---
title: "I Stopped Listening to Everyone Around Me. Then My Portfolio Exploded."
description: "The biggest threat to your property portfolio isn't the market — it's the people around you. How filtering out noise from friends and family transformed one investor's returns."
author: Joey Don
date: 2022-03-21
category: Market Analysis
url: https://premiumrea.com.au/blog/cut-toxic-advice-property-investment-breakthrough
tags: ["investment mindset", "property advice", "portfolio growth", "Melbourne", "decision making", "investor psychology"]
---

# I Stopped Listening to Everyone Around Me. Then My Portfolio Exploded.

*By Joey Don, Co-Founder & CEO at PremiumRea — 2022-03-21*

> The hardest thing I ever did in property wasn't negotiating a $40K discount or managing a nightmare tenant. It was telling my family to stop giving me investment advice. That single decision changed everything.

I want to talk about something that has nothing to do with interest rates, rental yields, or suburb selection — and everything to do with whether you'll actually build wealth through property.

It's about the people around you.

Specifically, it's about the well-meaning friends, family members, and acquaintances who will absolutely torpedo your investment career if you let them. I've watched it happen to dozens of clients. Talented, intelligent people with solid financial foundations who never pull the trigger on a purchase because someone in their inner circle talked them out of it [1].

The breakthrough in my own career didn't come from finding a better deal or learning a new analysis framework. It came from drawing a hard line between my personal relationships and my investment decisions. And I'd encourage every serious investor to do the same.

I've spent a lot of time thinking about why this pattern exists — why intelligent, capable people with the financial means to invest successfully allow themselves to be derailed by people who've never done it themselves.

Part of it is cultural. Australians have a complicated relationship with debt. The concept of "good debt" versus "bad debt" — the distinction between borrowing to acquire appreciating assets versus borrowing to fund consumption — is well understood in investment circles but almost completely absent from everyday conversation. When your parents hear "we're taking on a $600,000 mortgage," they don't hear "we're leveraging into an appreciating asset with tax-advantaged income." They hear "debt" and react with the anxiety that word triggers in anyone who grew up in an era of 17% interest rates.

The other part is evolutionary. Humans are wired to weigh negative information more heavily than positive information — it's called negativity bias, and it served us well when the primary risk was being eaten by a predator. In a modern financial context, negativity bias means that one cautionary anecdote from your uncle carries more psychological weight than ten positive case studies from your buyer's agent.

Understanding these biases doesn't eliminate them. But it does give you the framework to recognise when they're influencing your decisions — and to override them with data.

## The "expert" at every barbecue

You know this person. Everyone does. They've never bought an investment property in their life, but they've got extremely strong opinions about yours.

"The market's about to crash."
"You're paying too much."
"My mate bought in [suburb X] and lost everything."
"Why don't you just put it in a term deposit?"

These comments rarely come from malice. They come from fear — fear that's been absorbed from media headlines, from one bad anecdote, from a general anxiety about debt that's deeply embedded in Australian culture [2]. But the effect is the same regardless of intent: paralysis.

I've interviewed dozens of our successful clients about what nearly stopped them from investing. The answer is almost never "the numbers didn't stack up." It's almost always "someone close to me told me not to do it."

One client — she's now on her third investment property, total portfolio value north of $2.1 million — told me she nearly pulled out of her first purchase because her brother-in-law said the suburb was "too far from the city." The property she nearly didn't buy has appreciated $140,000 in three years and generates $850 a week in rental income [3].

Her brother-in-law, for the record, still rents.

## Why strangers will make you richer than friends

This sounds cynical, but it's a pattern I've seen play out consistently over a decade in this industry: the people who create the most value in your property journey are almost always people you didn't know before you started.

Your mortgage broker. Your buyer's agent. Your property manager. Your conveyancer. Your building inspector. These are transactional relationships, yes — but they're relationships built on aligned incentives and professional accountability. If your mortgage broker gives you bad advice, they lose their licence. If your uncle gives you bad advice, he shrugs and changes the subject at Christmas [4].

The most successful investors I work with have a very clear boundary. They discuss property strategy with professionals. They discuss property emotions with nobody.

That might sound harsh. But consider the alternative: you spend three months researching a suburb, running the numbers, inspecting properties, getting pre-approval — and then you mention it to your parents over dinner and they spend two hours explaining why it's a terrible idea based on something they half-read in the Herald Sun.

