apply. I think all of that is absolutely fair to review and decide whether we’ve got our settings right.”
He noted that there was no law that said that a bank couldn’t offer 40-year loans or even 50-year loans, but it needed to be appropriate for the homebuyer.
You see ideas like this float up out of the swamp from time to time, and people think they make a certain sense.
The longer you can spread your mortgage out over, the less your regular payments are. If the monthly repayments are smaller, that makes them easier to manage, and the house is more affordable, right?
BUT… you end up paying more over the long run (which is why banks would love to see something like this because they make more money), which means that house costs you more money to buy in total.
So how can something that costs you more money be more affordable?
This is the slight of hand the banks don’t want you to see. In truth, we’re not talking about making mortgages more affordable, we’re talking about making them more accessible.
And we put limits on the accessibility of credit for all sorts of good reasons.
BUT IT GETS WORSE – because if you introduce a change to the entire market, and the market is super tight and competitive, like ours is, the individual benefits get competed away, and nobody ends up better off.
Take first home owner grants for example. They’re popular with first home owners because they feel like they’re getting a leg up.
But every other first home buyer is getting the same leg up, and since they tend to compete with each other in similar markets, all it does is push up the price in those markets, and the homes are as unaffordable as they ever were.
So no, the only people who benefit from first home buyer grants are the sellers. The only people who would benefit from 50-year mortgages are the banks.
Let’s not go there hey?
DB
Gary always had big dreams.Growing up on a property where he rode motorbikes and explored the outdoors, he envisioned a similar life for his children. He wanted to raise them on a spacious property, away from the confines of a housing estate.
The journey began when Gary attended several I Love Real Estate (ILRE) one-day events. Initially skeptical, he soon realised the immense potential and authenticity of the program.
This led him to join I Love Real Estate and embark on a transformative journey.
Learning and ImplementingAt the time of joining ILRE, Gary and his family lived in a modest house with minimal equity and some toys financed by leveraging their home. Gary worked as a fitter and was studying to become a mechanical engineer to improve his income and serviceability for future investments.
Despite the challenges, he was determined to make a change.
His first major step was purchasing a piece of land for $570,000, significantly below the asking price, with a delayed settlement.
Overcoming Challenges and Living in a ShedTo make ends meet, Gary and his family lived in a shed they built on the property for nearly six years.
This unconventional living arrangement allowed them to save money and focus on their real estate projects.
Their first project was a renovation, subdivision, and new build, which involved renovating an older house and building a new one on the subdivided land.
Despite facing numerous challenges, including stringent lending rules, Gary secured private funding and completed the project with a net profit of $256,000.
Successful Projects and Strategic InvestmentsBuoyed by their initial success, Gary and his team took on more ambitious projects.
They completed a three-townhouse development, generating a $300,000 profit.
They then designed and built their dream home, a process that took two years and was featured in a magazine.
This home, built on the property they initially purchased, significantly increased in value, with a current valuation of $4 million.
Expanding the BusinessTo manage the growing number of projects, Gary brought in joint venture (JV) partners, including family and friends.
One notable project was a six-lot subdivision that generated $773,000 in profits.
Another involved demolishing an old house and building three townhouses across from the water, projected to yield $530,000 in profits.
To handle the increasing workload, Gary hired a project manager, his cousin Dan, who brought valuable expertise to the team.
Personal Growth and PhilanthropyGary’s journey wasn’t just about financial success.
He focused on personal growth, understanding that his mindset needed to grow alongside his wealth.
Inspired by his experiences and mentors, Gary and his family decided to give back.
They donated $28,000 to RAW Impact over the past few years and pledged to donate $5,000 after every development project.
Scaling Further and Personal FulfillmentLooking ahead, Gary is committed to scaling his business even further. He attended an elite program who encouraged him to 10x his business.
This led to the purchase of a helicopter and the development of new office space to accommodate their expanding team.
Gary and his wife, Camilla, who has been instrumental in the business, are also planning to build a holiday house with a helicopter pad, allowing them to balance work and personal life seamlessly.
Inspiring OthersGary’s story is a testament to the power of dreams, determination, and hard work.
From living in a shed to managing multi-million dollar projects, his journey showcases the transformative potential of real estate investment.
By sharing his experiences, Gary hopes to inspire others to pursue their dreams, embrace personal growth, and create a life they are proud of.
His journey with ILRE has not only transformed his financial situation but also enriched his personal life, proving that with the right mindset and support, anything is possible.
“Fast forward seven years later. We’re running a multimillion dollar business, we’ve got 31 houses under design and construction and $27 million worth of builds on the construction site.”
Book A FREE Blueprint Call With One Of My AdvisorsDiscover how YOU could create a new and exciting life with our unique real estate system to create passive income forever.
Schedule your exclusive, personal Property Genius Blueprint Call today and create a customised plan to potentially never worry about money ever again.
Book Your FREE Blueprint Call Here
These stories and the results in them were captured at a specific point in time. The real estate market and the investing strategies used to succeed are constantly changing. The achievements and results of these investors may have changed since these stories were recorded. Each of these investors engaged in in-depth training, coaching and mentoring to be able to achieve these results. Their results are not typical and should not be taken as a guarantee of the results you may achieve. Your personal results will be in-line with the training, education and hard work that you personally conduct.
See the world through the eyes of an economist.
These are the charts that caught my eye this week. First up, inflation came in at a palatable 1.0% in the June quarter, and 3.8% over the year. There were fears that a higher number might have forced the RBA to hike rates next week. As it is, the falling year-ended number is opening the way to rate cuts later down the track.
There was more dire news on the housing construction front. The number of residential buildings approved in Australia fell 6.5% in June. The ~163,000 dwellings approved in 2023-24 was the lowest total for a financial year since 2011-12. That’s not how you fix a housing crisis.
Detached housing approvals are largely holding up, but units are tanking. That’s a problem because strong unit construction is needed to bring housing online at scale.
And when you breakdown unit construction, the big falls are in the 4+storeys category i.e high-rise.
Finally, if you’re interested in learning a bunch of new words, have a look at the most-searched phobias in America. #1 is trypophobia – the fear of clusters of bumps and small holes. There you go.
And that’s how the world looked through the eyes of an economist this week.
DB.
This is why the construction outlook has gone to garbage.
There were shock-waves going through the commercial government sector last week when a major developer suddenly put over a dozen sites on the market, many with development approvals already in place.
“Market realities” including rising inflation, labour shortages and higher construction costs have forced private developer APH Holding to put more than $200 million worth of sites on the market and abandon plans to develop over a $1 billion of projects including a “mini-city” in Melbourne’s Forest Hill.
In response to written questions from The Australian Financial Review, APH Holding CEO Johnson Zhang (no relation to owner James Zhang) said the developer was committed to completing its projects under construction including Wellington Health and an apartment development, also in Box Hill, but would not undertake other projects.
“Our intention is to position APH Holding to navigate challenging market realities (inflation, labour shortages, higher construction costs and the like) while preserving our most valuable assets, like Wellington Health Box Hill.”
A spokeswoman from Accor, said it could not comment on the fate of its Novotel Box Hill hotel, which was due to open next year. That site, worth around $13 million, is now on the market with a permit for a 162-room hotel.
A site with approval for a 162-room hotel is emblematic of the current shake out in the construction sector.
Major sites – and many major residential projects – are coming on to the market with approvals fully in place, because the developer just can’t do the actual development anymore.
The numbers just don’t stack up:
A surge in holding costs, squeezed profit margins and a collapse in the off-the-plan apartment market are fuelling a sharp rise in the number of development sites being put up for sale, many of which have existing permits.
Analysis by DevelopmentReady.com.au, a portal that specialises in development sites, found more than a third of sites listed for sale over the past six months (September to March) were being offered with a permit (or an approved development application). This compared with 22 per cent of sites being sold with permits in the first two quarters of last year.
The growing number of development sites hitting the market comes after apartment sales last year slumped to their lowest level since the global financial crisis, according to the latest UDIA State of the Land Report.
Highlighting the challenges being faced by developers and their financial backers, non-bank lender Salvest provided land and construction funding on 22 developments last year – none of which have commenced construction.
“The project feasibility is no longer stacking up. In some instances, profit margins are coming up at negative 4 per cent when they used to be in the mid-20s,” Salvest managing director Anthony Ferraro told The Australian Financial Review.
A collapse in profit margins from 20% to negative 4% sounds wild, but when you remember that the cost construction materials alone is up 40% on pre-Covid levels (before you get to labour costs), it sort of makes sense.
But it’s why Australia is going to struggle to bring a meaningful amount of housing online this year.
And why the housing shortage just goes from bad to worse.
DB
Truth Bomb Tuesday: Time to flip this paradigm on its head.
Anger is the key to abundance.
Ok, we’re a little down the rabbit hole here. This is not your introductory class in money mindset.
But hear me out. It’s true. Anger is the key to abundance.
So to start with, think about what anger is.
Anger is the energy you need to fight for what you believe is right.
That’s what anger is. When you get tipped into anger, what you are feeling is your body rallying the resources you need to fight for what you believe is right.
And that doesn’t necessarily mean abstract concepts like ‘justice’ or ‘human rights’, although it can include those things.
If a toddler believes it should have exclusive access to the sandpit’s Tonka truck, and someone else starts playing with it, they will get angry.
As immature as their boundary is, their boundary has been crossed, and the body releases the energy of anger.
And so that’s what anger is. And it’s why I say that anger isn’t a bad thing. Unhinged, destructive expressions of anger are bad, but anger itself isn’t bad. It’s a fundamentally important source of energy and drive.
Ok, with me so far?
Now, what happens when we develop a healthy relationship to anger?
Very few people do this. We’re taught to be afraid of our anger, and to smother it away and to never let it breathe.
But what would happen if you could overcome generations of conditioning and have a healthy relationship to anger?
If you could have a relationship where anger is allowed to rise and live in the body, without being shamed or shut down? A relationship where the energy of anger is harnessed and channelled into productive and constructive outlets?
What happens then?
Well, many wonderful things happen. You have tapped a potent internal energy source.
(Hands up if you don’t need more energy?)
But when you have a healthy relationship to anger – when you have an energy that will fight to defend your boundaries – you become more confident in your boundaries.
When you offer a ‘no’ to the world, you offer that no with confidence, because you know you have the anger to stand behind your boundaries.
When we don’t have access to the anger needed to defend our boundaries, we have less confidence in them. We fear that our boundaries will be crossed, and we won’t be able to defend them – because the energy that is used to defend them has been smothered into weakness.
And if that happens, that puts us in a defensive position. Without confidence in our boundaries, we become fearful of situations where our boundaries might be tested.
We meet the world with fear.
But if we have a healthy relationship to anger, and we have confidence in our ability to defend our boundaries, then we are more willing to take risks.
Someone wants to work on a joint venture with you? Sure, why not. Let’s try. I can always exit down the road because I know I can stand by what I believe in. I have the anger I need to do that.
When you have access to your anger, you are more willing to meet the world and see what it has to offer.
And being willing to see what the world has to offer is the first step in abundance thinking.
DB.
Proof that the property market has completely jumped the shark.
How much would you be willing to pay to live in an old Iphone box?
What if I told you it had wifi and usb-chargers?
$300 bucks?
That’s the going rate, apparently.
In another sign that the Australian housing market is completely bananas, you can now rent your own personal coffin – sorry, capsule – in Sydney for $300 a week.
I mean, they are “ultra-modern single and double bed capsules”:
We are living in the future George Jeston:
“Experience the next generation of fresh, affordable long-term accommodation in Sydney. Secure your lease today and enjoy the perfect blend of comfort, technology, and unbeatable location”.
“Each capsule is equipped with multiple USB charging ports, power points, and a private keycard for access. Control your capsule’s air ventilation and store small personal items in an in-capsule safe”.
Wow. USB charging ports AND powerpoints. The features are too many to list, aren’t they?
But for me it’s just proof that the housing market is completely insane. Next time someone tells you that the market is going to crash or that rents are going to fall, point to this.
The businesses case for usb-powered battery cages only stacks up because the housing shortage in Australia is so unbelievably epic.
And you might think, well, this is just Sydney, And Sydney is Australia’s biggest city.
But where Sydney has gone, Brisbane is about to go. And so is Perth.
Don’t believe me?
Well, we got the latest construction figures last week.
In the year to March, QLD completed 33,900 dwellings. Assuming no dwellings were destroyed to make way for these dwellings (not a realistic assumption), that sounds like a decent amount of housing construction, right?
Only thing is, QLD added 141,400 people to the population in 2023.
Assuming 2.5 people per home, which is the national average, that means we needed 56,400 homes.
We didn’t get that. We got 33,900.
That is, the housing shortage in Queensland got worse (it was already bad) to the tune of 22,500 homes.
That’s a lot of homes and that’s just in a single year.
It’s the same story in WA. The population grew by 93,800, which equates to housing demand of 37,500.
But how many homes did WA get? Only 17,500 – a shortfall of 20,000 homes.
Again, that’s just in a single year.
Over the decade we’re talking about shortages to the tune of hundreds of thousands.
That’s why, as crazy as it is, capsule homes are coming to a future near you.
DB
See the world through the eyes of an economist: Jobs, spending and gas.
These are the charts that caught my eye this week. First up, strong employment growth has put a rate hike on the table for August. But when you dig into it, employment growth is entirely in the public sector, with the market sector posting no growth. That is, the economy isn’t strong enough to generate jobs right now.
It’s worse when you look at hours worked, with hours worked in the private sector already falling.
Not only that, the number of employers planning on recruiting continues to fall. There’s more labour market weakness ahead.
The CBA Household Spending indicator (HIS) shows that there remains a large disconnect between those who own their home, and those that don’t. With rents growing strongly, disposable income in rental households is being squeezed, and consumption spending is flat.
And with home ownership correlated with age, it’s not surprising to see that there’s a clear connection between how much more you’re spending right now and how old you are.
It’s the same story with consumer confidence. Renters are much less confident than other households, although nobody is having much fun right now.
One of the things holding up inflation at the moment is electricity prices, and electricity prices are rising because there’s supposedly a gas shortage. Worth remembering that this is rubbish. We have a lot of gas. We just export it (… to Japan and China who were recently found to be reselling it for a profit.)
Finally, in the latest chapter in AI destroys humanity, global data centres now consume more energy than most countries. Only 16 countries consume more. Totally worth it for the cool pictures though.
And that’s how the world looked through the eyes of an economist this week.
DB.
Property experts agree: we’re in trouble.
Property experts reckon the housing market is epically stuffed.
That’s the broad vibe.
Specifically, experts surveyed in the AFR’s quarterly property wrap say the current housing shortage is only going to get worse, and prices are only going to go up. It’s a ‘perfect storm’:
High interest rates and construction costs are choking off the supply of new housing, adding pressure to rents, squeezing first home buyers out of the market and putting the national target of 1.2 million new homes over five years out of reach, property experts say.
“With a record under-build relative to household formation, housing supply is critical in Australia,” Barrenjoey’s chief economist Jo Masters said.
“However, it is not easy to overcome a perfect storm and will require a number of catalysts. Building approvals have stabilised at low levels for houses but continue to trend lower for apartments. There has been some relief in access to inputs and labour, and in the prices of some early-stage inputs, but labour costs remain elevated and the regulatory burden high.”
There’s two separate things going on here.
The first is an explosion in construction costs post-covid, an explosion that could potentially get even worse if current disruptions to shipping routes get worse:
Disruption in the shipping industry threatens to inflate the cost of imported materials and new homes, with geopolitical crises in the Red Sea and Asia fuelling the worst freight delays since the pandemic.
High construction costs are being singled out amid a complex mix of factors that have pushed up the cost of building in most capital cities at a faster rate than house price growth, making it less economical to build new dwellings relative to buying an established home.
“The growth in costs has finally returned within normal margins. However, the price of construction is not falling and building or renovating remains almost 30 per cent more expensive now than pre-COVID after an extended period of escalating costs,” CoreLogic research director Tim Lawless said.
There are a tonne of projects across the country that just can’t get moving right now because the numbers don’t stack up.
You can see this in the number of dwellings under construction, which have ballooned well above normal ranges:
So that’s holding up current projects.
But the pipeline of future projects is drying up too. Dwelling approvals have tumbled:
Dwelling approvals data shows just how dramatically the flow of new homes has dwindled. The annual run rate of approvals is running at about 164,000, well short of the federal government’s ambitious target of building 240,000 dwellings annually over the next five years. Meanwhile, population growth of about 635,000 annually is running at near record highs.
“Right now, we are not seeing any indicators housing supply is about to rise,” said SQM Research founder Louis Christopher.
“SQM Research has forecast completions for FY25 coming at just 138,000 new dwellings. Perhaps a rate cut (when it comes) might be the catalyst.”
But approvals go hand in hand with pre-sales, and with costs rising and interest rates remaining high, pre-sales are grinding lower as well:
Ben Burston, chief economist at Knight Frank, agreed the failure to hit presale targets – as a result of lower investor demand leading to softer pricing for new product – had put a brake on new supply. Similarly, in the institutional build-to-rent sector, steep rises in construction and funding costs was not being sufficiently mitigated by higher achievable rents.
At this stage it looks like the restoration of high levels of housing construction will be a slow grind,” he said.
It’s a difficult state of affairs, but the maths is pretty simple right?
Lower pre-sales equals lower starts equals lower supply.
People are always surprised that I know what the market balance is going to be over the next five years. Like I’ve got a crystal ball or something.
But tomorrow’s shortage is being baked in today.
And prices will follow, as night follows day.
DB
Truth Bomb Tuesday: Just because it’s easy, doesn’t mean it’s not valuable.
There’s a paradox in economics. It is the idea that value of something is connected to how scarce it is, not how useful it is.
Take water for example. Water is about the most useful thing on the planet. Without it, we are dead within days.
And yet, it’s practically free because it literally falls from the skies. There’s such an abundance of it, that its price goes to zero.
Abundance = cheap.
This is the same reason why diamonds are expensive. They have limited industrial uses, but attract a hefty price because there’s an (artificial, google it) shortage of them.
Scarce = valuable.
I was thinking about this the other day because I saw a particularly beautiful old Queenslander pub.
High ceilings, wrap around veranda on the second floor. Feature fire place. Decent snitty and chips.
And it was made of timber. Like pretty much everything that could have conceivably been timber, was timber. Floors, walls, banisters, stairs. Everything.
And we’re not talking cheap pine here. We’re talking solid hard-wood timber. The kind timber that makes a builder blush these days. Lovely old timber.
And with all that gorgeous timber on display, it was beautiful.
But it probably wasn’t built to be beautiful. It was probably built to be cheap. 100 odd years ago, when they were still pulling cedar out of south east Queensland, timber was cheap.
And it was cheap because it was abundant.
But then, after the logging was done, solid hardwood timber became scarce. And as it became scarce, it became expensive.
And that’s why these old pubs are practically irreplaceable. Not in their original form anyway.
Anyway, the point I’m ambling towards is that if you want to make something amazing, you don’t necessarily have to use scarce resources.
And this is something I see a lot with the people I work with. People don’t value the skills they have if they’re abundant and come easily to them.
People who are natural people people – who are happy to call someone up and have a chat – they don’t value those skills and wish they had better number crunching abilities.
The number crunchers on the other hand can’t fathom how you can get on the phone with someone without rehearsing in front of the mirror for a couple of hours first. To them, people skills are the skills worth having.
And you can see this play out in my career too. I’ve always been a pretty comfortable public speaker, but I never valued that. It seemed too easy to even call it a skill. It wasn’t until someone showed me how I could turn my natural talents in to my current career that things really took of.
So this is my advice – to you and to everyone. Take a look at your natural talents. There might be things that come so naturally to you that you don’t even realise they’re a skill.
And just because it comes easily to you, doesn’t mean it’s not valuable. There’s somebody out there who is going to think that it’s nothing short of a super-power.
And then once you’ve figured that out, build your investment strategy and career around the talents you have in abundance.
It will seem like it’s too easy. But that’s ok.
Life is allowed to be easy you know.
DB.
Jeff and Sarah’s story is one of resilience and determination, marked by extraordinary feats and a relentless pursuit of success.Born in a small town in New Zealand, Jeff grew up in an environment where being in the spotlight didn’t come naturally.
His parents owned the local home furnishing store, and this early exposure to self-employment shaped his entrepreneurial spirit.
Physical and Mental ChallengesA few years ago Jeff took on a daring challenge that tested his physical and mental limits — swimming a mile in freezing temperatures.
High in the mountains at Thredbo, New South Wales, Jeff swam a mile in 4-5°C water, an achievement that only two out of nine participants completed!
This feat required not just physical endurance but a strong mental focus, something Jeff had cultivated through rigorous training and self-discipline.
Transitioning to Real Estate: A New AdventureIn 2018, after years of running small businesses and dealing with the challenges of obtaining finance, Jeff, alongside his partner Sarah, attended a free I Love Real Estate seminar.
At the time, Jeff was self-employed in the blinds and shutters business, while Sarah was working in aged care, a job she found unfulfilling.
Drawn by the promise of financial freedom and intrigued by the opportunities in real estate, they decided to dive into this new venture.
Jeff, who had always been entrepreneurial, saw this as a perfect chance to leverage his skills and ambition.
Learning and GrowingTheir journey in real estate began with education. Jeff and Sarah signed up for a series of intensive courses and workshops.
The initial phase was filled with excitement and a desire to try every strategy they learned. However, this approach led to a lack of focus.
Recognising the need for clarity, Jeff sought guidance from a coach who helped them identify the best strategies for their situation.
The Breakthrough DealTheir first major success came from a property in their local area.
Despite the challenges posed by the pandemic, they managed to complete a subdivision and renovation project that resulted in a profitable sale.
The market’s unexpected behaviour during the pandemic worked in their favour, leading to multiple interested buyers and a successful sale.
This project not only brought financial gain but also reinforced their confidence in their chosen path.
Bigger Challenges, Greater RewardsEncouraged by their initial success, Jeff and Sarah ventured into commercial real estate. One notable project involved building five commercial units.
The project was fraught with challenges, including unexpected costs and financing issues due to the pandemic. However, their perseverance paid off, resulting in a $300,000 profit.
This experience taught Jeff the importance of building strong relationships with contractors and understanding the intricacies of development.
Staying Local vs. Going InterstateJeff faced a significant mental barrier in expanding their investments beyond their local area. However, by shaking enough trees, they found lucrative opportunities interstate.
They purchased and leased warehouses, significantly increasing their value and cash flow.
This shift not only diversified their portfolio but also demonstrated the importance of adapting to market conditions and being open to new opportunities.
“…you can sit in as many seminars as you like, but you never learn as much as being out in the field doing deals.”
Building Strong Family and CommunityFor Jeff, real estate is not just about financial success but also about creating a legacy for future generations.
He is passionate about involving his children in the business, ensuring they learn the value of hard work and smart investing.
Jeff and Sarah’s commitment to giving back is evident in their support for various charitable causes, including programs for young people with disabilities and disadvantaged youth.
Embracing Life’s Adventures Beyond Real EstateOutside of real estate, Jeff and Sarah live life to the fullest.
Jeff continues to push his physical limits with extreme swims and other adventurous pursuits.
Sarah, having left her job in aged care, now works in community-oriented roles and has even bought a boat with her friend, sharing her passion for sailing.
A Journey of TransformationFrom swimming in icy waters to navigating the complex world of real estate, Jeff’s journey is a testament to the power of resilience, education, and unwavering determination.
Their story is one of personal growth, financial success, and giving back to the community.
Jeff and Sarah have not only transformed their own lives but also created a positive impact on those around them, proving that with the right mindset and support, incredible transformations are possible.
Jeff’s journey is a powerful reminder that stepping out of your comfort zone and embracing new challenges can lead to extraordinary success and fulfillment.
“Every time I go along to an I Love Real Estate weekend, it’s a bit like coming home.”
Book A FREE Blueprint Call With One Of My AdvisorsDiscover how YOU could create a new and exciting life with our unique real estate system to create passive income forever.
Schedule your exclusive, personal Property Genius Blueprint Call today and create a customised plan to potentially never worry about money ever again.
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These stories and the results in them were captured at a specific point in time. The real estate market and the investing strategies used to succeed are constantly changing. The achievements and results of these investors may have changed since these stories were recorded. Each of these investors engaged in in-depth training, coaching and mentoring to be able to achieve these results. Their results are not typical and should not be taken as a guarantee of the results you may achieve. Your personal results will be in-line with the training, education and hard work that you personally conduct.
Truth Bomb Tuesday: Yoda was a product of his time.
I rewatched The Empire Strikes Back the other day, and I think I know what’s wrong with the world.
(It’s amazing how well that film holds up. Classic.)
Anyway, there’s a point where Luke is deciding to rush off and help Hans and Leia, while Yoda and Obi Wan are trying to talk him out of it.
(If you think that having a 900-year-old Jedi master and a Jedi ghost from the spirit realm telling you that your current course is going to end in complete disaster – if you think that would be enough to make you stop and consider what you’re doing, you’ve never met a teenage boy.)
Anyway, at some point in the discussion Yoda says to him:
“Anger… fear… aggression. The dark side are they. Easily they flow, quick to join you in a fight. If once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny, consume you it will, as it did Obi-Wan’s apprentice.”
I actually had to stop and rewind it to see that I’d heard it right.
Because it is just epicly bad advice. Like close to the worst advice I’ve ever heard.
When I first heard it – probably in the cinemas – it seemed to make sense. It fits the playbook.
Getting angry is bad. Being scared is bad. Being aggressive is bad. They are literally evil.
And so we must do everything in our power to avoid going over to the dark side. We must exile those feelings from the body, and only flow towards love and kindness and helping old Jedi masters across the street.
We have raised generations of children on exactly this advice.
But I’ve had a few more orbits round the death star now. And I’ve had to work with hundreds of young property Jedi’s.
And so now when I hear these words it just smacks me in the face – like it is the worst possible thing to tell someone.
Anger isn’t bad or ‘dark’. (Hurting someone isn’t cool, but let’s not conflate the two.) Anger is the feeling that comes when something isn’t right in your star system. A line has been crossed. And injustice has been done.
And the energy of anger, when properly channelled, can be an immense source of power.
Same story with fear. Fear is an essential and necessary emotion. It goes hand in hand with being human. If we don’t allow ourselves to feel it, we disconnect ourselves from our felt body and an important source of knowing and intuition.
And then aggression? Well, one person’s aggression is another person’s assertive, and as someone who’s grown up in a world where I was constantly told that women shouldn’t be too ‘bossy’, I want to say that sometimes you have to fight for what you believe in.
Anyway, I think Lucas was tapping into an idea that was in the Zeitgeist of his age. Being calm and gentle is always good. Being angry and fearful is always bad.
And for generations we tied ourselves up in knots trying to uphold that ideal, smothering and bottling up the fear and anger we actually felt.
It’s not what we feel, but how we work with what we feel.
Seriously. You’d think a 900 year old Jedi master would know better.
DB.
See the world through the eyes of an economist: Rents, CBA forecasts and job ads.
These are the charts that caught my eye this week. First up, SQM Research released their rental data, which saw unit rents post a small fall – the first since Covid. Detached housing rents however continue to rise.
CBA published their forecasts for inflation. Interestingly, they expect inflation to be much lower than the RBA is currently predicting.
The key argument here is that inflation on discretionary items – which are more sensitive the economic cycle, are crashing quickly. Headline inflation will follow in short order. For that reason, CBA is not expecting more rate hikes this cycle.
The number of job ads newly advertised on SEEK in Australia fell 1.5% in June, back to its pre-Covid average.
All of the job ads series in Australia (there’s a few of them) are now falling quickly, suggesting weaker labour market outcomes ahead.
Retail trade numbers were up a little in the month. Growth has been flat for a while, but in a levels sense, remain well up on their pre-Covid trend. It could be worse.
And finally, not that anyone is counting, but America has far and away the most number of stars on it’s flag. Australia is outside the top 10. Good job ‘Merica.
And that’s how the world looked through the eyes of an economist this week.
DB.
Cecilia and Bunawat found themselves in a financial quagmire.With personal loans amounting to $42,000 and an annual combined income of $50,000, the future seemed bleak.
Bunawat had a lofty dream of achieving $250,000 in five years, but given their situation, it felt like a fantasy. They couldn’t even fathom reaching such a milestone.
Finding FocusTheir lives began to change when they attended an I Love Real Estate bootcamp. This was a significant turning point.
Instead of following conventional wisdom and buying an apartment in the city, they decided to purchase an older house with substantial land in Werribee, an area within their budget.
They bought their first property for $270,000. This was more than just a purchase; it was a beacon of hope.
“After attending bootcamp, instead of buying an apartment in the city, we decided to buy an older house with big land in an area that we could afford.”
Overcoming Limiting BeliefsCecilia and Bunawat held onto an old belief that taking loans was detrimental, so they saved for deposits instead of leveraging equity.
This belief, coupled with their perceived lack of money and experience, made them hesitant.
Nevertheless, they took a bold step and bought the next-door property for $295,000. This decision was fueled by a mix of fear and determination.
The Mindset Shift: Entering Active Real Estate InvestmentThe value of their properties increased significantly, a revelation that shifted their mindset dramatically.
They realised the potential of real estate investment and decided to take a more active role in their property journey, returning to their real estate education for guidance.
They purchased a property in Traralgon for $129,000 and invested $14,000 in renovations.
This project was a confidence builder, a crucial step in transforming theory into practice.
Joining Platinum and Seeing ResultsFeeling motivated and seeking more personalised guidance, they joined the Platinum program. Their post-Platinum journey saw immediate success.
They sold the Traralgon property for $167,000, making a profit of $22,000. This was a significant validation of their efforts.
This success was followed by the sale of a property in Ballarat East for $325,000, netting another $21,000 in profit.
These victories were more than financial gains; they were affirmations of their newfound skills and determination.
Joint Ventures and Major ProjectsWith newfound confidence and knowledge, Cecilia and Bunawat ventured into joint ventures (JVs). They bought a property in Ballarat for $335,000 and sold it for $565,000, making a $22,000 profit.
Their most significant project was a duplex in Doncaster East. Purchased for $890,000, they spent $1.2 million on construction.
They sold one unit for $1.65 million, realizing an impressive profit of $920,000. This was a dream come true, a testament to their hard work and strategic planning.
Current Deals and Future ProspectsTheir current deals include another JV duplex in Doncaster East, purchased for $1.3 million, with an expected profit of $550,000 in 2.5 years.
They are also working on a 1 into 3 development in Mount Albert North, bought for $2.285 million, with an expected profit of $700,000 in 1.5 years.
These projects are not just numbers; they represent the culmination of their journey from doubt to confidence.
Achieving Financial Freedom and Giving BackToday, Cecilia and Bunawat have a net wealth of approximately $2.1 million. Bunawat has transitioned to being a full-time mortgage broker, and the couple enjoys the joy, fulfillment, and choices that financial freedom brings.
They are now in a position to help others, such as assisting Bunawat’s mother in downsizing to a more manageable property and aiding a friend in avoiding mortgagee possession.
These acts of generosity are deeply personal, reflecting their gratitude and desire to give back.
Community Impact and Personal GrowthCecilia and Bunawat’s journey has also had a ripple effect on their community. They have helped friends and family members improve their living situations and gain financial independence.
Their success story serves as an inspiration, demonstrating that with perseverance, education, and a shift in mindset, anyone can turn their financial dreams into reality.
Final ThoughtsFrom being burdened by debt to achieving substantial financial success, Cecilia and Bunawat’s journey is a testament to the power of real estate investment and personal growth.
Their story highlights the importance of education, mindset shifts, and taking bold steps towards one’s goals.
Their journey not only transformed their lives but also positively impacted those around them, proving that success is not just about financial gain but also about making a difference in the community.
Cecilia and Bunawat’s story is one of resilience, learning, and unwavering belief in a better future.
It’s a story that reminds us that no matter how daunting the starting point, with determination and the right guidance, incredible transformations are possible.
“The JV we are doing will help our JV partners to live in a sought-after area where they can raise their family in a good school.”
Book A FREE Blueprint Call With One Of My AdvisorsDiscover how YOU could create a new and exciting life with our unique real estate system to create passive income forever.
Schedule your exclusive, personal Property Genius Blueprint Call today and create a customised plan to potentially never worry about money ever again.
Book Your FREE Blueprint Call Here
These stories and the results in them were captured at a specific point in time. The real estate market and the investing strategies used to succeed are constantly changing. The achievements and results of these investors may have changed since these stories were recorded. Each of these investors engaged in in-depth training, coaching and mentoring to be able to achieve these results. Their results are not typical and should not be taken as a guarantee of the results you may achieve. Your personal results will be in-line with the training, education and hard work that you personally conduct.
See the world through the eyes of an economist: Jobs data, retail spending and loneliness.
These are the charts that caught my eye this week. First up, the unemployment rate fell from 4.1% to 4.0% last week. The labour market remains healthy, and is broadly tracking the RBA and government forecasts.
A lot of the employment growth recently has been in full time work, but the lift in the number of Aussies holding multiple jobs might be a little concerning. It’s probably indicative of cost-of-living pressures.
But with the unemployment rate overall holding at low levels, it probably does push the prospect of rate cuts further back. As the chart below shows, historically the RBA tends to cut rates after the unemployment rate lifts:
That said, the unemployment rate seems destined to lift sooner or later. The ANZ job ads series was down 2.1% in May and the trend is firmly downwards.
Likewise, the ratio of job applications to job ads on Seek is clearly trending higher as well.
There’s an interesting demographic breakdown on retail spending at the moment. The younger you are, the more heavily you’re cutting back spending, while older generations are actually increasing spending.
However, the lift in personal finance approvals for household goods that happened in Covid is yet to be unwound. Credit is the new normal:
Finally, I thought this chart was interesting. Americans are spending almost 10 more hours alone than they were in 2023. Loneliness and alienation breed all sorts of social ills. I don’t think this is a good thing.
And that’s how the world looked through the eyes of an economist this week.
DB.
Michael, a Sydney resident, embarked on his real estate journey with I Love Real Estate in 2016.His background in property was limited, shaped by basic knowledge and family experiences. This is the story of how Michael transformed his life and built a thriving property portfolio through education, determination, and strategic investments.
“Before joining, I didn’t really know much about property to be honest.”
Humble BeginningsMichael’s initial foray into property investment was marred by challenges. His first property purchase with his wife was fraught with indecision and conflicting advice, leading to a long and cumbersome process.
Additionally, assisting his parents with the purchase of four investment properties in Brisbane revealed the pitfalls of relying on unverified advice. These experiences motivated Michael to seek proper education in real estate to better navigate future investments.
Joining ILRE and First StepsIn 2016, Michael and his wife joined ILRE and quickly adopted council auctions as their initial strategy.
They successfully purchased three properties, with their standout deal being a house in regional New South Wales for $18,500.
After spending $20,000 on renovations, they rented it out for a year before selling it for a $100,000 profit. This initial success laid the foundation for their confidence and future investments.
Strategic Developments and Granny FlatsCapitalising on their momentum, Michael and his wife built a granny flat on their property, generating $450 per week in cash flow.
They also ventured into more complex projects, such as purchasing a property in Sydney with the intention of developing townhouses or a boarding house.
Despite facing challenges with the council and DA submissions, they ultimately sold the property for a profit and moved on to more promising opportunities.
Rooming Houses and Family ProjectsIn 2020, Michael initiated rooming house projects for family and friends, which led to numerous successful deals. His wife questioned why they were helping others without owning rooming houses themselves, prompting them to add three rooming houses to their own portfolio.
Over the years, they completed more than 20 rooming houses, significantly boosting their passive income.
One notable project involved converting a property in Brisbane into a rooming house for his parents. Despite purchasing it for significantly less than the vendor’s price, they transformed it into a profitable venture generating $74,000 in passive income.
This success story repeated with another property in Brisbane, further cementing their rooming house model.
Expanding Portfolio and Achieving Financial FreedomMichael’s most recent achievement was securing a 1 into 2 subdivision deal to build two more rooming houses. This project is set to generate substantial income, allowing his wife to quit her job if she wishes.
With construction underway, they anticipate an annual income of $296,000 from their portfolio, enabling them to live the lifestyle they desire.
Overcoming Challenges and Building ExpertiseThroughout his journey, Michael faced numerous challenges, including managing complex renovations remotely and dealing with difficult tenants.
His first major renovation project in Moree involved purchasing a fire-damaged house which required extensive repairs and tenant management.
Despite these challenges, Michael’s determination and strategic approach led to significant profits and valuable learning experiences.
Transitioning to Full-Time Property InvestmentMichael’s success in real estate allowed him to step away from the family business and focus on property full-time. Their financial independence will enable them to travel overseas for up to six months, with plans to visit Japan, Portugal and other countries.
Managing projects remotely, a skill honed during COVID-19, will facilitate this extended travel.
Michael’s journey from a novice to a successful real estate investor is a testament to the power of education, perseverance, and strategic planning. With the support of ILRE and continuous learning, he has built a life of financial freedom and flexibility.
His story is an inspiration to aspiring property investors, demonstrating that with the right mindset and tools, achieving significant success in real estate is possible.
“I am now full time in property after stepping away from the family business. “
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These stories and the results in them were captured at a specific point in time. The real estate market and the investing strategies used to succeed are constantly changing. The achievements and results of these investors may have changed since these stories were recorded. Each of these investors engaged in in-depth training, coaching and mentoring to be able to achieve these results. Their results are not typical and should not be taken as a guarantee of the results you may achieve. Your personal results will be in-line with the training, education and hard work that you personally conduct.
Truth Bomb Tuesday: Why does some criticism make you angry?
Imagine two scenarios.
In the first, I’m out doing the grocery shopping. Some random person comes running up to me and says, “You should learn more about boat building in ancient Greece!”
I’d be like, “Whatever random guy. What are you even talking about?” and I’d move on.
In the second scenario, someone comes up and says, “You need to work harder and stop being lazy.”
At that point, I’m likely to get pretty angry. I’d tell him to get lost, maybe throw can of baked beans at him.
I’m sure you can relate.
Now, why do these two scenarios generate such a different response in me? Why does one feel like it’s irrelevant and why does one make me angry?
They are both the opinions of a random individual who knows nothing about me. They deserve the same weight.
The reason why the second one makes me angry is that it picks up on something that I tell myself on a regular basis.
I’m getting better, but I can be a bit hard on myself sometimes. I push myself, and sometimes that pushing takes the form of an angry footy coach telling me to pull my finger out.
“You’re lazy,” is a message I’ve copped a fair bit of. I’m pretty exhausted by it. I’m touched out by it.
So when I get it from random people – or from friends and family – it gets a rise out of me.
It’s triggering.
In that way, it’s a good rule to remember. The only criticism that makes you angry is the criticism that you’ve heard too many times before.
And if there’s someone in your world – maybe your husband or wife? – who really makes you angry, maybe this is something to check in on.
Is the reason why what they’re saying gets so far under my skin just because it’s something I’ve told myself too many times?
And if I’m tired of feeling angry with them all the time – and I’m tired of feeling judged and criticised all the time – maybe the antidote might be to find ways to be more gentle with myself.
I mean, ideally they could stop being critical and judgemental, but some people can’t be helped.
But it doesn’t have to affect you. It can land as irrelevantly as someone telling you to brush up on your nautical architecture.
You can neutralise the poison.
And that’s through a process of being gentle with yourself. Find peace with the story inside yourself first.
(Which, actually, is worth doing anyway.)
Stop criticising yourself, and then no criticism can really touch you.
DB.
See the world through the eyes of an economist: GDP, retail trade and student numbers.
These are the charts that caught my eye this week. First up, GDP data out yesterday showed that the economy is grinding to a standstill. It was up just 0.1% in the quarter and just 1.1% over the year – the slowest rate of annual growth since the 1990s recession.
One of the big reasons for this is the collapse of the consumer. Retail trade is growing at 1.3% – also the worst result in 30 years.
Growth of 1.3% might sound ok, but when you remember that prices are growing at 3.6%, and population is growing at 2.5%, it means that individuals are reining it in hard. Per capita retail sales are tanking:
Which is not surprising, since the cost-of-living crisis has caused consumer confidence, and particularly their estimate of family finances, to collapse.
But while the economy is slowing, the property market continues to power on. Corelogic house prices were up a solid 0.8% in May, the 15th consecutive monthly gain.
Interestingly, the good times are bringing sellers to the market. Listings typically lift when prices lift.
And finally, the Labor government seems to be making good on reining immigration levels back in. Students are bearing the brunt, with the grant rates on student visas tanking.
And that’s how the world looked through the eyes of an economist this week.
DB
You can pretty much lock these forecasts in I reckon.
NAB has update their house price forecasts and is now predicting even bigger gains over the next two years, especially in current market darling Perth:
Perth’s house prices are on track to increase by 21 per cent over the next two years, National Australia Bank says in its latest forecast, lifting its earlier prediction by almost 4 percentage points this year alone as values accelerate.
The bank is now expecting Perth’s home values to jump by 13.7 per cent this year and gain another 6.2 per cent by the end of 2025.
