Buy Now

The Ultimate Guide to Owning and Investing in Property

Lloyd Edge

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780730395249
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Personal Finance

Turn your property dreams into reality

What's stopping you from buying property? Is it the changing markets? The needless jargon? The rising costs? Buying property doesn't have to be difficult; you just need to step up on that ladder. In Buy Now, you'll get the simple, straightforward, easy-to-understand advice to help you not only enter the property market, but to launch and grow your own portfolio.

With bestselling author and award-winning buyer's agent Lloyd Edge by your side, you have everything you need to stop dreaming, step up, and grab that property ladder with both hands. In the book, you'll find newcomer-friendly advice designed to walk you through how anyone can budget and save for a deposit, understand the market, and secure a mortgage.

The author breaks down the jargon and tells you what you need to know in straightforward and easy-to-understand language, offering tips and strategies for those setting out on their property investing journey. You'll also find:

• Step-by-step guidance on creating a financial plan for your property hunt, finding your dream home or investment property, renovating, equity creation, and upsizing
• How-to guides, case studies, and interactive exercises that help you build the skills you'll need to conquer property investment
• Your ticket to going from no knowledge or experience in real estate to property master

Nobody ever got what they wanted by waiting. Take the first step toward financial freedom through property with practical advice from one of Australia's leading buyer's agents.

CHAPTER 1
THE POWER OF WHY: To get it, you must know why you want it

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I have built a large property portfolio, with assets, valued at $15 million, spread across three states. In this chapter I'll explain how I set goals when I began my property journey, including buying my first home and upgrading to my second, and how I learned to build a strategy with a long-term focus.

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As I've noted, for me it didn't happen overnight — it took 15 years. Could I have done it any faster? Yes. I made some mistakes early on that set me back. That's why I wrote this book — to show you how to create and meet your investment goals without making those rookie mistakes. In fact, it took me less than 10 years once I actually had a strategy in place and put my mind to it. So my main message is simple: if I can do it, so can you.

Over the past two centuries about 90 per cent of the world's millionaires have made their millions by investing in real estate. When it comes to creating wealth through property, however, it is not about going out and buying just any property, then sitting and waiting for your wealth to build. It is a long game — one that you plan and work for one step at a time. It involves psychology and a strong belief — it's something you must really want.

What I came to realise in my early career as a property investor was that all successful investors have personal goals to track their successes, and that they grow their portfolios steadily based on long-term strategic plans. With that kind of long-term focus, strategic investors can buy more properties, enjoy greater serviceability and create greater wealth over time.

GOAL-SETTING

I was fortunate in that I was already a goal-setter. From my background as both a musician and a golfer, I knew how to set goals and meet them through hard work and determination. So forming a strategy was the natural next step for me. And it worked.

Looking back over 20 years, and especially the past 10 to 15 years, I always set myself goals. For example, ‘In five years' time I want to have built this much wealth’ or ‘In 10 years' time I want to retire from teaching, and these are the investment strategies I'll use to achieve that’ or ‘I want to get my real-estate diploma in one year instead of three’. And I held myself accountable for those goals and strategies.

In fact, through my determination and willingness to work all hours of the night while holding down a full-time job, I gained my Diploma in Property in just three months.

I'm not suggesting that everyone should follow in my footsteps and buy 15, 20, 30 properties. Nor is it my advice that you should set your sights on becoming a multimillionaire — your goals may not run to that. What I'm talking about (and I'll share plenty of real-life illustrations in this book) is that you pursue your own goals, which might mean a strategy that you build a nest egg of three or four properties. If they're cashflow positive and see good capital growth, they should provide you with a steady income stream to fall back on if you lose your job or your business is shut down or you get sick and can't work.

You need to be clear on your reasons for taking this journey as well as the belief that you can do it — and you need to start developing both as early as you can.

LIFESTYLE CHOICES

I own a buyer's agency called Aus Property Professionals, but being a buyer's agent isn't really what I do, and it's not what I tell people I do. What I offer my clients is the means to achieve an outcome, which is the end goal they themselves have identified. So when people ask me what I do, I tell them I actually create lifestyle choices for people by helping them to create the equity that will eventually allow them to realise their dreams.

This is about much more than buying property. From my perspective, property is just the vehicle. Property, the stock market, gold or oil — they're all just vehicles. It's the outcome that's important.

Success comes down to really knowing your why — what you're trying to achieve. What are your goals in life? What sorts of lifestyle choices do you want to be able to make in the future? Once you're clear on the truly important things, then we can talk about crafting a strategy to enable you to achieve those goals through property.

Clients often come to me not really knowing what they want or why they want it. They may have been to a couple of property seminars, but they haven't taken the plunge yet. They may say, ‘Yeah, I want to enjoy financial freedom through property’ or ‘I just want to grow a property portfolio’. I can tell you from firsthand experience that building a property portfolio is useless unless you know what it is going to achieve for you. How many properties do you want? More importantly, why? If financial independence is your key goal, what does that even look like for you?

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Scan the QR code for a spreadsheet to help you set your goals.

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These days I start the conversation by asking a lot of questions about my clients' motivations to get them thinking. Do you have kids? Do you want kids? Do you need extra funds to pay for their education or to be able to afford an annual family holiday without worrying about where the money is going to come from? Do you have a home mortgage? Is owning your home mortgage-free important for you, or are you aiming for your dream home and the ability to pay that off? And I have them put it all down on paper.

Working through all those ideas, and thinking about the whys that drive your life now and those you want to drive your future, will move your understanding one step forward. If you've never asked yourself these questions, the answers will give you the clarity you need to move in the right direction. When you know what you want, you become clearer about what you don't want.

If you have a goal of, say, $100 000 a year in passive income, or paying off your home mortgage, or putting your kids through a private-school education, we can work out how to deliver that and build a roadmap around that. Then we can start formulating the strategy that will get you there.

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GOAL VS STRATEGY

A goal is an objective or destination. It could be paying off a mortgage, achieving financial freedom or buying a dream home. Smaller, interim goals (sometimes called momentum goals), such as saving for a family holiday or completing a duplex development, can be seen as milestones or stepping-stones on the path to success.

A strategy is a long-term plan for how you will achieve your goals. Those goals will determine your investment strategy — for example, whether the properties in your portfolio will be high-growth, instant equity, high-yield or subdivision projects. Without a strategy in place, there's a risk that you'll purchase the wrong type of property, one that doesn't help you achieve your goals.

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Achieving financial freedom is a long-term process. The only strategy almost guaranteeing a fast result is the one in which you purchase your own home, because once we set the full purchase brief for that, we can obviously start the property-buying process pretty much right away. But most of our work is with long-term, repeat clients, because we have a long-term strategy in place that is about delivering the outcomes they want through investment ...