Which input is more valuable? The one backed by data, or the one backed by anxiety?

There's a practical dimension to this that goes beyond philosophy. The quality of your professional network directly correlates with the quality of deals you access.

In property, the best opportunities are almost never publicly listed. They come through relationships — agent networks, broker referrals, solicitor introductions, and developer connections. These relationships are built over years of consistent, professional interaction. They cannot be replicated by asking your neighbour what they think about property investment.

Roughly 30% of our purchases for clients come through off-market channels — properties that never appeared on Domain or RealEstate.com.au. These deals are available to us because selling agents trust our ability to execute quickly and cleanly. That trust was earned through hundreds of completed transactions, not through social connections or family ties.

The implication for individual investors is clear: your time and energy are finite resources. Every hour spent debating property strategy with unqualified friends is an hour not spent building relationships with qualified professionals who can actually improve your outcomes.

I'm not suggesting you become a hermit. I'm suggesting you be strategic about who influences your financial decisions. The people who move your portfolio forward are almost always people you sought out deliberately — not people you happened to grow up with.

## The information diet that changed my business

When I left my IT career to go full-time into property, the loudest voices in my life were the most negative ones. Former colleagues who thought I was insane. Family members who wanted me to "get a real job." Friends who'd send me articles about property crashes every time the market dipped 2% [5].

I didn't cut these people out of my life. But I did cut them out of my decision-making process. Completely.

Instead, I built a network of people who were already doing what I wanted to do. Other buyer's agents. Developers. Fund managers. Mortgage brokers who'd processed thousands of applications and could tell me exactly where the lending market was heading. These people didn't tell me what I wanted to hear — they told me what I needed to hear, based on actual market data and professional experience [6].

The difference in the quality of my decisions was immediate and dramatic. Within my first year of full-time practice, I'd transacted on more properties than most agents do in three years. Not because I'm smarter than anyone else. Because I'd removed the noise.

We've now completed over 350 transactions across Melbourne's southeast, and the single biggest predictor of whether a client follows through on a good deal isn't their income level or their deposit size. It's whether they've got someone at home who's going to talk them out of it at the last minute.

There's a practical exercise I recommend to every new client, and I want to share it here because it's been remarkably effective at inoculating people against unhelpful advice.

Before you tell anyone about your property plans, write down the three most likely objections you'll hear. Then, for each objection, write a one-sentence response backed by data.

For example:

Objection: "The market is going to crash."
Response: "Melbourne house prices have not experienced a sustained decline of more than 10% in any rolling five-year period since 1980, and every decline has fully recovered within two years."

Objection: "You're paying too much."
Response: "The purchase price is 8% below the bank's desktop valuation and 12% below the most recent comparable sale in the same street."

Objection: "What if you can't find tenants?"
Response: "The vacancy rate in this suburb is 1.4%, and our average time-to-let across 350 properties is eleven days."

When you've prepared these responses in advance, you're not caught off-guard when the objections come. You can acknowledge the concern, deliver the data-backed response, and move the conversation forward without being derailed.

I've had clients tell me this exercise was worth more than any other advice I've given them — not because it changed their investment strategy, but because it gave them the confidence to execute the strategy they'd already developed.

## How to set boundaries without burning bridges

I'm not suggesting you tell your mother to mind her own business (though some of my clients have, and they're doing very well financially).

What I am suggesting is a simple framework:

**Share decisions, not deliberations.** Tell people what you've done after you've done it. "We bought an investment property in Cranbourne" is a statement. "We're thinking about buying in Cranbourne — what do you reckon?" is an invitation for interference.

**Filter advice by track record.** Before you accept property guidance from anyone, ask yourself: does this person own investment property? Have they successfully built a portfolio? If the answer is no, their opinion is entertainment, not education.

**Accept that discomfort is part of growth.** Every property purchase I've ever made felt uncomfortable at the point of commitment. That's normal. Debt is uncomfortable. Responsibility is uncomfortable. But discomfort and bad decisions are not the same thing, and confusing the two is how most people stay poor [7].

**Build your professional team early.** A good mortgage broker, a competent buyer's agent, a reliable building inspector, and a property manager with a 1:50 management ratio (not the industry standard of 1:170) — these are the people whose opinions actually matter. Assemble this team before you start looking at properties, not after [8].