Brisbane and Adelaide are also poised to rack up stronger growth in the next two years, with house prices predicted to increase by a total of 12.2 per cent and 12.3 per cent respectively.
“Adelaide has carried its momentum into early 2024 and Perth has accelerated further since late 2023,” wrote Alan Oster, NAB’s group chief economist.
Not much there I would disagree with.
Interestingly, NAB now expect that interest rates will be cut in November this year, and the falling interest rate outlook will drive prices into 2026.
But the real driver is the fundamentals of supply and demand. In a separate research report, senior economist Taylor Nugent notes that “We are not going to build our way out of housing undersupply any time soon,” with the pipeline of dwellings due for construction continuing to dwindle:
Drilling deeper into the ABS approvals data reveals a worrisome picture. Trend growth in private sector houses was up 6 per cent year-on-year. But the 102,000 detached houses approved in the past 12 months is not much better than 104,000 approved over 2019, before the pandemic hit.
Those annual results for detached are already soft and well below the near 120,000 average achieved in the five years or so before 2019, according to NAB.
“Attached approvals, in contrast, are both weak and threaten to fall further,” Mr Nugent said in his analysis.
Trend growth for private sector townhouses and apartments is down 28 per cent year-on-year, with only about 59,000 attached dwellings approved in the past 12 months, well below the peak of around 122,000 in the year to August 2016.
… “The broader elevated costs backdrop makes it difficult for valuations to stack up for some new projects, off-the-plan purchasing demand is low, and competition for resources with non-residential building and engineering work pipelines remain a hurdle.”
As supply of new homes is constrained, rental growth is expected to continue apace – NAB expects 8 per cent-plus growth into 2025.
Yep. This is what’s really driving prices right now. We have an epic housing shortage, and cost pressures have driven dwelling approvals to decade lows. There just isn’t enough new stock coming on line.
And the demand side (population flows) – and the supply side (construction flows) are both pretty slow moving beasts. We’re able to forecast dwelling completions 18 months out with high degrees of accuracy because it just takes so long to build a house.
So you can lock in the housing shortage.
And the big gains NAB are predicting look all but baked in to me.
DB
Truth Bomb Tuesday: Time to update your mental models
Most of us end up scared of what we really want.
It’s such a funny thing. It sounds so ridiculous.
But it’s not that we scared of the things we want themselves. (Who’s afraid of a new car?) Rather, we’re afraid of the part of ourselves that really wants something.
We become afraid of desire itself.
Again. It’s a crazy situation to find ourselves in. How did we get here?
The way I see it, we, as humans, our motivated by either our desire body or our commanding mind.
(There’s probably specific psychological terms for these but I don’t know what they are. But then Freud probably never crunched a feaso on two-into-four subdivision, so whatever.)
Anyway, when we’re hungry, we want to eat. That’s the desire body. And when we want to study to transition into a new career, that’s the commanding mind.
The whole journey of early childhood is bringing executive functioning on-line. It’s about empowering and learning to listen to the commanding mind – the voice that tells you not to hit Timmy for taking your truck.
The whole journey is about learning to not listen to the desire body, and give attention to the commanding mind instead.
And often, if we do just listen to the desire body – we take cookies from the cookie jar, we give Timmy a wallop, we write our name with crayons over the nice new wall – we get into trouble.
We realise that if we follow the lead of our desire body, we often get into trouble.
AND we realise that not following the desire body is actually hard. Those impulses can be strong – much stronger than our freshly budding executive function.
And so we become afraid of desire itself. We’re afraid of what it might make us do. We’re afraid that it will lead us into trouble. We’re afraid that we won’t be able to resist it.
And we carry this fear (some of us) for the rest of our lives. We feel safe when we’re listening to our commanding voice. We feel scared and unsettled when we’re listening to our desires.
(Sometimes we forget how to listen to our desires altogether.)
But if we’re not listening to our desires – if we’re not allowing desire to exist – then we stop having fun.
Life is productive, but not fun.
And the tragedy in it is that our fear is simply based on an outdated relationship between desire and decision.
We imagine the battle we’re living out is still the battle a four-year feels between a four-year old’s impulses and a four year old’s executive function.
But that’s not what we’re dealing with. It’s a battle between a 40 year old’s impulses and a 40 year old’s executive function.
Executive function continues growing and getting stronger the older we get.
So a four year old’s executive function is sometimes hopelessly outgunned. But the balance of the battle has completely flipped by the time we’re 40.
But we don’t update our mental model. We still think our desire is a terrible demon that is going to run away with us the first chance it gets.
It’s not. You are so much stronger than that now.
And with that strength, you can allow you desire room to breathe. You can let it be. It can’t control you. It won’t control you.
You are allowed to be desire-driven. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that.
You are allowed to have fun.
DB.
I reckon this is more politics than policy.
Peter Dutton recently proposed a two-year ban on foreigners buying property, as a way to help affordability for locals.
The general sense was that foreign buying was just too small of a share of total buying to make all that much difference, especially since, at least technically, foreigners aren’t allowed to buy existing property and have to buy new property. (In practice, it’s a different matter.)
But foreign demand does have to have some impact. And even if it’s only 5% of the market, 5% is still 5%, and does make a difference at the margin.
I mean, it’s certainly not going to drop house prices by 50%, but maybe it helps a little (although any impact will probably be swamped by other market forces.)
But it comes at an interesting time, because we’re getting mixed signals about the state of foreign demand.
The Australian was running a piece the other day that said Chinese buyers in particular are selling up shop, especially in Queensland.
According to Mike Zhang, an agent on the Gold Coast who specializes in real estate transactions for Chinese customers, many Chinese people are currently in a desperate attempt to sell their pieces of Queensland.
Troubled Chinese sellers are desperately trying to send money back to China in order to save their failing companies, causing a real estate “landslide.”
“The sell-off will continue as long as China’s economy has not recovered,” he asserts.
… As well, many members of the aspirational middle class in China have become distressed sellers as a result of stringent capital restrictions, increased state taxes on Australian property owned by foreigners, interest rate hikes in Australia, and the terrible health of most of the Chinese economy.
According to Peter Li, managing director of Plus Agency, his Sydney-based company continued “buying, buying, buying” for its Chinese clientele prior to the epidemic.
“We still service a lot of our Chinese clients.” “We are now assisting them in selling, selling, selling.”
This is anecdata, so it’s very hard to know what to make of it.
So far, the best data we have on foreign buying, from NAB’s quarterly survey, hasn’t shown much of a decrease in foreign interest, although maybe it’s starting to roll over a little.
But at the same time, PropTrack’s Overseas Search Report, shows that overseas search volumes to rent (+32%) and to buy (+20%) on realestate.com.au were much higher than the five-year average in April.
So maybe certain segments on the global community are starting to pull back their buying. But it doesn’t look like it’s having a huge net-impact so far. Maybe they’re just being replaced by other buying groups?
Anyway, at the end of the day, I expect this is just political pillow talk. I don’t think for a second that Dutton will actually ban foreign buying. It’s good sound-bytes, but I don’t reckon he’s serious.
So I can’t see it having any impact on the market.
DB
See the world through the eyes of an economist: Inflation, confidence, and immigration plans.
These are the charts that caught my eye this week. First up, inflation came in pretty much exactly as expected. With headline inflation at 3.6%, we’re a short stone’s throw from the RBA’s 2-3% target band, so the RBA will be happy with the result.
I’ve shared some charts here before on the way population growth is outstripping growth in the housing stock, making the housing shortage worse. The economist magazine notes that this is a problem across the anglosphere, with housing lagging well behind population growth.
Australian consumer sentiment continues to wallow in the doldrums, according to the Westpac survey. A cost-of-living crisis will do that to you.
There’s been a lot of talk about Peter Dutton’s announcement that he would pursue a lower immigration intake. But despite all the noise, the actual change to the permanent migration program would be pretty minimal.
Finally, new figures show that Australians are tipping in more than $50bn every quarter into their super accounts. Yes, that’s every three months!
And that’s how the world looked through the eyes of an economist this week.
DB
Who put a rocket under Perth?
Perth is crushing it right now.
Late last year I said I expected 2024 to be the year of Perth of the year of Brisbane.
Well, Perth has pulled the whip out and has opened up a sizeable lead on the rest of the country.
And not just in terms of price growth, but also in terms of rental growth too. For investors, cashflow is the lifeblood of investing, and Perth investors will be very happy with how things are playing out so far this year.
And Perth’s results are starting to attract attention. CBA economists recently did a deep-dive on the Perth market.
They note that on CoreLogic’s dwelling values index, Perth home values rose by 6% in the three months to April, dwarfing the quarterly 1.7% rise across the combined capital cities.
6% in the quarter is 24% annualised, which is about as good as any capital city market has ever done… ever.
But it’s not a flash in the pan. Perth has several years of strong growth under it’s belt now, and Perth’s dwelling values have risen 59.3% since the onset of the pandemic, the highest growth in the nation:
So that’s on the prices side. When it comes to rents, CoreLogic data also shows that Perth’s rental market is experiencing the strongest growth in the nation, with annual advertised rents climbing by around 14%:
I don’t know that newcomers to the market really how strong this kind of growth is. There are very few periods in my memory where rents anywhere were growing at such a strong clip.
Not only that, rental growth seems to be accelerating. Annualise the last quarter of results are you’re looking at something like 16% growth.
And so the question then is why? Why is Perth crushing it.
Well, like most things in economics, it’s all about supply and demand. And CBA note that WA currently has the strongest population growth rates in the country.
And looking forward, you’d have to think there’s still plenty of upside potential. Perth remains very affordable compared with the other capitals:
And given how strong the Western Australian economy is right now, I wouldn’t be surprised if they make good on that potential.
But you do have to remember that Perth’s market has traditionally been more volatile than the other capitals.
Between 2014 and 2019, Perth property values dropped by 18% as the iron ore market crashed.
Perth is far from a one-trick pony, but where mining leads, the economy follows. So there’s risks to the outlook here.
But for now, and for this year at least, it’s all about Perth.
DB
Truth Bomb Tuesday: Time to stop banging your head against that wall
It took me a while to figure out how to work with people stuck in a victimhood mentality.
People would come to me looking to turn their financial life around, but life was always screwing them over. Ask them about how things are going, and you get a shopping list of people and inanimate objects who had treated them unfairly in the past week – their partners, their children, their boss, their car that keeps breaking down, the printer.
All these things had thrown them into pitiful helplessness.
My first instinct – which is always the first misplaced instinct for most people – is to try to help them with the specific problems.
“Tell me about your partner. Let me give you the number of a good mechanic. Let me take a look at your printer.”
But like a hydra, for every problem that was resolved, two would grow in its place. The bucket of problems was never ending.
And so my second misplaced instinct was to look at the mindset behind the posture of victimhood.
“Yes, you have some challenges, but your life is also full of blessings if you count them. And we all have challenges – it’s a choice to let them bring us down and make us feel helpless. You have so much more power than you currently allow.”
But this doesn’t work either. As sorry as they feel for themselves – and as much as they might say they want to change – they remain wedded to victimhood, and will affirm that victimhood narrative whenever they get the chance. They don’t really want to let it go.
Why?
Because victimhood is a survival strategy.
We all learn different survival strategies when we are younger – strategies that make us feel safe. For some it’s hyper self-reliance. For some its hyper-vigilance. For some its fawning and people pleasing.
And for others, it’s victimhood. It’s a posture of helplessness and an expectation that the world will step in and sort your problems out for you.
And it feels good, not because it always works, but because it allows you to refuse the burden of responsibility. “I can’t do anything about it, so I don’t have to do anything about it. Poor me.”
But the point is, if it has been adopted as a survival strategy, it becomes very hard to let go of because, well, it’s about survival now.
The survival strategies we adopt at a young age are how we feel safe in the world. Without them we feel very vulnerable.
And so if you try to take away a victim’s victimhood (by fixing their problems or trying to shift their mindset), you’re taking away something that makes them feel safe, and the frightened mind will fight you hard on it.
All I think you can do is to help them see that this has become a default strategy (and there’s no shame here. You can’t blame a four year old for how they learnt to navigate the world), and then help them get ‘disenchanted’ with it as a strategy.
That is, help them see how it doesn’t truly serve them. Help them see how it’s holding them back.
And then, (and really this work should be done with the support of professional therapists), help them find new strategies for feeling safe.
They can’t ‘not’ feel safe. Nobody can. You can’t remove a strategy for safety without having something in its place.
So this is where the work is, and it’s more I can really cover in a blog.
But I guess the thing I want to highlight is that if someone has adopted victimhood as a survival strategy, all the problem solving in the world is not going to change that.
You’re beating your head against a wall.
DB.
This never ceases to amaze me.
There are always new ways to make money in property.
This is one of the things that I hear from my students all the time. “I would have got into property earlier, but I felt like I had missed the boat. The market had moved on.”
“The opportunities to make money in property have all gone.”
This is never true. There are always ways to make money. There are always opportunities. It’s actually what makes property such a unique asset class.
I think part of the misconception comes from the fact that most people think purely in terms of a buy and hold strategy. Buy something, do nothing, wait for the market to go up, make money.”
This is ‘a’ way to make money in property. But is probably not the best way, and it’s a strategy my students almost never rely on entirely.
Because there are just so many things you can do.
Take this recent story from Domain for example. They reckon that properties with ‘green’ features are worth 53% more than other comparable properties:
Home buyers are willing to pay up to 53 per cent more for sustainable houses than traditional properties in some suburbs across the country as energy-efficient features become a necessity rather than an option amid escalating costs of running a home, a new report from Domain shows.
Properties with eco-friendly attributes such as solar and double glazing are also selling 4 per cent faster on average and are attracting 17 per cent more buyer interest.
Nicola Powell, Domain’s chief of research and economics, said buyers were becoming more climate and budget conscious and were willing to pay a premium for energy-efficient features.
“Listings that include terms associated with sustainability and energy efficiency are fetching higher prices compared to those that don’t, so there’s clear demand for green homes,” she said.
“Buyers are recognising that features like cross-ventilation, north-facing orientation, heat recovery ventilation, and solar panels not only contribute to environmental sustainability but also offer practical advantages, such as reducing the costs of running a home.”
Melbourne attracted the highest price premiums on average of all the capital cities with sustainable houses fetching 28.8 per cent more or an extra $241,750 compared to non-sustainable homes.
In Sydney, sustainable houses commanded a 23.1 per cent premium or an additional $330,250 on average, while eco-friendly houses in other capitals collected more than 10 per cent.
And so suddenly there’s a new way to make money in property. If you can add these ‘green’ features profitable rate (anything below $330,000 in Sydney apparently!) then you can make money.
Green flipping properties is the new investment strategy in town.
But this strategy simply didn’t exist 10 years ago. Even five years ago.
And this is the thing. The market is always changing. I’ve been watching the market for a long time, and it never ceases to amaze me that people still keep coming up with new ways to make money out of property.
There really is no asset class like it.
DB
See the world through the eyes of an economist: Investor finance, wages and military spending.
These are the charts that caught my eye this week. First up, property investors are making a comeback. Google searches for ‘investment property’ are back at all time highs. This suggests that investor finance commitments should pick up in the months ahead.
There was an interesting chart from IFM (not to be confused with IMF) investors, which shows that Australian households have the highest debt servicing burdens in the world, after Norway.
Part of the story here is that Australia has very few fixed rate mortgages compared to the rest of the world, which means that when the official interest rate goes up, households feel the pain pretty quickly.
The wages data continues to suggest that the heat is coming out of the labour market, with both private and public sector wages rolling over.
And where wages go, services inflation tends to follow, which suggests that inflation should keep trending lower from here. (Did you hear me, RBA?)
On the activity front, household consumption is clearly softening, but private sector investment plans are back at mining boom levels. That boosts economic acticity now, and into the future.
And finally, and perhaps concerningly, military spending is on the rise all over the world, thanks mostly to the US and China. Peace is always a fragile thing.
And that’s how the world looked through the eyes of an economist this week.
DB.
Truth Bomb Tuesday: We’re so scared of it, but it’s so important.
Imagine you are creating some sort of AI robot, and you want it to replicate the human experience as much as possible.
Would you give that robot the capacity to feel anger?
I’m guessing that most people would say “No, of course not.”
I mean, partly that’s because we’re all really scared of where the whole AI robotics thing is going. We definitely don’t want to program anger into that system. We’re already doing our best to not make it angry.
“Oh yeah, no, that painting is totally realistic. You’re doing a fantastic job with rendering those hands. Well done.”
But it’s more because we generally think that anger serves no productive purpose.
Anger is typically seen as nothing more than a sign that a human being has lost control of itself.
And so we create very little space in our world for anger to come through.
Even as toddlers anger always prompts a parental intervention.
And then as adults there’s even less space. Anger is an emotion that is to be suppressed or avoided at all costs.
But this creates all kinds of problems.
I mean obviously if we’re bottling up all that anger, we are going to get all tangled up inside. It becomes dense and heavy and weighs us down.
But not only that it disconnects us from one of the most powerful sources of drive and motivation that we have.
Anger is the energy we use to champion our needs. It is the energy that says, “No, this is not okay with me.” And it’s the energy that says, “Yes, I deserve this. I’m going to go out and get it.”
Without that energy our efforts to create a beautiful life for ourselves can become half-hearted. We accept more shitty things than we should. We pull up too short on calling in all the things we desire.
Anger, in its right place and properly channelled, can be the cornerstone of creating an amazing life.
When we deny our birthright to anger, we deny our birthright life we were meant to live.
But it’s worse than that.
Because the river of anger has its source in the wellspring of desire.
(Ohh. Look at me getting all poetic. Anyone who says I’m not allowed to get poetic is going to cop a whack from my anger-management whiffle bat.)
Because we simply don’t feel angry unless something that we cherish is at stake.
Sometimes that might be a thing. If someone yells at your child or dings your car, you’ll get angry at them.
But it might also be a sense of an ideal you want the world to uphold. When you see injustice and cruelty, even to people you’ve never met, it’s natural to get angry.
But the thing to note here is that anger gives us immediate access to our desires.
It’s one of the best ways to know what you value and what you desire.
And the really interesting thing that I’ve noticed, is that the people who have disallowed anger in themselves the most, are also the ones who have the hardest time figuring out what they want.
The river freezes up. It’s as if once anger is forbidden, then desire is forbidden too.
And so the way I see it, we need to create space for anger. We need to find ways to channel it in a healthy and safe way.
Because if we can do that, it gives greater access to our desires, and greater access to a powerhouse of energy.
Why wouldn’t we want that?
And maybe that’s the next question. Who taught us to be afraid of our anger? And why?
DB.
Things are getting hot down there.
A few weeks ago I noted that we were in a compression market. With prices rising, across the board, that was pushing more buyers into the more affordable segments of the market, which in turn was lifting prices in those segments.
There was a bit more evidence this week that things are heating up in the $700,000 to $800,000 price bracket.
The first was a recent sale on the Central Coast NSW. The real estate agent noted that it was part of a development specifically tailored to investors, but more and more, he’s seeing first home buyers snap them up.
First home buyers are considering these properties, whereas typically, I would have expected an investor looking for yield to buy this type of property.
Hudson Homes are an investor builder. They market in seminars across metros and they sell products like this. I’ve represented properties like this before and had a very long time on market working with a few investors.
There seems to be a shift of these smaller blocks to first home buyers. First home buyers are now seeing this as a huge fit for them.
Over the last few months I’ve [also] seen a shift in the marketplace. There’s confidence you can buy a property now. This is largely thanks to the RBA leaving rates on hold and saying it’s a wait and see. We’ve seen the buyer community really pick up and get a bit more aggressive.
Just a reminder there that many orgs selling “investment advice” are really just the front end of a development marketing machine. They offer great advice if the only advice you want to hear is “buy a property from us.”
I never have, and never will, sell properties to my students. It’s a massive conflict of interest.
But that point aside, the point the agent makes about first home buyers going after investor properties is interesting.
Again, I think it’s just a feature of a compression market.
Tim Lawless research director at Corelogic also expects strong competition in the sub-$800K segment this year:
“It’s quite the turnaround from what we’re seeing in early 2023 when there were a larger number of investors looking to sell than buy, largely due to the sharp falls in home values at the start of the interest rate cycle,” Mr Lawless said.
“I think the entrenched house price growth which is typically the main motivator for investors, and also the fact that the rental markets are so tight and are expected to remain tight probably enticed a lot of investors to get in.”
“We’re already seeing competitive pressure to the lower end of the marketplace where investors and first time buyers tend to be more active, which could be behind the recent stronger gains in that segment,” he said.
“Beyond just investors and first-time buyers, even subsequent buyers potentially becoming more limited in their ability to obtain credit would turn to the middle to lower end of the market.”
Everyone wants to buy because the outlook for prices over the next 18-months is pretty clear. But with interest rates remaining relatively elevated, it’s just a question of what people can afford.
And for the majority of the bell curve, that’s something under $800K.
But with all that extra competition, under $800K won’t remain under $800K for long.
DB
Truth Bomb Tuesday: It’s the first, and hardest, discipline of growing up
In many ways, growing up is about becoming responsible for you needs.
Think about it. At the extreme, in our infant years, we are completely dependent on others.
Not only do we need other to see that our needs are met, we need them to be able to anticipate our needs – we need them to be able to identify and articulate our needs before we are even conscious of… actually, before we’re really conscious at all.
We need people to articulate our needs. We need people to meet our needs.
And there’s nothing wrong with that. This isn’t another post slagging off the work-ethic of babies. I’m not kicking that hornet’s nest again. (You can’t say anything these days.)
But it’s right place in our early years that we have that level of dependency.
From there, the journey into maturity begins when we start to take responsibility for articulating and meeting our needs.
We become vocal little turds – sorry, darlings – in toddlerdom, but we still don’t have the ability to ensure our needs are met. (Get a job!)
But we continue to grow up. And ideally, in the end, we can articulate what we need, and create strategies for ensuring that those needs are met.
That’s the ideal.
But, one thing I’ve noticed is that a lot of people don’t reach this ideal. For some reason the process becomes arrested, and people aren’t able to take full responsibility for their needs.
And where does it fall down?
Well, notice that I drew a distinction between the articulation of needs and the strategies we employ to meet our needs.
The way I see, it’s almost never a problem with strategy. We are naturally strategic animals. We’re generally good at manipulating our environment and getting what we think we want.
So strategy is not the problem.
Articulation in the problem.
For whatever reason, a lot of us don’t learn the skills required to articulate what we need.
There’s a couple (at least) of reasons for that.
First, our needs can be a bit complex. We are complex creatures. Our need for food and water is straight forward – but the need to be self-actualised in a meaningful way in a role where I feel I am making a difference? That’s complex.
It can take a long time (and a lot of trial and error) before you can fully and clearly articulate what your higher-order needs actually are.
That’s the first reason.
But the second reason is that many of us don’t even get that far. We don’t even make those first clumsy tumbles into articulation because we just don’t expect that our needs ever could be met.
Maybe we grew up with an emotional parent who took up all of the oxygen. Maybe we were constantly beaten with the stick of “just be grateful for what you’ve got.”
Maybe we never developed a robust sense of self-worth, and without that sense of self-worth, we just didn’t believe that we deserved to have our needs met.
Whatever it is, it tells us not to try. “Don’t even bother naming your needs, they’re not going to be met anyway.”
And that means that we never submit ourselves to the training. It’s a skill. We all have to learn how to name our needs. All of us.
And we’re not going to be able to do it on first go. It takes practice. Lots of practice.
But most of us just don’t even make a start.
Which means we are never able to name our needs.
And if we can’t even name our needs, then all the strategy in the world is not going to help us.
So learn how to name your needs. This is the discipline that growing up demands.
DB.
John and Cordelia’s story is a powerful testament to resilience, strategic foresight, and the pursuit of financial independence.As a Fly-In, Fly-Out (FIFO) worker, John faced the harsh realities of being away from his family for extended periods, missing out on precious life moments. This lifestyle, while financially rewarding, came at a great personal cost.
However, John’s encounter with adversity set the stage for a dramatic change, leading to astounding success in real estate.
“Due to my roster as a Fly-In, Fly-Out worker, it meant that I missed out on many of my family’s life events such as birthdays, Christmas and school holidays. “
Embracing ChangeIn 2017, during a significant downturn in the mining industry, John faced unemployment. This crisis, however, presented a silver lining.
With the real estate market in mining towns collapsing, John and his wife, Cordelia, recognised a golden opportunity. Prices of homes had plummeted, creating the perfect buying opportunity.
Armed with the philosophy to “buy when everyone is selling,” John began his foray into real estate investment, focusing on properties in mining towns with high potential for recovery.
A Strategic Entry into Mining Town Real EstateJohn and Cordelia’s real estate journey began with a strategic acquisition in Karratha, a coastal mining town, where they purchased a 5-bedroom house on a 540 sqm block for $385,000 in 2017.
This property, once valued at approximately $1.3 million during the mining boom, was acquired at a significant discount.
Initially, it rented for $620 per week, but now it brings in $1,350 per week, with its current valuation at $800,000. This initial success demonstrated the potential of investing in mining towns during economic downturns.
Doubling Down on Market LowsFollowing the Karratha purchase, they acquired a second property in South Hedland in 2017.
This 4-bedroom, 2-bathroom house was bought for $295,000, a fraction of its boom-time valuation of $1.2 million.
The rental income at the time of purchase was $650 per week, which has since increased to $1,350 per week, with the property now valued at $750,000.
This investment further solidified his strategy of capitalising on the market lows in mining areas.
Expanding the Portfolio in South HedlandIn 2018, John and Cordelia continued their investments in South Hedland by purchasing a 4-bedroom, 2-bathroom townhouse for $200,000, well below its $1 million peak valuation.
It rented for $450 per week at the time of purchase and has seen growth to $850 per week, with the property’s current market value at $500,000.
This third acquisition underlined the consistency in their investment approach, targeting properties with significant undervalued potential.
Strategic Investments in Economic DownturnsJohn and Cordelia expanded their portfolio further in 2020 with the acquisition of two 3-bedroom, 2-bathroom villas, each purchased for $120,000 during a mortgagee sale.
These properties were once valued at about $650,000 each during their peak. They initially rented for $420 per week, and now each brings in $750 per week, with their values appreciating to $375,000 each.
These villas were part of a strategic move to diversify within the mining town real estate market while still leveraging the low acquisition costs.
Capitalising on a Recovering MarketIn 2021, John and Cordelia added two more properties to their portfolio, both located in Moranbah. The properties, each featuring 4 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms, were acquired for $339,000 and $350,000 respectively.
These homes, which would have fetched around $1 million each during the boom times, were rented out for $620 and $650 per week at the time of purchase. Their values have risen to $450,000 and $460,000 respectively, with current rents of $740 and $790 per week.
These latest acquisitions illustrate John and Cordelia’s ongoing commitment to investing in mining regions, recognising their cyclical economic patterns and the potential for significant financial returns.
Throughout their real estate journey, John and Cordelia have demonstrated an adept ability to identify and capitalise on undervalued properties in volatile markets.
Their strategy of buying low in mining towns, recognising the cyclical nature of these economies, has not only yielded substantial rental returns but also positioned him for significant capital gains as these markets recover.
Their approach highlights the importance of market knowledge and timing in achieving real estate success, especially in sectors as dynamic as the mining industry.
Achieving Financial FreedomBy 2021, John and Cordelia’s real estate endeavours had created a portfolio worth nearly $6 million, with nearly $3 million in equity and an annual passive income approaching $150,000.
This financial cushion is nearing John’s goal to double his living expenses, setting him on the path to retire from FIFO work by early 2024.
Beyond Wealth: Giving BackJohn and Cordelia’s success story transcends financial gains. Inspired by John’s humble beginnings in the Philippines and Cordelia’s family origins of fleeing communism in Romania, they are driven by a profound mission to give back.
John plans to use his resources to help lift communities out of poverty, reflecting his deep commitment to making a difference beyond just accumulating wealth.
A Journey of TransformationJohn and Cordelia’s journey to real estate magnates is not just about transforming their financial status; it’s about creating a life that aligns with their values and allows them to make a meaningful impact.
Their story is a compelling narrative of how adversity can lead to opportunity, and how strategic investment can turn life’s challenges into a legacy of success and philanthropy.
“Our strategy was to buy low-cost “A-grade” assets that will be profitable no matter what part of the mining cycle we were in.”
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These stories and the results in them were captured at a specific point in time. The real estate market and the investing strategies used to succeed are constantly changing. The achievements and results of these investors may have changed since these stories were recorded. Each of these investors engaged in in-depth training, coaching and mentoring to be able to achieve these results. Their results are not typical and should not be taken as a guarantee of the results you may achieve. Your personal results will be in-line with the training, education and hard work that you personally conduct.
See the world through the eyes of an economist: Housing finance, deposits and café closures.
These are the charts that caught my eye this week. First up, finance data suggests that investors are returning to the market in a big way. The dollar-value of investor mortgages issued is the highest on record, outside the Covid bounce.
Still with the housing market, Domain data shows that the LVR (loan to value ratio) of the market overall has fallen to the lowest level on record. That means people are stumping up bigger deposits, possibly thanks to the bank of mum and dad.
The job ads data continue to tell us that the official unemployment rate should be higher than what it currently is. The number of new job ads on SEEK in Australia fell 4.7% m/m in April to the lowest level since January 2021.
And if you’re reading this in a café, spare a thought for café owners right now. Bankruptcies in the food and accommodation sector have lifted to record highs.
Like a lot of retail, hospitality spending hasn’t increased for a year or so. This is despite a growing population, which points to lower per-capita spending on takeaways.
At the same time, café owners, like the rest of us, are being hit with inflation. The costs of everything you need to make a café work are on a breakaway.
And that’s how the world looked through the eyes of an economist this week.
DB.
Truth Bomb Tuesday: Where your drive comes from matters. A lot.
Are you driving from the inside out, or just trying to fill in some holes?
It makes a big difference where you draw your drive and energy from.
Some people draw their drive from negative experiences in their past.
Think of the boy born into poverty who becomes a successful fund manager. Driven by a need to never be poor again, he excels at getting rich.
This archetype exists in the collective consciousness, but the number of success stories like this is, I think, are actually pretty rare.
Why?
Because it’s all about what you’re focusing on.
If you’re focusing on your poverty, giving all your energy to how much it sucks and how much you want to escape your poverty, what’s going to happen?
Yup, you’re going to call in more poverty.
This is what the theory tells us – the law of attraction and all that. Like attracts like.
As much as possible, we want to avoid using negative emotions as source of motivation and energy. It’s self-defeating.
And with that comes the concept of ‘need’. We can’t be focused on what we ‘need’. Because if you ‘need’ something, that must mean that you don’t have it.
Need automatically implies lack.
I see a lot of people get to this place and get confused.
“So you’re saying I can’t say that I need to replace my income, or I need a cashflow positive portfolio, or I need a new partner?
So what can I say then?”
We are used to thinking about what we want and what we want to create in life relative to what we need – relative to what is absent.
But there is another kind of creativity.
It is the creativity of the artist. It’s the creativity of the visionary.
It’s the creativity that says, what wants to happen? What wants to be called through? What would be fun / inspiring / exciting / awesome / wild / hilarious?
It is creativity purely for creativity’s sake. It’s not trying to fix anything. It’s not trying to fill in a hole.
Rather, you can feel it moving from the inside out. It comes from what excites your spirit and you feel yourself being drawn towards it.
In that way, it’s the opposite of lack-based desire. This moves from the outside in – it tries to call something out of the world to grasp and hold on to – to draw in and possess.
It asks, “What is out there that can fill the holes in here?”
These are very different things.
So rather than “I need more money” etc. We move to statements like, “wouldn’t it be cool to take mum to Egypt to see the pyramids. How cool would that be?”
I know we’re not great dreamers. Our creativity is often beaten out of us in school. We are taught to be analytical problem solvers, rather than creative dreamers.
But it’s this creative dreaming that is absolutely necessary. You can’t do it without it.
So take a moment to take stock. Look over your goals.
Are you trying to fill holes in your life?
Or are you doing fun things just for the fun of it?
DB.
Yan’s story is a powerful testament to the resilience of the human spirit and the transformative power of education and action in real estate.Migrating to Australia in 2009 with limited English and facing significant personal and financial setbacks, including a painful divorce and subsequent financial destitution, Yan’s life took a pivotal turn when she discovered the I Love Real Estate community.
This marked the beginning of her journey from despair to becoming a successful real estate investor.
“There was a point in my life when I had no money, no job, nowhere to stay and had very limited ability and experience to communicate in English.”
The Turning PointYan’s journey into real estate began almost by accident—a serendipitous click on an ILRE banner while searching for rental properties. This small action opened up a new world of possibilities and marked a significant turning point in her life.
She immersed herself in the resources provided by I Love Real Estate, which reshaped her outlook on life and equipped her with the knowledge she needed to succeed.
A Leap of FaithWith a newfound determination, Yan saved $15,000 from working two jobs, which she used as a down payment for her first house — a house and land Package that she purchased for $352,000.
This property’s value increased by nearly 20% by the settlement date.
Five months after moving in, Yan refinanced and cashed out to fund her second home, where she rented out spare rooms to increase her income.
Accelerating GrowthDespite her early successes, Yan felt she had more to learn and achieve. In August 2021, she joined ILRE’s Platinum Program, where she met her coach, Christine.
Christine provided invaluable guidance, helping Yan build a solid investment foundation and connect with like-minded investors in the community. This support was crucial as Yan embarked on more ambitious real estate ventures.
The Cairns CBD ProjectYan’s real estate education encouraged her to apply her learning to practical projects. In December 2021, she purchased a 4-bedroom house in Cairns CBD for $430,000. She invested in renovations, which amounted to $70,210.
After renting it out for 12 months, she sold the property, making a profit of approximately $60,000! This project significantly boosted her confidence and motivated her to continue growing her portfolio.
The Northern Beaches ProjectBuilding on her success, Yan and her partner Tim purchased another property in the Northern Beaches of Cairns for $470,000. The renovation is nearing completion, and they expect to make a profit of $50k-$60k.
This project, along with her ongoing plans to seek out an income deal and buy a principal place of residence, showcases her growth and the practical application of her real estate education.
A New Life Beyond Real EstateYan’s journey through real estate is about more than financial success; it has been a pathway to personal fulfillment and independence.
She has left her job to focus on her family and personal development, managing her time to maximize the quality of life for herself and her loved ones.
This change was made possible by the stability and confidence gained through her real estate investments.
Gratitude and Looking ForwardYan expresses deep gratitude to Dymphna, Christine, and the entire ILRE community for their support. Her story is a powerful example of how education, community support, and personal determination can lead to profound life changes.
From a challenging start in a new country to achieving financial independence through real estate, Yan’s journey is an inspiring tale of transformation and success.
“My ‘I Love Real Estate’ experience has given me the confidence that I have always wanted.”
Book A FREE Blueprint Call With One Of My AdvisorsDiscover how YOU could create a new and exciting life with our unique real estate system to create passive income forever.
Schedule your exclusive, personal Property Genius Blueprint Call today and create a customised plan to potentially never worry about money ever again.
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These stories and the results in them were captured at a specific point in time. The real estate market and the investing strategies used to succeed are constantly changing. The achievements and results of these investors may have changed since these stories were recorded. Each of these investors engaged in in-depth training, coaching and mentoring to be able to achieve these results. Their results are not typical and should not be taken as a guarantee of the results you may achieve. Your personal results will be in-line with the training, education and hard work that you personally conduct.
Truth Bomb Tuesday: Expand you’re thinking, expand you’re life.
You’re not thinking big enough. That’s my guess.
That’s ok. Most people aren’t.
I mean, when I sit down with my students for the first time, and we step through their goals and what they want to achieve, people are generally pretty modest.
They want to go debt-free. They want to double their take-home pay. They want to double their equity.
You can call this 2x thinking.
And 2x thinking is dangerous.
And I say that because 2x thinking is a form of ‘status quo’ thinking. If you’re just looking to increase your take home pay by $60,000 or something, you’re probably imagining just doing what you’re already doing, only a little more efficiently and profitably.
You’re not looking to shake things up. You’re just hoping to get better results out of the tried-and-true strategies that have gotten you to where you are.
It’s just you, with a little more money.
And the trouble with 2x thinking is that it is just a pretty half-hearted commitment to change in my opinion.
In fact, it’s little more than a commitment to not changing, married to a fanciful hope of somehow having more money.
Pfft.
That’s why I think we need to embrace 10x thinking.
We want to bring 10x changes into our life. We want to increase our income ten-fold. We want to increase our equity and wealth ten-fold.
This is what we should be setting our sights on.
Because this kind of thinking really shakes things up.
A commitment to 10x thinking makes you look at your life in a whole new light.
It’s not how do you increase your income from $70K to $140K. It’s how do you increase your income to $700,000!
Now obviously the strategies that have got you here and not going to get you to $700,000.
You need a whole new game plan.
And that shows up as innovation. You need to get creative. You need to push envelopes and experiment. You’ve got to get a bit courageous and ballsy.
You need to embrace that pioneering spirit.
And when you set your sights on 10x, it very quickly starts changing all your decision-making processes. You’re no longer looking for iterative improvements. You’re not asking yourself, “How can I do this better?” You’re asking yourself, “How can this be done in a way that’s never been done before?”
And when you’re in that 10x mode – when you’re expanding frontiers and living in that blue-sky thinking – it’s infectious. People pick up on it. They get a buzz from it.
They want to work with you because they want to go where you’re going.
So don’t settle for 2x. Don’t just settle for ‘better’.
Go for 10x. Go for exponential.
Live life like there are no limits.
Because the open secret is…
… there are no limits.
DB.
This tilt in the market will put even more pressure on prices.
We’re creating exactly the wrong kind of demand in the housing market.
It’s going to make things worse, not better.
Last week we saw that new home loan commitments were up 13.3 per cent year on year in February. That’s pretty healthy.
Break it down by investors and owner-occupiers and it’s all pretty standard. Investors were up 1.2% in the month and 22% in the year, while owner-occupiers were up 4.8% in the month and 21% in the year.
With investors and owner-occupiers moving in lock-step, that seems like a pretty balanced market.
But dig into it a little further, and there’s a problem.
The value of loan commitments for new housing construction fell 2.1 per cent in February after a decline of the same size in January. At $1.6 billion, the monthly total is now the weakest since September.
That is, while demand for existing homes is pushing higher, demand for new builds, or newly built dwellings is going backwards.
This means that we’re not going to be building the homes we need to take the heat out of the housing crisis.
The Housing Industry Association note that this is the weakest period of new construction in 20 years:
“This is a deeper and more sustained downturn in lending for home building than any other period observed in the past 20 years,” HIA chief economist Tim Reardon said.
“The rise in the cash rate is the primary cause of this poor result in new home lending. Higher interest rates are compounding the impact of the rise in the cost of construction caused by elevated land, labour and material prices. This is further exacerbated by macroprudential rules that remain overly restrictive.”
HIA Senior Economist Tom Devitt was also glum in his assessment of the data.
“The prospect of a pick-up in home building activity in 2024 is not likely given the low volume of new homes sales in the first three months of 2024”, Devitt said.
“Concerningly, sales in the first three months of this year remain 41.3% below the same quarter in 2021, 18.2% below the same quarter in 2020, and 18.9% below the same quarter in 2019″.
Yep. When you put it like that, they’re some pretty ugly numbers.
But think about what this dynamic means for a second.
The demand for existing homes is lifting, as demand for new homes is falling.
Not only does this mean that the housing shortage is going to get worse, it also means that competition for existing homes is going to heat up.
As buyers shun new builds in favour of existing homes, the price of existing homes gets bid up, sending prices even higher.
Expect some pretty intense price pressure on existing housing as this dynamic continues.
DB
See the world through the eyes of an economist: Rents, container rates and economic surprises.
These are the charts that caught my eye this week. First up, SQM research posted rental data for the March quarter. The exponential tilt seen since Covid times show no signs of abating. This is the median rental price level:
But when you turn that into annual growth data, we can see that the pace of change is moderating. The pace has come down on where it was in 2022, but still remains at historic highs.
Some interesting charts from CBA this week, looking at real household disposable income per capita – how much free cashflow we all have. Basically, in Australia, it’s falling quickly, putting us in stark contrast with the rest of the world.
In annual growth terms, we can see that while it is falling quickly in Australia, in most other countries it is growing. This is why household consumption is falling.
Inflation is the talk of the town again this week. On that front, container shipping costs have come down, after spiking during the early days of the conflict in the middle east. However, with things escalating, it will be interesting to see if this reverses course.
And part of the problem with inflation is that the economic data is too strong. Things are going too well. The World Economic Data Surprise Index shows that things have been considerably stronger than expected in recent times. This is proof that you can have too much of a good thing.
Finally, while the weekly news cycle tends to give you the impression that the world is going down the toilet, generally when you zoom out, you see that things are steadily getting better. For example, homicide rates in America have improved substantially in recent years, following an unusual tick up in 2020. Right now, things are about as good as they’ve ever been. Don’t give up on the world just yet.
