John Manciameli says the right strategy, team and data will accelerate your investing capacity and improve your property performance.
With 11 properties by the age of 32, successful property investor and finance broker John Manciameli knows all about maximising investment capacity.
On Property Hub’s Get Invested podcast, John joined Bushy Martin to talk about the importance of having the right strategy, investing in a specialised team, and using data metrics.
Strategy: Don’t look for perfection
According to Bushy, potential investors shouldn’t wait for the perfect house to come along, which could take months or years.
Instead, they should focus on the key attributes such as location.
“A lot of investors who are looking for the perfect property waste years before they even get on the starting grid. But as long as the major parameters are there, it’s never going to be perfect. And time can be a great benefactor when it comes to a property exercise,” Bushy said.
“Time is a massive factor in your results if you’re buying the right property in the wrong way in the right place. So if I could do it differently, I would have would have started a lot earlier and I would have avoided some of the procrastination. Taking action is the key piece to this whole thing. You won’t get a house 100% right, so rather than worrying about the colour of the skirting and the tiles in the splash-back in the kitchen, if you put your energy into the data that’s telling you what’s happening in that location, that’s the thing that’s going to drive a lot of your results down the track.”
Team: Hire a power broker
Investing in additional resources, such as a ‘power broker’, will ensure you have access to thorough analyses and information.
“It’s a new player in the mortgage brokering industry. So a power broker is typically someone who has extensive experience in banking and lending, but that person may not have done all the qualifications to become a licensed credit advisor or a mortgage broker. So for example, you’ve got someone with 20 years worth of banking experience at ANZ or CBA, and what they can do is support the mortgage broker in doing a deeper dive and a broader analysis of your lending options,” John said.
“So let me put this into context. The good mortgage brokers are run off their feet with enquiries, and what typically happens is we will want to help that person, but we may not have the time to do the deep analysis that’s required. Now, it’s not just about the interest rate, but it could also be about the credit policies that can help you move forward. So if you’ve got six enquiries, it becomes a task of trying to meet everyone’s expectations and almost choosing which ones you want to help, even though you want to help them all. So rather than saying no, what we’re suggesting is why don’t you think about recruiting a power broker and paying for that power broker? And what you’ve done is recruited your broker with extra manpower. So what’s going to happen is that broker that you trust is no longer at the precipice of saying yes or no.”
Bushy added: “They’ve got all the head knowledge. So they can do the scenario analysis and come up with the best option because they’ve got the time without having to answer phone calls every second of the day and be able to get the best fit for what that particular client is looking to achieve.”
Team: Find the right broker for you
The key to improving capacity is finding not just any good broker, but one that is specialised and experienced in what you’re trying to achieve with your investments.
“If you’re trying to build wealth, try and find that broker that’s really, really good. Because brokers are good at everything – we’re like the GPs of the medical world – but then you’ll find there are gaps and some will have specialities. So if you want to build wealth, you want the specialist whose knowledge is going to be focussed on lending solutions and lending structures that are going to increase capacity, minimise the cost and minimise your risks,” John said.
“Mortgage brokers get 30 emails a day from various banks. Now, if you specialise in growing a portfolio for your clients, which lenders do you think you’re going to pay attention to? The one that’s just advertised what they’re doing for first time buyers, or the one that’s just advertised saying that we’ve now improved our borrowing capacity for investors. It’s physically impossible for brokers to know everything about all the different niches of finance. So if you can find that broker that is really good in investment property lending, they will naturally have an instinct of where to take your business to.”
Researching the team behind the broker is equally important.
“Make sure your broker has got a team behind them, because the broker may have a lot of experience in the head, but if the broker doesn’t have the team to execute it for you, you’re going to be frustrated. Policies and applications will be submitted incorrectly and things like that will happen. So I can’t stress that enough, that you’re looking not just at the broker, but the ecosystem that the broker brings in to the lender,” John said.
Data: Find opportunities in regional areas
A wide range of data is now accessible for investors to research beyond the general media statements and find affordable and suitable property markets, especially in regional areas.
“We know for a fact now that the regional suburbs or significant urban areas are just as good as the major capital cities. So it irks me and frustrates me when I hear good people say I can’t afford to buy or invest because I’ve only got a budget of only $500,000, which is still fantastic. If you open up your eyes to these opportunities that are sitting outside of the stereotypical media analysis that you’re stereotypically going to receive in the media. It annoys me when I start hearing about the homogeneous nature of the property market when you read in the media. You hear about it going up or down, but we’re like, which suburb are you talking about?” John said.
“So far north Queensland, at the time of recording at the end of May 2023, is an unbelievable opportunity to pick up houses or good sized blocks with yields of 6.5%. Now this is not financial advice, but there are so many wonderful suburbs that have got the thirty data metrics that I use that have a positive correlation coefficient with capital growth, that are destined for growth. And there are a range of data metrics that you can buy to help you intelligently make that property acquisition. And it’ll prove to you without a shadow of a doubt that regional parts of Australia have the fundamentals for it to grow.
“If I could invest differently when I started, even then I would have looked more into regional. There is so much opportunity in regional Australia, and back in the day (and probably people still saying this now) they said don’t buy in regional. But the data behind this couldn’t be further from the truth. So now knowing the data, we know that regional markets do track capital city markets. So for those listeners who do have what may seem to be a modest budget, say 350k and even less, you’ve got wonderful opportunity if you can open up your eyes and just trust the data.”
Listen to the full interview here.
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