Insights & Resources
Expert analysis, market trends, and practical advice for property investors
Ordered and grouped by the latest substantive update. Original publication dates remain visible inside each article.
My mate Jay grew up watching the Melbourne Cup at Flemington Racecourse. When he finally bought a Victorian terrace seven kilometres from the CBD, he thought he was combining nostalgia with smart investing. Three years and $100,000 in losses later, he sold.
My owner-occupier rate is 5.19%. The official posted rate is 5.8%. I didn't refinance. I didn't use a broker. I filled out a single form and waited for the phone to ring.
Your fixed rate was 2%. Now it's 6%. That's an extra $2,000 a month you didn't budget for. And you're not alone — a massive cohort of homeowners is hitting this wall simultaneously. Some will sell. Some will restructure. And some will use this as the buying opportunity of a decade.
If you think having the lowest interest rate means you have the best mortgage, you need to think again. A 30-year home loan contains over $130,000 in avoidable interest. Here are four techniques your bank will never volunteer.
There are four categories of property where the price is irrelevant. They could be giving it away and I would still tell you to keep walking. Because the cost of buying wrong does not show up on settlement day. It shows up twelve months later, when the insurance renewal arrives, when the council rejects your development application, or when the building inspector finds termite damage behind fresh paint.
Frankston is having a moment. A rezone in March, a billion-dollar hospital, and median prices still under $800K. A subscriber asked me to analyse a 550-square-metre listing at $740K. The numbers are genuinely exciting — with one catch involving a helicopter flight path.
Eighty-four thousand dollars of capital growth in three months. Not from a speculative crypto token — from a three-bedroom house on 612 square metres in Frankston, a suburb most Melbourne investors have been ignoring for years.
Someone quoted a client $80K for a granny flat. Sounds great, right? Until I asked for the inclusion list. The external cladding was recycled timber panels. The bathroom had no waterproofing membrane. Two years and that thing would be a petri dish.
I drove to the build site last week to check on progress. It was 38 degrees. The plumber was running pipe. I brought him water and a pack of smokes. He brought his apprentice and worked twice as fast. Eighteen months from purchase, this property generates a thousand dollars a week in rent and has appreciated by more than the total renovation cost.
Walk through a completed granny flat we built in Narre Warren. Every material, every cost, every specification — from the 3kW solar system to the double-glazed windows.
A retired couple walked into my office with $700,000 in assessable assets and a pension of $28,000 per year. They walked out with a plan to build a granny flat using $200,000 from superannuation. That $200,000 vanished from Centrelink's asset test. Their pension jumped to $46,000 per year.
I just came back from inspecting two granny flats we're building. Let me walk you through every component — from the stumps to the roof — and show you exactly what $80,000 buys.
I'm standing in front of a property we bought nine months ago for $645K off-market. We added a $105K granny flat; the neighbours just sold for $730K and $760K. And ours earns $880 a week — a 6.1% gross yield.
A Darwin investor's property surged 17 percent in year one and 34 percent over two years. Sensational. After stamp duty, selling agent commission, legal fees, staging, and capital gains tax, the actual cash in hand was barely $103,000. Meanwhile, a buy-and-hold investor in Melbourne paid transaction costs once and refinanced to deploy equity into property number two.
A client with a double-digit property portfolio once told me something that rewired how I think about real estate. It wasn't about rental yields or renovation tricks. It was about patience.
The invitation said 'smart casual.' I showed up in a hoodie. On purpose. In a room full of developers in $3,000 suits, the young bloke in the hoodie who nobody takes seriously is the most dangerous bidder in the building.
This house looked like nothing special from the street. Standard brick veneer, 700 square metres, corner block. Six months later it was worth $92,000 more than we paid and generating $1,200 a week in rent from three separate households.
The bank tells you 4.5% interest means your money is growing. After tax and inflation, you're losing $740 a year on every $100,000. I ran the numbers on six different asset classes. Only two of them actually protect your wealth.
I remember sitting in my accountant's office, staring at a tax bill that made my stomach drop. I had done everything right—found the land, managed the build, held the asset while it appreciated. And then the ATO took almost half of it back. The mistake was not the property. The mistake was whose name was on the title.
Everyone screams about Victorian land tax. I spent an entire weekend building a comparison table across all eight states and territories. The results surprised even me — and I do this for a living.
Six hundred thousand dollars in Melbourne used to buy you options. Today it buys you risk. The suburbs that were $580K at the start of the year are now $650K. If your budget hasn't grown with the market, your margin for error has shrunk to almost nothing.
Melbourne just got ranked the world's most liveable city. Again. My Shanghai friends are impressed. But only Melburnians know the full story — the weather tantrums, the suburb pecking order, and the house prices that make 'most liveable' feel like a cruel joke.
If you're still telling people Melbourne property is falling, you haven't looked at the numbers since January. May 2025 alone added 0.8% to house values. That's 9.6% annualised. Let me show you where the money actually went.
Frankston: hospital expansion. Cranbourne: subdivision potential. Hampton Park: land scarcity. Plus the suburbs to avoid. The definitive southeast Melbourne buying guide.
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