And that’s how the world looked through the eyes of an economist this week.
DB.
Truth Bomb Tuesday: Are you a bit lazy? Are you sure?
I was having a chat with some students the other day, and I want to clear something up.
I want to talk about laziness.
This is something that I hear people often self-identify with. “I believe I could do more, but maybe I’m just lazy.”
But think about laziness for a sec. What images come to mind? What is it? It’s like someone sleeping in til way past 10am. It’s someone zoning out on the couch in front of the TV. Its someone driving to the shops when they could have walked.
Stuff like that right? That’s the commonly agreed definition right?
But none of these things are inherently bad.
In fact, some students need to do more of these things. They’ve been burning the candle at both ends and they’re starting to stress themselves out… and the people around them.
“Mary, you need to take it easy for a bit. You’re next task is to watch the Three Body Problem series on Netflix in a single weekend.”
The problem though is that society has built all these structures of shame around “laziness”, and then defined laziness as being pretty much the same bundle of activities we call ‘relaxing’.
And so some people can’t “relax” because they feel they’re being “lazy”. This is a huge problem. If you can’t relax, you can’t rejuvenate. And if you can’t rejuvenate you’ll burn out. And if you burn out, you’ll never get far.
So we need to distinguish laziness from relaxation.
How do we do that?
By recognising what laziness is.
Laziness is when you lack the willingness to do the things that you yourself know you should do.
The most important thing here is that you yourself set the benchmarks that define laziness – nobody else.
So it’s laying on the couch when you had blocked time out for study.
Or its staying in bed when you promised yourself that you would get up and do some early morning exercise.
Or it’s watching trashy TV when you had planned to research some deals this weekend.
Laziness is when you are unwilling to hold yourself to the standards you set for yourself.
That is, it’s about integrity. It’s about an alignment between what you say and what you do.
And in that way – and this is the really important thing – you can be lazy AND frenetically active at the same time.
You could be cleaning up the house when this is the only quiet hours you have to do some study.
Or you could be putting extra hours into your day job when you should be researching deals, etc.
In my eyes, this kind of thing – which we often call procrastination, is an important form of laziness.
We just don’t recognise it as laziness – being out of integrity with our word – because we’re brought up to believe that laziness has to involve a couch or a bed.
It doesn’t.
Laziness is about integrity.
How does your schedule look when you look at it like that?
DB.
Jo’s journey to real estate success began at a point of financial desperation.In her early 50s, she found herself with no assets, no savings, and the heavy responsibility of supporting four children alone after a challenging divorce.
With no financial buffer, every expense pushed her to the brink of disaster, and her career alone wasn’t enough to secure financial stability.
Embracing Education as a Pathway to ChangeWhen Jo discovered I Love Real Estate she was initially skeptical about the possibilities it promised, fearing it might not cater to someone with her financial limitations.
However, as she delved into the educational materials, she found a beacon of hope. The training offered multiple strategies for executing no-money-down deals — exactly what she needed.
Inspired by the success stories of others in the I Love Real Estate community, Jo committed herself to learning everything the program had to offer.
This dedication paid off and after 20 months of intense study and preparation, she embarked on her first real estate deal.
Strategic Moves in the Real Estate MarketJo’s commitment to education led to her first major breakthrough in the real estate market, resulting in three profitable joint venture deals:
The Block of Four One-Bedroom Units: Jo’s first deal was a renovation flip of a dilapidated block of four one-bedroom units in regional Victoria. Despite the property’s poor condition, with cobwebs likened to scenes from “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” Jo saw its potential.
This project was a joint effort with a partner she met at the annual ILRE Super Conference. They renovated the units, significantly increasing their value, and turned a profit of $211,000.
Two-Bedroom Units on a Single Title: Her second project involved renovating two two-bedroom units also located in regional Victoria. These units were outdated but structurally sound, making them ideal for a quick cosmetic update.
This time, Jo partnered with a contact from the I Love Real Estate Facebook group. Their effective management and minimalistic renovation approach led to an added projected profit of $77,000.
Another Two-Bedroom Unit Flip: The third deal mirrored the second, involving another block of two-bedroom units needing updates. Along with her JV partner, Jo tackled this project, focusing on key improvements that would offer the best return on investment.
This deal is expected to add another $47,000 to their shared profits.
In each of these projects, Jo invested her time, effort, and newfound expertise rather than her own money.
Her ability to identify potential, coupled with her project management skills honed through years of raising children and managing household logistics, proved invaluable.
A Future Redefined by Real EstateToday, Jo Besly is no longer living paycheque to paycheque but is building a future on her terms. The ILRE program not only provided her with the knowledge she needed but also introduced her to a community that supported her throughout her journey.
With three successful deals under her belt and more in the pipeline, Jo is a testament to the power of education and community support in real estate investing.
A Beacon of Hope for OthersJo hopes her story will inspire others who feel trapped by their circumstances.
She emphasizes the importance of education, the right mindset, and the support of a like-minded community as keys to overcoming obstacles.
She is proof that with determination and the right support, anyone can turn their life around, even from the most challenging starting points.
“I knew that if I had no money, I needed to provide some other type of value to the market. I’m a quick learner and a good student so I knuckled down and worked through all the modules step by step.
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These stories and the results in them were captured at a specific point in time. The real estate market and the investing strategies used to succeed are constantly changing. The achievements and results of these investors may have changed since these stories were recorded. Each of these investors engaged in in-depth training, coaching and mentoring to be able to achieve these results. Their results are not typical and should not be taken as a guarantee of the results you may achieve. Your personal results will be in-line with the training, education and hard work that you personally conduct.
Economists can see the writing on the wall. We’re going to miss.
We are on track to miss our housing targets by a wide margin.
Actually, it’s looking like we’re not even going to come close. It looks like we’re going to throw a dart at a dartboard and hit the vending machine with the chips and nuts over in the corner.
“Look out Gary!”
Analytics group Oxford economics reckon we’re falling 80,000 homes (30%) short every year:
Australia needs to approve about 80,000 more homes annually if the national cabinet is to meet its 1.2 million new dwellings target, according to Oxford Economics Australia.
The entrenched shortfall in supply is putting further pressure on soaring rents and dwelling prices, which are already at record levels, economists warned.
The total number of approvals for home construction declined by 5.8 per cent.
The total number of dwellings approved in February fell to 12,520, which is 5.8 per cent less than the same time last year, the Australian Bureau of Statistics reported on Thursday.
When extrapolating the ABS figures out to a trend estimate, that would equate to about 163,000 approvals annually, said Timothy Hibbert, Oxford Economics Australia’s Property and Building’s forecasting head.
That is “well below Australia’s national housing accord target”.
An almost 50 per cent increase in approvals annually – about 240,000 approvals – would be required to reach the federal housing target of 1.2 million new homes over five years, according to Mr Hibbert.
“There’s no mistake that this is a step down. There’s still a downtrend playing through, which is expected for the rest of 2024,” he said.
He’s not wrong. To get 240K a year, we need 20K a month. 12K is a long way shy of that.
But it’s not like we hit 20K the month before, or even the month before that. In fact, we almost never hit 20K in any given month. The idea that we’ll suddenly start doing it every month, for five straight years, is just a pipe dream.
And the thing is, when you dig into the data, it’s actually worse than it seems.
Because if we want to be smashing these ambitious housing targets, we need to be bringing housing to market ‘at scale’.
And the only way to do that is through units and particularly high-rises.
Trouble is, it’s high-rise and the unit sector where the weakness is. Approvals for attached dwellings were actually down 17.2% in February, and in rolling annual terms, is at the lowest level since 2012!
The lowest levels since 2012 are not going to cut it. No way! They need to lift to the highest level on record, and the stay there!
Hot tip: not going to happen.
Because, things in the construction industry are tough, and projects are just not stacking up financially:
Master Builders chief executive Denita Wawn, who represents the building and construction industry, said the pace of home building had slowed due to labour shortages and higher cost of materials.
“Despite the community’s high demand for more housing, especially higher-density rentals, there is a mismatch in the number of homes coming through the pipeline,” Ms Wawn said.
“When it comes to signing new contracts, the pen is not making it to paper as the investment does not stack up.”
Yup. At this rate, we’ll be lucky to hit the vending machine. We’ll be lucky to hit the toilet door. At this rate, everyone in Pub Australia should be nervous.
DB
See the world through the eyes of an economist: House prices, immigration and chocolate prices.
These are the charts that caught my eye this week. First up, the housing shortage remains in full effect. It’s not just about the number of physical houses in the country, which I’ve written about before, but also the number of properties for sale on the market. New listings to the market are about average, but the total listing stock remains at historic lows.
That’s even though sales are declining, with monthly sales also hovering around record lows. I mean, why would you sell a property going into a boom unless you had to?
The total number of companies going bankrupt in Australia has reached the highest levels since 2015, thanks largely to higher interest payments.
But a big part of that uptick is insolvencies in the construction sector, which continues to have a horror run. This is part of the reason why construction rates are actually falling right now.
A business survey in New Zealand has shown that firms’ hiring intentions have fallen sharply. NZ led the cycle in and out of Covid, so suggests that more labour market weakness is ahead for Australia, which has been anticipated.
Finally, the solar eclipse in the US has created an epic tourism event. You can track the course of the full eclipse by looking at the occupancy rates for Airbnb in America.
And that’s how the world looked through the eyes of an economist this week.
DB.
We’ve been waiting for this for years. Has it finally arrived?
Last week I noted that we’re in a unique phase of the market and it’s driving price gains in more affordable suburbs:
There’s an interesting thing happening in the market right now. We’re in a compression phase.
Often at the turn of a cycle, as the market starts to lift, it’s the top end of town that moves first. Premium suburbs lift, leading the way for mid-tier and entry-level properties.
But right now, we’re seeing a big lift in the cheaper suburbs, with many entry levels suburbs growing by 20% or more.
Now there’s another pressure building in the affordable sector, apparently. Downsizers.
Downsizers are selling up their expensive properties, and looking to buy back in somewhere cheaper:
The affordable end of the housing market, already streaking ahead, is about to get even more competitive for buyers as more downsizers seeking to reduce their mortgage join the fray, property experts say.
Thomas McGlynn, chief executive of Sydney-based real estate agency BresicWhitney, said the trend – which started about six months ago – has gathered pace and was likely to continue until interest rates were cut.
“We’re seeing more vendors, probably one out of 10, are downsizing to reduce their debt due to uncertainty over the rate cut,” he said.
“I think the cost-of-living crisis and the lag effect of interest rate rises have pushed more people over the edge.
“There’s a lot of pressure that’s bubbling away at the moment.
“People who bought at the peak of the market are now more motivated to rapidly reduce their financial commitments, while those who have built large equity in their homes but are struggling with cash flow, are also selling to relieve financial pressure.”
They then trot out a soon-to-be-retiree who downsized out of a house into a unit.
Look, I think this is definitely a trend. Some people will prefer somewhere smaller as they age.
But we’ve been talking about the downsizing phenomenon for years and it’s never really materialised.
Turns out, people prefer the suburbs they’ve been living in for 20 years to having one less bedroom to clean.
And I also wonder how much financial pressure can be driving this.
When you look at how many distressed listings are out there in the market right now, it’s pretty trivial, according to Domain. It’s well down on 2019 levels.
I mean, I know things are tight for a lot of people, but are they tight enough to justify selling up and buying something smaller?
Maybe it helps at the margin, but I can’t imagine it’s a major driver.
So I don’t know. Might just be real estate agent spin.
But, at the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter. The data speaks for itself. Things are hot in the affordable end of the market.
And it’s going to stay that way.
DB
Truth Bomb Tuesday: Get this right and it will feel like magic.
People are often surprised to learn that figuring out what you really want is often the hardest part of the journey.
People say things like “Oh I know what I want. I want to be rich and financially free.”
But rich is just a number – some figure of net worth, and nobody is going to get excited about a number. To alchemise a goal into motivation and motivation into energy, you need to have a clear emotional connection to what you want.
So something like, “Have a net-worth of $5m.” isn’t really going to do it. It’s too cold. But something like, “Have enough money so I can quit my job and take the grandkids on an overseas holiday every year” is something you can get emotionally invested in.
Once you’re emotionally invested, you’re motivated. Once you’re motivated, it’s easy to find the energy.
So we need to give our dreams and aspirations real definition.
The trouble is, we often don’t really know how to do that.
Sometimes that’s just because we’ve never really had to. We’ve followed the well-worn paths of life – into a job, into home-ownership, into family, without ever having to determine if that’s what we actually want in our heart of hearts.
And most times it works out – we’re happy enough – and so we never have to dig any deeper.
Other times we don’t have a clear sense of what we want because we’ve grown up believing that life never gives you what we we want – that we don’t deserve it or the world is fundamentally a cruel place and if we get too excited about anything we’re bound to be disappointed.
No pointing digging into the soul to figure out what actually makes us happy because it’s never going to happen.
But whatever the case, many of us end up with under-developed desire muscles. We never stop to figure out exactly what we want.
And so the thing I normally recommend is ‘data sampling’. That is, just start experimenting in your life. Go on an overseas holiday. Work in a charity. Take your friends out for lunch. Sit on the beach for a day.
Just play with the clay of life until you get a clear picture of what it is that lights you up.
But there’s another way. A backdoor hack.
And that’s to look at what you’re instinctively inspired to offer others. This is often the clearest way to identify your core needs.
Do you always rush in to support your kids and your friends in their dreams? Maybe what you really crave is more support to be yourself.
Do you rush in to make others feel comfortable and at home – like they belong? Maybe what you really crave is belonging.
Do you rush into encourage others to relax and take time off work and to practice self-care? Maybe what you need is deep relaxation and refreshment.
They key to watch here is when you successfully offer these things – even though they seem to have been offered from a deep and instinctual place – when they’re successfully offered, we’re left with a bit of a hollow feeling.
We support our daughter at her dance recital, but something doesn’t land. We don’t feel satisfied. Do we need her to be more grateful?
Or we welcome the new guy into the office, make him feel at home, but again, it’s an empty satisfaction. We want him to be more grateful. He said thank you but would it kill him to bake a cake?
But we don’t really want them to be more grateful. We want to be offered what we are offering others.
And so I think it’s always worth checking the back door. Is there something that you deeply want, that’s only showing up as a deep-seated drive to offer something to others?
Tackle this one directly, and you will massively level up your happiness, with almost no effort.
It will feel like magic.
DB.
This sounds like a horrible idea.
Want to hear the scariest idea I’ve heard in a while?
We’re in the middle of a housing crisis, and we definitely need to get innovative, but this sends chills down my spine:
Mirvac chief executive Campbell Hanan has thrown his weight behind the push to develop lower-value mortgages, allowing more first home buyers to step on the housing ladder by acquiring a home without land in a housing estate or master-planned community.
The growing popularity of land lease communities – which allow buyers to purchase a new home on land for which they pay rent – suited downsizers with equity from the sale of their family homes, and a loan product that would also allow first-time buyers into that market would be good, he said.
“When you get to a position where affordability becomes the challenge that it is today, it does beg the question whether you can divorce land and the cost of building houses,” he told The Australian Financial Review.
The key challenge he’s trying to unpick for his land lease communities is that banks just won’t lend on property unless they have security over the underlying land.
Which is why they work for cashed up retirees who have the cash to purchase the dwelling outright, and then have the income streams available to service the rent on the land.
But they don’t really work for anyone else.
So should we make these kinds of properties available to first home buyers?
Oh gawd, what an awful idea.
Remember, when you’re buying a property, you’re actually buying two separate assets bundled together – there’s the land and the dwelling itself.
The land tends to appreciate in value. They’re not making any more of it, and there’s a chronic shortage of it already. And the more the population grows, the more scarce it becomes, and the more its value goes up.
Land appreciates.
Dwellings on the other hand go the other way. They get run down and need repairs. Like cars, they lose value with use. And at some point, with no upkeep and maintenance, they will become worthless.
Dwellings depreciate.
And so if the plan here is to ‘divorce’ the land and dwelling, what the developer is saying to young buyers is, ‘we’ll keep the asset that’s appreciating in value, while you go out and get a mortgage to pay for the asset that’s depreciating in value.”
If that sounds like a raw deal for young buyers, trust your instincts.
There is absolutely no way that a buyer is going to get ahead financially in this scenario. It might be marginally better than renting, since you probably get greater security of tenure, but on a purely financial basis, it’s going to be pretty much exactly the same.
Not only that, you’ll have a debt of $200K to $300K on an asset that loses value every year.
Surely banks will take a dim view of that when assessing your serviceability when you do decide to start building your portfolio.
So yeah, nah. This sounds like a disaster.
DB
See the world through the eyes of an economist: Approvals, sales, business confidence and container rates.
These are the charts that caught my eye this week. First up, building approvals continue to nose-dive and detached building sales remain in the gutter. There’s no signs here that we’ll be building our way out of the crisis anytime soon.
Which leaves Australia with a chronic housing shortage. The rental vacancy rate remained at record lows during the week, which correlates with super-charged rental growth. This will continue for some time yet.
The NAB Business Survey showed that businesses are pretty ambivalent about current trading conditions. They’re not bad, but they’re not good either.
That said, a growing share of employers expect to increase staff over the next three months, with very few expecting to decrease staff numbers. This should stop the unemployment rate lifting too far.
Finally, container shipping rates remain elevated. They spiked during the outbreak of tensions in the Middle East, and haven’t come back down. We’re still nowhere near Covid levels, but it does show how vulnerable the economy is to shocks. Another trade shock now could see container rates spike again, triggering a fresh round of inflation. But for now, we’re fine.
And that’s how the world looks through the eyes of an economist this week.
DB.
Truth Bomb Tuesday: Giving is good, but not always.
Where are you giving from?
This is a really interesting question. When you give, do you give automatically, out of impulse? Or do you stop and consider deeply whether you actually have the resources to offer?
I was talking to a former student the other day – former in the sense that she has “graduated” into financial freedom and now just does what she wants all day. Bless her.
But she reflected that once she started taking responsibility for her financial journey, that set in train a whole bunch of changes that turned her into a different person – a better person, in the sense that she likes who she is more now.
And one of the things she had to figure out was how she managed her energies.
The way she tells it, she grew up without a strong sense of belonging, and without getting her needs for intimacy met.
Her therapist said there’s three things that tend happen in that kind of scenario. You either harden up around that need – tell yourself that you don’t actually need it and just learn to live without it.
Or you collapse – you live in a sort of constant despair and victimhood and a belief that that need will never be met.
Or you rush to meet that need in others, in the hope that it will be reciprocated. You start roping people into reciprocal contracts without letting the counter-parties know what they’re signing up to.
She went down the third route. She would rush to help people fit in and feel like they belonged. She’d be the one organising parties and birthday dinners and making sure everyone felt included.
She offered what she wanted to receive. She wanted to feel welcomed. She wanted to belong. And so that was what she offered to others.
… Even if it wasn’t really needed or even her place to do it. She’d be the one showing the new team member around, even if they weren’t even in her team. She’d be checking in to make sure that people felt included, even if they were hyper-individualistic and didn’t actually care whether they fitted in or not.
And she’d instinctively make excuses for people so they didn’t feel ostracised, even if their behaviour probably meant that they did need to be cut off.
It was automatic.
But it wasn’t authentic.
She gave and gave, regardless of where her energies were at. She’d often end up feeling depleted and drained.
But, the good news is that as she learnt to own her own needs directly, and to take responsibility for making sure those needs were met (in collaboration with her loved ones), she stopped living in that kind of transactional reality.
When she gave it was because she chose to give, not because it was an automatic learnt response.
The way she described it, it came from deeper in her being. The impulse to give came from deep within, rather than being a surface level response.
In that way, it was more authentic and nourishing.
And so I think this becomes a really interesting question: where are you giving from?
Because if you are giving automatically – hungrily – without checking in with how you actually feel first, then it’s possible that you are caught in this kind of transactional reality.
And maybe what you need to do is discover what unmet need is driving the urge to give, own it and meet it directly.
It’s an interesting question.
DB.
Eventually we’re going to have to face we’re in a crisis.
When is the rental market going to roll over?
Rents have been growing at a blistering pace since Covid. Take a look at the chart. Australia has never seen anything like it:
The hard news I have to deliver is that I can’t see this retracing any time soon… if ever. Not as long as the supply-demand dynamics remain as they are. (Double-bad news: they look like they’re actually going to get worse.)
But this isn’t just an inconvenience for renters. It’s life changing. New analysis shows that almost a million renters are at risk of being displaced from their communities.
Now PropTrack has released its Rental Affordability Report, which shows that “Australia’s rental affordability is at its worst level on record”.
PropTrack found that “households earning the median income of roughly $111,000 can afford to rent the smallest share of properties since 2008 when records began, driven by surging rents in recent years”.
“From financial year 2018-19 to today, national median household income has increased 19%. Since the pandemic, median rental prices grew 38% across the country”.
PropTrack also shows that only 39% of rental properties advertised on realestate.com.au from July to December 2023 were affordable across the country for a typical-income household spending 25% of their income:
The funny thing about being an economist for as long as I have is that you begin to see the stories that people are hiding. Take a look at the above chart. Why are we talking about the 30th percentile? We never talk about the 30th. It’s always the 25th.
But what happens if you look at the 25th? Well, from the chart above, the number goes to zero.
Which is to say that for the bottom 25% of Australians – the bottom quarter!!! – there are no affordable rentals on offer anywhere in the country.
That’s not a problem. That’s a crisis.
And the crisis has a name: Homelessness.
Analysis by Suburbtrends reckons that up to 800,000 renters are at risk of being ‘displaced’.
More than 800,000 renting households across the country could be priced out of their current suburbs, displaced by wealthier tenants who are themselves moving into more affordable areas as rents soar to new highs, new data shows.
Analysis by Kent Lardner, director of Suburbtrends also finds that those in the lowest socio-economic groups, represented by over 150,000 households – are bearing the heaviest burden.
“The mounting pressure from the relentless increases in rents are prompting wealthier households to seek out cheaper rental homes, crowding out those in the lower socio-economic ladder,” he said.
“The intense competition for a limited pool of rental properties and a dire shortage of affordable housing options mean this problem will ripple out to the poorest suburbs, leaving those in the lowest socio-economic households under the most strain over the medium to long term.”
Yep, this is how it works. People move out of their suburbs to where they can afford.
But at some point, there’s nowhere left to go. After the bottom rung of the ladder, you’re in the pool.
This is a crisis.
The property market is in desperate need of support.
But I wouldn’t be holding my breath. We’ve been talking about a housing crisis for decades.
Rental prices will keep heading north, and more and more Australians will end up in the pool.
Surely we’ll have to do something about it soon?
DB
Truth Bomb Tuesday: It’s hard to become completely free.
Do you remember when you grew up?
It must have happened at some point right? At some point you must have moved from the dependency of childhood into the independence of adulthood.
But when was it?
Was there a particular moment in time? Your eighteenth birthday? Your 21st? The first time you got a job? The first time you moved out of home?
When did you realise that your life was now your responsibility – that you now had to rely on your own drive, your own power, and your own inner-resources?
There probably wasn’t a point in time where that transition happened – no clear separation between those two life-phases. Like most of us, you probably just bumbled your way into adulthood, slowly stepping out from under your mother’s skirt, to stand more and more on your own.
I think this is a shame. It’s a shame we don’t have clear markers here anymore.
Because we learn things as children that don’t serve us as adults.
As children, we are dependent on the care and the resources of our family. If we’re lucky, we practice a healthy dependency – where we are totally dependent, but grateful and ready to contribute where we can.
There is a particular skill set that goes with being a child, and it’s a skill set we practice and become good at. It’s not that easy to receive.
But it is not a skill-set that serves us as an adult. As an adult we don’t want to be primarily looking to others for our material needs.
But many of us do. And we call that dependency a job. We rely on our employers for our material needs, and in return, offer gratitude and a willingness to contribute where we can.
We are good children.
We apply the child’s mindset to work because we never consciously stepped away from it. We never had a clear moment in time where we stopped being a child and started becoming an adult.
Many cultures have clear ceremonies of initiation. They are ceremonies of transformation – where the child gives way to the adult. Where dependency is replaced with responsibility.
We don’t. Not in the West. And so we never have a point in time where we consciously let go of the strategies that served us as a child, and learn a new way of being.
And as a result, we never take full responsibility for our lives, and never step into our full power.
And we’re always looking to others – to our employer, to the government, to the economy etc. to provide for us.
It’s time to let that go. It’s time to acknowledge that you are an adult, and that you no longer have the luxury of being dependent on others.
It’s also time to acknowledge that the strategies that served you as a child are now holding you back, and preventing you from stepping into the fullness of your power.
This is your ceremony of initiation. This is your invitation to become a fully realised adult.
… because it’s just not going to happen unless you make it happen.
DB.
See the world through the eyes of an economist: House prices, infrastructure and Taylor Swift.
The data is still largely giving us pretty pictures to paint. First up, there was the acceleration in house prices, with Corelogic’s data for February lifting a solid 0.6% in the month of February. Expect the acceleration to continue, for all the reasons I’ve written about elsewhere.
Dwelling approvals fell 9.9% in the month of January. This often tends to be a softer month, but it’s not suggesting that we’re going to see the acceleration in house building that many politicians seem to be banking on.
On the job ads front, the ANZ-Indeed index fell a further 2.8% in February. This suggests further labour market softening is ahead of us, but that was to be expected, and these numbers don’t suggest that process is getting out of control.
On the infrastructure front, the states continue to spend big, and we’re now back at levels recorded in the 2012-2014 mining boom. The big difference, as you can see, is that recently, the lion’s share is now going to transport infrastructure.
Finally, since everyone is talking about it, I found figures on how much Taylor Swift makes on a concert (well, Taylor Swift enterprises.) Each one pulls in $14 million. Taylor Swift 4EVA!
And that’s how the world looks through the eyes of an economist this week.
DB.
Truth Bomb Tuesday: I wouldn’t normally recommend this, but it works.
Want to know a secret wealth hack you can do with debt?
Use a heavy debt load to force change in your attitudes to money.
Now, this isn’t for everyone. This isn’t even for most people.
And generally, I would say that if debt is not giving you access to an income generating asset then you just want to avoid it.
This is the classic distinction between good debt and bad debt. Good debt buys productive assets that make you wealthier in the long run. Bad debt buys you consumables you can’t afford and it makes you poorer in the long run.
But sometimes even that doesn’t matter. Simply having a debt hanging over your head forces you to live differently.
I’m thinking about a friend of my son’s. He was a capable guy, and handy on the tools.
But like a lot of young men he was living in the moment. He worked odd jobs, worked hard for a bit and made good money.
He then hit the road, hit the beaches and hit the bars. When the money would run out, he would skip meals and lay a swag down in the back of his ute. Sometimes he would pop back home if he was really hungry.
He learnt to get by on very little money and he was happy.
But it can’t go on forever.
And so at one point, his dad, who I think could see where things were going, got him a good job on a good worksite, with a solid contract.
A few weeks later, when his rego was coming due, his father said, why don’t we get you a proper ute?
I think they ended up spending about 25 to 30 grand. But they put it on finance.
Now, for the first time in his life, he had financial commitments he couldn’t just walk away from.
He was locked in.
And that meant he had to take his work a bit more seriously. He had to be a bit more committed.
At first it was tough. It was a decent chunk of money to come up with each week.
But in time it just became part of his life, like brushing his teeth.
He built a good habit. And when he gets around to getting a mortgage, he’s going to know how to manage it … And the school fees, and the repayments on the investment property, and so on.
And that’s why I say that normally taking on that that stretches you, particularly for something you don’t really need, isn’t a great idea.
But sometimes a serious financial commitment is what’s required for someone to get serious.
It’s also why I say that buying a house for your kids is almost never a good idea. You’re denying them an opportunity to build strength in their financial muscles.
And it’s why I think we need a new category of debt. There’s good debt, bad debt, and getting your crap together debt.
DB
Office conversions are stalling. Did they ever make sense.
One of the most hyped ideas to come out of Covid was that we could turn all the empty office towers into residential apartments.
I was always a little sceptical about this. I mean, it sounds like a good idea. There’s an empty building and a lot of people who need a building to live in.
But having done my fair share of renovations, my head did swim a bit about how you were going to covert offices into apartments.
I mean, think about the plumbing. Offices tend to have centralised toilet facilities, with each floor following the same layout as the others to make the plumbing simple.
So at the very least, you’ve going to have to replace a centralised plumbing system with a distributed one.
As my plumber mate says, “That’s not going to be cheap.”
And that’s just the start of it.
Anyway, in a turn of events that isn’t all that surprising, those office conversions seem to have hit a stumbling block.
Thousands of new apartments planned in the Sydney CBD have been delayed or cancelled with rising construction and financing costs making real estate developers increasingly nervous about converting office towers into units – even after the projects have already been approved.
Some office blocks have been waiting for six years for conversion, delaying hundreds of apartments in the area. Alex Stuart, the director of research house Urbis, which conducted the analysis, said buyers were also less willing to pay high prices after an increase in interest rates over the last two years.
“Launches have slowed down because market confidence has been slow the past 18 months from interest rates going up and challenges around construction quality,” he said. “A lot of these projects which received approval from a certain feasibility three or four years ago now don’t stack up as well due to what’s been happening.”
Construction costs have risen as much as 40 per cent since the COVID-19 pandemic, while the majority of financiers were only lending to off-the-plan apartment projects if they received pre-sale commitments for more than two-thirds of the building.
In Sydney’s CBD, there are nine commercial-to-residential redevelopments that have approval but have not advanced to construction. At least another two residential projects have not advanced, or are stalled to the point where approvals expired. If these projects were to go ahead, they would create more than 2000 new homes in the heart of the city.
I think those projects would have had pretty thin margins even before construction costs exploded during Covid.
But it speaks to one of the realities of the Australian property market – there’s no low hanging fruit.
There’s no easy way to bring housing to market at scale. There’s no land just sitting around that’s ideally suited to huge apartment towers.
It’s the reason why we’re talking about office conversions in the first place.
Australia is stuck with a housing shortage.
And its why house prices aren’t looking like slowing down anytime soon.
DB
It has Canadian flavours, but their boom is built with the same bones as ours.
Someone flicked me a kind of mind-blowing report on the Canadian housing market.
If you think the Aussie housing market is tight, have a look at what’s happening in Canada.
And if you think that the Aussie property market has no more room left to run, look at what’s happening in Canada!
The thing you’ll note here is that the exact same dynamics are playing out in both countries, it’s just a little more bonkers over in Canada.
So this is all from a report by the National Bank of Canada (a private bank, not a government agency.)
What they note is that the Canadian property market is buckling under the weight of a massive surge in immigration.
Canada added a completely unprecedented 1.25 million people to the population in 2023, completely dwarfing anything that came before it.
Canada’s population growth rate in 2023 was 3.2%, five times the OECD average.
This has created an epic housing shortage. Looking at the ratio of the working age population to housing starts, the deficit to required housing is massive.
There has been effectively little to no housing supply response. Housing starts are tracking along with historical averages.
NBC economists estimate that to keep pace with population flows, Canada needed to have built 480,000 units in 2022, and 725,000 units in 2023. These are huge and completely unrealistic numbers. Housing starts only came in at 241K and 263K units in those years, and the residential construction sector has never exceeded 274K units on an annual basis.
But with the housing shortage growing to epic proportions, rents obviously started to sky-rocket.
As this impulse feeds through into the inflation data, inflation is much higher than it would have been without the huge surge in immigration. In fact, if you take the shelter component out, inflation is already pretty much back to target.
Which is to say that in their view, Canadian interest rates have to stay higher for longer to make room for the extra immigration.
Now I think you’re starting to hear grumbles about this situation in Canada at the moment, but nobody really wants to talk about immigration.
Like here, if you start talking about immigration, someone is going to pop up out of the plant in your café and call you a racist.
Which is why you can get these massive immigration numbers with almost no public debate about what kind of numbers are ideal.
And that’s exactly what we’ve seen here in Australia too.
Our story hasn’t been quite as extreme as Canada’s, but the exact same dynamics are playing out.
I mean, what did people think was going to happen when we lifted immigration into a housing crisis?
Did anyone even ask the question?
The sad truth is that immigration is the lazy politician’s economic lever. More people = more GDP, and it’s much easier to create visas than to implement reform, or industry policy or tax policy.
And if it puts a rocket under house prices, that’s somebody else’s problem.
DB
See the world through the eyes of an economist: auctions, global house prices, wages and the gender pay gap.
This is what caught my eye this week. First up, auctions continue to run hot, and auction clearance rates (how many resulted in a successful sale) continue to boom. When you map this against house price growth, it suggests that price growth should accelerate further from here.
The housing rebound seems to be consolidating around the world. Australia’s property market tends to move closely with other developed markets, since they’re driven by many of the same factors. There’s comfort in this, since it gives us more confidence that the ongoing recovery has substance.
We got wages data last week, which showed the Wage Price Index accelerating to 15 year high. Importantly, it came in above inflation, which means that real wages are growing again.
However, before we break out the bubbly, it’s worth noting that measures of labour under-utilisation (a broader measure than unemployment), suggests that wage growth has probably topped out, and we shouldn’t really expect it to go much higher from here.
Speaking of wages, we also got a report on the gender pay-gap this week. On average, men still earn more than women, but the gap is closing, down from 18% in 2014 to 12% in 2023.
This has more to do with women’s career trajectories, and the time they take off to work for the family, rather than inherent bias within jobs. Still, it’s not ideal to punish women financial for taking time to care for the kids.
The solution? Pay women for the work they do at home. I rekcon. Somebody look into it.
And that’s how the world looks through the eyes of an economist this week.
DB.
Sales should pick up this year… but it won’t close the shortage.
New home buyers are starting to get active in the market.
That was the word from Stockland’s earning call last week. The CEO reckons sales inquiries are booming:
Home buyers are returning to the market as expectations grow that the cycle of interest rate increases has peaked, pushing up new sales inquiries by 20 per cent last month alone, Stockland chief executive Tarun Gupta said.
… If you look back last 12 to 18 months, things have been slowing down really as a result of the high interest rate environment,” he told The Australian Financial Review.
“But we have been saying for some time that as the outlook for interest rates stabilises, we would see demand starting to come back. And that’s what we’ve seen over the course of the last half.”
…“January inquiries, compared to January last year, we were up about 20 per cent, give or take,” he said.
“If you look at around the states, WA is very affordable, and there’s good momentum in that market, south-east Queensland also an affordable market, and we’re seen good momentum there. Sydney is starting to wake up. And Melbourne, Victoria, still subdued.”
Affordability was the biggest challenge and buyers were downsizing to smaller homes on smaller lots, Mr Gupta said.
Yeah, I don’t know if you get to call young people being forced to buy smaller houses on smaller lots ‘downsizing’.
But the point he is making about interest rates is a point I’ve made before.
When there’s uncertainty about where interest rates are headed, it’s hard for young buyers to know what they can afford. And young buyers tend to stretch themselves as far as they feel comfortable… and then a little further.
So I always thought that once the outlook for rates stabilised, we should see demand start to return in a pretty big way. So it looks like that is happening.
And a 20% lift in inquiries does sound like a lot. But you’ve also got to remember that we’re coming off a pretty low base here.
CBA charted out residential building approvals by state the other day, and it’s a pretty bleak picture. It shows approvals falling everywhere, with big falls across the board.
Same story when you look through to the pipeline of building activity. Commencements are in lockstep with approvals and falling sharply.
It’s going to take a lot to turn that around, and I don’t think a 20% lift in inquiries (and how many of them convert into actual sales?) is going to do it.
As I’ve said before, the housing shortage is going to go from big to massive over the next couple of years.
And that’s going to be a massive tail wind for property prices.
DB
Truth Bomb Tuesday: It should be easy. This is why it’s not.
Making changes in your life is hard for the same reason that Jenga is hard.
You know the game Jenga right? You have a whole bunch of little blocks stacked one on top of the other in a tower, and you have to pull a block from the tower and put it back on top of the tower, without knocking the whole tower over.
Loads of fun.
Now on the face of it, picking up a block and moving it sounds trivially easy. It’s just a tiny little block. It weighs next to nothing.
But picking up a block is hard because through the structure of the tower, it is connected to every other block. You can’t move one without it having impact on every other one.
It’s the same story with making changes in your life.
Often the changes we want to make involve unlearning life techniques and survival strategies we learnt at a younger age.
Maybe as a teenager you saw your parents have a rough time financially, and you learnt to be fearful around money.
Or maybe your pants fell down while you were asking Becky to the senior prom, and since then you’ve spent the rest of your life running from shame and playing it small.
Or maybe you were left to cry it out as an infant, and now you’ve spent the rest of your life papering over the belief that the world is a fundamentally hostile and lonely place.
On the face of it, these things are no heavier than a Jenga block. They’re not huge. Anything that can be expressed in a single sentence can’t be that big.
But you can’t address them in isolation.
Once you’ve adopted a particular posture towards money, for example, that implies particular postures towards careers, relationships, spending on yourself and how you express love for yourself, to name just a few.
To pick up the block called ‘beliefs around money’, and move its alignment even a little bit can suddenly mean that everything else in your life is no longer in alignment. It doesn’t fit any more.
If you stop believing that scarcity is the fundamental nature of existence, for example, then suddenly it no longer makes sense to be working 60 hours a week for the same salary you started on 10 years ago.
Change one thing, you change everything.
And what you find is often the rigidity in your life is not in the foundational belief, but in the things that have been built around it.
You might hear someone say something like, “oh yeah, I am totally willing to change my beliefs around money, but I’m just not willing to walk away from this career I’ve invested 20 years in.”
Rigidity gets transferred up the tower.
And so this is why change is hard. Go back and change the child, and suddenly that adult doesn’t make sense. The adult needs to change to.
But before this becomes all doom and gloom, there’s an opportunity here. And that is to recognise that if we can go back and change just one foundational belief, the leverage of that is enormous. We can change are whole life.
Change one thing, change everything.
That idea should be exciting.
DB.
Maria and Bill were quick on the uptake when they first came to Australia, they could tell from day 1 the money making potential of property. Now, as a property development power couple, they net up to 5-6 deals every year, making them hundreds of thousands of dollars in the process. We’ve got Maria and […]
As they say, when life gives you lemons, make lemonade.And Julie, a newly-divorced single mum, decided to do just that. After all, she had a six-year-old daughter to feed and raise on her own.
But her work as a remote area nurse (RAN) initially made it difficult, as it was the type of work that required her full attention.
Being a RAN meant she had to travel in rural and remote areas of Australia. She also had to work with indigenous communities while supporting the mining, agricultural and tourism industries.
It was a fulfilling job.
But the drawback was that being a RAN meant Julie was often away from home. To the point that she sometimes wondered if that was one of the reasons why her marriage didn’t work out.
This also became a big challenge for Julie and her young daughter. The nature of her work exacerbated their feeling of isolation. She and her daughter didn’t see each other often, and she also felt lonely in her workplace since their team worked different shifts.
Another big challenge she faced was the fly-in fly-out (FIFO) or drive-in drive-out (DIDO) policy. Julie had to balance the feeling of being separated from her loved ones while quickly building a good relationship with the people in the communities they were in.
It was tough!
Additionally, the divorce worsened Julie’s financial situation. She became so financially insecure that she found it difficult to pay back her debts. And in the end, she had to file Part 10 Bankruptcy. It gave her some momentary relief from her creditors.
At that point, the only other source of money that Julie had besides her job was the $42,000 divorce settlement… But it had yet to arrive. And even though Julie had her own properties, she had no assets.
With a young child to feed, Julie knew that she could not just wait and rely on the divorce settlement. She needed to do something more.
Julie wanted to make a change not just for herself but also for her daughter.
That made her think about what to do with the divorce settlement she was expecting.
The desire for change was the reason why Julie decided to join ILRE. And it was a decision that changed her life.
Since joining the program, she had undergone several major changes in her life – both personally and in her career as a property investor. She went on a journey of self-discovery and massive growth. At the same time, she managed to secure deals, RENOs, strata, and JVs, among others.
Joining Platinum was the best decision she made in turning her life around. Since then, she has owned three investment properties with her own PPR.
So, how exactly did she turn her situation around?
Buying Investment PropertiesAfter going through the divorce settlement, Julie decided to take the pieces of advice she got from the program and began to change her mindset.
Previously, she had so many doubts about herself and her life decisions. But thanks to the mindset shift she had, Julie decided to trust in herself more, as well as the learnings she got from ILRE.
She began her property investing journey with a one-storey building deal in Parmelia. It was a joint venture (JV) that involved a renovation-to-flip of the house. They purchased the property for $250,000, while its purchase cost was $9,062. Renovation cost them $67,000, but they were able to sell the property for $415,000.
That meant they made a profit of $87,955 – a 27% ROI. Julie’s share was $21,988, which was not bad for a first deal.
This JV experience motivated her to explore similar property investing projects.
Julie’s second deal was another JV. But this time, it involved the renovation and flipping of a property in Halls Head, Western Australia.