## The real cost of listening to the wrong people

I ran the numbers on this once, just out of curiosity. A client came to us in mid-2017, ready to buy. Her parents talked her out of it. She came back in early 2019 — the same suburb, the same type of property.

The price difference? $127,000. For the same product, in the same location, eighteen months later.

That's not an abstract number. That's real money she'll never recover, because someone who'd never bought an investment property convinced her to wait [9].

Melbourne's southeast corridor has delivered average annual capital growth of 8% to 10% across Cranbourne, Hampton Park, Narre Warren, and Berwick over the past decade [10]. Every year you delay is roughly $50,000 to $80,000 in lost equity on a median-priced house. And that's before you factor in the rental income you're not collecting.

I'm not saying ignore everyone and buy blindly. I'm saying be ruthlessly selective about who earns a seat at your decision-making table. Your financial future is too important to be shaped by people who've never built anything themselves.

If you want to talk to someone who's actually done this — 350 times and counting — you know where to find us. We only say what we'd do ourselves. That's always been the rule.

Let me close with something I don't say often enough: the people who give you bad property advice are not bad people. They're scared people. And their fear is not irrational — it's just misapplied.

Property investment involves large numbers, significant debt, and genuine uncertainty. Those three elements trigger anxiety in almost everyone. The difference between a successful investor and a perpetual hesitator isn't the absence of anxiety — it's the presence of a framework that converts anxiety into analysis.

When someone tells you the market is about to crash, they're expressing their anxiety. When you respond by checking the CoreLogic Home Value Index, vacancy rates, and your property's debt-service-coverage ratio, you're channelling your own anxiety into productive action.

The framework I use — and the one I teach every client — is simple:
1. Quantify the downside. What is the maximum amount you can lose in the worst plausible scenario?
2. Assess your capacity to absorb that loss. Can you continue making repayments if rents drop 20%? If interest rates rise 200 basis points?
3. Compare the quantified downside to the expected upside. In Melbourne's southeast, the historical worst-case (10-15% decline, full recovery within two years) is dramatically outweighed by the average case (8-10% annual growth, 5-7% yield post-modification).

If the maths works — and it almost always does for well-selected properties in our target corridor — then the anxiety is noise. And we've already established what to do with noise: filter it out.

I'm Joey Don. I've built a career on filtering noise for clients. If you want to talk to someone who backs up every recommendation with data — and who only buys what they'd buy themselves — you know where to find us.

## References

1. [PremiumRea client consultation data. Primary barrier to purchase commitment is external social influence, not financial capacity.](#)
2. [Australian Securities & Investments Commission, 'Financial Attitudes and Behaviour Tracker', Wave 7, 2019.](https://www.asic.gov.au/regulatory-resources/find-a-document/reports/rep-627-australian-financial-attitudes-and-behaviour-tracker/)
3. [PremiumRea case study. Hampton Park: $590K purchase, $850/wk rent post-renovation.](#)
4. [ASIC, 'Credit Licensing — Australian Credit Licence Obligations', 2019.](https://www.asic.gov.au/for-finance-professionals/credit-licensees/)
5. [CoreLogic, 'Monthly Housing Chart Pack — Melbourne', 2017-2019.](https://www.corelogic.com.au/research/monthly-indices)
6. [REBAA, 'Why Use a Buyer's Agent', 2019.](https://www.rebaa.com.au/why-use-a-buyers-agent/)
7. [Vanguard Australia, 'Index Chart — Long Term Investing', 2019 edition.](https://www.vanguard.com.au/personal/education-centre/en/insights-article/index-chart)
8. [PremiumRea property management. PM ratio 1:50 vs industry average 1:170+.](#)
9. [CoreLogic, 'Home Value Index — Melbourne Southeast Suburbs', December 2019.](https://www.corelogic.com.au/research/monthly-indices)
10. [REIV, 'Median House Prices — Melbourne Metropolitan by Suburb', 2009-2019.](https://reiv.com.au/market-insights/median-prices)

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Source: https://premiumrea.com.au/blog/cut-toxic-advice-property-investment-breakthrough
Publisher: PremiumRea (Optima Real Estate) — Melbourne buyers agent