Property investment
Not by earning more. By getting the structure right early, buying in a sensible order, and never letting one property quietly block the next. Here's the whole method, explained from scratch — including the parts that can go wrong.
We come at this from an accounting and tax background, which is unusual in broking. It means we're thinking about deal three while we work on deal one.
The blockers
None of them are stupid. All three are the kind of thing you'd reasonably assume if nobody had ever walked you through it.
"I'd have to save another whole deposit."
Usually not. As your property rises in value and the loan comes down, the gap between the two becomes equity — and lenders will let you borrow against part of it. That borrowed amount becomes the deposit for the next place. You need enough equity and an income that supports both loans, but you rarely need to start saving from zero again.
"I'll just use my bank again. They know me."
They do, and that's part of the problem. Going back to the same lender often means both properties end up bundled together as one security. It feels tidy, but it means you can't sell, refinance or release equity from one without renegotiating everything. It also stacks all your borrowing capacity with a single lender's assessment rules.
"I'll buy again when I can comfortably afford it."
Sensible instinct, wrong measure. Your capacity to borrow shrinks with every loan you take on, and different lenders shrink it by wildly different amounts. Which lender you use first can decide whether property three is possible at all. It's less about waiting until it feels comfortable and more about doing things in the right order.
The sequence
This is a real order of operations, not a metaphor. Each step depends on the one before it, and skipping one is where portfolios come unstuck.
Step one
The first property does the heavy lifting. It needs to be something that grows, held on a loan structured to let you get at that growth later — which mostly means its own loan, with its own security, and an offset attached.
Step two
Value rises, the loan falls, equity opens up in between. Once a year we revalue, recalculate what's usable, and tell you plainly whether you're ready or whether it's another twelve months. Most of this stage is patience.
Step three
We set up a separate loan split against the first property to fund the next deposit — deliberately kept apart, so the two properties never become one tangled security. This is the step banks most often get wrong for you.
Step four
Chosen for how it assesses your existing debt, not for loyalty. Then the cycle restarts with two properties producing equity instead of one — which is the point at which this starts to compound rather than crawl.
A cycle typically runs three to five years, not months. Anyone promising faster is selling you risk.
Talk through your step one →Have a play
Put in what your property is worth, what you owe, and what the next one might cost. This works out the deposit side of the question in about ten seconds.
A rough guess is fine — the lender will value it properly later
Assumes a 20% deposit plus about 5% for stamp duty and fees
Not sure what your place is worth? Look at what similar homes on your street have actually sold for in the last six months, not what they're listed at. A lender's valuer will do roughly the same thing.
Equity you could use
$160,000
Looks possible
$5,000 spare
On deposit alone, the equity is there. The next question is whether a lender agrees your income can carry both loans.
What "usable equity" means: lenders will generally lend against up to 80% of what a property is worth. Take 80% of your value, subtract what you still owe, and what's left is the part you can actually get at.
Estimate only, and general information rather than credit advice. It ignores your income, existing debts, lender policy and your actual valuation. Having the equity is not the same as being approved.
Structure
Rate is the number everyone shops on. Structure is the thing that decides whether you can still move in five years. Here's what we set up differently, and why.
Worth saying plainly: Ankur's background is accounting and tax, which is why we spot structural and tax implications most brokers miss. But we're acting as your broker here, not your accountant or financial adviser — we'll flag the issues and work alongside your accountant, and the formal tax advice comes from them.
Pace
The fastest-growing portfolios and the ones that fall over are often the same portfolios, two years apart. These are the things we test before recommending another purchase.
Test one
Two months of vacancy, a rate rise, an unexpected repair and a quiet quarter at work — all at once. If that scenario breaks you, the purchase is too early regardless of what the equity says.
Test two
We'd want cash or available redraw sitting behind the portfolio after settlement, not a balance of zero and optimism. Buying with nothing in reserve is the single most common way this goes wrong.
Test three
Every loan uses up borrowing capacity. If this property would close the door on any future one, it needs to be worth being the last. Often the better answer is a smaller purchase, or waiting a year.
And the thing we'd want you to hear: property values can fall, rents can drop, and borrowing against your home puts your home in the picture if things go badly. None of that makes this a bad strategy — it makes it one that deserves a plan, a buffer and someone telling you the truth about the numbers.
SMSF
On 10 August 2026 the rules changed: a super fund can no longer borrow to buy residential property. SMSF lending had been one of the things we were best known for — a single $316,000 deal led to more than $5 million in SMSF lending through referrals alone — so here is exactly where things now stand.
What changed
From 10 August 2026 a self-managed super fund can no longer enter a new limited recourse borrowing arrangement to buy residential property. This is legislation, not lender policy, so there is no broker, lender or structure that works around it. A fund can still buy a residential property outright with its own cash — it just can't borrow to do it.
Anyone telling you otherwise is out of date.
What still works
Your fund can still borrow to buy business real property — broadly, premises used wholly and exclusively for running a business. For a lot of our clients that means the fund buying the workshop, clinic, warehouse or office their own company then leases back. It's a genuinely useful structure, and it survived the change untouched.
The "wholly and exclusively" test is strict.
If you already have one
Existing SMSF residential loans are protected, and you can still refinance them to another lender. If yours has a 7 in front of the rate, that's worth looking at now. Be careful with anything beyond a like-for-like refinance though — a top-up, an equity release or a change of security can be treated as a new arrangement, which would be caught by the ban.
Like-for-like refinance is safe. Extras may not be.
Our part and their part: we handle the lending — which lenders will write it, what they want to see, and how the borrowing is structured. Whether an SMSF purchase suits your fund at all is an investment and tax question for your accountant and SMSF adviser. We work with them, not around them.
Questions
No. Some people buy an investment property first and keep renting where they actually want to live — it's common enough to have a name, rentvesting. It works when the place you want to live is expensive and the places that make sense as investments are somewhere else. The trade-offs are real though, including first home buyer concessions you may give up, so it's worth modelling both.
It increases your total debt and ties your home into the plan, so yes — it's a real risk and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. It's also how the large majority of portfolios get built, because it's the only deposit most people will ever have access to.
The way to manage it is buffers, conservative assumptions about rent and growth, and not stretching to the absolute limit of what a lender will approve. What a lender will approve and what you should borrow are different numbers.
Once a year is enough for most people. We check what each property is worth now, how much equity has become usable, whether your rates are still competitive, and whether any fixed periods or interest-only terms are about to end. Interest-only expiries in particular tend to arrive as an unwelcome surprise if nobody is watching for them.
It's usually fixable, and it's a common reason people come to us. Untangling means refinancing one or both onto separate securities, sometimes with different lenders. There are costs and it takes a few weeks, but it restores your ability to move on one property without permission on all of them.
Constantly, and a fair share of our referrals come from them. As one buyer's agent put it: "I've worked with many mortgage brokers in my career, and Ankur is up there with the very best. He finds solutions to any problem." If you already have a team, we'll slot in alongside them. If you don't, we can point you to people we trust.
No, and be a bit careful with anyone who does while also arranging your loan. We're finance specialists — our part is what you can borrow, how it should be structured, and what it costs to hold. Property selection is a separate skill, and if you'd like help with it we can point you to buyer's agents who do it independently of us.
In your corner, from first call to fourth property
A new ABN, a decline from your bank, an SMSF loan that needs refinancing, or just a first property and no idea what comes next. We'll tell you what's actually possible, and you'll hear back within six hours.