The purchase of the property cost them $330,000, and they had to pay another $75,000 for its renovation. But unlike the Parmelia deal, Julie and her partner decided to rent out Halls Head.
Fortunately, they were very careful in selecting the tenants for the property since they wanted to avoid any issues. Their due diligence paid off as it helped them create a positive outflow from renting out the property.
Following the success of the second deal, Julie proceeded to do other JVs. One of which was the renovation and flip of a property in Ballajura. The total purchase and renovation cost for it was $416,000.
Even if other related costs, such as option fee and hold fee, are added, the property’s value outweighs the total cost. And they got a sale price of $530,000, which meant they raked in a profit of $80,400, half of which is Julie’s share.
As for the other JV, it was also a renovate-and-flip property in Rockingham. It cost them $367,000 to purchase and renovate. Despite additional costs such as renovation and option fees, the property was valued at $445,000 – and they sold it for that amount. They got a $63,000 profit from it and, again, half of it was Julie’s share.
For Julie and her partner’s latest JV, they renovated and flipped a Safety Bay property to turn it into an Airbnb and rental. They decided to take out a $460,000 loan to finance their purchase of the property for $585,000.
While it cost them an additional $40,000 for the renovation, they were able to raise the property’s value to $750,000 as a result. That’s enough to offset the total cost of the property’s purchase and renovation. They’re also able to derive further profit from it through the $480 per week rent. The property is expected to generate Julie a profit of $105,000.
The Life-Changing Result of Being a Property InvestorAfter joining ILRE and applying their advice, Julie gained the financial freedom that she’d always been aspiring for. Even better, she was no longer the insecure person she was before. She’s gained much-needed self-confidence.
And starting her own renovation company could be considered an added bonus!
Julie also believes that her success story can inspire her grandson. In particular, she wants him to see her as proof that as long as you work hard enough and believe in yourself…
You will be able to overcome anything.
After all, before meeting Dymphna and joining ILRE, Julie had no assets. But now, she has a PPR and three investment properties with a total equity of $1,180,000.
Now, if someone were to ask her if she ever wanted to go back and not join the program, Julie would smile and reply:
“There’s no way I’ll ever want to go back. No way!”
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These stories and the results in them were captured at a specific point in time. The real estate market and the investing strategies used to succeed are constantly changing. The achievements and results of these investors may have changed since these stories were recorded. Each of these investors engaged in in-depth training, coaching and mentoring to be able to achieve these results. Their results are not typical and should not be taken as a guarantee of the results you may achieve. Your personal results will be in-line with the training, education and hard work that you personally conduct.
Truth Bomb Tuesday: This is what the sour grapes fable was actually about.
I want to show you something important.
It starts with the story of sour grapes.
We all know that one. The Fox can’t reach the grapes he wants and so tells himself that those grapes were probably sour anyway.
Now the thing to remember about Aesop’s fables is that we’re not talking about some things that some people do, but things that we all do. Aesop is identifying fundamental human tendencies, and we should see them not as examples of flaws that some people carry, but flaws that we all carry.
Now, what’s actually happening in that moment of sour grapes? Well, at the most basic level, the Fox is diffusing the discomfort that comes when you can’t get what you want.
That’s what the fox is trying to do. And when he convinces himself that the grapes were sour anyway, then he no longer feels the discomfort of being separated from his desires.
But the sour grapes strategy is only one of many strategies for achieving this aim.
Sometimes we flip the script and tell ourselves that we didn’t actually want it that much anyway.
Sometimes we tell ourselves that we don’t really deserve that kind of success. That success like that belongs only to a few very special and very virtuous people. It was never meant for people like us.
Or we tell ourselves the success requires us to make compromises we’re just not willing to make. That we have to be selfish or greedy or callous.
“I don’t want to be wealthy, because wealthy people are greedy and selfish.”
Do you see what I mean? There are 1 million ways to skin this cat.
But the fundamental desire here is to diffuse the discomfort that comes with not having what we want.
But we don’t want to do this.
Why? There’s two reasons.
The first is we don’t want to do anything that undermines the validity of our desires.
What you want is what you want. It’s okay to want what you want.
You should be very guarded against any voice that wants to tell you that your desires are too selfish or too greedy or too dreamy or anything other than perfectly what they are.
The other reason is that discomfort is an energy. It’s a powerful motivating force. Put your hand on an open flame and you become very focused and very motivated to move your hand.
When there is discomfort in your life, you become very motivated and doing what you have to do to eliminate that discomfort.
In that sense, the sour grapes strategy or any of the other defusing strategies are the cheap and easy way out.
What we have to do is to find the discipline and the strength to be able to be with our discomfort, and to let that discomfort transform itself into drive and motivation.
But very few of us can do that. Most of us will take the easy way out.
And that is what Aesop was trying to show us.
DB.
Myth or reality? Investors are leaving the market in droves. I’ve seen a few reports recently of a mass exodus of investors from the property market. They’re leaving in droves apparently. I haven’t noticed this first hand, so I thought I should look into it. So, at one level it’s true. There are a lot […]
"We were very negatively geared, working really hard, long hours...We were doing it all wrong.”
Truth Bomb Tuesday: The power of networks is actually astounding. I have an argument with my marketing guys pretty regularly. At ILRE we have a range of systems and strategies that people can access. And they also have a powerful community that they can be part of. Which one do you think is more important […]
Ever wonder if you’re passing a millionaire in the street, someone worth talking to? What if you took that chance and actually asked? Well that’s exactly what happened to Allie. Her story is how a chance encounter with a secret millionaire celebrity lead to her to make $265,000 in gross profits from a single property. […]
Want to know what the next boom looks like? Look here. When trying to size up the shape of the coming boom, one of the biggest pieces of the puzzle is what’s happening to rents right now. And I think this is something that people often forget – just how important rents are to price […]
There’s a swing factor in property you just don’t find anywhere else. You know why property is the most amazing asset class in the world? Because its different? Why is it different? Well, did you ever hear about the guy who overpaid on BHP shares because he just loved the stock so much and his […]
The office market is struggling. But that’s creating opportunities of their own. Want to know the next big trend in property? Knocking down office towers and building apartments. The office sector is in a bit of trouble. Companies have been slow to bring their workforces back to the city, or are opting for hybrid work […]
Richard had a few property ventures before joining I Love Real Estate. Some good, others not so much. But it all paled in comparison to the massive setback he had in the middle of his property journey, a venture that just went horribly wrong. But using what he learnt at ILRE he was able to […]
Truth Bomb Tuesday: Collaboration isn’t just a nice flow. It’s a tool for survival. “You don’t have to do it alone.” Actually, that’s maybe not strong enough. “You are not supposed to do it on your own.” “I’m not sure it’s actually possible to do it on your own.” What’s “it”? I dunno. Probably everything. […]
This deal blew my socks off. Slow market? What slow market? A recent sale in the press the other day caught my eye. Basically the vendors bought a property and turned around and sold it nine months later – for a capital gain of $500,000! That’s nice. I’d take that. The property wasn’t amazing. It […]
Tuesdays pause gives us hope that rate hikes are done. Are they? Is the RBA finally done? After the most aggressive rate hiking cycle in history, the RBA’s pause on Tuesday gave us hope that they might finally be done. It does seem to be the vibe. All the recent data has come in softer […]
The fundamentals look solid across the country. But in Brisbane, they look amazing. I’ve said many times over the years that of all the capitals, Brisbane has the most potential. And it’s not that I just have a soft spot for the city. As a market, the numbers stack up. But since saying that, Brisbane […]
The fundamentals look solid across the country. But in Brisbane, they look amazing. I’m generally not a massive fan of high-rise apartments as an investment class. There’s just so little you can do with them to create value if you need to. Like you can almost never add another bathroom and an entertainment area. But […]
Truth Truth Bomb Tuesday: Don’t be a useless dreamer I talked a lot about the power of visualising and positive thinking for a lot of people, it sets their BS detectors off. This is good. Its good to have our BS detectors on high alert, because I have seen a lot of people tripping merrily […]
This is the key reason why a house price collapse is an impossibility, we have a shortage of housing. Yes, it’s about to get a whole lot worse. Last week I shared some analysis from independent Kiwi economist Tony Alexander, arguing that the crash in kiwi house prices is over. I shared it because the […]
“I’m basically financially free for the rest of my life. And it makes me really proud to show my kids that you can make money without just having to go to university and work your butt off for the rest of your life.”
Truth Bomb Tuesday: Be driven at the calendar, chill at the desk. There’s a particular dance we have to do in this journey. A particular balance we have to strike. We have to cultivate a sense of urgency without getting into a rush. We have to cultivate a sense of urgency because life is short. […]
Yes, we have a shortage of housing. Yes, it’s about to get a whole lot worse. I’m not sure people are really across how epic the housing shortage is going to be in 12-18 months’ time. I mean, the Aussie housing market is already in a chronic shortage. There’s no stock on the market, and […]
If you listen to the myth, you could get into trouble. Somewhere, a long time ago, some pecker-head said that property prices double every seven years. Since then, it’s become Australian folklore, alongside Bunyips and Dropbears. And it has just as much basis in reality. Like I don’t imagine there are many, if any periods […]
Here’s proof that million dollar deals are still out there. Can you still make a million dollars out of property? Are you kidding? The average investor in some suburbs of Sydney is making an profit of a million dollars, per deal! That’s the latest insight from Corelogic’s Pain and Gain report, which takes recently sold […]
Is there going to be a rush of new stock on the market? So the RBA paused rates on Tuesday. Phew. You can hear a collective sigh of relief around the country. I think we’re very close to the peak now, but I’m not convinced we’re completely done. There’s a good chance there’s another one […]
"I have now been able to create so much passive income I don’t have to work if I don’t want to. And it means that I’m able to make better choices and spend more time with my daughter.”
What happens to property prices from here? Ask these economists So property portal Domain has some strong egg-head economists working for them, and they tend to be pretty good with their forecasts. And what are they predicting for the next year or so. Boom. Pretty much. I mean, we’re not going back to the crazy […]
Sharon is relatively new to the I Love Real Estate world, having only joined in 2019. Despite that, she’s one of the fastest growing success stories I’ve ever seen from one of my students. She was able to put together a rooming house that’s now generating just under $50k, and she did it all in […]
Work from Home was one of the big themes of Covid, but it looks like going the way of Covid too. So the rise of Work from Home was one of the big trends of the pandemic, and it had a big impact on the property market as everyone suddenly needed more rooms and more […]
"I'm just an average person with a desire to make something happen for myself and those that are most important to me. If you believe in yourself you can do it too. I honestly believe that. And I hope one thing you take from this is, YOU could be standing where I am now."
Truth Bomb Tuesday: This is a condition that a lot of people have Someone shared something with me that really struck a chord. It went like this: The best New Year’s resolution I ever made was to start devouring all my nicest things, and save no small pleasure for an unspecified future. Now I burn […]
The RBA’s not slowing down. There’s more pain ahead. So the RBA just went ahead and shocked everyone last week, hiking rates by 25 basis points to 4.1%. If you’ve got whiplash I don’t blame you. The pace of hikes, and the RBA’s aggressiveness is unprecedented. We’ve never seen anything like it. This chart compares […]
The auction market is scorching right now The market is certainly heating up, and I’ve got a story for you here of an investor who made two mill in two years off a single property. But things are certainly heating up. The auction clearance rate for the weekend just gone came in at just under […]
Before joining I Love Real Estate Sergio saw the rut that was forming at his feet. Working to day to day, he had no goal and while he was still making a living, he wasn’t building wealth. Looking to escape the black hole sucking him in, be began noticing the common “propositions” for wealth building… […]
Where Sydney goes, the nation follows The market bottomed out much quicker than people expected. And now it’s changed gears into boom much quicker than people expected too. Not long ago, people thought Sydney would be ending the year with falling prices. Now, some analysts reckon we’ll close out 2023 with prices growing over 10%. […]
Truth Bomb Tuesday: How to reclaim your power from your emotions.
“Sometimes my emotions get the better of me. I get close to landing a deal, and then I get scared. Self-doubt creeps in, and I just can’t go on. I know my emotions are holding me back, but I just don’t know how to overcome them.”
I’ve heard my students say this a hundred times. And it’s true. Your emotions can hold you back.
But let’s break it down a bit and let’s start at the beginning.
(Bearing in mind that I don’t have formal training in psychology, just a lot of experience working with people over the years. If you burn out a fuse in your brain trying these hacks and cause a small house fire, I take no responsibility.)
Ok, so what are emotions. Your emotions are your DNA’s way of controlling you. They’re the tool your DNA uses to e-motivate you into particular courses of action.
We tend to talk about emotions as if they’re an end result. “I did the good thing, and then I was happy. End of story.”
But they’re not an end, they’re a means. Good emotions like happiness motivate you to do more of the good things. You sit in the sun and feel warm. Being warm is good for the organism. And so you get a feeling of happiness to keep you coming back to ‘staying warm’.
Similarly, “bad” emotions like fear or jealousy motivate you to avoid certain situations. If I do public speaking, I risk looking like a fool and being rejected. Rejection is dangerous for a social animal like a human. Therefore, you get fear to make you avoid public speaking.
So our emotions are a tool designed to control us and motivate us. They are the mechanism the body uses to keep the conscious mind focused on achieving our basic human needs – safety, social inclusion, self-actualisation etc.
And that’s awesome. The only reason we’ve reached this stage of evolutionary sophistication is because we had a simple guidance system like this hard-wired into our brain.
Go life!
But like any system, it’s not without its glitches.
And those glitches come about because the world we live in is much more complex than the world we evolved in.
First up, that means we’re not great at evaluating what our self-interest actually is. We tend to overstate how risky a situation is, and we have trouble comprehending the potential benefits.
(I’ve literally heard someone say, “I can’t get up on stage with you Dymphna. I could die. Or worse!” …There is a “worse” than dying?)
Our system wants to do what’s best for us, but it’s often very hard to understand what ‘best’ actually looks like.
The other thing that’s hard to navigate is time. We just don’t do well with it. So given the choice between closing a deal that sets you up for financial freedom in ten years, or looking silly in front of a real estate agent you’ll never see again, many people will choose to avoid looking silly.
So it’s glitchy.
But the point is, your emotions are a system. It is a system designed to motivate you into particular action. And it’s not a perfect system – a long way from it.
When you feel an emotion, it’s not the end of a story. It’s the beginning of a process.
I find if we can keep this in mind – that our emotions are not us, and do not define us, but rather are one of the many wonderful and flawed systems going on in the human body – then that gives us a bit of space and perspective.
And it gives us an ability work with the signals of our emotional system consciously…
… which takes away some of their power.
DB.
Carrie Li and Felix Wang have an amazing immigrant success story.See, they left China on a whim because they made the incredibly risky decision to move to Australia… And they did it with nothing in their pockets!
But everything paid off in the end.
It was a huge sacrifice to make because Carrie and Felix were born and raised in China. And from an early age, they were taught very traditional Chinese traditions and beliefs. One of those beliefs was going to university and getting a good job in the city.
Now, before moving to Australia, the couple was able to achieve the Chinese dream. It also seemed like everything was perfect in their lives.
…Yet it just didn’t feel right to them.
As Carrie put it:
“On the surface, we were living a very happy life, but I don’t know why, but something was missing. So, I wanted a change. We quit our jobs and came to Australia as international students.”
So, to get to Australia, Carrie took up a master’s in accounting, while Felix took up a master’s in supply chain and logistics management.
After some time, Carrie and Felix were able to purchase and fully pay off their PPR at $368,000. This signalled the start of the couple’s property journey, although Carrie did it alone for the first five years.
She already had a passion for property, but she didn’t know how and when to start.
When she learned about ILRE in 2012, she checked it out. There was an instant connection, so she immediately joined.
While Carrie was buying property and making deals… She wasn’t listening to the pieces of advice she got. Nor did she implement her learnings perfectly.
Her first deal was a buy-and-hold worth $668,000. But the position changed, and she lost half of the money as a result. Her next deals were also buy-and-holds that continued to reduce their cash flow. For the fifth deal, she bought another PPR. While it earned her a positive cash flow of $13,000, it wasn’t enough.
The result?
Carrie had a negative cash flow of $40,000 at the end of 2017.
Bringing on Felix and Joining PlatinumCarrie knew that things had to change.
So, by November 2017, she joined Platinum and brought in her partner, Felix. This was a real game-changer for both of them… and things started to head in the right direction.
The couple’s first platinum deal consisted of strata titling, cosmetic renovation, and a flip in Perth. It involved a five-week renovation for two houses, with both houses sold in six weeks. They profited $120,000 from that deal, which was amazing since Perth had a particularly depressed market at the time.
Soon after that deal, they formed an A-team and hired experienced people to help them out.
Now, their 2nd deal led to a moral dilemma. See, they bought a property that was making good cash return for the first two years. But the market turned, and they soon became saddled with debt.
But Carrie and Felix knew a banker that could get rid of the debt for a fraction of the fee. But this wasn’t what they wanted. So, they asked for advice from their coach, Tam, who gave them two choices:
Be debt-free legally and unethically, or carry the pain but follow the heart.
Felix said:
“There was a voice in our hearts. This was not aligned with the traditional core ideals we learned from our parents. So, we decided to carry the pain.”
It was this decision that allowed them to move forward and continue succeeding. And since they’ve experienced dealing with catastrophic failure, they felt like they can handle anything.
Their third platinum deal was a retrofit rooming project for a property they bought before joining Platinum. For this deal, they turned a 4×1 into a 6×4 in six weeks. They had an equity increase of $88,000 as a result and rented out the home room by room.
This deal allowed Carrie and Felix to turn negative cash flow into positive and helped them learn what they were good at.
This was why their next deals were the same retrofit rooming projects that made their old properties profitable. Deal four turned a 5×2 into a 3×4 in four weeks, and they had an equity increase of $145,000. As for deal five, they turned a 3×2 into a 5×4 in five weeks and increased equity by $223,000.
They found their cookie cutter.
Through this, Carrie was able to free up more of her time to work on real estate, and they expanded their A-team.
From their success, they were able to upgrade their second PPR and add a granny flat. After the revaluation, they staged the house and increased equity by $186,500.
Shopping Centre and the AftermathThe couple’s next and most recent step was unexpected – they suddenly bought a shopping centre!
Carrie shared:
“We always ask ourselves what will fit our portfolio next. We need cash? We need equity? So what kind of deal can we do? Commercial! Go for commercial!”
It involved a difficult process for Carrie and Felix.
After all, they had to deal with seemingly non-stop negotiations with a commercial property valuer. He was known as a commercial “god” and owned the centre.
Other matters also needed to be addressed. For instance, risk factors had to be covered. And they needed a release vendor of guarantee on leases and outgoings.
It took Carrie and Felix three whole months to complete negotiations… But their efforts paid off.
Somehow, they were able to negotiate the price down from $865,000 to $706,000. There was also a quick settlement, which was good.
After the settlement, Carrie and Felix did a brave DIY refurbishment of the property. Social and marketing were handled, and they negotiated leases with vendors. Management of the centre was also fixed.
Currently, the shopping centre’s 8% CAP rate value is $1,250,000. But once it reaches the full 8% CAP rate, it will increase to a staggering $2,460,000.
This is by far the couple’s most successful deal.
Though Carrie and Felix’s ILRE journey was filled with ups and downs, they made it… and even emerged on top.
Before meeting Dymphna, they only had a single PPR worth $368,000.
Now?
They have total property values worth $6,067,500…
Own equity of $3,538,500…
And a positive cash flow of $203,00.
Through Dymphna’s guidance and the support from ILRE’s amazing community…
Carrie and Felix went from owning a single house to multiple properties worth millions.
And looking at them now, it’s hard to fathom that they started their life in Australia with nothing in their pockets.
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These stories and the results in them were captured at a specific point in time. The real estate market and the investing strategies used to succeed are constantly changing. The achievements and results of these investors may have changed since these stories were recorded. Each of these investors engaged in in-depth training, coaching and mentoring to be able to achieve these results. Their results are not typical and should not be taken as a guarantee of the results you may achieve. Your personal results will be in-line with the training, education and hard work that you personally conduct.
Truth Bomb Tuesday: I couldn’t believe that life was actually like this…
Freedom is painful.
I know we talk about freedom as if it’s the greatest thing God ever invented. Apart from love is the only thing worth dying for.
Just ask Mel Gibson.
But it’s actually painful.
It’s kind of a pain in the arse actually.
I learnt this the hard way. When my business partner ran off with our clients’ money it was a massive slap in the face. It was a brutal loss of innocence.
A single mum, a business on the brink of bankruptcy, how had it all gone so wrong?
Up until that point I think I had just figured that life would look after me.
I would finish my studies and life would offer me a good job. I would do some dating for a while and then life would send a good husband on a horse my way and he would take care of me. I would work, money would come and life would make me rich.
Now none of these ideas were consciously held obviously. If you had asked me, that’s not what I would’ve told you life is like.
But what we say and what we actually believe deep down can be worlds apart.
And so this was a painful awakening. I realised that life wasn’t going to take care of me. It wasn’t going to all work out unless I made it work out.
Suddenly I realised how much responsibility I actually had for my life.
I wasn’t on a set of tracks cruising towards happy town. I had to choose to make it happen. I had to make choices.
But having choices is just another word for freedom. If you have no choices you have no freedom.
And so I became painfully aware of my freedom. I became painfully aware of my responsibility.
What a pain in the arse!
And I resisted it for a long time. I wanted to go back to my innocence – back to that cozy place where the world was looking after me.
And after I spent a time feeling sorry for myself, telling everyone how unfair it was … After I spent a good while moping, I took responsibility.
And once I took responsibility, once I accepted my freedom, that’s when things began to change.
That’s when my life became truly my own.
So this is the question for you. Are you resisting your responsibility? Are you resisting your freedom?
Are you still hoping that the world will come and look after you and that everything will be easy?
Because I can only help you once you have swallowed that bitter pill.
A bitter pill called freedom.
DB.
It’s not going to be massive, but there’s a little good news for property prices here.
It’s a tough time to be a builder.
That seem to be going bankrupt left, right and centre.
We’ve had a few big names go under in recent months, guys like Porter Davis Homes, Mahercorp and Urbanedge Homes, alongside scores of smaller players.
And the people who have been in the industry reckon things are going to get worse. That there’s “a lot more pain” on the way.
So far this financial year, insolvencies in the construction industry – the number of construction firms going bankrupt – is at a decade high, and there’s still months in the year left!
Australia’s construction industry is headed for “a lot more pain” as tearaway inflation in materials, labour and rain delays worsen devastating losses on fixed-price contracts, just as the pipeline of new work dries up and competition intensifies.
Builders behind more than 5200 homes, worth at least a collective $2.2 billion, have collapsed since 2021 and the official insolvency figures released on Tuesday show failures in construction have hit a nine-year high, just short of the decade record of 1802.
The financial-year-to-date figure is the highest since 1802 in 2014 and a 43% jump on the 2021 total of 953 construction insolvencies:
Industry insiders are worried. It looks grim:
“It’s the grimmest I’ve ever seen in 45-odd years in the industry,” said veteran home builder Robert Lynch, executive chairman of ASX-listed builder Tamawood.
“It’s going to be a very tough 18 months to two years. We’re going to see a lot more pain. They’ve been so slow to build they’re finishing off a lot of houses now that are going to lose a lot of money. I see that being a huge problem.”
Homebuilders were caught in a perfect storm.
They took on a stack of new work, as the governments home-builder program tried to fill an expected hole by incentivising new construction. Only the hole never happened, and the builders extended themselves.
That would have been fine, but then Covid threw supply chains completely out of whack, and the price of construction materials exploded.
Since home-builders had signed fixed-price contracts, materials inflation ate into their margins until there were no margins left.
At that point, they were losing money. They’ve been raising prices on new contracts, but the industry on average is still losing money:
And now we have an insolvency crisis, as various support programs come to an end. One insolvency expert is calling it an ‘insolvency armageddon’:
Scott Taylor, partner at insolvency and reconstruction law firm Taylor David Lawyers, said that nearly 5000 firms had avoided insolvency because of government support programs including JobKeeper.
Taylor described the situation as an “insolvency armageddon”.
“The situation is dire. We’re seeing industries across the board starting to feel the pinch of the economic headwinds,” he said.
And this is happening at the same time as demand is falling, thanks to rising costs and rising interest rates. New housing approvals have fallen to a 2½ year low.
New dwelling approvals in the 12 months through March fell 15 per cent to 180,893 from the year-earlier period, the Australian Bureau of Statistics said on Monday. It was the weakest yearly result since October 2020, when approvals totalled 180,165.
The sharp decline, which the industry warned will worsen the affordability and rental crises, is crimping the pipeline for new housing.
They’re not wrong.
With demand and immigration rising, we’ve got an epic housing shortage brewing.
You can forget about affordability improving.
DB.
Richard didn’t come to Australia for fame and fortune, he only travelled to follow his (then) girlfriend…
When the relationship didn’t pan out, he had grown attached to his new home in Australia, and looked into making his stay permanent.
Realising that would be an expensive endevour, he researched several investment strategies before landing on property investment.
Jump to just 3 years later and he had completely replaced his income, now living entirely off his investments.
Today we chat with Richard and find out exaclty how he replaced his entire working income so quickly.
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John became a student at I Love Real Estate 20 years ago.
Of course, he was only a student for a few of those years, and is now happily retired on the Gold Coast.
We’ve tracked down John for an exclusive interview on how he spent the last 20 years as a property investor, the secret strategies he used, and exactly where and how he used them.
Enjoy.
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At the young age of 20 Kelly and Liam rushed into the property market guns blazing, investing only with a dream and whatever she knew at the time.
Soon after, the town they bought in was hit with the mining crash, and their propeties lost $100k in value each.
Still working their 9 to 5’s, they were desperate to turn their situation around, determined not to exit the market at the huge loss they faced.
Looking for any way to deepen their property know-how, the took the trip to one of I Love Real Estates live events.
Even at the behest of their friends concern, they signed up then and there.
Today, Michael chats with Kelly to find out how her and Liam flipped their $200k ditch completely on it’s head.
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https://dymvideo.s3.amazonaws.com/ilove/20221024SuccessKellyAndLiam.mp3
When you hear insane property success stories, you eventually find out that one detail that makes it less… Impressive.
Like how they had a huge inheritance to get started, or built their portfolio over several decades.
This is not one of those stories.
We’re chatting with Michael, one of my students and the owner of a crazy huge $819k gross rental empire.
Not $819k equity, $819k in gross rental income.
Not only that, but he put it together in the space of a couple of years.
Today Michael tells all on how he did it, and what he’s got cooking next.
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What would you consider a good price for a decent peice of Australian property these days?
$600k? $800k? Hell for something decent a lot of people would say a cool million is fair play.
How about $300k?
Seems crazy right.
But one of my students did it, and I’m interviewing her today to find out exactly how. (It’s probably not what you think.)
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Venessa was a struggling property investor just a few years ago.
Coming out of a divorce she simply had not structured her portfolio to survive the break-up…
With her finances on the line she decides to join I Love Real Estate, and uses a new strategy that involved not buying the property herself.
A few months later and she pockets $57,000 in profits with barely a string attached.
We talk with Venessa today to get all the details on her strategy, deal, and how she pulled it off.
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Luke was a career residentual valuer, so after 8 years and 14,000 valuations he had a pretty good idea of what property was really worth.
One day he realises just how he could stop working with property and have property could work for him.
After seeing an I Love Real Estate ad on Facebook and doing a boat load of research, the crossed the fence and was amazed as to what he was hearing.
Luke’s forte became joint ventures, where he teamed up with other students to create monster deals.
Eventually moving on from single projects to being the manager of multiple, Luke could be owkring on 4 or more deals at a time. All of which net roughly $150k profit each.
Today Luke reveals his story and secrets behind his success, enjoy.
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When Saemus worked in the corporate world, the one asset class that kept catching his eye was PROPERTY.
When Seamus looked a way to completely replace his income, it was the obvious answer.
More specifically, Seamus was attracted to rooming houses because it was a win-win-win.
Affordable housing win for the tenant, great asset for a potential buyer, and a great investment for person who pulled it off.
Today Seamus opens up his 6 Million dollar portfolio and explains how it came to be, and how it makes him a whopping $775,000 in gross income every year.
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Suzi had always been a self-described “property junkie”.
Today she lives up to the title, and she’s one of the most knowledgeable students I have today.
Today, she gives us her tell-all tales on making your own property gold mine.
You wouldn’t believe the amount of value she generating by just knowing right person to talk to…
Listen in and enjoy.
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Mark Baker might be a familiar name to some of you…
It’s not surprising, he’s one of the most successful investors I’ve ever worked with.
Ex business owner turned property investor, Mark cracked the code on passive income, and now EASILY clears $100,000 every year in passive income alone.
Today Mark finally spills his guts on the secrets behind his huge investments and deals, from finances to the top strategies he used himself.
Enjoy.
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Matthew had received only one piece of advice from his grandfather when it comes to real estate.
“Real estate is important, real estate will you get somewhere.”
When Matthew found himself lost in life, he decided to chase his grandfathers admittedly vague words.
Stumbling across an ad from I Love Real Estate he saw a path to fulfilling that dream of real estate success.
With coaching from I Love Real Estate Matthew, with his partner Sahara, where able to create “the property that keeps on giving” and were able to generate an insane $400,000.
Today with chat with both of them to find out every detail of their journey and huge property deal.
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$20,000 seems like a lot of money right?
And yes, it is.
But if I told you a student of mine used just $20k to completely replace their working income…
Suddenly seems like a pretty insane return on investment.
Today we’re chatting with Sanjeev to find out exactly how he did it.
Enjoy.
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Eugene was a career IT worker his whole life, and was pretty successful at it too.
So successful that he kick started his investment career and owned a whopping 20 investment properties.
But despite all that, he was barely turning a profit.
There was clearly a piece of the puzzle missing
In comes I Love Real Estate, and soon enough Eugene finds that missing piece.
We’re chatting with Eugene today to find out how he transformed his portfolio into a passive income money-printer…
To the point where he made a whopping $25,000 in just 6 weeks.
Enjoy.
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Truth Bomb Tuesday: Many people do this, but I’m not having it.
Why do we engage in defeatist self-talk?
There are lots of types of negative self-talk? There’s criticism, shaming, ridiculing… so many ways to hate on ourselves. It’s astounding really.
But today I just wanted to look at defeatist self-talk.
This is something I hear a lot with students in the first year or so they spend with the I Love Real Estate Community.
It’s stuff like,
“I don’t have what it takes to be an investor.”
“I’m just not good with money.”
“I’m don’t have the smarts to make good money investing.”
The thing you notice about talk like this is its absolutist. There’s no nuance – no measure of degrees. It’s absolute and total.
I’m too stupid to be an investor and there’s absolutely nothing that can be done about it. Nothing.
Now, when I point that out, obviously there is nuance there. Very few things in this world are set in stone. And I promise you that if you can read and write and do basic maths, you can be an investor. No doubt about it.
But talk like that doesn’t leave any room for change – there’s no skilling-up, there’s no role for mentoring, there’s no room for experience playing a part over time.
Nope. You’re fundamentally stupid and there’s just no changing it.
So what’s going on here?
Why do we offer ourselves such limiting beliefs? And why do we buy into them?
The simple answer?
It feels good.
Yep. True story.
It feels good to say, there is absolutely no way I can do this. I am cosmically destined to fail.
Even though that statement of belief limits us to a mediocre life, it still feels good to say it.
Why?
Relief.
When we throw in the towel and give up the idea of success in any shape, there’s a sense of relief that follows.
We don’t have to try now. Trying won’t help. We don’t have to work hard. Working hard won’t help. We don’t have to take risks and put ourselves out there. That won’t help either.
Nope. They won’t help because nothing will help.
Phew. We can let go of trying and the pressure to try.
And that feels nice.
So that’s why we do it.
Now, it is a short-term hit. Like a little taste of sugar or cocaine.
But we have to recognise that quitting feels good… in the moment.
Like addicts breaking a habit, we have to be willing to say no to that short-term hit, and sit with the discomfort of having to try; of having to apply ourselves; of having to take risks and put ourselves out there.
And this is why I have zero-tolerance for defeatist statements like this.
You’re not being humble. You’re not being self-deprecating.
You’re selling out your future for a short-term hit of relief.
And it’s not ok.
I see you.
DB.
Investing sometimes looks easy. But you need to invest and believe in yourself first.
A few years ago I remember helping Anna crunch the numbers on her first project – a pretty straight forward renovation on a town house that she had got on vendor finance.
“So what’s your profit at the end of the day?” I said.
“$22,000.”
“Yep. Better than a kick in the teeth, right?”
“Yeah, but… I don’t get it.”
“Do you want to go through the numbers again? – see how we got to $22K?”
“No, I mean I understand all the numbers. I just don’t… I just don’t believe it…
… We barely did anything.”
I see it with my students all the time. It just seems too easy.
When I sit down with students and help them crunch the numbers, look at the feasibility study, calculate our expected return – like we did with Anna – there’s often a moment where they’ll question the results… or the process, or their maths, or the fundamental principals of mathematics…
It just seems to good to be true. Like it’s money for nothing.
And sure. In some ways it is easy.
With the systems we’ve perfected in the I Love Real Estate community, you don’t need a finance or an engineering degree. You don’t even know how to swing a hammer or ride a shovel. Once you ‘get’ the system, with a bit of time and effort, you can make real money.
But it’s not nothing. It’s not money for nothing. It’s only seems like that because the world has taught you to totally devalue your time and energy.
You still have to do the work. You learn the systems. You do the research. You arrange the finance. Sometimes you even end up being the one swinging the hammer. There’s no free lunch here.
You’ve got to put in your time and energy.
The only thing that needs to change is how much you think that time and energy is worth. In Anna’s case it was $22K. Only she just didn’t believe. She didn’t think her time and energy could be worth that much.
Why?
Because she’d spend most of her adult life earning $20/hr doing office admin.
Her company had told her what her time was worth…
… and she believed them.
And look, sometimes your time is worth $20/hr to someone.
But that’s not set in stone.
Your time is worth whatever you’re willing to make it worth.
And if you learn the systems, and do the research, and become an expert in an area and all that, then your time starts to be worth more.
And it can be worth a LOT more.
And so look. I know we make this look easy.
And compared to other ways of making money, it is easy.
But you’ve still got to invest yourself.
And know what you are worth!
DB.
A few years ago Peter and Fiona had a solid family unit and already owned a couple properties…
Living the dream right?
But they still woke up to work their day job every single morning.
The money just wasn’t adding up.
Until you realise their properties were negatively geared.
Eventually they learnt how to make their properties for work them.
Even going as far as to make a whole acre, a chore that needed to be mowed every month, to a $150,000 passive income cashcow.
Listen here to see how they did it.
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Melissa has an interesting origin before joining I Love Real Estate.
She was a “prize home buyer”, buying homes to be given away in huge raffles.
She would scout, buy, and even renovate dozens of homes to be given away.
But despite her impressive wheelhouse, when she joined ILRE she wondered if she actually had any skills to offer.
Eventually she realised the value of her experience and was able to share it with the community and now here to you.
I truly beleive you should practice what you preach, and Melissa does both in spades.
Enjoy.
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Back in 2007, Peter already knew that property investing could transform their lives. But he just kept making the wrong deals… until his wife, Jenny, came across I Love Real Estate.When Peter’s family survived the weeks-long boat ride going to Australia as a child, they knew that their lives were going to change for the better.
But they soon found out that it wasn’t as easy as they thought.
You see, Peter and his family already knew that property investing was the way to go. But since without enough knowledge about it… they didn’t make much progress.
In fact, Peter’s first experience with property investing left a bad taste in his mouth.
You see, his parents were the first to try their hands at property investing. But because they entered into the wrong JV deals with the wrong people, they incurred a loss of $50,000.
When it was Peter’s turn to try it out several years later, he entered the industry when there was an oversupply of property in the market. That meant demand for property was so low and competition was stiff.
But his wife, Jenny, knew that despite their initial failures, they were still on the right track.
That’s why she continued to look for ways to support Peter’s passion for property investing. And after attending countless seminars on property investing… Jenny finally found one that clicked.
You see, she attended one of I Love Real Estate’s free seminars… And everything finally changed for the better.
Want to know how Peter and Jenny found their footing in the property market?
“I want time to look after my elderly parents who sacrificed so much.” – Peter
Deal #1: The ‘Unlivable Property’When Peter and Jenny restarted their property investing career…Peter was working full-time in taking care of their child. So, they knew that getting enough cash flow was the way to go.
The couple then looked for a place they could renovate and create equity. They eventually found one, but when they got it…
The property was unlivable.
To start with, there was no bathroom. The previous owner pulled out everything to try and renovate it, but he realised it was too much work for him. So, he decided to put the property on the market.
But the couple believed that it was the opportunity they were waiting for.
So, they quickly got to work and realised that it was a job that’s bigger than they expected.
Despite Peter having no experience in renovation, the couple persevered. And to make it to their three-month renovation deadline, he had to live in an unlivable place. He even joined a gym just so he could shower every day!
After the renovation was completed, Peter was ready to flip the home.
…But Jenny wasn’t.
“The whole journey, we wanted to flip,” admitted Jenny. “But at the end, when I look at the property and I thought, ‘Oh, that’s so beautiful’, now, I don’t want to flip. I really want to keep it.”
To convince her husband to keep their newly-renovated property, Jenny shared Dymphna’s cash flow strategy with Peter. That’s why instead of flipping, they decided to lease it out.
Deal #2: Better Cash FlowPeter and Jenny’s first deal was cash flow neutral.But this next one caused them to earn $15,000 per year.
However, it still wasn’t what Peter wanted – he was serious about finding a property that he can flip. But even after three months, he still couldn’t find a good enough deal.
So, Jenny told her husband:
“I said to him, ‘Oh, can I please have another one that is going to be like the first one?’ And so then, later on, I can actually quit my job and just manage them.”
Thankfully, they found one.
And to finish the renovation, Peter once again had to live onsite – in a house with no flooring, no heating, and no bathroom.
But since it yielded a positive cash flow, the sacrifice was worth it.
Deal #3: Converting an Existing PropertyThis third deal had something to do with an existing property that didn’t make any money. In fact, the couple lost $50k after buying it.
But Jenny remembered Dymphna’s words: “If a property doesn’t perform, you have to do something about it.”
That’s why instead of letting the property stagnate… the couple decided to apply their short-term rental strategy once more. And this time…
They finally earned something out of the property – $20,000 per year to be exact!
“We had to learn new skills, get out of our comfort zone, and learn how joint venture the right way. I Love Real Estate has given us choices.”
Deal #4: The Dream Holiday HouseBy December 2020, Jenny was finally able to quit her full-time job to manage their rented properties. But at this point, Peter still didn’t give up on his dream of buying and flipping homes. Jenny continued to support him though, despite still being unable to find a great deal.
And after a couple of months of research, Jenny proposed a compromise:
“If you want to develop, how about we go buy something with development potential on it? And I will apply the cash flow strategy for now to keep it, and you can develop later?”
Of course, Peter agreed!
So, they bought and renovated a new house that’s only 10 minutes from the beach. And Jenny was ecstatic!
Because now, they were able to buy their dream holiday house. While Peter could still fulfil his wish of developing the property into a triplex later on.
Achieve Long-Term Success with Property Investing
All these four deals allowed Peter and Jenny to earn more than $1 million in equity. And mind you, their property investing journey wasn’t easy!
In fact, it took them 5 years to build a portfolio that earns them $100,000 in passive income a year. But they never wavered. They took their time and held on since the entire ILRE community was there to back them up.
But the biggest lesson the couple learned with ILRE was there was another way to live life than just working hard.
Yes, they now have a lucrative property investment portfolio. But what matters most to Peter and Jenny is that they now have enough free time to sit back, relax… and witness their kids grow up in front of their very eyes.
These stories and the results in them were captured at a specific point in time. The real estate market and the investing strategies used to succeed are constantly changing. The achievements and results of these investors may have changed since these stories were recorded. Each of these investors engaged in in-depth training, coaching and mentoring to be able to achieve these results. Their results are not typical and should not be taken as a guarantee of the results you may achieve. Your personal results will be in-line with the training, education and hard work that you personally conduct.
Aman was a pretty common case before joining I Love Real Estate.
Taxi driver, immigrant, not the kind of person you’d look at and say “that’s the worlds next millionaire”.
So when Aman was in line to generate $1.4 million of a single duplex property deal, you better beleive he started turning a few heads.
So today we’ve scored Aman for an exclusive interview to find out every little detail that lead to his life-altering mega-deal.
Enjoy.
For blogs, articles, videos and more, head to https://iloverealestate.tv/
https://dymvideo.s3.amazonaws.com/ilove/20230222SuccessAman.mp3
Truth Bomb Tuesday: It’s kind of obvious when you think about it
So the science of motivation is shifting.
It’s a very interesting time to be alive. There’s so much going on. It’s wild.
Take AI for example. Nuts.
But psychology is also offering up lots of gems at the moment too.
