Azeem Rahman says surrounding yourself with the right team of professionals will help accelerate and fast track your property investment journey.
Azeem is a full-time employee who has successfully been building a $3 million plus property portfolio since the age of 24.
On the Get Invested podcast, he talked about the important lessons he learnt about being guided by reliable and credible property professionals, and ‘spending the time to actually get the team together’.
“It’s like having your own business. If you’re running a business, no matter what scale it is, you cannot be running it on your own in order for it to be successful. You need to have your team there with you, and all of them doing their parts and doing them really well, in order to achieve the long-term goals of your business. And so the same thing applies with property investing,” he said.
Assembling your property team: How to find a trustworthy advisor
Azeem revealed the key principles to finding a trustworthy advisor.
“The key principles are they need to be credible, they need to be reliable, they need to have a level of intimacy, and that needs to be on the basis of the bottom of self orientation. These are the four things that you need to be looking out for when you’re having conversations with somebody. You’re not going to get this by looking at what’s being shared with you on social media and you’re not going to get a good sense of it on a website. You will get that sense when having your conversation, and it may not take one conversation, it may take multiple conversations, and that’s completely fine. Take your time because it’s important to ensure that it’s a right fit on both ends,” he said.
“It’s someone who ticks all those boxes, because if any one of those is missing, it does not prove to be conducive for a long-term successful relationship with that individual. So for example, if that advisor is really credible, really has their best intentions at heart for you and really cares, but they’re just actually not reliable as an individual and they don’t actually adhere to the time that you guys have scheduled to come together and have a conversation, or they tell you that they’re going to do something but they don’t, then it just completely blows it out of the water for you, and your trust for that person will naturally go down. Similarly, if it’s the other way around, if they have everything and they meet all the boxes but they’re not credible or they haven’t spent enough time in the business or in the industry, then again, your natural trust level is going to be low. So you need to find someone who’s going to tick all those boxes.
“Another thing I would mention as well is experience and professionalism – both need to be there. You can’t be dealing with a professional who’s not experienced, and you can’t have someone who’s got experience but they’re not going to be professional. In this space in particular, I see a lot of people claim to be strategists and advisors, but they are missing three fundamental things – they’re either not professional, they’re not experienced, or they actually don’t live by what it truly means to be an advisor and it’s all just smoke and mirrors.”
Assembling your property team: Justifying the costs of a property advisor
For Azeem, the additional costs of professional advice are worth the long-term benefits and success.
“I was having this conversation with someone the other day where they were asking, isn’t it actually costing more money to get the assistance of an independent advisor? And I said, absolutely it is, but ask yourself this question – what is the cost of not getting that advice? And they literally just stood there and they thought about it and said, yep, that makes a lot of sense,” he said.
“If say, hypothetically, an advisor is going to charge you a fee of $4,000 and you go on later to purchase the property for $500,000, if my math is correct that initial investment you made with your advisor is less than 1% of the property purchase transaction. That can be all the difference it makes to get you set up for success, which can then help propel you longer term, depending on what your longer term plans are, how many properties you’re planning to purchase, what else needs to happen in order for you to meet your goals and to execute that strategy. But that is actually going to help you to accelerate and fast track.”
Assembling your property team: Finding the right time to engage a buyer’s agent
There are five key things investors need to consider when deciding whether to engage with a buyer’s agent.
“First and foremost is your passion in real estate and investing, and there’s a number of questions that you need to ask yourself about your passion. The second is time – if you have time to put towards it. The third is your affordability – can you afford to do so? The fourth is your is your risk tolerance, and the fifth is the data mindset. Property is a finance and numbers game, and so you need to also be able to think and execute based on data and not purely on feeling. So those are the five factors that I would encourage anyone to think about,” he said.
“If the vast majority of answers to those key factors is yes, I do have all these things, then great, you should be able to go off and do it yourself, on the basis though that you get yourself educated as well. This is because if you have the passion, you have the time, and you have the low risk tolerance but you go blindly for the rest, then you’re still going to likely be unsuccessful. Alternatively, if you have determined from those five factors that actually you don’t have the ability to do this on your own, you’re not interested, you don’t have a passion for it but you know logically that investing in property is good for your future financial situation, then there’s your reasons for engaging in a buyer’s agent.”
Assembling your property team: How to find the right buyer’s agent
Azeem encouraged investors to take their time when researching and deciding on the right buyer’s agent.
“There are a number of factors that you need to consider, and the key amongst all of this is you need to take your time. If you’ve already decided that you do need a buyer’s agent, you need to spend the time to shop around and speak to a number of them to get a good idea. So the first thing is have a look at their tenure – how long have they actually been in business for and actually been operating as a buyer’s agent. Now the reality is, which goes for anything in life, you don’t need to be a high performer for X number of years in order to be doing well, but there is something that needs to be said about tenure. Through time, an active and ethical buyer’s agent will know how to navigate and go through different experiences and different situations, it just simply can’t be through one particular point in time. So I would say minimum, practically speaking, you want to be dealing with someone who’s got at least five years of experience or more,” he said.
“The second thing is, outside of the traditional legislative requirements to be a licensed agent, I think it’s important for them to be qualified as well as a PIPA member, which stands for Property Investment Professionals of Australia. So I think that added qualification is a good thing for a buyer’s agent to have done because it actually represents that this individual, or this agency, has taken the time to further qualify themselves beyond what the mandatory basic requirements are from a legislative perspective.”
Listen to the full interview here.
Want to Know How you can build wealth and optimise your property finance with the help of leading, qualified experts? Check us out and talk to the team, now.