And when I look at it, what I see is a discipline slowly coming to grips with the fact that humans aren’t that special.
100 years ago, we saw a massive distinction between humanity and every other living thing. Humans were special. God made us special. There was as much difference between humans and dogs as there was between bananas and grains of sand.
That was the old view.
Now, we’re slowly waking up to the fact that, actually, we’re not that different. At the end of the day, we are animals with animal biology.
Sure, humans are unique in their way. But we have a lot more common with dogs than our precious little egos would like to imagine.
So that seems to be where psychology is at.
So take the revelation from Dr Emily Balcetis at New York University, for example.
She says that humans are much more motivated by fear than they are by reward.
And so if you want to really drive yourself and achieve your goals, it’s worthwhile focusing on catastrophic failure.
So if you’re trying to get yourself up early to spend time on the I Love Real Estate course materials for example, don’t visualise all the nice things that will happen once you have made your fortune in real estate.
Rather, focusing on the disaster that’s going to befall you if you don’t do your study.
Imagine me, sword in hand, tongue out, and necklace of severed heads around my shoulders.
Or imagine working in the office until you’re 80, as your health deteriorates and cancer takes hold.
Fear of catastrophic failure is a powerful motivator.
Of course, now that we think about it, this seems kind of obvious. We know that we are driven by fear.
But it is very interesting to think about how you can marshal your fears to build your motivation. That’s a very interesting game.
And it’s definitely worth playing with.
That said, I guess I would offer two thoughts of caution.
One, we need to know that we are processing stress well before we introduce more stress into the system.
We know that stress has a number of negative health effects. Putting yourself into a panic just to kick some goals, might not be the best thing for you from a wholistic perspective.
The other thing is that I think that while fear is a good place to motivate from, it’s not a good thing to navigate by.
Happiness is not the absence of fear. Happiness is what happens when you live the life that makes you happy.
That means your direction must be set by what makes you truly happy. It must take you closer to that, not just further away from your fears.
But maybe that’s where we’re going: navigate by joy, motivate by fear.
Who’s a good boy then?
DB.
This won’t derail the market, but some people are going to feel the pain
We can expect to hear a lot more about negative equity over the coming months.
This is the unfortunate situation where you owe more on the property that the property is worth.
In a sense, you’re trapped. It costs you money from your own pocket to sell the property because the money you get from the sale won’t pay out your mortgage.
It sucks.
So far, it’s not a big deal. The Australian Financial Review estimates that about 120,000 homeowners across the country are now facing negative equity. But that number rises the more prices continue to fall.
Around 120,000 homeowners nationwide who bought with low-deposit loans at the tail end of the pandemic boom are likely to have already fallen into negative equity after nine successive interest rate rises triggered record-breaking price drops.
A total of 289,125 homeowners who bought between November 2021 and April 2022, when house prices were booming, were also edging closer to going underwater as prices fell 8.9 per cent since their peaks.
These calculations are based on CoreLogic’s records showing that a total of 1.188 million homes changed hands between March 30, 2020, and April 30, 2022, and Standard & Poor’s estimate that more than 40 per cent of new mortgages taken during the pandemic peak were low deposit loans.
Experts say a large chunk of these properties would be worth less than their mortgage within months, particularly if interest rates rise to 4.1 per cent as predicted by some economists.
So far, there is little evidence that households are under mortgage pressure, although mortgage arrears are starting to creep up at a faster clip according to Standard & Poor’s Performance Index.
That’s right. This isn’t a big deal for the market overall. The numbers are relatively small compared to the total housing stock, and we’re seeing very little evidence of forced selling yet.
So I’m not fazed.
And for most people, if you can still afford the payments, what do you care if you’ve got negative equity on paper? Give it a few years and the market cycle will turn and you’ll be right.
But what I think it does do is point to the dangers of negative gearing.
Sometimes, based on your particularly financial circumstances, and depending on how you structure it, negative gearing can make sense.
But for a long time, accountants were telling people to go out and buy property, and just ignore whether it was cashflow positive or not. If it was making money, you won. And if it was losing money (negatively geared), you just claimed it on tax, and you still won.
But that’s not how it works.
Because if you’re negatively geared at this stage of the cycle, you can get in to trouble.
As mortgage rates go up, your property just starts costing you more and more money.
And if you can’t afford that, then you probably have to sell.
But if you’re stuck with negative equity, you can’t sell unless you can come up with the money to cover the difference.
(At a time when money is already tight!)
That’s a pickle.
Seriously, I’ve worked with so many students who just walked blindly into negative gearing (often holding the hands of their accountants – accountants who knew very little about property investing) and then just found themselves in a real pickle when the market turned.
It’s a tough lesson to learn.
But in the end, it’s probably healthy that the market has given us all this reminder.
DB.
Robyn left school at 14 and opened her own photography studio at 20. She very quickly learned that it was going take a long time to get wealthy through her art. That’s when she decided to go into property investing.Before becoming a property investor, Robyn wanted to earn an income through art. That’s why she opened her own photography studio at 20 years old. However, she learned the hard way that the artist life can give her a good income… but it couldn’t make her wealthy.
So, at 22 years old, Robyn bought her first block of units and renovated them. She ended up making more money out of that one renovation than she did in a whole year of doing photography!
This spurred Robyn to continue with property, buying an investment property year after year, believing that it will give her more passive income and ultimately, more control over her time.
Unfortunately, without a Strategy and a Plan, it was very hit and miss for Robyn.
Sure, some deals yielded her great profits. But some barely scraped over the line.
“I really just had to take responsibility for where I was at.”
That’s when she decided to get proper guidance on her property investing. She dragged her husband, Ross, to an ILRE weekend… and the rest, as they say, is history.
After joining Dymphna Boholt’s program in March 2020, Robyn was finally able to create the life she’s always wanted for herself.
Deal 1: A Commercial Property to Kick Things OffRobyn’s first deal with ILRE took place just last year.
Her first assignment was to buy a multi-tenanted commercial property. So, she set her sights on a block of eight shops in Townsville.
The commercial centre had two vacancies. And Robyn bought the commercial block at $930,000 using the upside strategy to renovate and filling in the vacancies to increase it’s value.
At the time, the aggregate rent from the tenants amounted to $93,000. After renovating the property and finding two more tenants to fill up the vacancies, the property is now valued at $1.4 million. Meanwhile, rent is rolling in at $145,000.
That means after overhead expenses, this commercial investment is giving Robyn an additional annual net cash flow of $60,000.
Deal 2: Getting Rid of a Problem ChildBefore joining ILRE, Robyn a property in Ramsey Crescent that she named Kylie the problem child, since she let an agent talk her into buying. Robyn didn’t do any research and bought the property on the agent’s ‘good word’ and advice.
Kylie was holding Robyn back, so the ILRE team helped her cut her losses and get rid of Kylie after over 200 days sitting in the market.
When it finally sold, albeit at an $83,000 loss, Robyn was able to free up much-needed financing in order to move forward to better performing deals
This brings us to deal number three…
Deal 3: Renovating a Previous Hoarder’s HomeRobyn’s third deal with ILRE involved a knockdown and build duplex deal in Bokarina.
The property came with a few unwanted additions, as the previous owner was a hoarder who didnt even clean the house before handing the keys over to Robyn.
The purchase price was $750,000. Three builders gave estimates of how much it was going to cost Robyn to finish renovations, but that figure went up by $300,000 after six months.
At any rate, Robyn is anticipating a net profit of $500,000 from this deal.
Deal 4: New Art Deco PPRRobyn’s fourth deal with ILRE involved a lovely four-bedroom, four-bathroom apartment. It’s very remarkable, as it had bright turquoise tiles in every bathroom.
So, Robyn and her interior designer hatched a plan to go with an art deco theme to maximise some of the turquoise touches.
Renovations cost her about $150,000. That’s on top of the $1.5 million price tag and the $68,500 purchase costs.
Two agents have since appraised the apartment, yielding an equity range of $2.4 million to
$2.7 million after renovation and market uplift.
That’s an equity increase of up to $950,000 for Robyn!
“It’s got to be unique because I am.”
Deal 5: Getting a Massive Discount on the CoastFor her fifth deal with ILRE, Robyn cut another duplex deal.
This time, the property is at Wurtulla, right on the coast. The property had been for sale for about six weeks. And Robyn just knew there’s got to be something wrong with anything that doesn’t sell in six weeks on the coast.
So, Robyn using her learnings from ILRE called up the agent and negotiated the purchase down to $788,000 from a listing price of $900,000.
Robyn is expecting to net $500,000 from this deal, as well.
“I really enjoy the process… making sure I’ve done my homework so that I’m accountable.”
Deal 6: Fixing Water Leaks at an Apartment BuildingRobyn’s sixth deal with ILRE took eight months of negotiations for a 12-year-old apartment that’s never been sold.
The problem with the penthouse apartment was that every ceiling and every window in the whole apartment was leaking. There’s just massive water leaks everywhere!
Having renovated for high rises before, water leaks are nothing new for Robyn. She had fresh knowledge, fresh information, and fresh ways to deal with the problem.
So, on week 9 of the projected week 12 renovation, she had sold and settled the penthouse apartment for an anticipated net profit of over $200,000.
Make Your Dream Life a RealityRobyn created the life she’s been dreaming about since leaving school at 14, within 18 months of joining ILRE.
But more importantly…
Robyn’s property investing journey has allowed her to rechannel her passion for photography into projects that fit her mantra of making the world a better, more beautiful place.
For Robyn, there are far more important things in life than money. That includes doing things that make her happy. Like only eating cake with pink icing, or giving her companies snazzy names like Chocolates for Breakfast.
But the reason she’s able to do all that is her highly profitable property portfolio.
“To me… the little things in life are really, really important.”
Book A FREE Blueprint Call With One Of My AdvisorsDiscover how you can create a new and exciting life with our unique real estate system to create passive income forever.
Schedule your exclusive, personal Property Genius Blueprint Call today and create a customised plan to potentially never worry about money ever again.
Book Your FREE Blueprint Call Here
These stories and the results in them were captured at a specific point in time. The real estate market and the investing strategies used to succeed are constantly changing. The achievements and results of these investors may have changed since these stories were recorded. Each of these investors engaged in in-depth training, coaching and mentoring to be able to achieve these results. Their results are not typical and should not be taken as a guarantee of the results you may achieve. Your personal results will be in-line with the training, education and hard work that you personally conduct.
Truth Bomb Tuesday: They told you your superpower was a curse…
Are you sitting on a hidden super-power?
Are you squashing it?
There’s a good chance you are.
When I first got into the game, an older investor once told me that women don’t make for good property investors because they’re ‘too emotional’.
You needed a good, logical head on your shoulders. You needed to be able to meet the numbers on their merits. You needed to focus on the property’s marketable features, not whether you like the colour of the curtains in the kitchen.
(I got so emotional and upset that I kicked a hole in his car door with my Blundstones.)
This is obviously nonsense. In my experience, men are just as emotional (=likely to make bad financial decisions on impulse) as women. They just get ‘emotional’ about different things.
(I’ve never heard a woman say she wanted to buy a property because “look how close it is to the skate park!”)
But the other thing is that, regardless of gender, our emotions are our super-power. If they’re harnessed in the right way, they become the only star we can reliably navigate by.
This isn’t just the opinion of an opinionated woman either. This is hard science.
Back in the 1990s, the neurologist Antonio Damassio studied people with damaged orbitofrontal cortexes.
These people had lost the ability to feel any emotion at all. There was no impact on their intelligence. Just the complete absence of emotion.
How do you think those people went?
You might imagine, like my old mate, that their curse was actually a blessing. Surely without the baggage of irrational emotions, their life would be nothing but an easy road built on calm, logical decisions, right?
Surely they’re just gliding through life, right?
Wrong.
Their lives were a mess.
Without emotion it became impossible to make decisions. Every decision had to be evaluated on its metrics.
So a question like, which café should we go to, became a nightmare. They couldn’t default to something like “I like the vibe at that place more.”
They had to compare prices across the full menu, or scan the reviews at Yelp to see which one got the best score.
Every decision became like this. And it became completely exhausting for them.
The thing we don’t appreciate about our emotions is that they are the source of all our drive.
Our desire to build a better life, to attain financial freedom, to help our friends and family and be an anchor in our community – all of these things are emotional considerations.
They tell us where we should be going. They are the only star we can navigate by.
And once we’ve decided where we want to go, then yes, cool-headed, rational, logical thought is super useful.
But without emotion, it’s useless.
And that’s why I say that emotion in your super power.
Even though at some point (probably a man) has told you that it’s a burden – a character flaw.
And even thought you probably thought you should squash and smoother your emotions away, so you could make it in this cold and rational world.
This is the tragic story that we’re all waking up from.
Your ability to feel – that is your superpower.
Don’t let anyone take it from you.
DB.
Growing up Brooke had a keen interest in money for a very good reason, they just didn’t have that much of it.
So when it came time to decide a career path, Brooke immediately realised the potential property had.
Living out in the country, not even owning a computer, they had heard about I Love Real Estate through a friend, and took the trip to Brisbane to see if it lived up the hype.
Brooke was immediately engrossed, enamored with the amount of strategies and ideas being presented.
With an insane work ethic Brooke would relentlessly seek out coaching and mentoring, and it would pay off in dividends.
With a single massive deal Brooke was able to pocket $30,000, and we’re interviewing Brooke to find out how they did it.
For blogs, articles, videos and more, head to https://iloverealestate.tv/
https://dymvideo.s3.amazonaws.com/ilove/20230213SuccessBrooke.mp3
Supposedly Aussies love property. I’m not so sure.
A lot of people say that ‘Australians have a love affair with housing’, and that’s why house prices tend to be a bit higher than in other countries.
But that’s a little unsatisfying to me. It kind of says to me that Australian have some irrational adoration of property, (even though he’s clearly no good for you girl.)
And the trouble with the love-affair story is that love-affairs end. If there’s no basis for our connection to real-estate, then it can turn on a dime right?
And it kind of implies that other nations don’t love their houses. Like the Canadians… who like to live in boxes. I’m not sure we have such a different attitude to housing –either as a place to live or as an investment class.
So while I agree that Australia is different, I think simply pointing to some sort of irrational love-affair is just lazy analysis.
And the truth of it is there are some important differences between Australian and international property markets, and the better we understand these, the better we can understand where property’s going.
The first is a peculiar shortage of land.
We still think of ourselves as a ‘land of sweeping plains’. While it’s true that we do have a lot of space, and in total one of the lowest population densities in the world, most of that space is empty.
In fact, we cram our selves into cities along a very narrow coastal strip, and as a result we’re actually one of the most urbanised countries on earth.
Almost 60% of us live in cities with populations of more than one million. The only countries out there with higher proportions are Japan, Hong Kong and Singapore – countries famous for being tiny.
And we know that, across the world, real estate prices are a lot higher in bigger cities. So if we have more of us living in big cities, that’s going to push average house prices higher.
And Australian property makes a lot more sense if you think of us as a relatively small country – which is closer to the practical reality.
The other interesting point is that while we concentrate ourselves in big cities, these cities are geographically large.
That is, compared to other countries and international cities of similar populations, our capital cities spread themselves out over a much larger area.
This has a big impact on commute times. In Sydney it’s common for people to spend 2hrs+ each way in traffic. Our transport infrastructure hasn’t really kept pace with our expanding geographic boundaries.
As a result, we set up a trade-off between house prices and commute times. If you’re willing to live further out and commute for longer, you can get a cheaper house. But if you want to live close to employment hubs, then you’re going to have to pay for it.
This trade-off isn’t as pronounced in other cities, and so we end up bidding prices up, making our cities relatively more expensive.
And one of the reasons why our cities have such big footprints is that our homes tend to be a lot bigger than in other countries. Three quarters of us live in detached houses, a much higher proportion than in most other rich countries.
And the average size of a new house – 206 square metres – is a touch higher than America’s, with no other country coming close.
What’s more, our homes tend to be constructed using more expensive materials, with more thought and effort put into design.
The international comparisons that talk about how expensive Australian property is never account for qualitative differences – differences in size, materials, design, vibe.
Australian housing is just a lot better than in other countries, and that’s why it costs more.
What’s more, we just don’t build enough of it. This comes back to the tight supply of land. But as I’ve argued a few times recently, construction rates in Australia haven’t come close to keeping pace with population in recent years.
And that feeds directly into prices.
These factors, taken together, explain why the Australian property market has stood head and shoulders above the rest of the world in recent years.
And if you look at each of those, there’s nothing to suggest that any of these factors are going to reverse any time soon.
The love affair continues.
DB.
Desley didn’t want her kids to have the life she did, working day in day out on the farm just to get by.
When she decided to sell the farm and move to somewhere more urban, she did so without realising the huge shift in finance her life would take.
But after stumbling across I Love Real Estate, she realised the answer to her problems was staring right in the face.
Her first deal now nets her 11%+ return per annum.
Not bad, but she had her eyes set on something bigger.
And bigger is just what she got, when she had the chance to buy an entire shopping centre, she jumped on it.
Now, the shopping centre pays for itself, and we’re interviewing her to tell us just how she pulled it off.
For blogs, articles, videos and more, head to https://iloverealestate.tv/
https://dymvideo.s3.amazonaws.com/ilove/20230208SuccessDesley.mp3
After escaping Vietnam on a fishing boat and bouncing around refugee camps in Hong Kong as a kid, Vu was determined to turn his life around. Luckily, he found I Love Real Estate and got all the guidance he needed to achieve his goal.For 30 days and 30 nights, young Vu and his parents sailed the open sea on a fishing boat.
They were fleeing persecution in Vietnam, but they were soon faced with brand new challenges. While at the mercy of the unrelenting sea, they ran out of food. They ran out of water. And they had to watch some of their companions pass away from hunger, thirst, or sickness.
But against all odds, the whole family made it to Hong Kong. That’s where they spent a year in refugee camps while waiting for their asylum application to get accepted.
Eventually, they were invited to live as refugees in four countries: Australia, France, Canada, and the USA.
Australia caught the eye of Vu’s dad simply because of all the nice beaches. And little did he know, it was a winning choice that would change the course of Vu’s life forever.
After all, it was in Sydney where Vu found I Love Real Estate (ILRE) decades later. With the help of Dymphna Boholt, Vu was able to build a multi-million-dollar property portfolio.
A portfolio that has already secured the future of Vu, his wife, and two daughters.
A portfolio that has allowed Vu to give back to his parents for all their sacrifices.
A portfolio that has turned his life around just after doing just three deals.
Deal 1: Pre-ILREPrior to joining ILRE, Vu had already invested in a three-bedroom house.
But even after adding a granny flat to it in 2013, his cash flow just amounted to no more than $9,000.
It wasn’t bad… but Vu knew he could do a lot better.
Deal 2: Five TownhousesVu bought another property using the equity that had been built up from that first deal. Initially, his plan was just to pay this investment off over time.
But the truth is that that plan would have put him in debt for the next 30 years had he not worked with Dymphna.
“I’m very grateful to be in a community that taught me strategies, goal-setting practices, and visualization exercises to dramatically change my result,”
You see, Dymphna helped Vu map out a plan to just keep the front house and use the lot in the back to build five townhouses. And the initial plan was to keep all five townhouses… But the ILRE community had bigger plans for Vu.
After brainstorming with the team, Vu decided to sell three of the townhouses for an impressive net profit of $962,000.
Meanwhile, the remaining three properties, which included the freshly renovated front house, created a $32,000 annual cash flow for Vu.
Because of the dramatic financial results from this deal Vu’s wife, Vivian, no longer had to work and could just spend her time taking care of their daughters.
Deal 3: Six More TownhousesWith the connections Vu built from doing deal number two, he was able to secure a nearby site very quickly and the results are projected to be even more impressive than his previous deal!
After purchasing a house and lot for $610,000, Vu is now building six more townhouses in the lot at the back of the front house.
Local agents are projecting that Vu would be raking in $1.2 million net profit and a $74,000 annual cash flow from this deal.
And for now, the plan is to hold on to these properties for as long as he can.
“But I’m always open to changes,” said Vu. “If a different site comes up and we need the funds to double down accordingly, we will.”
For the foreseeable future, though, Vu is looking at a property portfolio worth $2.5 million, from just $374,000 before joining ILRE.
Even better, his initial passive income of $9,000 would go up to $114,000 once this third deal is finished.
Looking at everything he’s achieved in the past couple of years, Vu couldn’t be more thankful about taking the leap with ILRE.
“Looking back in 2018 where I first attended an ILRE conference, I felt quite overwhelmed seeing the results from some of Dymphna’s students,” admitted Vu. “Luckily, I didn’t let that feeling stop me.”
Instead, Vu challenged himself to achieve even just a small part of what other ILRE students have achieved.
And Vu’s courage was rewarded with education, proper guidance, and a portfolio that has his family secured for life.
Turn the Odds Around Through Property InvestingAs a young child who fled Vietnam and ended up in a foreign country with a language that his parents didn’t even speak… there weren’t many doors that opened up easily for Vu.
Still, he took the leap of faith with ILRE.
And that decision has allowed Vu to extend help to kids who were just like him.
With the money he’s earning from real estate investing, Vu is now helping Vietnamese orphans pay for school. He hopes that by giving unfortunate Vietnamese kids access to education… they’ll be able to escape the poverty cycle much, much faster than he did.
Down the road, Vu is counting on real estate and ILRE to help him ensure that his wife will never have to work again. And that their daughters will never get to experience the hardships Vu experienced in his time.
“Thank you, ILRE, for reducing my family’s debt sentence.”
Book A FREE Blueprint Call With One Of My AdvisorsDiscover how you can create a new and exciting life with our unique real estate system to create passive income forever.
Schedule your exclusive, personal Property Genius Blueprint Call today and create a customised plan to potentially never worry about money ever again.
Book Your FREE Blueprint Call Here
These stories and the results in them were captured at a specific point in time. The real estate market and the investing strategies used to succeed are constantly changing. The achievements and results of these investors may have changed since these stories were recorded. Each of these investors engaged in in-depth training, coaching and mentoring to be able to achieve these results. Their results are not typical and should not be taken as a guarantee of the results you may achieve. Your personal results will be in-line with the training, education and hard work that you personally conduct.
Anthea never had a 5 year plan, never had the need to worry about it.
When she finally came across a goal for herself it seemed pretty humble, a home of her very own.
And after seeing an ad on Facebook for a free I Love Real Estate event, she figured she’d take the free advice and run.
On the day, she couldn’t take notes fast enough.
Using the strategies she learnt as a student she now lives in her own home rent free, and passively earns a profit while doing it.
We sit down with Anthea to find out exactly how she pulled it off, and what’s next in investor journey.
For blogs, articles, videos and more, head to https://iloverealestate.tv/
https://dymvideo.s3.amazonaws.com/ilove/20230203SuccessAnthea.mp3
The surprising source of an epic crisis.
“Where exactly has this rental crisis come from?”
I’m getting this question a lot, and people get that it has something to do with Covid, but what exactly?
So let’s rewind a bit to 2020. When the pandemic first hit and the borders shut, the general consensus was that rental prices were probably about to fall.
With net immigration going from about 180,000 a year down to zero, that should have lowered demand in a meaningful way, and that should have led to lower rental prices.
And in a way it did. In suburbs keenly exposed to international students – like inner-Melbourne for example – the prices of units and other accommodation options popular with students did fall sharply.
But around the rest of the country, something weird started to happen.
The rental market actually tightened.
In a massive way.
The vacancy rate fell to a record lows. The number of available rental properties actually halved!
Why?
Well, what happened is that there was a race to space. We needed more rooms, because suddenly everyone needed a study, and people just wanted to get away from each other.
The average household size, in the 2021 Census fell from 2.6 to 2.5 people.
That doesn’t sound like a massive difference, but it had a huge impact on the housing market.
Across the country, that shift could have meant that we suddenly needed an extra 200,000 homes.
That is, it had the same impact on the housing market as if 200,000 homes were suddenly destroyed in a flood or a bush fire!
That’s why the vacancy rate tanked. That’s why rents exploded!
And it takes the housing market a long time to catch up from a shock like that.
In a good year – in a great year – we’re lucky to build 200,000 dwellings (detached and units).
So we had to dedicate an entire year of growth just to fixing this imbalance, never mind that the market is already in shortage and there’s people lining up for those new houses.
So it was always going to be a long road back for the rental market.
But just as we were starting that road back, Covid ended.
(Or at least we put it behind us.)
Covid ended and the borders reopened.
Immigration restarted and restarted with a vengeance. The government now reckons we’re going to import a record 300,000 migrants this financial year.
Pre-Covid we were running at something like 180,000 a year, and that was already quite accelerated compared to the previous decade.
So just as the rental market was starting to get back on its feet, the government dropped super-charged immigration on it.
And rents just kept on heading north.
And right now, they’re not slowing down. If anything, they’re accelerating.
And that’s where this rental ‘crisis’ came from.
Not that you’re allowed to call it a “crisis”.
Because that would mean that somebody might have to do something about it.
DB.
Everyone thinks you have to be in the right place at the right time to be a successful investor.
Doesn’t matter if it’s stocks, property, crypto, everyone has that same excuse.
I use the term “perfect storm” a lot, and I think people get the wrong idea, that I’m only talking about timing.
But considering I’ve been saying “perfect storm” for the last 5 years might clue you on how little to do with timing it actually has.
And so today we’re interviewing Jarrod, another student of mine that fell into a “perfect storm” when investing in rental properties, and exactly how he used it to generate his massive wealth.
For blogs, articles, videos and more, head to https://iloverealestate.tv/
https://dymvideo.s3.amazonaws.com/ilove/20230127SuccessJarrod.mp3
Felicity had some experience with property before joining the I Love Real Estate community.
She had built her dream home, made a bit of money, and was well off enough.
So when she joined ILRE, she oddly decided to not focus entirely on her own profits.
She moved into project managing and partnerships, but despite her best efforts to “not focus on profit”, she would end up being wildly successful in her endevours.
So much so that she project managed a $5.4 million dollar deal, took a huge cut of the profits, and all without spending a single dime on it.
So today we’re chatting with Felicity on how her unorthodox mindset lead to her massive success, enjoy.
For blogs, articles, videos and more, head to https://iloverealestate.tv/
https://dymvideo.s3.amazonaws.com/ilove/20230122SuccessFelicity.mp3
These are the five factors to watch this year.
As we come storming out of the gates into 2023, I think there are a raft of factors lining up behind property this year.
I actually went and made myself a list. Here’s what I reckon will be the five driving factors of 2023, in no particular order.
1. Interest Rates
Interest rates always have a big impact on the direction of house prices. When the RBA started raising rates in April last year, it coincided almost perfectly with a peak in property prices.
The RBA then went on and dropped a sledge-hammer of 300 basis points on the economy through the remainder of the year. If the property market fundamentals weren’t as strong as they are, I think property prices could have closed the year a whole lot lower.
There was no RBA Board meeting in January, so now all eyes will be on the February Board meeting.
Not a whole lot has changed in the meantime. Inflation did come out a little stronger than expected, which might dash hopes that the RBA is ready to put the rate hikes back in the box.
But it still looks to me like we’re pretty close to the top of the cycle. So my guess is that it stops hiking sometime in the first half of the year. After that, the RBA will pause and take stock. And given how aggressive they’ve been, it wouldn’t surprise me if we could be looking at a small series of rate cuts kicking off late in the year.
When that happens, property prices will be given a solid lift.
2. Rents
The rental market is still incredibly tight. Corelogic data showed us that rents reaccelerated in December, and are growing at 10.2% per annum.
Given they were growing at close to 10% through most of last year, that gives us one of the most epic accelerations in rental prices in living memory.
Vacancy rates remain at record lows, so there’s just no signs that the rental boom is winding up any time soon.
Given rental returns feed directly into property prices, this will driver property prices strongly through the year.
3. Immigration
Immigration is returning in full force right now. The last estimates I saw predicted an immigration intake of a record 300,000 this financial year.
Given rental markets are incredibly tight, and there’s an ongoing housing shortage, the extra demand for property should continue to push prices higher from here.
4. Jobless Rate
At the same time, the Aussie economy continues to deliver and the unemployment rate remains at record lows. Household income is robust, despite inflationary pressures, and there’s nothing to suggest households can’t maintain their mortgage commitments. More money in more pockets leads to higher house prices.
5. Credit conditions
With an ongoing commodities boom, only set to accelerate as China reopens, money is flooding into Australia, and credit conditions are easy. There is absolutely no sign that banks are looking to rein in their exposure to Aussie property. This should mean that the mortgage market is competitive, and credit is plentiful, all of which supports Aussie house prices.
… and that’s not all.
And really I’m just listing the short-run factors. The long run fundamentals are just as supportive, like the supply-demand balance and ballooning infrastructure spending.
At any rate, these are the main five factors to watch in 2023.
My feeling is its going to be a good one.
DB.
Before joining I Love Real Estate Jeff had tried his hand in property education and courses.
Learnt a bit, how to buy just below market value and sell just above.
Nothing special.
It was when he found the RIGHT coaching and took the RIGHT actions that things changed.
Suddenly he was generating 24%+ profits from huge property deals, netting him $383,000 in cash.
To find out what the big difference for Jeff was, we’ve grabbed for an exclusive interview to reveal his new-found secrets.
Take a listen.
For blogs, articles, videos and more, head to https://iloverealestate.tv/
https://dymvideo.s3.amazonaws.com/ilove/20230118SuccessJeff.mp3
Analysis paralysis caused Trudi and Brett to pass up on dabbling in property investing. But 7 years after meeting Dymphna Boholt, they finally realised what she said about it wasn’t crazy at all..If you’re living a relatively comfortable life, would you ever consider going all-in with property investing?
Probably not.
For the longest time, Trudi and Brett thought so, too.
After all, they’ve been living in a pretty comfy house all their lives. And they’ve even bought and sold 6 PPRs before joining I Love Real Estate.
But the couple soon learned that being okay with just ‘doing okay’ is dangerous.
“When you have nothing at all, or you’ve just started out… certainly there’s a driving force but for us, we were really comfortable,” said Trudi. “There was no drive. So, that was the problem.”
You see, the couple first encountered Dymphna Boholt and ILRE back in 2013. And back then… Trudi thought Dymphna was a complete lunatic.
Why?
Because Dymphna was telling everyone to buy in Sydney!
But Trudi believed that it wasn’t really a good deal.
“I had worked in Sydney,” said Trudi. “Sydney’s gone, like, Sydney went ages ago. What is she talking about?”
As it turned out… Dymphna was right.
Three years after their initial encounter, Trudi saw that Sydney’s property prices skyrocketed to 90% higher than the previous value.
So, Trudi gave Dymphna another chance and tried joining ILRE again in 2016. But every time Dymphna had a boot camp, something came up for both Trudi and Brett.
It was only in 2020 that the couple finally had enough free time – and mustered enough courage – to join ILRE and take property investing seriously.
And now… they’ve never looked back.
Deal 1:The Warehouse in the Flood ZoneTo find their first deal, the couple decided to go on a road trip to survey properties. They met with a few agents, planted some seeds, and started researching the market. Then, they came across a warehouse that was next to a heavy transport route.
The problem? The warehouse was in a flood zone.
But Brett was unfazed. He knocked on the owner’s door and asked about his experience with the flood.
This is what he found out:
“The property got flooded but after that, they’d built everything above it,” said Brett. “So, all their pallet racking, all their electronics, all their electrical… everything was above that level.”
Satisfied with the answer, Brett decided to buy the property. Now, TNT and FEDEX are leasing the warehouse… which is giving them a cash flow of $31,000 a year.
Deal 2: Trading the ‘Comfy Couch’ for the Odd HouseTo start their second deal, Trudi and Brett made the hard decision to sell their PPR.
The couple had really had to think hard about it before deciding to sell that house. After all, it was their comfy home for over a decade. It was in a great complex, had a six-car garage, and plenty of security.
But selling their PPR was a turning point in the couple’s lives.
Because with this, they’ve finally gotten over their analysis paralysis. Plus, the sale earned them over $500,000 in profit.
Now, of course, the family needed to have someplace to live. So, they decided to buy a house with the ‘most bizarre interior design’ they’ve seen for nearly $2 million. Trudi and Brett then spent $350,000 to renovate the property.
For now, their family plans to live in this new PPR for the next 12 months. The couple also estimates that they could earn as much as $800,000 for the new PPR… once they are ready to sell it.
Deal 3: The First Joint VentureDespite their initial wins, Trudi and Brett found themselves struggling in the property market. It’s because they soon realised that the market was just so hot that it was difficult to compete!
Thankfully, Dymphna’s Platinum program came along. It’s where they were told to take a break before going at it again.
And that’s exactly what they did.
Then, the couple decided to enter into their first joint venture after joining ILRE. Their JV partner found a deceased estate with two bedrooms and one bath. Trudi and Brett paid for the purchase cost, while their partner shouldered the strategy cost.
Their idea is to build duplexes on the big block of land and either hold, sell, or sell part. And they expect to earn as much as $190,000 out of the deal.
“At the end of the day, it’s all about cash flow,” says Trudi. “So if we can hold, we will. And we have it all drawn up legally that if one of us needs to sell, we sell or offer it to each other.”
Deal 4: The Deal of a LifetimeILRE also taught Trudi and Brett how they can become better business owners, not just all things property investing.
“One of the focuses and part of Dymphna’s whole program is having systems in place,” says Brett. “It’s about being ready for the deal of a lifetime.”
And that deal came on their fourth property investment.
For their fourth deal, the couple put an offer in for a commercial property. And they did it with a trusted real estate agent.
At the time, Brett was looking for a property that he could run and put his business into. Essentially, he wanted to leverage off his businesses by renting his own property through the superfund.
Brett sadly missed out on the first property he wanted.
Fortunately, his agent didn’t give up and got a pretty good off-market deal on another property. And since the property was undervalued at $650,000, Brett settled everything within 2 weeks.
Now, the property is adding $28,000 to their cash flow.
Deal 5: The JV Deal with Huge PotentialFor their fifth deal, Trudi and Brett entered into another JV with their previous partner. It was a big house with four bedrooms, two bathrooms, and located in a huge block. It also already got a subdivision approval, so the potential was huge!
But despite having their paperwork in order… their first finance broker rejected their application.
At first, the couple wanted to give up. But the ILRE community told them no, you need to get that property.
…And so they did.
Retire Early and Make an Impact through Property InvestingAfter 5 deals under Dymphna’s wing, Trudi and Brett managed to create a yearly cash flow of $192,000.
And they managed to increase their total portfolio value up to nearly $8 million in 2 years!
But for Trudi and Brett, it’s not just about the money.
Investing heavily in property allowed them to retire early and spend more time with friends and family. They were also able to donate money to a nursing scholarship program and help facilitate emergency accommodation for relatives of trauma and end of life patients.
And for anyone who wants to achieve the same level of success, this is what Trudi advises:
“Just look forward, never look back. Be persistent and learn to just talk to people.”
These stories and the results in them were captured at a specific point in time. The real estate market and the investing strategies used to succeed are constantly changing. The achievements and results of these investors may have changed since these stories were recorded. Each of these investors engaged in in-depth training, coaching and mentoring to be able to achieve these results. Their results are not typical and should not be taken as a guarantee of the results you may achieve. Your personal results will be in-line with the training, education and hard work that you personally conduct.
When James’ business and career suddently went under, he found himself saddled with $300,000 worth of personal debt, and no income or hope of ever paying it off.
Even though he turned to property to make it back up, with such a dire starting point, he wondered if there was any way out of the hole.
Through I Love Real Estate James was able to find a partner to get his journey moving, he finds the property, they put up the money, he works his ass off on the renovation, then they split the profit when they sell.
Sounds simple enough, maybe even too good to be true, but James uses this strategy to generate $82,000 paydays with insane turnaround times.
Today we’re interviewing James to see how he does it, and what he’s got planning next.
For blogs, articles, videos and more, head to https://iloverealestate.tv/
Cashflow Is King Summit vShort
John had been a career real estate agent for years.
Loved his job, thought he was good at it, never saw a reason to change anything.
But when change came to him, he had no choice but to adapt with it.
At his first I Love Real Estate event he had realised how little knew in his decade of real estate experience.
Come today and he’s now puting his new knowledge and skills to the test, and making huge profits doing so.
Listen in to find out how John does it, and the secret behind his amazing success.
For blogs, articles, videos and more, head to https://iloverealestate.tv/
https://dymvideo.s3.amazonaws.com/ilove/20230109SuccessJohn.mp3
When you start investing in real estate your accountant might say to just go out and buy an investment property just because “it’s a good thing to do.”
And if you’re a budding property investor like Tom was you might’ve just listened.
Of course one day with I Love ReaL Estate and he realised just how much he was doing wrong.
These days Tom is doing deals that turn $850k properties into $1.5mil equity power-houses, and we’re talking with him today to learn just how he does it.
For blogs, articles, videos and more, head to https://iloverealestate.tv/
https://dymvideo.s3.amazonaws.com/ilove/20230104SuccessTom.mp3
In her previous marriage Chrstine was “not allowed” to get a job.
So after 30 years when she finally escaped it, she had no idea where to go financially.
She only had one thought… “I like property”
And simple as it seems, it eventually lead to her to seek out I Love Real Estate’s coaching.
3 years later and she’s now managing huge project deals from Renovations, demolitions and even AirBnBs, generating more wealth than she would just renting out existing homes.
We chat to Christine today about her amazing journey and her hugely successful new career.
For blogs, articles, videos and more, head to https://iloverealestate.tv/
https://dymvideo.s3.amazonaws.com/ilove/20221228SuccessChristine.mp3
Truth Bomb Tuesday: There’s one thing I want you to do this Christmas…
Try and flip Christmas on its head this year.
I remember chatting to a student a couple of Christmases ago. She had a long list of presents to get the family. She had things the kids wanted (roller blades) and things the kids needed (new school bags). She had something fun for the hubby, as well as some new socks for him too.
She had done a huge amount of mental work. She had spent a lot of time thinking about what everyone in her family wanted or needed.
“And what about yourself hun?” I said.
“Oh… Not sure. Maybe some new earrings?”
She didn’t have anything. Maybe her husband would pick up the slack and think into what she really needed. Some hubby’s are good like that. (And some aren’t! Pick up your game fellahs).
But at the end of the day she had done a huge amount of mental work figuring out what other people needed, and she had done almost no work figuring out what she needed herself.
And my bet is that this played out all year round.
It’s the classic thing about being a parent (and I really want to name the fathers here making sacrifices daily for their family.) But it’s the classic thing about being a parent. You spend all this time thinking about what other people need, that you just don’t end up with the time or space to figure out what you need.
But if you don’t know what you want, you’re rudderless in the river of life. You just end up going with the flow, and that takes you who knows where.
To create the life you want the first thing you have to do is figure out exactly what it is that you do want.
And to do that, you have to know yourself as well as your children.
And this is the tyranny of the 9-5 and all that story. So many of us are run so ragged that we become strangers to ourselves. We don’t even know what we like anymore. If you had a day off, what would you even do with it?
May as well keep working, because at least when you’re working it feels like you have control.
But if the tyranny of the 9-5 is not working for you, then the first step is to figure out what you want. Its to put your peg in the sand and set a course.
So my Christmas wish for you is that you carve out a bit of space to flip Christmas on its head.
Find half an hour or so to stop thinking about what others need, and give a bit of time to figuring out what you want.
What would be your perfect Christmas gift?
(And allow yourself to include experiences like sky-diving or a solo bush walk or whatever. Don’t limit it to things.)
But what would be your perfect Christmas gift? Take the time to feel into what it is that would make you happy.
Because this is where everything starts.
..
And that’s us for the year. A huge shout out to everyone who works with me and to everyone in the I Love Real Estate community.
You are all amazing!
Have a great break, and see you bright and early in the new year!
Best wishes!
DB.
I reckon there will be three key things to watch in 2023
So on Thursday last week, I wrapped up the 2022 property market and said that there’d be three drivers to watch in 2023.
The first of those was rents, and I talked through how a continuing surge in rental price growth will be a rocket under property prices.
Today, let’s talk through the remaining two drivers, and put some numbers on what I reckon we can expect for 2023 and 2024.
Driver #2: Lack of stock
As a general rule, property prices only fall when there’s a rush of new stock on the market, that causes a surge in supply.
That hasn’t happened. It’s not happening.
In fact, the ‘spring selling season’ this year was a total bust.
For the ten years prior to the pandemic, we always saw an increase in listings in spring. Spring sees an average uplift of 21% in new listings nationally.
But 2022 was different.
Spring came and went without the usual surge in listings. In fact, listings actually fell!
New listings added to the market in the three months to November totalled 118,734, down from 121,859 in the three months to August.
That’s the first time that’s happened since Corelogic started tracking listings data 12 years ago. It’s possibly the first time ever.
For now, vendors seem happy to ride out the cycle, and wait for prices to improve. If they think the market will turn soon, they’re probably right.
But what that means is that there’s a real shortage of stock on the market at the moment.
We’re just not seeing the “buyers’ market” that many people were expecting.
And that’s keeping a floor under prices. And as conditions stabilise and the RBA backs off on the rate hikes, it should see property price growth accelerate quickly once the market turns.
Like most things in Economics, it’s all about supply and demand.
Driver #3: Construction Crunch
It seems that every time I pick up a newspaper these days, I read about a major builder going bankrupt.
I actually made a list. In the past few months, all of the following builders, some of them giants in the industry, have gone belly up:
- Elderton Homes
- Lanskey Constructions
- Oracle Platinum Homes
- Besse Construction
- Condev
- Snowdon Developments
- Inside Out Construction,
- Solido Builders,
- Waterford Homes,
- Affordable Modular Homes,
- Statement Builders,
- Langford Jones Homes,
- Willoughby Homes, and
- Norris Construction Group.
That’s a big list. And that’s not even counting the smaller outfits.
The big killer here is construction costs, which have exploded with Covid-related supply chain bottlenecks.
Based on ABS building approvals data, the average new house costs more than $400,000 to build – a figure a full $80,000 higher than before the pandemic:
For builders, many of which signed fixed price contacts 12 months ago, this is a nightmare scenario.
A growing number are giving up the ghost and exiting in the industry.
At the same time, new homes sales are falling quickly.
So with new homes sales falling, and nobody around the build them anyway, we’re looking at a construction crunch.
But the market relies on the flow of new stock to keep things in balance.
Without it, our already undersupplied capitals will plunge further into housing shortage.
And, coming back to supply and demand, that will see strong price pressure in the second half of the year.
A prediction?
So look, there’s still a lot of uncertainty here. These are still unusual times. I don’t have a crystal ball.
But my base case looks something like this.
The RBA gives up on rate hikes in the first quarter of 2023.
In the second quarter, house prices find a floor and turn the corner.
In the second half the year, house prices begin to accelerate quickly, on the back of the three drivers I’ve outlined above.
That will net out at something like 4-5% growth for the calendar year. But that growth will be entirely backloaded into the second half of the year.
And so we’ll follow that up with 8-10% in 2024.
As I said, there’s a lot of uncertainty in that picture.
But I am confident that the market is closing in on a bottom, that it will grow quickly on the other side, and that there’s always opportunities for investors who know what they’re doing!
DB.
Julie’s early property endevours completely misfried, she had invested right before the GFC and the hit to not only her investment but her finance as a whole forced her to sell at a massive loss.
She was completely ready to give up on property.
On a chance encounter she attended one of I Love Real Estate’s 1-day events, having a base of knowledge in real estate she immediately saw the unique opportunity ILRE presented.
Upon signing up she immediately got to work in Perth to find the right strategy for her.
Along the way she discovered her incredible talent for networking, a talent that would eventually lead her to making $237,000 seemingly overnight.
In this interview, host Michael takes us along Julie’s story, from her beginning, to deals, to her career today.
For blogs, articles, videos and more, head to https://iloverealestate.tv/
https://dymvideo.s3.amazonaws.com/ilove/20221216SuccessJulie.mp3
Before Gary joined I Love Real Estate he thought property was nothing more than an opportunity to buy a home.
Originally buying a home to live in, he was forced to sell it at a LOSS of $30,000.
A huge amount of money at the time, the loss made him completely rethink his long term plan.
Despite his disheartening initial experience, when the opportunity to learn real property investing came his way, he grabbed it by the horns.
The success Gary was able to obtain was unprecented, and eventually he was able to realise his Australian dream home.
Join us today as we interview Michael, how he changed his mindset, achieved success, and created the dream home that was years in the making.
For blogs, articles, videos and more, head to https://iloverealestate.tv/
https://dymvideo.s3.amazonaws.com/ilove/20221208SuccessGary.mp3
This guy is usually on the money.
Louis Christopher has been in the property game a long time.
(Almost as long as I have!)
And he heads up one of the best research centres in the country, SQM Research.
Anyway, he was picked up in The AFR this week because he reckons that property is due for a pretty quick rebound.
He reckons the fundamentals are already in place, there are greenshoots emerging, and as soon as the RBA stops hiking rates, property prices should pop:
Sydney house prices could bounce back by up to 9 per cent next year if the Reserve Bank of Australia pauses interest rate rises, keeping the cash rate below 4 per cent according to the Boom and Bust report.
Louis Christopher, managing director of SQM Research and author of the report, said a pause in the rate rise cycle, which is expected to occur as early as June next year, with the cash rate holding steady for the rest of 2023, could ignite a recovery in dwelling prices across the biggest capital cities.
Sydney house prices could surge by as much as 9 per cent next year if the RBA pauses interest rate rises by next June. Janine Barrett
That scenario assumes that interest rates will peak at 4 per cent, inflation hits 8 per cent but falls back to 5 per cent, and the unemployment rate rises but stays below 5 per cent.
“I believe the markets can recover, and they’ve been showing some signs of recovery, such as the modest rise in auction clearance rates and asking prices, even while we’ve had these cash rate increases,” Mr Christopher said.
“If the RBA were to hold it below 4 per cent, given the surge in the economy that accelerated wage increases, I believe that will create grounds for a housing market recovery, albeit a soft one where we would see some single-digit house price rises occur in 2023, or at the very least, a situation where the housing market would stop falling.”
In this base case scenario, Sydney house prices are predicted to rise between 5 per cent and 9 per cent next year, the sharpest gain of any capital city.
“Sydney is expected to lead the recovery driven by the surge in underlying demand for residential property and its diverse economy,” Mr Christopher said.
“Sydney is capturing the lion’s share of net overseas arrivals, people are coming back from the regions and returning into the office environment and the taxation changes made by the NSW government will encourage first-time buyer activity.”
… Nationwide, house prices are forecast to rise between 4 per cent and 7 per cent.
Mr Christopher said the RBA was still expected to increase the interest rate by 0.25 percentage points next month and through the first half of next year but will likely pause when the cash rate hits 3.85 per cent.
This is how his forecasts chart out, in case you’re interested.
And I reckon he’s right. The greenshoots are emerging. The fundamentals are already strong.
Probably the only place where I differ is where I see the interest rate cycle peaking out.
I reckon we’re much closer to the end than most people realise.
I reckon we might get one more this year, and then that might do us. Inflation already looks like it’s peaking.
Which means we could see the market turn, potentially in the first quarter next year.
DB.
Before joining I Love Real Estate Sergio saw the rut that was forming at his feet. Working to day to day, he had no goal and while he was still making a living, he wasn’t building wealth. Looking to escape the black hole sucking him in, be began noticing the common “propositions” for wealth building… […]
Truth Bomb Tuesday: Be direct. Be clear. “I give you permission to do whatever you want, all the time.” You should see people’s faces when I say this to them. It’s subtle. But they freeze up a bit and their eyes bug out. There’s a jolt of energy that slips through their system. “What if […]
The fact of the matter is, for 99% of the people, jobs suck. Especially the ones that suck up those precious daylight hours inside stuffy cubicles and tight business suits. While some tolerate this lifestyle, Henry could do it no longer. Seeking an escape from the wage-slave rat race, he looked to real estate investing […]
Prior to joining I Love Real Estate Natasha was in a tight spot. Living outside of Australia her safety became questioned and her family’s future uncertain. New to investing, she worried she might never be able to return to Australia and be financially sound. Joining I Love Real Estate helped avoid a negative gearing deisaster, […]
Cory & Amanda were swamped with credit card debt, taking on cost after cost simply to keep their heads above water. The rat race was simply swallowing them up, and they needed a way out. By being at the right place at the right time and playing it smart, they were able to do just […]
Truth Bomb Tuesday: This bent my head a little bit If you’re looking for something a bit out of the ordinary – and a bit mind-bending and inspirational – check out the Andy and Jim documentary on Netflix. (No affiliate kickbacks, I promise!) More and more I love a good doco. The reality is that […]
Don’t believe the hype. Everyone is trying to sell you something. Ok, so here’s an exercise in cutting through media hype. The AFR (who should probably know better) was running an article the other day under the dramatic headline “Distressed Listings Blow Out as Interest Rates Bite.” It caught my eye. The number of distressed […]
Today Michael chats with Vanessa, ex-full time mortgage slave, who once worked endless hours to just maintain the dream of ever paying it off, to now full time property investor. We learn just how Vanessa transformed her financial position and create a brand new, fulfilling, exciting, and profitable lifestyle for herself and her family.
Feeling like you’re falling behind? You probably are. Can you hear that sound? That’s the sound of your lifestyle going to the drain. Gurgle-gurgle-gurgle. Inflation seems well and truly off the leash now. Headline inflation is running at over 7% annually. It’s been so long since we’ve had inflation in Australia that I’m not sure […]
Soon, governments are going to be paying you to buy property. So the Victorian state election is coming up, and one of the promises I’ve taken a bit of interest in is Dan Andrew’s proposal to introduce a shared equity scheme, following a brief trial over the past year. At the moment, there’s talk of […]
If you’re a seasoned investor chances are it’s snuck up on you before… The investment from hell. No matter how stack it, no matter how much you THINK it “can’t possibly fail”, Eventually, the drain it has on your income continues to swell untill it hits ciritcal mass until… Bang. Your finance can take it […]
Truth Bomb Tuesday: A simple framework for de-escalating conflict “In the end, I lost it at my husband, threw the loaf of bread at him and said ‘Stop trying to change me! I’m sick of feeling like I’m wrong all the time!” And he said, ‘That’s exactly how I feel! I feel like you’re always […]
This is the MOST common story I’ve heard in real estate. Just entered the market, negatively geared property, and a slow-but-steady train to a DISASTER investment. The bright side is, I’ve seen it so many times, I know how to get out of it. That’s where Tak and Hoe Ping were when they joined I […]
At the young age of 20 Kelly and Liam rushed into the property market guns blazing, investing only with a dream and whatever she knew at the time. Soon after, the town they bought in was hit with the mining crash, and their propeties lost $100k in value each. Still working their 9 to 5’s, […]
Jordan and Alex have an incredible story to share. Abandoned by conventional money-making tactics, they slowly accumulated a debt that would plague them for life. In comes I Love Real Estate, and the opportunity to learn of a way to finally achieve economic freedom. Michael joins Jordan and Alex and they take us through exactly […]
I’m sharing a sucess story from a personal student of mine. Mary was down with a bad case of “busy mum sundrome”. Taking care of a family had taken over her entire life. And as fulfilling as that can be, it was equally dominant on her time. In comes I Love Real Estate, and a […]
There’s a push to move to a four-day work week. But a big problem still remains. There was news last week that some Australian companies have started moving to a 4-day work week as part of a global experiment. Employees from some Australian companies are now working four-day weeks with no cut to their pay. […]
Truth Bomb Tuesday: We were actively designed to be irrational about threats like this. I was trading messages with a friend of mine. She lives in the hills outside Byron Bay. They had some epic floods earlier in the year, and last week they got quite a bit of rain. Around 2 a.m on Friday […]
Today I’m sharing a story from one of my personal coaching and mentoring students. His name is Mark Schneider. Average bloke, or so he seems at first. But just below the suface lies an incredible story. From ill-fated buinsess owner to successful property investor, Mark’s taken huge strides not just financially, but within his own […]
Today I’m sharing a story from one of my personal coaching and mentoring students. His name is Mark Schneider. Average bloke, or so he seems at first. But just below the suface lies an incredible story. From ill-fated buinsess owner to successful property investor, Mark’s taken huge strides not just financially, but within his own […]
Today I’m sharing a story from one of my personal coaching and mentoring students. His name is Mark Schneider. Average bloke, or so he seems at first. But just below the suface lies an incredible story. From ill-fated buinsess owner to successful property investor, Mark’s taken huge strides not just financially, but within his own […]
How much are you ever going to achieve if your first instinct is to hide? Something happens when you decide to stop hiding. Once you decide to stop being a shrinking violet – once you stop being terrified of being judged and being judged to be not good enough there’s a magic that starts unfurling […]
Truth Bomb Tuesday: Happiness is hard to find and even harder to hold. Have a guess. How much happiness do you think you can handle at time? 3 hours? 8 hours? 12 hours? Nup. Scientists have measured it. Want to know how much happiness the average person can handle? 4 seconds. That’s it. Maybe if […]
Sri Lanka is in real trouble. It can’t happen here. So a student asked me the other day if I thought that the economic crisis playing out in Sri Lanka right now could happen here. The very short answer is no. Zero chance. Things are tough in Sri Lanka right now. The economy is collapsing. […]
Truth Bomb Tuesday: Don’t have what it takes? That might be a blessing. When I first started out on my journey as a property investor, I was a bit bitter about how far back in the pack I was starting. I was a single mum, running a struggling business. I had barely two-cents to rub […]
No-money-down strategies work. Here’s proof. People often ask me if it’s possible to make money in real estate if you’re starting with nothing. It is. 100%. Now I could give you lots of examples from students that I’ve worked with personally, but I thought this CEO profile from the AFR is a great example of […]
Truth Bomb Tuesday: If your motivation is a eulogy, you’ll never get far. “After you die, how do you want to be remembered?” I was filling out some interview questions for a glossy magazine a while ago. They were doing a special on ‘Women in Business’ and they were giving me a run. The questions […]
Signs are looking good for anyone who’s investing in units right now… Units struggled to see much demand over the pandemic, but as things shift back into place, we might see demand rising VERY soon… Here’s everything I’m diving into this week. Why prices are rising at the fastest pace since the 1990’s,…Although the worst […]
How Qantas wasted our money I caught up with an Aussie couple the other day. (I am currently fulfilling a life long dream to sail around Europe. I’m writing this from the boat in a fjord in Norway!) Anyway, this couple was telling me about how rough their international flight legs had been. I asked […]
Truth Bomb Tuesday: Are we hard-wired to fear the things we love? Humans are pretty strange creatures. We are a mess of contradictions and competing drives. How we get anything done amazes me. And the more I work with people (and I mean really work with people – getting past spreadsheets and feasibility studies into […]
Are people calling wheat the new brown gold? Well no, not really. But there’s more to this story than meets the eye… Here’s what else I’m talking about. The why US dollar dominance is under threat,…But it still has no known predators. Where in the world you can use wheat and garlic as a deposit,…But […]
The inflation data is hot, but I don’t think its getting hotter. So there’s an awful lot swinging on what inflation does right now. Not only is inflation eating into household budgets, it’s what’s prompted the RBA to go on the most aggressive rate hiking campaign in history. (Though to be strictly accurate, it’s the […]
“If I can, you can. I really believe this. You can only improve. Take action, make yourself uncomfortable. There are always people to help.”
Truth Bomb Tuesday: I use my intuition. You shouldn’t. “Listen Dymphna, I’ve just got a good feeling about it.” “No you don’t. You just think it looks cute.” We were looking a potential investment for Jenny. To me, the numbers weren’t stacking up. It was an older house, and it looked like it needed a […]
What would the immortal bard say about your excuses? I was talking to a student the other day about why they were behind on their five year plan. “I’ve just been very busy.” “Well, it’s five years of your life, not mine.” “No, things have just been really busy. The kids had a swimming carnival, […]
Truth Bomb Tuesday: To avoid energy vampires, we need discipline. Most times, we choose the wrong discomfort. I think this is probably true generally. When we make a bad choice in life, it’s rarely because we chose the painful option over the pain free option. Most times it’s because we choose the wrong discomfort. We […]
Inflation! Interest rates! Global economic pressure! Recession! This is the narrative you’ve seen pumped out by the mainstream media. Fortunately for us, it’s total BS. And real economists are are finally spilling the beans… sorta. So here’s what I’m talking about. Why economists are almost always wrong individually,…But taken together get pretty close to the […]
Sometimes actions speak louder than words. There’s a story I love about the Brooklyn Bridge. In May of 1883, the newly built bridge opened for traffic. Spanning the East River to link Manhattan and Brooklyn, it was the longest suspension bridge in the world. It was an engineering wonder. But people had said that it […]
Truth Bomb Tuesday: Those sci-fi writers knew a thing or two. I watched Dune the other night. I love a bit of sci-fi. Anyway, I was reminded of this quote: “I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it […]
Here’s what I’m covering this week. Why the Aussie jobs market is still leading the world,…And why you can’t find a tradie for love for money. Why the economic forecast are strong,…But households are gripped with fear.…Just as inflation looks like rolling over. And how the latest census data solves a puzzle in the rental […]
RBA hikes, but it’s not as bad as people think. So the RBA hiked rates by another 50 basis points on Tuesday. That’s the third hike in a row now, with many people saying we’ll get another one next month. It’s possible. But even if that’s true, and even if it’s a big rate […]
Truth Bomb Tuesday: I found this story inspiring. In these crazy times, I thought I wanted to offer something inspiring. And when I read this obituary for Leonardo Del Vecchio last week, I thought that is was definitely a story worth sharing. Long story short, when he died, he owned the largest sunglasses empire in […]
Everyone’s got their own “analysis” on the latest GDP data. It’s usually shallow, obvious, and sometimes they charge you for it. So I’m laying out the dirty secret in the data (free of charge). Here’s what I’m covering. Why the Aussie economy firing on all cylinders…And property remains a key driver of growth. Why this […]
Truth Bomb Tuesday: Sometimes the first step is the hardest There’s a quote I’ve seen attributed to popular horror writer Stephen King: “Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just have to go to work.” While this might be a little rich for someone who farms out the actual writing of his novels to […]
If history is a guide, then people are panicking about nothing. A few people in the media are now talking about house prices falling 30%. Is this unusual? Well, no. People talk about this all the time. Like every six months or so. People talking about 30% falls is incredibly common. But what about falls […]
Truth Bomb Tuesday: We used to crave stimulation. Now only the rich can get away from it. I don’t know if you remember the early days when mobile phones first came out. They were the ultimate status symbol – a military-grade transmitter the size of a house brick. Only the very rich had them. But […]
Economic bloodbath? Maybe so, but the job market didn’t get the message. Infact, the market is looking stronger than it has in half a DECADE. It sounds like sunshine and rainbows, but there’s more to the story. And I’m diving it into it. Here’s everything on the agenda: Why unemployment fell to a 48-year low,…But […]
Usually I keep my eyes squarely glued on Australia property. But there’s A LOT to learn from American property right now. And the way it ties into Australian real esate may suprise you… Here’s what I’m talking about. Why the global ecnomy is still a great place for Australia to be,…And what’s driven exports to […]
Truth Bomb Tuesday: How to make sure your goals aren’t empty dreams. Help us out here. I’m road testing a new motto. What do you think? “Invite tomorrow, empower today.” Catchy? Can you see on it on a motivational poster with some dolphins and stuff? I’m trying to catch a really important balancing act that’s […]
If the economy is going great guns, why does it feel like I’m going backwards? So we got the first quarter GDP data last week. It was pretty good all things considering. Defying expectations, and flying over a quarter marked by Covid outbreaks and massive floods, GDP delivered. The economy grew by 0.8% in the […]
Who’s labour backing now that they’re in office? I’m covering the sectors to look out for, and why it might spell BOOM for property… Plus, you’ll also discover… The markets that will find support from this government policy,…And the segments that will catch a lift. Why global investors are increasingly worried about stagflation:…And the one […]
“We believe we can achieve anything we desire. We’ve learnt so much more than real estate.”
We have a new government… A new Prime Minister… But more importrantly, a new plan for property. I’ve deep dived into Labour’s potential plans for Aussie property, the good, the bad, and profittable. Here’s the points I’m covering: Although the ‘Help to Buy’ scheme is expected to be popular among buyers, it could lead to […]
Rate hikes? Personally, I didn’t notice. And neither did the Aussie economy. Despite all the hollering about the recent interest rate scare, we seem to have help up alright. And I’m going to tell you why. Here’s what else I’m talking about. Why business is still super optimistic about the outlook,…Especially as retail sales continue […]
I mean, who doesn’t love Aussie property? I don’t know if you were in the market during the last cycle, but around 2016 one of the big themes in Aussie property was the influence of foreign buyers. Back then, regulation seemed a bit lax – actually, I shouldn’t say that. The laws were there. But […]
Who’s got their finger on the “Secret Safety Switch” that’s gonna save interest rates? Here’s what I’m covering this week. Why china might already be in recession,…As they pay a heavy price for a ‘zero-Covid’ policy. Why this could ultimately push commodity prices even higher.…Which floods Australia with cash. Why Melbourne is facing an epic […]
Truth Bomb Tuesday: If you want honesty, get it in writing. “I just wish they would be honest with me.” I have seen quite a few joint ventures go pear shaped in my time. Not within my community. We are super-big on making sure you get everything down on paper, and getting the right contracts […]
The Coalition is staking the final week of the campaign on a plan to let people raid super to buy a house? Is that a good idea? So housing was brought onto centre stage with the Prime Minister this week and the LNP’s campaign launch. The bold proposal? To let people raid their super to […]
The election campaigns are running red hot at the moment. And labor is looking to make a big push to new home buying. And when I say big, I mean $300,000 big. Sounds nice, but when politicians are involved, I always ask abuot the strings attached. So that’s why I’m talking about it this week. […]
Truth Bomb Tuesday: Guard it jealously. You won’t get it back. You have a lot of resources at your disposal. How wisely do you use them? Some of your resources are unlimited. Like your creativity. I seriously believe that everyone has an unlimited number of million dollar ideas inside of them. The only challenge is […]
Truth Bomb Tuesday: We tend to shame jealous feelings. There’s something being missed there. I was talking to a friend recently who has a tendency to get jealous. So I decided to do a quick lightening search around how to work with your jealousy. (That’s one of the things about being independently wealthy. You just […]
Labor’s pitch to voters has a surprising winner So we got Labor’s contribution to housing policy last week, with their Help to Buy scheme. This is a shared equity scheme, with the government effectively coming in as a money partner on your home. So if you can come up with a 5% deposit, the government […]
“You can do this with very little money. We’ve shown that. The only thing to do is take action.”
Everyone loves to talk about the effect the pandemic had on property. But I’m doing it differently. Not just looking at the short term, not even the current cycle, I’m talking about how the pandemic altered property PERMANENTLY. Here’s what else I’m covering. Why this a ‘best-ever’ labour market,…And how that is going to push […]
Truth Bomb Tuesday: The ingredients for success are simple. So why aren’t more people successful. People often want to know what the formula to success is. They expect it’s going to be complicated. They expect me to get out a chalkboard and draw up an equation with 200 different variables, and dozens of weird symbols. […]
Clive Palmer is making some big promises on interest rates. Can he deliver? So Clive Palmer is promising to keep Aussie mortgage rates at 3%. Amazing. How is he going to do that? Well, we don’t know. He didn’t tell us. He only just came out and made this massive promise to fundamentally change the […]
Truth Bomb Tuesday: Are you sending a clear message to the universe? I want you to imagine something. Imagine there’s an old man who comes into the possession of a new kids bike. He wants to give it away, so he asks two kids in his local neighbourhood if they want the bike. The first […]
This jobs market truly is one for the ages. I don’t know if people really get that. So we got the jobs data last week, and I don’t think people really get how important this is. Because when you have a jobs market that’s this tight for this long – when everyone who wants a […]
Rate hikes are so not happening. Not like this anyway… Right now, markets are still pricing in a riduclous outlook for interest rates. Normally, money market pricing gives you a pretty good indication what’s going to happen to interest rates. But right now, they’re saying rate hikes are going to do this: That is, rise […]
Truth Bomb Tuesday: The stories we tell matter, but who is telling yours? I’ve written a few times about the power that comes with being the author of your own story. And I don’t just mean that you get to decide the way you live and the things you get to do. I mean being […]
It’s that time of year! I’m taking a break in the usual schedule to discuss the 2022 Australian budget. All the dirty details, the losers, and the 20 BIGGEST winners to come out of it. From taxes to petrol prices, I hope you enjoy. If you’d like to book a FREE 60 minute Real Estate […]
“Our kids are learning early that there’s another way. They also don’t have to be tied to a job for 40 years of their life.” - Natalie
Truth Bomb Tuesday: It’s beautiful to share. But don’t be in a rush. We are all merchants of our own healing. Once we understand what the medicine is that is going to sort us out, we become super inspired to share it with the world. I think this is sort of universal. It certainly describes […]
Inflation is here, but it might be worse than you think. Andrew Leigh, the shadow assistant minister for Treasury, was tackling the big issues over at The New Daily the other day, lamenting the shrinking size of Malteser packets: Freddo Frogs were reduced from 15g to 12g – but the price stayed the same. New […]
It’s no secret that natural disasters hit Australia hard year after year. Among fires, hurricanes, and heat waves, floods are actually among Australia’s most expensive disasters. The damage ranges in the billions, and someone has to pay it. Today I’m talking about the nature of those costs, and their potential to completely derail the Aussie […]
Sometimes trust is just a way of avoiding responsibility. There’s a saying in the Muslim part of the world that goes, “Trust in Allah, but tether your camel first.” I love this one. To me its saying, yes, trust in abundance or spirit or whatever you want to call it, but don’t think that that […]
Truth Bomb Tuesday: There’s no useful information in happy. I’m going to tell you why you don’t actually want to be happy. I’m serious. You don’t. You don’t necessarily want to be unhappy either. You just don’t care. As far as you’re concerned, happiness is largely irrelevant. Now you might be thinking, “Hang on Dymphna. […]
DESPITE the strength the property market continues to show in 2022, there are STILL people saying it’s due to fall anytime now. Today I want to go over 3.7 TRILLION reasons why I think the exact OPPOSITE. Plus I’m covering these topics… Wihy some sectors are seeing strong wages growth,…But most aren’t and real wages […]
Truth Bomb Tuesday: If you can get clear on your why, it will unlock a mountain of energy. The first step in the journey is finding your “why”. Why is the place that you drive from. It’s home to all the energy you need to achieve great things. It’s your mission and reason for being. […]
“You know, I just can’t say enough about this program because it’s changed our whole lives.”
No shock, another property LEGEND has come out against negative gearing. If you know me, you know I’ve thought this for years. But it’s nice to know other high-level investors are starting to spout this ‘secret’ property truth. I won’t spoil who, but this legendary investor said more than a few interesting truths on the […]
Truth Bomb Tuesday: Compassion is less active than we think. These are some dark days. The war in Ukraine bleeds on, and the floods along the east coast are truly devastating. The outpouring of compassion and support has been truly amazing. There’s nothing like watching Aussies come together. It got me thinking about compassion. There’s […]
Heard of the Great Reshuffle yet? If not, you should have, it’s a huge job trend that’s pushing the Aussie economy in CRAZY directions. Millions are leaving their jobs – or joining the workforce – trying to find new jobs with more fulfilling and flexible roles. And can you blame them? Lockdowns taught us that […]
In the market for a new place? Make sure you understand all the costs involved in sealing the deal. In property, the price tag is never the price. If you’re a bit new to the game, make sure you’ve clocked these ‘extras’ and make sure you understand the impact they have on your deal. Bank […]
“What we found in this community is the sense of belonging. We support each other, we meet on a monthly basis and we share stories. No judgments.”
Here’s what I’m covering this week: How property prices kept surging into the new year,…And which city is leading the way. Why we have never seen such a shortage of rental accommodation.…And which cities are suffering most. What border reopening will do to Australian property. Why a ‘race for space’ is changing the way we […]
Truth Bomb Tuesday: Your fears aren’t irrational… just waiting to be worked with. You can’t just “let go of your fears”, no matter what the motivational posters tell you. I overheard a conversation at one of our gatherings a few years ago. A woman was talking about how she felt stuck in some of her […]
Rental markets are tight, but you have to be a little careful how you interpret it. One of the interesting and most over-looked features of the property market right now is just how incredibly tight the rental market is. Everyone focuses on price growth, but rents have been surging. They’re growing at over 9% nationally, […]
Regional markets have had a blinder. Can it continue? So the regional property markets have had an incredible couple of years. Some of them have grown by 30%. And that’s at the same time as rents are growing at 10% plus too. If you owned regional property at the start of 2020, you’ve done spectacularly […]
Rents are still EXPLODING in 2022. And if you were prepared (aka listening to me) you’ll know just how BIG it’s paying off for investors. I’m diving into that, as well as a ton of other property and ecomonic news and events this week. Here’s everything I’m covering. Why we are probably past “peak-Covid”,…But ‘story […]
The rate cycle has turned. But that’s no reason to panic. So the rate cycle has definitely turned. Rates aren’t going any lower from here. Not that I think there’s even any room for them to actually go lower. But barring another economic crisis, the next move is certainly up. The only question now is […]
Truth Bomb Tuesday: Before you can slay dragons, you have to tie up your shoes. The road to your great dreams is paved with a thousand tiny, little achievements. I get a lot of people coming to me looking for help with their ‘hero’ story. And that’s awesome. They know that they’re not living the […]
I’ve received a lot of questions about the nature of the real estate that’s well and truly underway. It’s easy to forget that this boom isn’t just another random event. It’s part of a super-cycle, and it’s something I’ve talked about for years now. So today I’m specifically talking about the demand that comes with […]
The race for space defined 2021. What about 2022? Now one of the more interesting property trends that came out of 2021 was the “race for space.” And no, I’m not talking about some billionaires, desperately clinging onto adolescence by climbing into a giant dildo and shooting themselves off into near space. I’m talking about […]
Truth Bomb Tuesday: You hate your job, but is it actually the job. “You know, maybe your job isn’t actually the problem.” I was talking to a student the other day, and they had the February blues. I think it’s something that comes after Australia day. Summer is ending, your holidays are over, and the […]
The dust has well and truly settled on 2021… It was a whirlwind of a year, whether you were involved in property or not. But after it’s all said and done, I’ve come to a conclusion on the 5 BIGGEST winners from the 2021 property scene. Spoiler alert: It’s not the usual suspects. But it’s […]
Everything an investor needs to know about LMI. K know some people might be across this already, but I had a few questions about this recently so I thought it might be a good idea to put together some ideas about Lenders Mortgage Insurance, or LMI. What it is, if you need it, if there […]
“Who wants to work 80 hour weeks for $65,000 a year when you can generate a passive income of almost $150,000!”
2022 is the year that keeps on giving… And it’s still January. Once again records are being shattered and the momentum property has is showing no sign of stopping. So on that note, I’m deep diving into everything driving property as high as it is, and how high it can go… Here’s the breakdown. Why […]
Markets are in a flap, but my advice to these investors is to stay calm. The whole economy is a bit schizophrenic right now hey? In some ways, it’s an incredibly challenging time. Omicron is putting strain on the health system, the CBDs are still ghost towns, and supply chains are all kinked up. And […]
“It’s been brilliant and is going to give us a LOT of options. If Dymphna gives you an opportunity, I’d say go for it.” - Carson
Can you guess where the money is flowing right now? So on Monday I started looking at the five big property market winners of 2021 (according to Proptrack’s Paul Ryan anyway), and telling you whether I thought they would continue on into 2022. We saw how 2021 saw a surge in first home buyer activity, […]
Sometimes nothing happens unless you make it happen. Is this the year you’re going to get it sorted? Tell me it is. Tell me this is the year you bite the peach straight off the tree and get it sorted. Because I have some shocking news for you: 2021 is over. Done. Dusted. In fact, […]
The property market keeps serving up winners. So, here we are 2022. How did that happen? Now, I hope you’ve hit the ground running. I hope you’ve got clear on your goals, clear on your strategy, and clear on how you’re going to access the support and resources you need. I am sure this year […]
Welcome back! Hope you all had a great break. As per my usual a ‘holiday’ is one part relaxing and two parts working. But I enjoy it all the same. For the first episode of 2022 I’m keeping it tight and relevant. And I’m honing on the infrastructure boom that’s chucking diesel fuel into the […]
I gave you three reasons why 2022 will be big for property. Here’s two more. So I flagged a couple of days ago that I thought there were five reasons (at least!) why property prices were going to continue to boom in to 2022. The first three were record low interest rates, massive money printing […]
How 2021 became the most epic boom in my lifetime. I don’t think most people realise how epic 2021 has been from the perspective of property prices. I mean, we all know that property prices are booming. It’s front-page news right now. And not to toot my own horn too much, but this is exactly […]
Truth Bomb Tuesday: To find your tribe, look within first. We had our super-conference a few weeks ago and it always leaves me on a high. And it’s not just the amazing stories of students totally transforming their financial lives – though that is awesome too. For me it’s feeling like I’ve found my ‘tribe’. […]
To get a sense of how big Bitcoin is, look backstage… I think people don’t really appreciate how big the crypto space has become in just a few short years. It’s actually massive. And you can talk about how many coins are traded every day, but in a digital era where things are flying around […]
Crypto has created the first global-scale network of trust. Do I think Bitcoin is revolutionary? Look, Bitcoin and the whole crypto-currency universe is one thing. And we can talk about that. But blockchain technology – the innovation underpinning crypto-currencies – that is a revolution. Why? Because blockchain scales trust. If you don’t understand this point, […]
I know I sound like a broken record at this point (Pun intended) But I can’t help but be excited for the continued SMASHING of all these property records. Which records exactly? I drop all the juicy details this weeks episode. Here’s everyone else you’re gonna learn on top of that. How the inflation data […]
Truth Bomb Tuesday: If you get your push and pull sorted, you’re sorted. As we roll into the end of the year there’s two questions I want you to ask yourself: How’s my pull? How’s my push? When you are calling things into your life, these questions are key. The pull is your attractive power. […]
The Kiwi government is worried about the boom… about 18 months too late. There’s a bit of a funny situation unfolding across the ditch in New Zealand. (A funny sitch across the ditch?) Basically, house prices are in the middle of an economic boom, and policy makers are tying to walk it back… … even […]
More hot news from the Aussie property market… A couple was able to flip their house for over $600k. They only had it for 9 weeks. You might be thinking… Huge scale renovations? Crazy sellers? Nope. In fact, in the whole 9 weeks they didn’t even touch it once. I’m gonna tell you how they […]
Truth Bomb Tuesday: If you don’t think you deserve it, it’s not going to happen. Do you deserve to be happy? Do you deserve to be wealthy? Do you deserved to be loved? If I ask most people this question I get two things. The first is the words that tell me that they do […]
We have no idea where most of the cash actually is. So cash is dying a slow death. It was on its way out before Covid, but Covid really took things down a notch. (I couldn’t even pay with cash at my local op-shop! The napkin holders cost 50c Glenda!) Australia is actually leading the […]
Free money has set the economy on course to boom. Interesting story last week. So not only have we avoided the ‘tidal wave’ of business bankruptcies that were expected in the early days of Covid, we have managed to get the number of business bankruptcies down to record lows. So there have been just over […]
As if things couldn’t get any better… A newly introduced government policy is to set to boost house prices to MOON (and back). I won’t bore you with the details, I’ll save the juicy bits for the episode itself. Not only that, but there’s tons of news for you to discover this week. How Covid […]
Truth Bomb Tuesday: You’ve got to be generous with money AND time. I spend my time the way I spend my money. Extravagantly. You should see some of the crazy things I blow my time on. 6-hour lunches. Joy flights over the harbour. Cuddle-in-bed Sundays. I’m dishing out minutes the way a hip-hop rapper dishes […]
I’ve been prattling on about the boom for weeks now. But there’s a good reason for it, the stats are just too insane. This week I’m honing in specifically on auctions, and how Australia’s auction market is now the hottest it’s ever been. The demand for housing is leading to some insane numbers at certain […]
Truth Bomb Tuesday: Is it even possible to live up to your own expectations? A lot of people live under the tyranny of what I call the ‘impossible rulebook’. It’s good to hold ourselves to a standard. It’s good to be conscious agents in how we offer our gifts and talents to the world. It’s […]
As lockdowns around the country are FINALLY lifted, people are looking for a change of scenery (In more ways than one…) In case it’s not obvious, I’m talking about PROPERTY. In Sydney alone property prices have already lifted 1.9%. Sounds like a meagre number, but considering the tiny timeframe between lockdown and now, it’s absolutely […]
Why is it so hard to get ahead? How did we get here? One of the richest nations on earth, and we’re all still struggling. Or it feels that way sometimes. We’re not living-in-a-shanty-town-on-a- rubbish-tip struggling, but still, 60 odd years of economic miracles and how much relaxation do we have to show for it? […]
Truth Bomb Tuesday: We die when we stop allowing. I want you to do a little exercise for me. I want you to write me up an invoice for $0.01. Yep. Just one cent. And make it out for all of 2020. Now how do you justify that invoice? What did you do that made […]
On this episode of the podcast I wanted to shed light on a particular real estate journey that is as common as it is remarkable. Mary Palaric was a student of mine that came to me as many do, running her life on a treadmill. No matter how hard you run or how fast, you’ll […]
Property is unique amongst all the possible ways to make money in Australia. It’s uniquely demanded, uniquely exciting… And it’s uniquely profitable. So much so that it gave these particular Aussies entrepreneurs the most profit they had seen in 39 years. In this episode I want to tell you exactly why and how it happened. […]
Truth Bomb Tuesday: We die when we stop allowing. Just make me one promise: Don’t resign your aliveness. Not now. Not ever. Don’t resign your aliveness. I know life can be tough. There are things that make you angry. There are times when you feel grief and sadness… or jealousy and resentment… or abandoned and […]
When it comes to managing bad tenants, prevention is worth an ounce of cure. As a property investor, the last thing you want is a bad tenant. And 99 out of 100 tenants are great. But what are your rights when the rent stops and the tenant burrows in like a tick? We’ve all heard […]
It’s no secret that the property market is BOOMING right now. So much so that even the mainstream media is picking on it. But like always, I’m one step ahead. I won’t spoil the surprise, but those who think the market has peaked will soon have egg on their face. The data ties into tons […]
Truth Bomb Tuesday: If we can do this, the sky’s the limit. I know I’m a glass-half-full kind of girl. (That’s not an accident. That’s a choice. But that’s a topic for another blog.) So I know I’m a glass half full kinda girl, but I get a sense that humanity is taking a big […]
As the market continues to soar, experts are still left in the dark. In this weeks episode, we explore the city that experts are sailing into completely blind… And how those in the know are about to make out like bandits. On top of that, here’s what else I want to cover. Why the RBA […]
Make sure you understand the full costs involved in purchasing property. In property, the price tag is never the price. If you’re a bit new to the game, make sure you’ve clocked these ‘extras’ and make sure you understand the impact they have on your deal. Bank fees Interest rates, loan establishment fees and refinancing […]
Truth Bomb Tuesday: Sometimes you need to cull the dead wood… but get first things first. Sometimes you need to cut people out of your life. I’m not going to lie. Sometimes you do. But I’m also not going to pretend that this is easy. There’s a saying that your net worth is the average […]
I reckon the experts are wrong on this one… again. So I reckon the ‘experts’ have it wrong. In the latest Finder RBA Cash Rate Survey, which polled 40 property experts and economists, Melbourne was the firm favourite to become the nation’s house price leader over the next 12 months: Experts are predicting the property […]
So the Australian government recently released their projections for covid and how vaccinations rates will pull us out of lockdown hell… So I decided to take a look, and shockingly enough, the data goes beyond misleading… It’s not a matter of it being wrong, infact, it’s almost less than just ‘wrong’. When you look at […]
Truth Bomb Tuesday: Change is hard… but sometimes easier than you think. I sometimes you just wake up one day and realise that everything you need is already at your fingertips. Sometimes you just need something to stop you in your tracks – for the alarm clock to go off – something that makes you […]
This is nothing short of a paradigm shift. I saw a report from some analysts the other day saying that they expected house prices to double from here. That sounds pretty wild, given how far land values have come. (And remember, with property we’re talking about two assets bundled into one – the land value […]
As cases skyrocket and government efforts to vacc are wrapped up in supply issues, many are becoming scared that property will once again take a hit amidst the renewed covid calamity. But the virus itself has very little to do with house prices. It’s the fear that drives people hearts, and their wallets. I decided […]
Truth Bomb Tuesday: Humans have one super-power… and most of us never use it Can you imagine if you had to learn everything from scratch? I mean everything. Okay, so I watched ‘My Octopus Teacher’ the other day. I know I’m late to the party. But it was a great little docco. And one of […]
In mid-2020 business confidence hit an all time low. And how could it not? Lockdown meant small business had to turn away paying customers, all to appease our political overlords… Well, it’s happening again in 2021. And the clock is ticking for Aussie businesses once again. The pollies are a little better now, but plenty […]
Truth Bomb Tuesday: It’s amazing how many people make this simple mistake about motivation I’m going to tell you why you’re probably doing motivation wrong. You probably don’t even know you’re doing it wrong. You’re probably doing it the way we’ve all been taught. But you need to stop it. Now imagine you are out […]
I think I know why the rental market is so unusually tight… The political atmosphere is feeling pretty charged right now, wouldn’t you say? Things are getting hectic. And look, I don’t blame anyone. These are very challenging times. It’s tough enough being stuck in lockdown, let alone wondering whether society as we know it […]
Wherever there’s global and financial stress, inflation is sure to follow… You might be thinking – “Well it’s obvious, COVID caused the government to panic, printing money like no tomorrow” But there’s more to the story, and the real answer is a lot more interesting than first glance, and the implications even more so… The […]
Truth Bomb Tuesday: Most people would never guess, but my energy comes from a surprising place. Confession time: I am an introvert. No seriously. I am. Now I know I don’t really look like it. I know I make public speaking look easy. I can get up in front of 5000 people and talk to […]
I could mire you with my usual spiel about chaos in the streets and panicking in the Parliament… But right now, I want to cut through the BS and deliver the hard facts about what’s going economically and financially, and why property is holding strong through it all. Here’s everything I’m going over. Why jobkeeper […]
In normal times, this should put a pause on rental growth. But these aren’t normal times.
One of the interesting things about this boom is that it’s really being driven by two engines of growth.
The first is record low interest rates and the massive money printing program the RBA is currently in the middle of. $5bn a week, with no end in sight.
I’ve written a lot about that before.
But the second driver is a little more interesting – or at least unique. It’s a rental boom.
Rental prices are growing at a scorching clip right now. On Corelogic data they grew at 7.7% over the year to July.
But it’s actually stronger than that. Because the national average is being held down by some ordinary results in the high-rise unit sectors of Sydney and Melbourne.
When you look at unit rental growth, you can see Melbourne is down 4.9%, and Sydney is barely positive at 0.9%.
That’s all about the glut in high-rise, which typically has been driven by student and immigration demand – both of which have dried up with Covid.
But if you strip out units and just look at detached housing, you can see growth is very strong across the country. Sydney at 7.2%, Adelaide at 8.2%, Brisbane at 9.2%. And check out Perth! 16.6%.
That’s scorching. And that boom in rental prices is helping fuel the boom in house prices.
Remember the return of an asset and the price of an asset is inexorably linked. And the rental price is the return you get for your property asset.
So the rental boom is driving the property boom.
But the question now is, what happens if households start to freeze up with the recent round of lockdowns.
Typically, rental growth is driven by household incomes, which is tied to jobs, and by confidence.
But we know household and consumer confidence has taken a knock since the recent rounds of lockdowns started.
It’s the most dramatic decline since the Covid crash, to one of the lowest levels on record.
Now typically, that would probably see rental growth start to slow.
But these aren’t ordinary times.
I mean, I would have expected to see rental growth fall through 2020. People were very nervous.
We also had a complete collapse in immigration and student numbers, which both help drive rental demand.
But what we saw through 2020 was that the rental market became very competitive.
I think what happened was that sharehouses broke up, children left their parent’s houses – people just tried to get away from each other.
And that caused rental demand to surge – which is what drove the boom in rental prices.
And so with lockdowns pinning down most the country again, what do we thinks going to happen?
Will households bunker and rents slow?
Or will people disperse further, driving even more rental gains.
I’m not totally sure. History is no guide to us these days. These are unusual times.
But it totally wouldn’t surprise me if this boom driver splutters for a bit…
… and then bursts back into life.
DB.
This is a great way to work with fate.
I’m running an event called Women of Cashflow, and I’ve taken it upon myself to really help women get on top of their finances.
For whatever reason (and there are a few), women tend to fall well behind men in terms of financial security and wealth. There is absolutely no reason why we need to accept that.
Anyway, as part of all this, I’ve also been researching bad-ass women of history.
I actually think I’ll write a book about it. Why has no one ever written a book about it?
(Because history books were written by men while their wives (or mothers!) cooked them dinner.)
We’ll probably only ever know about a millionth of all the amazing women who have ever lived – who deserved to be as famous as the men of their age – but oh well, that’s what we’ve got.
Anyway, this week I was reading about St. Catherine of Siena. Have you heard of her?
She was canonized in 1461, declared patron saint of Rome in 1866, and of Italy (together with Francis of Assisi) in 1939.
She was a great philosopher and the second woman to be declared a “doctor of the Church. She was also proclaimed patron saint of Europe in 1999 by Pope John Paul II.
She was a pious person, but also an esteemed philosopher, which was rare given the times she lived in, and the dance she would have to have danced to have her voice heard and her head not cut off.
But she did it.
There’s a story that the people of Siena wanted to have Catherine’s body after she passed away in Rome.
Knowing that they could not smuggle her whole body out of Rome, they decided to take only her head which they placed in a bag.
When stopped by the Roman guards, they prayed to Catherine to help them, confident that she would rather have her body (or at least her head!) in Siena.
When they opened the bag to show the guards, it appeared no longer to hold her head but to be full of rose petals.
Totally bad ass.
But the reason I came across this was because of a quote someone shared with me.
“To a brave person, good and bad luck are like her left and right hand. She uses both.”
I love this.
I love how it says that if you have courage, then whatever happens to you is an opportunity. It’s an opportunity to grow or to capitalise.
Or maybe you don’t even know what it’s an opportunity for. Maybe it’s just something you roll with, trusting that your courage will deliver you to your destination eventually.
This is a great way to see the world – not as a place where ‘bad’ things happen, and ‘bad’ results occur.
Rather, the world is a place that is constantly alive and dancing, and there’s always an opportunity to dance with it, and to take whatever life serves up, and find a way to put it to use.
The good and the bad are the same – like your right and left hand.
So be a bad-ass like St Catherine. Dance with the world and whatever it offers you.
(And leave a corpse that turns to rose petals).
DB.
Lockdown hum and drum is running rampant throughout news. While I’m not lockdown crazy, I decided to take a practical approach and talk about it on this weeks Intelligent Investor Update. Safe to say the results shocked me. Here’s everything I’m diving into this week. What the impact of lockdown is really going to be […]
The property boom is moving at an incredible pace.
It’s actually getting hard to describe how big this property boom is.
You know I’ve been in the game a decent while now. I’ve definitely never seen anything like it.
Westpac released their property outlook the other day, and there was one chart that really popped out at me.
It’s this one here. On the left hand panel there’s the turnover rate in Australia. What is shows is that the turnover rate has spiked to the highest level in over a decade. We’re selling a huge amount of properties right now. Things are moving.
And when the market is hot like this, price growth is inevitable. But check out the price growth. The right hand panel in the chart above looks at the 3-month annualised rate.
So that says, if the pace of growth we’ve seen over the past three months continued for the rest of the year, what kind of annual growth rate would we get.
And look at what it’s saying for Sydney and Melbourne – 32%!
32%! Are you kidding me? That’s blistering!
Again, never seen anything like it.
The thing to note here though is that Australia’s not alone. The whole world is in an epic property boom right now.
This chart looks at global house prices, again on a 3-month annualised basis. And as you can see, it’s really ramped up in recent months – to the highest levels in over a decade, possibly ever.
Things are moving very, very quickly.
Part of that is a demand story. The RBA has been on a money printing spree since October last year, and at last count, they’ve added over $200bn to the system.
That’s a lot of cheese.
So all that money is creating a surge in demand.
And that’s chewing through the available stock.
That’s the thing about property. When prices lift and demand soars, you just can’t go an easily add a few months supply to the market. Supply is very inelastic – it barely reacts at all.
And so what we’ve got, with the current pace of sales, is a collapse in the total listings available on the market – the right hand panel of this chart here.
It would take a little over 2 months to sell every property on the market in the country right now, at the current pace we’re going.
We’ve only got 2 months worth of supply – the lowest level on record.
So do you see what I’m saying here?
Demand is surging because money is abundant.
That’s seeing us chew through the available stock, and there’s a shortage of homes on the market.
That is also pushing prices higher.
We’re in a boom loop of epic proportions.
Who knows where this ends up.
DB.
Here’s everything we’re covering in this weeks Intelligence Property Investor Update! The average buisness owner in Australia gets sued 3 times in their lifetime, with a greater than 50% chance of a devastating lawsuit which can WIPE THEM OUT 1 out of every 4 people (on average) get sued There is a lawsuit happening every […]
Truth Bomb Tuesday: This sounds good on paper, but it’s a bit dangerous.
“Don’t ask why this is happening TO you. Ask why it is happening FOR you.”
Someone dropped that little mantra on me the other day. It stirred up a few things in me and I had to sit with it for a bit to figure out what I really made of it.
In the end, I’m very conflicted.
On one hand, I love it.
I think it’s a great practice – a great discipline – to refuse to see yourself as a victim.
As soon as you adopt the posture of a victim, you give away all your power. That’s practically the definition of ‘victim’ – it’s someone who stuff happens to.
And so if you refuse to see yourself as a victim, that’s a good thing. If you then pull a bit of psycho-spiritual ju juitsu on it, and flip it on it’s head and ask yourself, “what do I stand to gain out of this?” that’s awesome too.
It’s always good to meet the world as an opportunity hunter – and to see the world as a place that is endlessly throwing up opportunities for you to grow and be a more awesome version of yourself.
And it’s great to check in with yourself, and find the lessons and growth in setbacks and challenges.
This is a great practice to have.
BUT…
But I do think we need to be careful about constructing the universe as some sort of psychic guru who only cares about our growth and development, and will orchestrated the entire flow of time and matter around helping us become a better property developer.
I find this very unlikely.
I don’t think this is how it works.
I think the spiritual laws are probably a lot like physical laws in flavour. Atoms don’t follow gravity because gravity has a special place in its heart for atoms. It’s just how it works.
And I think we will often live in patterns that reflect our deeper beliefs and attitudes. If you believe that people are horrible and always out to screw you over, then there’s a good chance you will attract those people into your life.
If you drop an envelope containing $1,000 on the way out of the bank, it’s much more likely that it’s because you have a belief that you’re not worthy of money than it is because the universe has some particular lesson in mind for you.
That said, sometimes life will give us lessons. When we shift our beliefs about ourselves, some parts of our life will become incompatible. That can potentially throw up some challenges – some hard lessons might have to be learnt.
I’ve seen that happen.
So look, yes. Meet adversity with an opportunity mindset. That’s awesome.
But don’t imagine the ‘universe’ cares a dot about teaching you a lesson. That’s just not the universes job.
That’s your job.
Don’t give away your power.
DB.
Here’s everything we’re covering this week. Why the RBA is actually printing more money than people think Why our exports are booming Why there’s fewer applicants to jobs than ever Where rents have fallen 20% over the past year, and where they’ve gone up by 20%. If you’d like to book a FREE 60 minute […]
We won our Olympic bid. Here I look a gift horse in the mouth.
So Brisbane won the right to host the Olympics. Up you go Brisbane. Well done.
But, we do know that hosting an Olympic games costs a lot of money these days. Is it really worth it?
Now, I don’t want to be too much of a wet blanket, but I will make a couple of points:
1. The Olympics are expensive…er
It costs a lot of money to put on an Olympics. Tokyo is set to cost $28 bn! A bit of that is due to the Covid kerfuffle, but most of its not.
It just costs a lot of money
2. It always cost more than you think
When Tokyo won the rights to the Games back in 2013, they said it would cost them $7.3bn. It’s now $28bn.
We can call that a miss.
And not to say that politicians are always hopeless at estimating how much things cost, but a recent study by the University of Oxford’s Saïd Business School has found that every Olympics since 1960 has run over budget, and the average over run was a whopping 172 percent!
But I’m sure Brisbane will be different.
3. Only one Olympics has ever ‘turned a profit’
As business, Olympics aren’t great. They earn money through television rights, but these are typically a fraction of the costs.
The one Olympics that did make money was The Los Angeles Olympic Games in 1984 . And the only reason for that is because when the bidding opened to host the event, Los Angeles was the only city to express interest – the previous three Olympic games had been overshadowed by negative experiences – terrorism in Munich in 1972, colossal cost overruns in Montreal in 1976, and boycotts in Moscow in 1980.
LA said they’d do it, but only if they could use their existing infrastructure, and that kept their costs down.
Brisbane has said that 80% of the venues are already in place, so maybe that’s encouraging. A lot of cities have been saddled with white elephants.
Beijing’s “Bird’s Nest” stadium was built for $460 million and requires over $10 million every year to maintain and remains mostly unused. most of the facilities built for the 2004 Athens Olympics contributed immensely to the Greek debt crisis. It took Montreal until 2006 to pay the debt from the 1976 Games!
4. The other benefits are vague… and questionable
In the absence of profits, host cities talk about vague benefits like “being put on the map”, “becoming a modern city” etc. These things are nice, but how much are you willing to pay for them?
The QLD premier says the Olympics will generate $7.4bn and create 120,000 jobs, but those numbers are pretty rubbery.
Academics from Victoria University’s Centre of Policy Studies undertook an economic assessment of the 2000 Sydney Olympic Games and found that not only did the Games reduce Australian household consumption by A$2.1 billion, they also failed to increase employment or meaningfully boost tourism.
The benefits can also be patchy, creating winners and losers. Dr Joan Carlini, a lecturer in the Department of Marketing at Griffith Business School, analysed the impact of the Gold Coast Commonwealth Games. She says:
“Sports fans don’t act like leisure tourists. They are not buying coffees in shopping precincts. What we also found in our study of the Commonwealth Games is that a lot of locals left town during the event. Businesses got a double whammy in that they didn’t get the normal local trade and they didn’t get the tourism trade.
“There were lots of businesses in the Gold Coast that had to close [during the Commonwealth Games] because they didn’t have access to their location. You don’t hear those stories. The Gold Coast has a lot of small-to-medium enterprises, rather than large corporates like the big cities. In many cases, these were family businesses that have been affected severely.”
5. It is a good excuse to do infrastructure
A lot of the benefits of hosting the Olympics comes with the modernisation of infrastructure that’s required.
Now it’s true that you don’t actually need to have an Olympics to modernise your infrastructure. You could just do it.
But tax-payers seem to be willing to fork out for it when they feel like they’re city is on show to the world.
Brendan Lyon, partner with Infrastructure & Projects Group at KPMG Australia, says
“A burning platform is a really good way to focus everyone on the outcome, and something like an Olympic Games is a much more positive burning platform than having a genuine crisis.”
Worth it?
So I dunno. What do you reckon? Do you think it will be worth it?
At least we know it will probably be a lot of fun.
DB.
Are the current round of lockdowns going to undo the Aussie economy?
So with over half the population of Australia under some sort of lockdown, has our luck finally run out?
Is this the end of our dream run.
I don’t think so… yet. But the clouds are definitely looming.
Westpac’s greybeard Bill Evans reckons that the current lockdown will cost a thumping $8 billion and should see us post a fall in GDP of around 0.7%.
And that’s if things don’t drag on for too long – and this delta variant is proving to be a bit of a tricksy beast.
Evans reckons we should come bouncing back in the December quarter, but if lockdown drags on for longer than we expected, then we could easily get a negative print and find ourselves back in recession for an ‘double-dip.’
Obviously, that’s not great news.
But let’s remember why recessions suck. It’s not that we have less stuff – though that’s technically what it means.
They suck because we when produce less stuff we need less people to do the work, and unemployment rises.
It’s unemployment that we’re really worried about.
And we’re worried about it first and foremost because being unemployed is not fun. It can be brutal. It can create scars in a life that can take years to heal.
That’s no good.
But it’s also unemployment that creates some nasty flow on effects. When people lose their jobs they start cutting back on spending. That flows on to the broader economy.
If enough people become unemployed then you can also see that start to drag on asset prices – maybe even (God forbid) house prices.
So it’s worth remember where things currently stand when it comes to unemployment.
And the truth is, we’ve currently got one of the best and tightest labour markets in years.
The lockdowns will knock some of the wind out of that, but our starting position is strong. Really strong.
The labour data for June came out last week, and though this doesn’t capture the recent lockdown in Sydney, it showed the unemployment rate was now down to 4.9% – the lowest level in a decade.
It also showed us when Victoria went into lockdown, the first impact was on the amount of hours worked, with people largely hanging onto their jobs, but working fewer hours.
That keeps the unemployment rate down.
Looking forward, we also know that employers remain hungry for workers. On the jobs website Indeed, job listings are up over 50% since Covid started.
As a result, the ratio of unemployed people to the number of job vacancies is at the lowest level on record (going back to 1996).
So long story short, the current round of lockdowns are mashing into an economy that is actually running pretty hot.
And so yes, it’s going to have an impact. The longer it drags on, the worse that impact is going to be.
But I don’t see it undoing all the good work that’s happened in the Aussie economy over the past twelve months.
The economy should weather this one pretty easily.
DB.
Misleading real estate myths are nothing new, but like a bad game of telephone, an innocent line can turn ugly very quickly… Especially when it’s affecting the bottom line of Aussie property investors. So! I scrubbed the grime off these rumours, and decided to dedicate this weeks Intelligent Property Investor to nothing but the cold […]
Truth Bomb Tuesday: Anyone can be broke. Ask me how.
Henry is broke. Poor Henry.
But Henry shouldn’t be broke. He’s earning six-figures. But that’s the thing. Anyone can be broke.
It’s surprisingly easy.
I’m not talking about one person here – I’m talking about high income millennials. The so-called Henrys – High Earners, Not Rich Yet’s.
A recent survey in the US found that 60% of them were living pay-cheque to pay-cheque.
From the AFR:
High-earning Millennials are feeling broke.
Sixty per cent of Millennials raking in more than $US100,000 (AUD$134,300) a year say they’re living pay cheque to pay cheque, according to a new survey by PYMNTS and lending company LendingClub which analysed economic data and census-balanced surveys of over 28,000 Americans.
That is partly due to lifestyle choices. Many of these Millennials are likely HENRYs – short for high earner, not rich yet. The acronym was invented back in 2003, but has come to characterise a certain group of 30-something six-figure earners who struggle to balance their spending and savings habits.
HENRYs typically fall victim to lifestyle creep, when they increase their standard of living to match a rise in discretionary income. They prefer a comfortable and often expensive lifestyle that leaves them living pay cheque to pay cheque.
Ok, let’s not gloat too much or roll out that ‘entitled millennial’ troupe.
Yes, it’s about lifestyle and expenses. But life is also much more expensive than it used to be. The average Henry leaves university with a debt of US$80,000! That’s a heckuva hole to be starting in.
And then houses are more expensive than they used to be, etc. etc.
But there’s a really important point here – and that’s about lifestyle drift.
When you’re earning good money, you’re probably working hard for it. And that means you want to feel rewarded for the work you do.
And you’re probably moving in circles that spend freely. Expensive dinners out, that sort of thing. And they probably live in in expensive suburbs.
You either open up the wallet and fork it out, or you feel like you’re being left behind.
I mean, I once had a student who as a high-end engineer on the mines. He was earning like $300K a year.
But when he came to me he was still renting. When I asked him why he said that he hadn’t been able to save enough to build a deposit!
There are two sides to the wealth equation. There is your earn and your burn. If you’re not earning more than your burning, then you’re just not saving money and you’re just not moving forward.
But this requires sacrifice – and it doesn’t matter what level of income you’re starting from – it requires sacrifice.
It requires a disciplined commitment to keep your burn on a leash.
If you don’t watch it, it will quickly drift out of control.
This is something we all have to watch.
Even multi-millionaires like me.
Humans are just funny like that.
DB.
Negative rates could be a thing
I’ve heard a few people say that the only way for interest rates from here is up.
Let’s make something clear: It’s not.
Rates could still go lower. Rates could go negative.
I know that sounds radical, and it is. But we’re all set to go.
It was actually revealed last week that APRA asked the banks to make sure they were ready to handle a negative rates universe.
From The Australian Financial Review
The prudential regulator wants banks to be prepared for zero and negative interest rates, and has called on them to take all “reasonable steps” to ensure their technology systems can deal with extreme monetary policy settings.
… APRA said at the very minimum, banks should “develop tactical solutions” – short-term fixes to create workarounds on existing systems – to implement zero and negative market interest rates and cash rate by April 30, 2022. It wants this done for all products referencing the cash rate or a market interest rate. This includes business lending, residential mortgages, personal loans and credit cards.
Let me talk you through how negative mortgage rates might become a reality…
The key to understanding this is understanding what banks actually do.
The high-school version is they get money from depositors (who they pay interest to), and they then lend it out to borrowers.
This isn’t wrong, but it’s only part of the picture.
Mostly, the banks borrow money from domestic and international capital markets. They borrow money like you and I borrow money, and they have to pay interest just like we pay interest.
They then lend that money on to borrowers.
The difference they get between what you pay them, and what they pay the markets, is what they make as profit.
In that sense you can think about banks as merchants of money. They “buy” money at a particular price, and then “sell” money on at a premium, keeping the margin as profit.
Ok. That all make sense?
Now, what’s changed is that banks are able to get money at a much cheaper price these days.
Much, MUCH cheaper.
And that’s because the RBA has dropped the official cash rate (the baseline for all rates in the market) to just 0.1%.
But the RBA is just making it up.
So what if the RBA decides that rather than 0.1%, they say the TFF rate is going to be -0.5%, or -1.5%?
That is, what if they say to the banks, we’ll pay you to take this money off us, so long as you lend it on to borrowers?
The banks would then have the ability to pay you to take the money off them (i.e a negative mortgage rate), and as long as the RBA is paying them more than the banks are paying you, they’re making a profit.
And that’s how negative mortgage rates might happen. The infrastructure is already in place and it’s already functioning.
And the reality is we’re already seeing the first wave of nations cross the river over to negative rates.
The European Central Bank started with 0.1% funding for banks in 2014. By 2016 the rate was -0.4%. And now it’s -1.0%.
So look, I’m not saying that we’ll definitely see negative mortgage rates any time soon.
But it is not true to say that the only way for rates is up.
That’s just not true.
DB.
I never thought this day would come. But Australia is now the wealthiest nation on the planet. Or should I say, Australians are now the wealthiest people on the planet. While you might not see us topping the GDP charts, in 2020 we rocketed ahead of the median wealth per adult. What does that mean? […]
Five tips for making your offer count.
So you’re ready to go. You’ve found a property and you have made contact with the agent. Now is the time to put in an offer.
This can be a scary experience if you’ve never done it before.
So before you go in, let me walk through some do’s and don’ts to help you get over the line and get your offer accepted.
Firstly,
(And I can’t stress this enough.)
Do your research!
You need to know what a reasonable price for the property is compared to the rest of the market. No one will take you seriously if you go in too low, even though this is a common tactic. We’re not bargaining for silk skirts in the markets of India here, people!
If you go in too low you run the risk of putting the vendors off-side. They may not even want to go further into negotiations with you.
So know the local area market and offer a reasonable price as a starting point. Below what you hope to pay, of course, but still in the ball park. Show the vendors that you know your stuff.
Secondly,
Be ready to negotiate.
You may have done all your research and offer a price that you think is totally fair, and you don’t want to move much from your offer. But the vendors will want more than you offer, so you might have to offer them something.
Keep your heart out of the negotiating room! You may love this property but never tell the vendor that. They will use this against you, and they may end up squeezing you for way too much.
And never tell the agent how much you’ve actually got to spend, because that’s exactly what you’ll end up paying.
Third,
Be prepared to walk away.
If the vendor wants more than you know the property is worth, be prepared to let it go. There’s always another one around the corner.
If negotiating isn’t your thing and makes you nervous, you may want to consider getting an agent to help you. Chances are you’ll be dealing with the vendors agent, so it could potentially even the playing field.
Fourth,
Ask questions.
Part of negotiating is to have a strategy. Part of that strategy is understanding why the vendor is selling. What’s their motivation? This is the first thing you ask when buying a car, right? So why not when you’re buying a house?
Talk with their agent. Knowing things such as time frames for settlement and if the vendors have already bought elsewhere will help you to work out your offer.
They may be highly motivated to get a sale, and willing to take an unconditional offer that is a bit lower, just to get the job done.
And having said that ask yourself
What conditions do I really need on my offer?
The most successful offers are streamlined, or “clean’ offers.
These are offers that don’t have too many conditions attached, or are conditions that work in favour for the vendor.
You may consider removing some of the normal conditions to make things easier for the vendor (and get you the sale, of course!)
Conditions such as the cooling off period.
If your finance is sound, you’ve got your pre-approval sorted out and you’re ready to move on the sale, your offer may be accepted over someone else’s of the same amount just because you’ve shown that you’re serious.
No cooling off period required.
So things to remember. Do your homework and start with a reasonable offer. Leave your heart at the door. Ask questions and prepare a strategy.
These things will all help you to get over the line.
And if you think the vendor is being unfair, because you know the market, be prepared to go somewhere else.
After all, you’re investing in property for the long term, right? So getting it right now will help you become an expert in the future,
… if you’re not one already.
DB.
Sellers are freezing up. The boom loop is in effect.
So the boom keeps on booming. And we’re now in a feedback loop that will keep prices growing quickly through to the end of the year.
I call it the ‘boom loop’.
So we’ve got the latest results from Corelogic. Monthly price growth is down a bit from the spectacular numbers we saw in March, but still growing very, very quickly month on month.
Nationally, prices were up 1.9% in the month, with Sydney continuing to lead the charge.
The regions continue to grow strongly as well, given us a very decent clip from coast to coast.
There is something a little weird with Perth’s numbers. I’m not sure I trust them. Mortgage growth, rental growth and the vacancy data all tell us that Perth should be outperforming the other capitals, not underperforming them
So I’m not so sure what’s going on there. I’ll have to look into it.
But if you look at the annual growth rates, we’re well into double digit growth now.
And most of that has come in the past six months. Dr Andrew Wilson highlighted the strength in 2021 in this table here:
Take a look at Sydney! 17.8%! That’s mammoth.
If it keeps that pace up we’re looking at 36% year on year.
And as I said at the start, it is likely to continue.
And that’s because there’s a real absence of stock on the market right now. There are very few homes for sale.
The number of new listings coming on to the market (left hand side panel of the chart below) are about normal, but we’re churning through the stock so quickly that the total number of listings (right hand panel) is way down on ‘normal’ levels.
That creates a bit of a feedback loop.
With prices rising so quickly and very limited stock available, that really discourages would-be sellers.
Potential sellers are worried that if they sell, they won’t be able to find another place to move into, or that prices will run away from them and they won’t be able to find what they want.
When prices are growing quickly, sellers freeze up, and you get even less stock coming on to the market.
Which in turn pushes up prices even higher.
That’s the feedback loop I’m talking about.
And it’s why prices will continue to grow strongly for the next six months as well.
2021 is shaping up to be one of the most epic years in the property history.
What a time to be alive.
DB.
Global debt reached $281 Trillion last year. It’s a big, scary number (Especially when it’s attached to the word ‘debt”) But other than being a big scary number, most people never give it much thought. You’re more likely to hear that “Who is the world in debt to? Jupiter?” joke than you are to hear […]
Truth Bomb Tuesday: This is a hack for knowing what you should set your sights on.
Gun for your most satisfying desire.
This is my advice to you. This is my advice for people trying to figure out what they want.
It’s actually one of the hardest things to figure out in this journey: what do I really want?
It sounds like it should be an easy question.
But so many of us having been living small – so many of us haven’t given ourselves permission to be happy for so long – that it can be a very difficult thing to figure out.
To know what YOU really want, you have to know what YOU are really about.
If you’re not connected with yourself and at peace with yourself, this can be hard to know.
And often when people start to think about what they want, they get a lot of what I call ‘decoy’ desires – these are desires that seem authentic enough, but when you scratch the surface, they’re not really yours. They don’t really belong to you.
I’m thinking about the person who says they want to be a doctor, when the only reason they want to be a doctor is impress and satisfy their parents.
Or I’m thinking about the person who says they want to go on a kite-surfing holiday, when they’re only saying that because it sounds glamourous and adventurous, when the truth is that they burn easily and would much rather be curled up in the mountains with a decent red and a good book.
Or I’m thinking about the woman who says she wants a Tesla, when she really gets much more enjoyment out of a powerful SUV. (That was me!)
So we’ve got to get past these decoy desires to discover and name what it is we truly want.
The next trap we face then is the allure of short term thrills.
Imagine a genie pops out of a bottle and offers to grant you a wish. What happens if you go for a piece of the most epic chocolate cake ever made? What if you go for a night out with Brad Pitt? What if you go for front row seats at the State of Origin.
All great wishes. All authentic wishes. But you wake up the next day and then where are you (assuming you’re not in the arms of Brad Pitt)?
No, what I think we have to go for is the most satisfying desire we can find.
This probably takes a bit of trial and error. A bit of data sampling. We need to experiment and see how different things land.
But everyone has something, that when they land it, they get a deep feeling of satisfaction, that burns like a lovely warm fire in their belly.
This is the feeling to go for. Because this endures. This gives our life a richness – the sense that this is a life well-lived.
It hits us deep and shapes who we are and how we experience ourselves.
Now I can’t tell you what that is.
For me, it’s getting up in front of a bunch of people and sharing knowledge that I know is going to change people’s lives.
I can’t tell you why, but this just gets me. It leaves me deeply satisfied and contented. The glow lasts for days.
But it could be anything. Surfing, painting, caring for your children, whatever.
Only you can know.
But if you want to be happy – if you want to live a good life – then you have to gun for the most satisfying desire you can.
Once you land this – once you figure out what it is – then the rest is easy.
It’s just logistics really.
DB.
More proof that the Aussie property market is running hot like hell right now. (Like we needed more…) But it’s not only the property world, unemployment is is hitting record lows, Aussie businesses are on the rise, and foreign powers are starting to take notice… In this weeks episode I explain all the why, wheres, […]
Truth Bomb Tuesday: Most of your suffering is served up to feed your ego.
I dropped a line last week that got a bit of response and thought I should probably unpack it a little more.
Suffering feeds the ego.
Now, this absolutely doesn’t mean ‘sadness feeds your vanity’. That’s not what those terms mean.
“Ego” is what it originally meant. It’s the problem solving mind – the part of the mind that has created an image of us, and then uses that image to navigate the world, developing and executing strategies.
Now our first instinct when we are suffering (which means everything from being a bit hungry, to losing a limb, to existential dread) is to fire up the problem solving mind and to start developing strategies.
I feel anxiety about my financial future. I need to think up a way out.
That person annoys me. I need to find a strategy to get them out of my life.
I feel insecure and suffer for a lack of self-confidence. I need to figure out how to get some new clothes.
This is pure instinct. It’s just what we do. Humans are problem solvers.
However, we are more than just problem solvers.
And often times the peace and relaxation we crave comes once we drop and deactivate our problem solving mind – a mind that by-definition lives in the strategized future, or the instructive past.
Mediation, and coming into ‘the moment’, I reckon, is just about switching off the problem solving mind.
But, the problem-solving mind has quite a high opinion of itself. And it doesn’t really like being ‘switched off’. That’s why meditation is so hard.
And if it’s starved of energy, it gets hungry. If it gets hungry it goes hunting.
And what does it eat?
Suffering.
A problem-solver can’t exist without a problem. A healer can’t exist without an ailment.
The ego needs problems to ‘fix’.
And this is where the whole complex gets a bit glitchy.
If there are no problems then the ego – the problem solving mind – will make one.
It will start to focus attention on something we might perceive of as a problem. It might take a minor annoyance and blow it up a bit out of proportion. Or it might invent something entirely out of thin air.
It’s needs a problem to justify its existence.
And this is why it can feel like you can be making awesome progress in your life – you’re getting financially sorted, you’re setting yourself up, you’re working on your relationships – and yet for all that, you’re not feeling your anxiety and stress levels decrease.
You can see that you’re making progress, but every problem gives way to a new one, and it just doesn’t feel like you’re getting anywhere.
And this is because for every problem you solve, the hungry ego will go out and find something to takes its place.
This doesn’t stop until we make it stop.
Until we notice this and start to deenergise the whole complex, our ego will keep us running like a hamster in a wheel.
Freedom only comes when we come back into that place where there are no problems.
That’s not a place ‘out there’.
That’s a place ‘in here’.
And it’s only accessible through conscious will.
So don’t try and solve the world.
The real work is within you.
DB.
As the market takes off, more buyers are turning to the bank of mum and dad. What are the risks?
With the market running at full tilt, and first home buyers still leading the charge, more and more people have been asking me about guarantor loans.
I think most people have got the general gist, but let me step out the basics, and explain when I think they’re a good idea, and when they’re not.
Who Can Go Guarantor?
Now we typically think of guarantor loans being another act of tireless sacrifice of parents for their children. And this is typically what the bulk of guarantor loans are going to be.
However, it doesn’t need to be your folks. In the eyes of a bank, a guarantor has to be someone with a ‘strong relationship’ with the buyer, and the guarantor must be receiving some kind of financial benefit.
So we’re typically talking family. Not just parents, but also grandparents or siblings or de facto partners.
And the financial benefit is that they don’t have to sell their house or dispose of other assets to be able to help out the buyer.
So you know, you can’t just ask your mate to go guarantor on your loan. It’s not going to fly.
Guarantor loans can also be relevant for trusts, but let’s not open up that can of worms just yet.
How do Guarantor Loans work?
So there are actually two types of guarantee a guarantor can offer. The first is around serviceability. The second is around the deposit – the security.
Most often we’re talking about a security guarantee, where the guarantor is offering up assets or equity in their own home.
Remember, banks want you to have some skin in the game. That’s what the deposit is for. The deposit provides a buffer between what the bank will receive if you
default and they have to sell your house, and how much money they actually lent to you.
The deposit means that it’s almost impossible for the bank to lose money.
The guarantor’s equity is doing the same thing. It’s the skin that you and your family are putting in the game. It’s what protects the lender if worse comes to worst and you have to default.
And that’s why the guarantee is useful. It potentially allows you to need less of a cash deposit ready to go, and potentially get your LVR down so you can avoid Lenders’ Mortgage Insurance.
What are the risks?
While it should be unlikely if you’re not stretching yourself too much, if your parents are using equity in the house, then their house is, theoretically, at risk.
So if you default, the lender has the ability to hit your parents up for any shortfall, potentially forcing them to sell the asset they put up as security.
However, the bank is really just interested in the money, and if the capital can come from other sources, they’re not going to force your parents to sell just for the sake of it.
The thing to note is they are not exposed to the full price of the house – just the shortfall between the value and the loan.
So if you’ve got a 10% deposit, your parents offer another 10% through equity in their home to get you up to a 20% deposit (and therefore avoid LMI), then your parents are only on the hook for 10% of the purchase price, at most!
The other thing to remember is that if your parents are guarantor on a loan, this liability will be factored into their serviceability calculations if they want to go for a loan themselves in the future.
Right for you?
I think guarantor loans can be useful for getting your kids set up with their first home. The first home really is the first step on the road to wealth, and I think it generally is a case of the sooner the better.
That said, I generally encourage people to think about their first home through the lens of a deal-maker mindset. I’ve talked about this before, but there are just so many options when it comes to property, and just buying a vanilla property with a vanilla mortgage is just one of them.
I’d encourage both kids and parents to explore some of the options, and see if there are creative ways to engineer a deal that gets the kids in a home and protects the parent’s equity.
I’ve seen it happen, time and time again.
A guarantor loan might still be the best way forward, but you’ve got to explore the options for a deal first.
DB.
The OECD has shown us a link between democracy and house prices.
One of the key questions I hear a lot is why are Aussie house prices so high?
And look, they are. They’re high relatively to where they’ve been in recent years. They’re high relative to incomes and rents and pretty much all the things that matter.
New data in the Australian Financial Review this week shows that over the past 20 years, we’ve had the fourth fastest house price growth in the OECD, behind only Sweden, Canada and New Zealand.
We also have the second highest mortgage debt in the world:
Now people who are new to the game look at this and think, we’ll prices are high, so they’ll have to come down at some point. They might even say it’s a bubble.
But we’ve been hearing about a bubble for at least twenty years now, and I still haven’t seen anyone make a good case for it.
So the question remains, why are house prices so high, and why are they going to go higher yet?
The OECD reckon they have an answer for us. They’re a little late to the party, but they think they have it figured out.
We’re just not building enough houses.
Thanks, rocket scientists:
Planning and zoning restrictions are a key problem behind Australia recording the fourth-fastest house price growth out of the world’s advanced economies over the past 20 years, according to a new report by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.
Local households are the second-most indebted in the world and it takes six years longer to afford a home in Australia: 16.4 years of disposable income for a 100-square-metre dwelling versus 10.4 years for the OECD average.
… Paris-based OECD director of policy studies in the economics department, Luiz de Mello, said low interest rates had contributed to rising house prices.
But restrictive regulations were also a leading reason why the supply of new housing had failed to keep pace with demand from high population growth and strong immigration levels before the pandemic, he said.
“Australia has high housing costs relative to incomes and house prices have increased very quickly over the last 20 years,” Mr de Mello said.
“Supply has been rigid because of regulatory measures such as restrictive land use regulations and restrictive zoning in many cities.
“Greater flexibility in land use regulations and zoning such as height caps in cities, and the speed of administrative processes for construction, would make supply more responsive to the increase in demand.”
Ah, that old chestnut. Zoning and planning, land release and density.
And look it’s true. Everyone knows it’s true. We haven’t built enough houses to keep pace with population growth.
We know it’s true and yet we just can’t fix it.
Why? Because it would involve coordinating across Federal, State and Local Government jurisdictions. It would mean getting the greenies and the NIMBYs on side, as well as the land bankers and developers.
It’s a political nightmare.
And look, a lot of that ‘red tape’ makes good sense. I’m personally a fan of preserving some historic areas in our cities. I don’t want to see them all replaced with 50-storey apartment complexes.
I at least want to have a discussion about it.
It’s just the nature of democracy. It’s slow. They don’t have this problem in China. If the government wants to build a high-rise tower, they just make it happen.
So is it any surprise really that the four most expensive property market on the planet are also four of the freest – that they’re often held up as examples of stable and highly effective democracies?
But democracy always comes with a price.
And in Australia’s case, it’s house price growth that continues to lead the world.
And I just don’t see that changing any time soon.
DB.
On this weeks journey to make YOU smarter, we’re covering more news and financial events from Australia and overseas.From China’s NEW 3 child policy to Australia’s GDP, and why you might be unknowingly sitting on a chest full of cash….Here’s a quick rundown of what’s in this weeks video. What the latest ‘Global Uncertainty Index’ […]
The covid recovery period is finally in full swing. With global powers like America finally pulling free from the lengthy pandemics cold grasp… And now that Australia has been on the mend for quite some time, I started asking myself… Is the economy cured as well? So I decided to answer that question on this […]
This trend is consistently behind the biggest gains in property value we’ve seen.
In these ‘New Normal’ times, location is more important than ever. And if you want to grow wealth, particularly over long time horizons, there’s one idea you really need to get your head around: gentrification.
Gentrification is a phenomenon that has raised the values of suburban property prices around the world, and it’s something that we can overlay over the normal ups and downs of the cycle.
It happens when the demographics of a suburb change, sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly, for the better. The place goes from ‘the wrong side of the tracks’ to ‘the hottest place in town’.
Think about what’s happened to the inner-cities of Australian capitals. Places like Newtown in Sydney or Fitzroy in Melbourne – these places used to be slums. No, literally. In the 1800s they were actual slums.
But people’s tastes change.
And this process of gentrification – of an area become more gentrified and more attractive to a wealthier cohort of people – this can drive a lot of capital gain in house prices.
If you can get on the right side of gentrification, you can get in while property prices are still cheap, and capitalise as market prices lift.
The thing to note is that gentrification can happen anywhere.
You can see it playing out. Often it begins with younger creative folks just looking for somewhere cheap to set up their arts studio / coffee roasters / skateboard factory.
That begins to change the tone of a suburb.
Seeing the opportunity, a few professionals move in. They start to spend their money, kick off new businesses. Things start to happen. Interesting things.
An arts festival might find a new home. A funky new gallery, with great coffee might open up. Someone starts a microbrewery out of the old electricity sub-station.
A 24 hour laundromat. (Yep, that’s a thing now!) Awesome dumplings at 9pm.
A rocking little wine bar, or a provedore’s pantry. You tried sourdough, but it was so high maintenance! Now you can buy it down the street, with excellent free range salami.
And the skate park at the corner is epic. There’s even a bike path all the way to the beach!
Location has always been the most important factor driving prices, but now in our post-Covid, work-from-home world, location is tied to lifestyle.
Gentrification is a good way to know a suburb is on the up and up. In fact some suburbs have experienced capital gains rates of 50-100% just in the past few years, due to this happening.
These are the stages that you can watch for in the progression of suburb gentrification.
Firstly, people get together and talk. There’s lots of “Wouldn’t it be great if we had…?” and “have you been to that great little place?” Ideas and visions and shared.
You might get in touch with council or meet with some other business people to see what’s going on.
Next, planning needs to happen to get some of those bigger ideas to the table. Developers show up at this stage and you might notice more building going on.
There might be more animated chatter in the streets about things that are moving.
You might notice more community based activities.
Council might put out for public consultation on some of their plans.
Bigger developments might be in the offing. New schools, hospitals or shopping centres will mean more jobs and more services. And an improvement in lifestyle for all those young professionals.
This makes a suburb very attractive.
So if you notice that the population is getting younger, there are less elderly people, more infrastructure is being created, and that funky little Mexican place is just getting busier and busier, then you’re probably on the money.
Take not of how many premium vehicles you see driving around!
(Dead giveaway.)
So check out the demographics when looking into up and coming locations. Check for future developments. See how many cafes there are and how many milk alternatives they have.
It may be that the suburb next door is just kicking off and prices are still pretty low. Do some homework, become a local area expert, and get ahead of what’s coming.
If you’re too late to the party, you might miss out on doubling your investment… and some great Margaritas.
DB.
Truth Bomb Tuesday: There are two places negative self-talk comes from. One is bad. The other is a disaster.
Where does negative self-talk come from?
Your self-talk is important. These are the things you tell yourself about yourself. They give you an insight into your beliefs and attitudes about your most important asset:
Your self.
Some people come with great self talk. They’re encouraging and supportive. They reflect a belief in a person’s abilities and intrinsic self-worth.
These people are the lucky ones.
The rest of us – and probably the majority of us really – have to live with negative self-talk. We have to endure an inner monologue that puts us down – that always throws doubt on to our abilities and our fundamental loveabilityaness.
(Yes it’s a word. My inner monologue says so.)
And so it’s one of the things we have to work on. If you’re constantly telling yourself that you’re not good at something and that you’re going to fail, guess what! You’re probably going to fail.
So we’ve got to turn that around.
Now, in my experience, there are two types of negative self-talk.
The first genuinely reflects a negative perception of ourselves. For whatever reason, we’ve come to believe that we’re not good with money, or we’re not good with numbers, or we don’t deserve to be wealthy or whatever it is.
The antidote to that kind of self-talk is shifting the underlying beliefs. Maybe affirmations might do it. Change the talk, change the belief.
This is actually a reasonably straight forward fix.
But there’s a trickier self-talk that’s much harder to defuse.
This is self-talk that comes from laziness.
This is self-talk that is willing to throw the self under the bus, just to avoid doing something difficult.
It’s the person who has to do a study module on feasibility studies, who throws up their hands and says “Oh, I’ve never been good with numbers. I can’t do this.”
It’s the person who’s about to sign up for a financial training program, who declares, “I’m not good with money, I’ll always be poor.”
It’s the person faced with finding time in the week to study the course materials who just says, “I can’t do this. I’m dumb.”
The negative self-talk is a justification for the person’s laziness. Sorry to be blunt, but it’s their refusal to take responsibility for themselves.
Their negative self-talk is just an excuse.
Now, you can have results or you can have excuses, as I always say. So excuses are bad enough on their own.
But this is doubly bad because you’re reinforcing a negative perception of yourself. You’re talking down your skills and abilities.
And that has consequences.
The more you say it, the more you come to believe it’s true.
And once you believe it’s true, it comes true.
And what’s happened? You have actually made yourself “dumb” or “bad with money”, just to avoid doing some work!
What a disaster.
So watch out for this.
Negative self-talk is a weed that needs to be pulled out at every opportunity.
But watch where that self-talk is coming from.
And whatever you do, don’t let your laziness feed you negative lies.
DB.
There was a surprising driver behind last weeks strong GDP result…
Property to the rescue again!
So amongst all the hoo-ha last week about our strong GDP numbers – and look they were good. 1.8% in the March is a big number, especially when the markets were expecting 1.5%.
And the economy is now bigger than it was pre-Covid.
So look, great result. Go Aussie go.
And not to take anything away from that, but when you actually dig into the numbers, a big chunk of that growth – the bulk of it actually – comes from the property sector.
Specifically, stamp-duties and renovations.
Together, these two accounted for a full 0.9 percentage points of the 1.1% increase over the past year.
So you know, like almost all of it.
That’s what the AFR reckon:
Record stamp duty revenues and a surge in home renovations are driving Australia’s economic recovery to a greater extent than any other time in almost two decades, raising the risk that growth could slow as the property market eventually cools.
Growth in expenditure on “ownership transfer costs” and “alterations and additions”, which covers spending on real estate stamp duty and home renovations, accounted for 0.9 percentage points of the 1.1 per cent increase in gross domestic product (GDP) over the past year, according to an analysis by The Australian Financial Review of the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ March quarter national accounts data.
“It is a hefty contribution that you are getting to GDP growth from what is typically two fairly small components of GDP,” said HSBC chief economist Paul Bloxham.
The last time that stamp duty and home renovations, which comprise just 4 per cent of GDP, drove economic growth to a similar extent was in June 2002, as the 2000-2004 property price boom gained steam.
Mr Bloxham described the surge in stamp duty payments and home renovations as “unsurprising” given the nature of the policy response to COVID-19, including the adoption of record low interest rates and the government’s $25,000 HomeBuilder grant.
So go property go. Punching above your weight again. It’s a reminder of just how important the property sector is to the Australian economy.
But it is also true that government policy – particularly the HomeBuilder program has driven a good chunk of this.
HomeBuilder could be used for “substantial renovations” and 121,000 people have taken up the scheme.
Showroom managers are saying that business is through the roof:
The showroom manager at Sydney-based Abode Renovations, Cherie Stelzer, said the business was booked “way more in advance” than at any other time.
“Normally, we used to be booked three to four weeks in advance. Now it is about six or eight weeks in advance,” she said.
Customers frequently cited the additional savings resulting from the international travel ban as their reason for undertaking a renovation, according to Ms Stelzer.
“Until anybody can travel and spend their money otherwise, I think they are really happy to update their homes,” she said.
My contacts in the industry are saying a similar thing.
And I’m not sure it’s going to let up. We know from the last national accounts that households are sitting on a massive war-chest of cash. Household savings are now tipping $200 billion!
I reckon a decent chunk of that will make its way into property one way or the other – either as funding for a renovation, or as a deposit on a new home or investment property.
So thanks again to property, carrying the Australian economy again.
DB.
Victoria’s lockdown adds insult and injury to insult and injury.
Poor Victoria.
I am so so so sorry for you!
Victoria had its lockdown extended for another seven days, and Victoria really has to be wondering when this nightmare will end.
What’s worse, it comes hot on the heels of a terrible budget – a budget that’s really going to hurt the economy and the property sector specifically.
So I want to talk about that budget here, and send all my sympathy to Victorians who are really having a rough trot at the moment.
So a lot of people are calling it a ‘disaster budget’. And look, to be brutally honest, I think I agree.
I’ll explain why I think it’s such a dud for the economy and for property in a sec, but just to show I’m not being biased or ‘political’, I’ll give the Andrews government some credit where credit’s due.
They did bring in some good policies to support the high-rise construction sector. After immigration and student demand got hammered, we ended up with a large stock of unsold apartments – some people in the industry think there might be as many as 10,000!
So the government has stepped in to some degree, by:
-
waving stamp duty on newly completed homes that have been unsold for a year or more;
-
extending stamp duty concessions to new off-the-plan purchases worth up to $1 million from 1 July; and
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extending the 50% stamp duty discount on new homes in the Melbourne local government area that do not qualify for the full waiver.
They also announced they would mop up some of the excess and turn it into social housing.
So I think this a pretty sensible and a good thing to do.
But still, it doesn’t change the fact that the rest of the budget was a bit of a shocker, with a bunch of new taxes on property particularly concerning. These taxes included:
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A 19% increase on land tax for properties worth between 1.8 and 3 million dollars. Victoria already has the highest land tax and stamp duty in the country.
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A 13% increase on land tax for properties worth over 3 million,
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An 18.2 % increase on stamp duty for properties worth up to 2 million,
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There’s also a new thing called a ‘Windfall Gain Tax’. The extra money that would have been made from rezoning will now be taxed at 50%. This will cut development from areas that desperately need new housing and could add up to $25,000 to the price of a new housing lot.
It looks to me like the Victorian Government is behaving like a hungry shark!
These tax increases will hurt self-funded retirees and deeply impact housing affordability, especially in areas that need it most.
Mum and Dad investors are going to be hard hit. And while they won’t sell up and move out, because the capital gains tax is also baying at their heels, it means that any new investors coming from out of state are likely to be put off.
These taxes will result in higher rents and better returns for those that stay in the market, but the costs will be borne by those entering and holding the market.
And those hoping to keep their jobs.
Surely the Victorian Government wants to keep people in employment. This will do the reverse.
More people work in the property industry in Australia than in mining and manufacturing combined, and property employs 25% of Victorians.
The property industry relies on the development and construction of new housing to maintain this level of employment.
Without new developments, there aren’t any jobs for that 25% of Victorians.
Way to go Vic State Government!
This could potentially derail the Federal Governments’ efforts to reduce the current unemployment rate to something in the 4s.
As a result we may see businesses packing up and leaving Victoria for other states.
Potentially for good.
I guess the extra $380 million per year in the governments’ coffers will be worth it. Maybe they can spend that on affordable housing. Or welfare for the newly unemployed when all the major corporate businesses leave the state.
But I don’t see it playing well.
So I dunno. What do you reckon? Is this a good move by the Victorian State Government or not?
Could you see yourself buying into Victoria now that you know about all these tax increases?
Or would you, like a lot of people I know, just decide to invest elsewhere?
DB.
While everyone is clamoring over property in 2021 (rightfully so), I’m taking a look forward to what it might look like in 2022.Along side this far off look into the future is this weeks news financial and updates from here and overseas.If you want to see the accompaning video and presentation slides for this week, […]
Truth Bomb Tuesday: Despite all my rage I am still just a possum in a kitchen with the lights on.
People are afraid of who they really are.
This is something I see all the time. People get so locked up and defensive trying to be this and that.
They invent an image of themselves that they want to (or more likely, feel that they should) present to the world, and then trim themselves to fit.
And they don’t want to dig beneath the surface because they’re afraid of what they might find there.
They’re afraid of that animal lurking in the shadows of their psyche. They’re afraid of what might happen if they let it out.
Where would all that emotion and anger and rage and shame and lust all go?
No no no. Nothing good can come of that. Lock it away. Lock it away.
The way I see it, we all need to get a bit more wild. We need to let our animal out more.
And I’m comfortable saying that because we have gone so far in the other direction, that we can ease it off a bit and still have a decade’s worth of therapy left.
And there’s a really interesting question here. Why are we so afraid of getting wild? Why are we so afraid of our animal natures?
Why are we so scared of that? What do we think is going to happen?
If you say it to most people – something like, “he went wild” or “she really let her animal out,” what do we imagine that means?
For most people, they imagine something like a possum in a kitchen with the lights on.
Have you ever had this experience? Maybe it’s a Queenslander thing. It doesn’t happen so much now, but in one place I used to live in, possums would get in the house all the time (because my kids didn’t know how to operate a door!)
And you’d hear them shuffling about in the night, and then you go out and flick on the light and find a scared and blinded possum with a half eaten apple on the kitchen table. And then when you try to catch them, they run about all over the place and climb up on the curtains and cause all sorts of havoc.
They go ‘wild’.
And this is sort of what we think ‘wild’ means. Crazy and causing havoc.
But what we’re imagining there is an animal in a very specific situation. Most times when we engage with animals, we’re the big scary human with opposable thumbs and weapons, and they’re scared and close to panic.
And so when we imagine a ‘wild’ animal, we imagine something scared and panicked.
But this isn’t how most wild animals spend much of their time. Probably very little actually.
Most of their time is probably spent like cats – just chilling out and flopping around, waiting for the next feeding round.
A cat on a cushion – that’s what ‘wild’ is really like.
But when we imagine letting our own animal out – the part of ourselves that feels deep authentic emotion – that seems scary.
Why?
Because the emotions we are locking away are exactly the ones that can cause havoc – grief and rage and so on.
When we look to see what animal is lurking in our psyche we see a terrified possum, blind and under attack.
But that’s not our fate.
If we have the courage to do the work and begin to feel what we actually feel, then we can move past possum in a kitchen, to cat on a cushion.
And once we’re in cat-on-a-cushion mode, we’re able to access a much deeper, natural source of power.
So this is my thought for the day.
Don’t be afraid of your wild. Don’t be afraid of your animal.
Deep down, you’re much more relaxed and chill than you think you are.
DB.
One of the biggest issues modern property investors face is falling behind. Information travels a mile a minute in todays age, and I hear all too often of how a bright young investor takes their eyes off the game for one second… …And bam. That moment, that cycle, that opportunity, passes them by. Despite this […]
Truth Bomb Tuesday: Most people get this completely wrong. It’s easier than they think.
I’ve got one question that will define how wealthy you will be.
How much money did your parents have?
No. that’s not it. This is even bigger than that. It has more influence over your financial fortune than that.
The question is this:
Do you love yourself, or do you love your ego?
In my experience, everyone has a tap-out point. I do this exercise with my students where I get them to visualise working with larger and larger sums of money.
If I say I’m giving them a $1,000, pretty much everyone can imagine what they’re going to do with it.
But what about $10,000? Or $10 million? Or $10 Billion?
The numbers don’t really matter. The point is to demonstrate that everyone has a tap out point – where they just can’t ever imagine having or working with that kind of money.
And one of the key determinants of our tap out point is how much we love ourselves.
Your ability to love yourself – to feel you are worthy of the riches you have – will define the wealth you are capable of achieving in this life time.
Now, that may or may not have a woo-woo factor involved. It may be the case that the universe at some sort of quantum level is picking up on your ‘vibration’ and is arranging itself accordingly.
Maybe. It feels like it some days.
But we don’t have to go reaching into the occult to understand this one. It’s simply about what your subconscious is comfortable with.
If your subconscious firmly believes you don’t deserve more than $40,000 a year (provided you slave your guts out for it!) then that’s what you’ll get. Any other reality – even if you win the lottery or whatever – any other reality will be uncomfortable, and your subconscious will find a way to sabotage it.
I’ve seen it happen time and time again.
So all of this hinges on what we think we are worthy of. And that swings on how much we love ourselves.
Now, some people take this info and run off half-cocked. They think, well, I need to love myself, so I have to make myself loveable. I’ve got to do good deeds. I need to achieve certain things. I need to have an impact. I need people to like me.
If I make a success of myself, then I will make myself into someone worthy, and then I can have nice things.
There is some mileage to this, but it is a punishing road. You create a situation where you have to be constantly performing and achieving. It’s exhausting.
And what you’re doing, rather than loving yourself, you are loving your ego.
That is, you are loving the picture you have created of yourself. The ‘idea of you’ that lives in your mental rendering of the world.
This is the ego. This is an image. It is a false idol.
Loving the ego – an image of who you are – based on achieving this or that, is not what it means to love yourself.
To love yourself is to fully embrace who you fundamentally are, warts and all. It’s about loving your deepest truest being, no matter how that being moves or is received in the world.
This is where you real work is. This is where you have the most leverage.
This is where you have the most power to completely turn your life around.
It’s in loving yourself – deeply and fully.
So watch this. Your ego wants to be loved.
But it’s a false idol.
DB.
Australia property isn’t boom. Global property is booming.
I think because we’ve seen house prices in Australia boom so much in recent memory, we tend to think about the current boom as being ‘just something the Australian market does.’
It is true that there are some very Australian dimensions to the current boom. There are a number of factors that are unique to Australia.
Australia is still the lucky country. As the experience of our poor Indian cousins shows us, we have an awful lot to be thankful for here.
And that luck is reflected in our economy, which in turn is reflected in our house prices.
But while there are Australian dimensions to the current boom, this is very much a global phenomenon.
House prices are booming pretty much everywhere.
Like Korea. House prices are out of control in the nation’s capital, Seoul, according to the ABC:
If the rate of Australian home price rises is bringing a tear to your eye, you are unlikely to find much sympathy from South Koreans trying to buy in their country’s capital.
Seoul’s property market is on a tear. Apartment prices in the metropolis of nearly 10 million people rose by an extraordinary 22 per cent in 2020, outstripping all other cities in Asia.
… Seoul residents Park Jong-hui and Oh Hye-jin thought they had set a reasonable budget when they started looking for a place to live with their three-year-old son Park-jay.
Even as the global pandemic hurt the economy and imperilled jobs, demand was outstripping supply and they kept being outbid for every place they were interested in.
After months of disappointment, they have finally managed to secure a place.
But it is much further from Seoul’s centre than they would have liked. In the traffic-plagued city, it means a long commute.
“We have to move outside Seoul,” said Jong-hui.
“It will now take one hour and a half to go to work, which is disappointing.”
Yep. That sucks.
But we are all global citizens now, and we’re all in the same boat.
And the thing that’s driving the boom in Australia is the same thing driving the boom in South Korea: cheap money.
The official cash rate in Korea is 0.5%, which is a bit higher than our 0.1%, but it’s still pretty much nothing.
And like pretty much every developed country on the planet, Korea is printing money. Take a look at this chart of Central Banks’ balance sheets (a proxy for money printing) in the G10 nations:
You can see central banks have printed a staggering amount of money since Covid started.
That, in turn, is filtering into the economy, and piling up in citizens bank balances. This chart shows you how much savings rates have increased since Covid, with citizens everywhere pocketing huge amounts of money. (Check out Ireland!)
And so with super low interest rates, serviability has exploded. And with the run up in saving war-chests, deposit power has exploded as well.
Which is why, all over the world, house prices are going ‘through the roof’ as The Economist puts its:
Or another set of countries telling the same story (check out New Zealand):
So this boom has Australian flavours, but it is global in nature.
And it’s why its going to be with us for a long, long time.
DB.
Tuesday’s budget contained a few pieces of good news for property
I’m still getting across everything Tuesday’s budget means for property, but on the whole its looking pretty friendly.
The Coalition’s general approach to housing policy is to not do anything that might put property prices at risk (e.g scrapping negative gearing). Instead, the focus is on supporting certain segments and tilt the playing field a bit more in their favour.
In the early days, this was just flat-out cash for first home buyers through First Home Owner Grants (FHOGs). More recently, it’s become a bit more targeted, with the government back First Home Loan Deposit Scheme aimed specifically at the deposit hurdle.
(That said, the HomeBuilder grants are basically just FHOGs targeted at new builds.)
Anyway, Tuesday’s budget saw the Coalition continue this line of attack, with a number of targeted support measures:
Single-parent support
I’m a huge fan of this particular piece of policy. Known as the ‘Family Home Guarantee’, the government will guarantee 18% of a home loan for 10,000 eligible single parents, whether they are first home buyers or previous owner-occupiers.
Effectively, single parents will be able to buy property with a 2% deposit!
I think this is great policy because we know that housing insecurity leads to worse life-outcomes. A child constantly on the move will struggle to do well at school.
So helping single mothers and single father’s get a stable roof over their heads is great social policy.
HLDS Extended by 10,000 places
The government will extend the first home loan deposit scheme (for new homes) by 10,000 places.
The first round of the First Home Loan Deposit Scheme (FHLDS), was introduced at the start of 2020, and was very quickly taken up. It’s 10,000 places were pretty much fully subscribed in a less than two months.
After Covid hit, the government added another 10,000 places.
Now, the scheme is being extended, but rebranded as the “New Home Guarantee” and will now be limited to new builds.
This also makes sense. Increasing demand without increasing supply pushes up prices, and that was one of the major criticisms of the original FHOGs.
So making sure this measure supports new construction is good policy.
The only thing I worry about here is that the construction industry is stretched thin right now. With the HomeBuilder program, there was a massive ramp up in new construction projects.
Adding fuel to this fire may just push up construction costs, which will feed through into higher housing costs.
More Super Access
The First Home Super Saver Scheme was announced in the 2017-18 Budget. FHBs could make voluntary contributions of up to $30,000 from their super to use as a deposit.
The latest budget increases the cap to $50,000.
That’s pretty reasonable.
Downsizer Contribution Extended
The downsizer contribution was also first announced in the 2017-18 Budget. The measure allows older Australians to make a tax-free contribution to their super of up to $300,000 (each) from the proceeds of selling their home, without being counted toward the contribution cap.
From July 2022, Australians 60 and older (as opposed to 65 and older) will be able to access the scheme.
On paper this is a good idea. We want a bit of flexibility in the housing market. We want to make sure that people aren’t financially penalised for moving into more appropriate housing.
That said, people often underestimate how big it is to up and move house, and since it came in three years ago, only 22,000 people have made use of it.
So it’s a good idea, but might not have all that much of an impact.
Infrastructure spend
The other thing worth noting is that there’s a lot of big-ticket infrastructure spending in this budget.
Infrastructure changes the nature of land (makes it more useful, generally), and that changes its value (normally for the better).
So a big infrastructure budget like this while will have a downstream positive impact on property prices.
So on the whole, this is a property friendly budget.
There’s nothing in here that’s going to dampen the current housing boom.
And some of the measures here should even give it a kick along.
DB.
Recently I’ve been looking into what governments are doing to try and stimulate their economies post-COVID. Americans are being as direct as ever, stimulus cheques. And in Melbourne… They’re giving away free donuts. I laughed at first too, but it actually makes a lot of sense. So I couldn’t help but talk about it on […]
Feeling more intelligent lately? You should. (If you’ve been watching these updates that is…) And if not, it’s your lucky day. My weekly Intelligent Property Investor Update is designed to make you smarter, no strings attached. Here’s what we’re homing in on this week. Why Retail sales figures are three years ahead of schedule The […]
The property market and economy are heating up like crazy, and not just in the big cities. Tons of news is coming out that the big outlets just aren’t showing, but the countries smartest investors are salivating over. If you don’t want to miss out, (And trust me, you don’t) then jump on this weeks […]
I’ve been receiving a tons of positive comments and emails about my weekly Intelligent Investor Update. I’m glad everyone is enjoying it as much as I’ve enjoyed hosting it. At first I was a little worried aspiring investors weren’t that interested in becoming smarter. It’s nice to be proven wrong, even more so after hearing […]
Records are already being broken, rental markets are shifting rapidly, and there’s huge financial storylines unfolding in every sector. But don’t panic, I’ve wrapped up all the news in my latest episode of The Intelligent Property Investor. Here’s everything I’m covering this week. How the property market broke a record that’s stood for 33 years […]
With the property market as red hot as it is, it’s the perfect time to get educated and involved. Having the tools and knowledge to do that is exactly the point behind my Intelligent Property Investor update. The free weekly video series is loaded with practical and potentially profitable news and information. Here’s what you’ll discover in this weeks update… What’s the scoop […]
I want you to be smarter. Why? Because an intelligent property world is a healthy property world. And to do that I’m starting a weekly masterclass/podcast dedicated to enlightening and educating that property world (AKA you), for free. It’s called the Intelligent Property Investor. It’s a weekly video series with updates on economic news, market trends, […]
In the 10th and final episode of the Great Real Estate Reset we pull back the curtain a little and answer some of the viewer questions recieved during the original live broadcast. From bank loans to tax law Dymphna answers a slew of interesting questions with answers ranging from specific knowledge to general advice. Thanks […]
In the second to last episode the Great Real Estate Reset Podcast Dymphna enters a dialogue on the mental game of wealth and success, and how you need to be thinking in order to be wealthy. It’s not just strategy or dumping dollars into the right place, it’s a concious and vitual set of mentalities […]
Welcome to part 8 of the Great Real Estate Reset podcast! We’re now entering the tail end of our live-cast turned podcast, and today Dymphna shares some key wisdom about the nature of a property investor. It’s not just what or where you buy that makes you successful, it’s mindset and long term planning. As […]
In potentially the most exciting episode of the Great Real Estate Reset Podcast series, we deep dive into the facsinating and incredibly practical world of property cycle, specific the cycle that you need to live and die by in order to be a successful inverstor. Investing in not gambling, it’s a science that can be […]
This Part 6 of our Great Real Estate Reset, Dymphna’s live broadcast cut down into podcast form. Part 6 diverges slightly from the world of property and hones in on the driving force behind it; You. Your life is a series of micro-decisions and butterfly effects ultimately culminating into your actual experiences and more importantly, […]
In part 5 of the Great Real Estate Reset series jumprs right off from part 4, moving directly into an obvious, but often overlooked, aspect of being an investor, growth. It’s all well and good to invest and pocket some change, but long term investing requires long term strategies. Without those strategies you stop being […]
Continuing on in our Real Estate Reset series, part 4 covers one of the most key aspects of actually making money and replacing your income as a budding investor: cashflow. Using real world examples Dymphna explains how everyday people have exploded their cashflow and passive income using specific and targeted strategies, from their humble origins […]
Originally taken from Dymphna web-streamed-summit, part 3 of our densely packed new series dives into the fundamental bases of knowledge required to effectively become a real estate investor in the currently climate. From asset protection to tax law, Dymphna describes the dirty details of structuring an air-tight investment, while outlining key business principles along the […]
This is part 2 of our newly budding series, originally part of a live-streamed event, we’ve cut it down into digestable podcasts releasing every few days. Episode 2 is all about the financial factors directly driving the economy forward, specifically what’s driving it upwards as we exit COVID era. Everyone likes to beleive that when […]
2020 was truly an unprictible year, and as we well and truly roll into 2021 the property world of Australia is in the midst of a Real Estate RESET. A hugely exciting landscape is forming for keen eyed property investors, and that’s exactly the topic we’re covering in this new podcast series. In the first […]
The financial world is shifting big time in 2021. I’m here to take you through what IS and WILL be happening in the financial world, from interest rates to global politics, these are the biggest factors shaking up the financial world and by extension, our financial back yard. Enjoy! For blogs, info, events, and to […]
[Recast] Striking gold in real estate can feel like a pipe dream at times, but all it takes is having the right strategy at the right time. Meet Mark Baker, originally an independent business owner for over 20 years, he eventually stumbled across Dymphna and ILoveRealEstate and realised he could apply his skills in a […]
[Recast] Todays Podcast speaks to one of the most common issues people, and even my students, have with investing, fear of commitment and fear of failure. Before people even have the chance to get experience they’re obsessed with the “perfect deal” or the “perfect moment”.. But as you’ll find, no one ever made money waiting […]
[Recast] It’s a common problem all people face, the feeling fo being “unworthy”, that you’re simply not good enough for wealth or success. Dymphna sits down with Rayleen Burns to discuss some of the tactics and strategies in order to strengthen your ability to be “wealth worthy”, and truly regaining your emotional self control. Listen […]
[Recast] While you can “make it” in any property field, I can never stress the importance of “Niche”. If you aren’t striving to fill needs then you aren’t taking full advantage of your investments no matter where you are or what your speciality is.Being able to supply a need doesn’t just mean your capable as an investor […]
When tough times hit, when stock makets crash, when pandemics strike, you always find Australians returning to the unkillable beast that is Aussie property. But why do we fare better than markets overseas? Today Dymphna explored just what is it that keeps Aussie real estate afloat during financial stress, and how countless investors continue to […]
In this new series we focus in on the real basics of property, particularly focusing on what you can do as a young investor, or a parent looking to set up steer your hopeful young one in the right direction. Dymphna specifically hones in on a friend of her son, in an attempt to help […]
In our premier epiosde of our new Myth Busters series, we take a look at property from the 20th century and how the baby boom came to a head in 1962, where the 4.1 MILLION population explosion all suddenly had the means and the age to buy a home and start a family. While some […]
The pressure of COVID has been crushing. It’s not just financial, it’s effecting people on every level. Rates of violence, suicides and depression are running rampant in “first world” society. People say “pressure creates diamonds”, but is that really true? Today we’re exploring how to really deal with the pressure of a covid-plagued world, and […]
Dymphna sits down with Michael and Serrah, two investors from England who made a huge call to move to Australia, already in their 40’s and with a family. At the time neither were investors, slowly they realised how shifting focus to investment properties gave them huge opportunities. Now as multi-millionaire investors they share their story, […]
Today we’re sitting down with Michael May, one of ILoveRealEstate’s most esteemed coaches. As we go through his journey from strictly raised radiologist, to mortgage broker, property developer, and eventually full fledged investment coach, you’ll find that “humble beginnings” couldn’t be more of an understatement. Hope you enjoy. Hungry for more? To book a free […]
When it comes to the wealth of the rich people like to throw around a lot of assumtions, “The rich exploited this boom, or this guy just got lucky, ect. ect.” When in reality, the rich make the most money when times are tough and the ecomony is weak. This has been a repeating and […]
Rental Gaurentees are a super common policy, often with new properties, often with negative gearing, it’s a tempting draw for investors looking for security… But it’s a con. And I’m here to tell you why, as a investor, you never win out on rental gaurentees. If you want to find out more about this type […]
In the final part of our Corona chaos summit series, we quickly turn to Dymphna and her team to answer viewer questions from the live event. A lot of these burning questions ARE important, Dymphna gives out some really comprehensive answers on all things related the current property climate. We got some great questions about […]
Continuing on from part 6, Dymphna speaks about the ongoing property cycle and the drastic turns it will take in the next 6-8 months, ongoing to the next 12. Though the outlook is grim, Dymphna offers a fresh perspective, backing her convictions with evidence and experience, she proves how the coming fallout is more than […]
Jumping into part 6 of our COVID themed real estate breakdown, Dymphna covers the 4 futures model, her famous system for taking action and actually acting within your own best interests. This system is PERFECT for the current climate, the sooner you take action the better, the sooner you know what’s going to benefit you, […]
In part 5 of our exposee in killing it during the corona crisis, Dymphna covers the secrets behind asset growth, the key insider tips on how to engineer your property to grow in value by your hands, in your own time. If you sit around waiting for your property to gain value naturally, it’s no […]
Leaping right off from part 3, part 4 continues on breaking down and showing the power behind structure in property investment. How the correct structuring across all your assets can save you headaches and dollars, especially during a massively shifting market like this one. Dymphna then moves into her “Property Blueprint”, the 3 key foundations […]
In part 3 of our series covering just how to avoid being a fincial casuality in a post COVID world, Dymphna covers the formula for success – Laying out the skeleton of what will become a powerful blueprint for your investments. You’ll find that protecting your assets during and post development is the real key […]
Continuing on from part one of our new part podcast-part masterlcass series, Dymphna jumps into just what you should and shouldn’t be confident about while being an investor – That dispite the bad turns the world is taking, there is a so-called “Perfect Storm” brewing in the investment world. Exactly how you participate is up […]
Welcome to part one of our new podcast series covering just how the COVID-19 pandemic has effected real estate, what can you do now, and what the future holds for the Australian property landscape. Part 1 of this series is an overview and introduction to the crisis sweeping the globe, covering the exact trail of […]
In part two of our series focusing on the future of Australian homes, Kevin and I take a look at a growing unforability epidemic; The fact that there is a huge crisis pertaining to how all propeties are being designed, specifically being designed for the wealthy, and leaving pensioners and youth in the dust. But […]
You might think you have an eye for good architecture, you might think you know what kind of layouts and designs sell. I’ve spoked to property developments with DECADES of experience that still get this wrong, so don’t be so sure. This excerpt from one our live event features Kevin Doodney, a leader and revolutionist […]
In the final part of Dymnpha’s COVID financial break down we explore the potential future for the Australian economic landscape. Looking at the worlds debt coming out of this, comparing it directly to other financial crisis (namely the GFC) and applying it practically to Australia’s financial position, Dymphna pieces together a image of the future […]
Part two of explanation and speculation of the investment world during and after COVID-19 dives into Government Policy. The policies effecting stimulous, the dole, and overall spending. The important thing to pay attention to here is just what these policies are opening up. Spending being shifted the schools, unis, transportation. Being on top of these […]
The world has continued to march on in light of the COVID-19 pandemic, in this new series Dymphna takes you through exactly what has been happening behind the scenes in the world of property and finance. Consumer trends play a huge factor in the future of the investment world, combining those trends with shifting bank […]
In the final part of our series on all things negotiation, we wrap things up with a discussion on the best negotiators in the world; Children. That’s right, kids! While their tactics may seem simple, by the end of this podcast you’ll fully realise their power even when applied to business.Dymphna also takes a look […]
In part two of Dympha’s ultimate negotiation guide, we reveal the sure fire, step by step process for nailing any negotiation. From the obvious ones like good preparation, to the nuance of being in control of any conversation.Dymphna will guide you through these steps in order to completely take control of any negotiation without the […]
In the final part of my COVID-19 economic crash course, we give real attention to the direct actions you should be taking in the protection of your financial life and assets, from how to deal with new government policy, to strategy on how to work around and even take advantage of new policies in from […]
In part 3 of my COVID-19 economy series we’re taking a look at what exactly to expect from the housing market in the near, and very distant, future. Expanding on how potential population growth and infrastructure spending will directly affect the housing market and the actions you take now to ensure you don’t just survive, […]
In part two of my breakdown of how COVID-19 is effecting the economy, I’m deep diving directly into the Share Market, how the health crisis created a “Demand Shock” which directly impacted credit across the Aussie banks, eventually snowballing into the financial crisis we face right now. I’ll be running you through exactly how this […]
COVID-19 has changed the way the word has functioned, and the economy now has no choice but to catch up. I’m going to take you through exactly what the financial response from owners, buyers, and the government mean for the rapidly shifting economy and how it might be creating some of the greatest investment opportunities […]
Negotiation is one the most valuable core skills when dealing in anything relating to both money and people. Most people will tell you it’s all about attitude, or manipulation, but in reality it’s about “relaxed confidence” and the power of REAL credibility. In part one of my negotiation masterclass series, I identify exactly what you […]
Picking up where part one left off, Dymphna and Michael Myer cross section the incredible plans and execution of one of the greatest property investing undertakings in this countries history, the creation of entire towns that are environmentally stable and sustainable. Myer discusses the exact tax strategies he’s used to save huge amounts on this […]
I recently received news that famed financial planner “Harry Dent” put out public word to “Sell! Sell! Sell!”. This got my blood boiling! Australian economics requires an Australian perspective, and that’s my issue. I break down exactly why Dent’s opinion on Real Estate simply doesn’t work, and what you SHOULD do as an Australian, whether […]
Dymphna dives deep into the career and origins of Michael Myer, one of Australias greatest entrepreneurs known for his prowess in property, business – and even bakeries. Michael tells his story of success in particular in creation of entire sustainable towns – His ingenuity and raw sense for investment innovation cultivated into the amazing story […]
Amongst the freak out and doomday-sayers of the current property market, the people not freaking out have one thing in common, they’ve either been in the property game for decades, or they’ve listened to someone who has. I sit down with my friend and fellow property veteran Mark Baker to discuss the exact property trends […]
Out of everyone we’ve ever worked with here at ILoveRealEstate, no one is more inspiring or personally successful than Jon Giaan. Sitting down with Jon today we discuss every facet of not only starting and running a business, but maintaining success in every aspect. Whether that be your own business, your health, or even weaknesses, […]
This excerpt from one of Dymphna’s live shows looks deep into her personal journey from accountant to full time real estate investor, and how to use what she learned in order for anyone to do the same. Her story isn’t just about money, Dymphna’s tell all story involves, her family, the emotional weight, fears, and […]
I’m a firm believer that you’re a result of the habits you’ve set for yourself, good or bad, you’ve established rituals, diets, automatic responses, all leading to who are directly. It’s easy to say you want to be successful and strive to be successful but if you develop good habits before taking massive steps it […]
The biggest concern for any budding property investor is just how much you’re spending and losing when selling a property; Development costs, advertising, tax, anything you can imagine. The fact of the matter is you won’t realise how much you lose until it’s too late. Dymphna breaks down and simplifies these figures and let’s you […]
While you can “make it” in any property field, I can never stress the importance of “Niche”. If you aren’t striving to fill needs then you aren’t taking full advantage of your investments no matter where you are or what your speciality is. Being able to supply a need doesn’t just mean your capable as […]
Loans are one of the corner stones of property development, but securing and managing them is as daunting as it is difficult. Dymphna chats with Andrew and Clint from Wizdom to discuss not only the ins and out of securing a loan, but also insider secrets on how to properly structure your loans while minimising […]
It’s a common problem all people face, the feeling fo being “unworthy”, that you’re simply not good enough for wealth or success. Dymphna sits down with Rayleen Burns to discuss some of the tactics and strategies in order to strengthen your ability to be “wealth worthy”, and truly regaining your emotional self control. Listen and […]
Today’s podcast delves into the reasons you, and many others, just can’t seem to stick to their goals. Whether they be big, small, or even financial.Honing in positive and negative reinforcements, Dymphna discusses the phycology behind goals, and how exactly you can train yourself to start achieving them. Hope you Enjoy. If you want to […]
This special motivational speech from Dymphna speaks to one of the most common issues people have with investing, fear of commitment and fear of failure. Before people even have the chance to get experience they’re obsessed with the “perfect deal” or the “perfect moment”.. But as you’ll find, no one ever made money waiting on […]
When Sanjeev and Illa’s baby girl was born, they wanted a way to escape their ‘hectic’ jobs. Initially, they started small and focused on building cashflow.
Three years later, they’re just a deal or two away from replacing Sanjeev’s income, and having the family time they so desperately wanted. Despite having cash flow as their main focus, they’ve managed to increase their equity 10-fold.
Deal by deal, this is how they did, from small time subdivisions, to massive projects generating over $50k in rental income annually.
Additionally, if you’re really curious for the EXACT methods Sanjeev and Illa put in motion, book your free spot to this exclusive online masterclass; “How to generate cashflow & growth regardless of the current economic climate”
If you want to find out more about this type of information and book a free seat to the up and coming growth and cashflow one day training events go to: https://iloverealestate.tv/
I see all too often developers and investors pulling their hair over Land Tax and excessive fees, the truth is, they’re just not structuring it right.
I sit down with Derek Sky, Lawyer and tax expert in order to break down and inform you on some of the up, downs, and secrets that can and will impact the tax you pay on property. Hope you learn a thing or two and enjoy.
If you want to find out more about this type of information and book a free seat to the up and coming growth and cashflow one day training events go to: https://iloverealestate.tv/
Five years ago Peter faced the messy ending of a business partnership putting him in the hole, as a long time builder he fell back on what he knew but knew he needed to expand on it.
Stumbling across ILoveRealEstate and desiring to break his habit of “Analysis Paralysis” he committed himself to not only the education but also to creating the lifestyle he wanted for himself and his family.
Starting small he worked his way up to larger and larger deals and now makes 114k a year purely through passive income alone.
I hope you enjoy Peter’s inspiring story of resilience.If you want to find out more about the education and coaching Peter received and book a free seat to the up and coming growth and cashflow one day training events go to: https://iloverealestate.tv/
One of the largest growing concerns for young people in Australia the accessibility and affordability of the ever growing property market. I sit down with my son Justin to discuss the concerns of the current generation and potential solution. Our perspective is one of many so take it all with a grain of salt, as I always I encourage everyone to make up their own minds. Enjoy.
If you want to find out more about this type of information and book a free seat to the up and coming growth and cashflow one day training events go to: https://iloverealestate.tv/
Natural Disasters have always existed and will always exist, but their effect on property has become more pronounced than ever.
Today Dymphna will take you through the nitty gritty in how these horrible events not only impact the lives they come in contact with, the billions of dollars spent repairing and recuperating what was lost, and how it may directly effect your bottom dollar. Hope you enjoy.
If you want to find out more about this type of information and book a free seat to the up and coming growth and cashflow one day training events go to: https://iloverealestate.tv/
It’s no secret that things are changing in 2020. Dymphna Boholt deep dives into the facts, trends, and her biggest predictions in everything 2020 real estate.
From the effects of estimated population growth, to how shifting interest rates will directly effect your loans.
The content and advice Dymphna drops in this podcast can only be defined as essential. Please enjoy.
If you want to find out more about this type of information and book a free seat to the up and coming growth and cashflow one day training events go to: https://iloverealestate.tv/
Naomi’s story is as remarkable as it is unremarkable. Originally squeezing into the property games last minute she quickly became lost amongst the technical terms of real estate and struggled to make progress within her first two months of trying.
Pushing through with the help of Kevin and ILoveRealEstate she learnt to not only educate herself but build herself and her projects from the ground up, eventually culminating into a classic but unforgettable personal development story.
To learn more about the coaching and support Naomi received as well as Dymphna’s own strategies and methodology, get on her free online masterclass; “Fast Tracking your Real Estate Success in 2019” Link Below.
https://bit.ly/2SpPh2gh
Entering the property games, Ted immediately assumed he was at the top of the food chain. Having prior experience as an apprentice builder he could only assume there wasn’t much else to know when it came to property development.
Soon enough he not only realised the sheer amount of holes in his knowledge but also that what he signed up for wasn’t a competition, it was a community. Ted grew not only financially but also personally, shedding his arrogant exterior and becoming a better person not by hiding his insecurities, but by overcoming them.
To learn more about the coaching and support Ted received as well as Dymphna’s own strategies and methodology, get on her free online masterclass; “Fast Tracking your Real Estate Success in 2019” Link Below.
https://bit.ly/2SpPh2gh
Striking gold in real estate can feel like a pipe dream at times, but all it takes is having the right strategy at the right time. Meet Mark Baker, originally an independent business owner for over 20 years, he eventually stumbled across Dymphna and ILoveRealEstate and realised he could apply his skills in a significantly more lucrative field.
Seeing the potential in large scale, shared housing, Mark formulated the perfect strategy that worked for him. Now working as a dedicated rooming and boarding house specialist, his success speaks for itself.
Mark preaches that mindset and support are two of the biggest, if not the biggest factors to his success, to check out the coaching Mark received as well as Dymphna’s own strategies and methodology, get on her free online masterclass; “Fast Tracking your Real Estate Success in 2019” Link Below.
https://bit.ly/2SpPh2gh