Gordon, founder of buyers agency Australian Property Scout, told Yahoo Finance he disagreed with Aussies who slammed him and other “selfish” property investors for adding to Australia’s rental crisis. The 34-year-old former labourer said he stood behind the video and explained that it was filmed during his company's end-of-year Christmas party.
“I’m super proud of all of them. There are 25-year-old kids there with five property portfolios, that’s super impressive," he said.
“We’ve got kids in their 20s and 30s and people in their 50s and 60s and they’re all trying to create their own financial futures.
“I think this is the biggest thing that a lot of people don’t understand. When you look at the pension, the pension is life support, right? It is the absolute minimum that the government has to pay you.”
Gordon said he was “pleasantly surprised’ by the amount of people who supported the video and had “gotten behind it”.
“When I hear people saying it’s distasteful, I’m like we worked our butts off and we’re really good at what we do,” he said.
“If that’s the way we want to party, once a year and all get-together and have a celebration of what we’ve done as a business and how many clients we’ve helped with their portfolios, realistically, I think it’s the sign that you’re using the right people in the essence of we’re successful at what we do.”
Property investors helping ‘solve’ rental problem
Gordon said he thinks the rental crisis has been exacerbated by investors exiting the market in COVID and noted many sold at a loss.
“When you throw on top of it, we had this massive building shortage during that time where a lot of older tradies brought forward retirement plans and stopped working,” he said.
“We had a massive shortage of materials … So what we saw was this massive price increase for houses and also labour increases as well because we didn't have anyone effectively in the country or new migrants coming into the country, adding to the labour force.
“When you then throw on the fact that in the tail end of COVID, the government then introduced the most aggressive immigration policy we’ve ever seen, that is where the rental crisis has actually come from.
Gordon said landlords were providing a "solution" to the rental crisis by bringing properties to the market. ·Source: Supplied
Gordon said property investors were helping to “solve that problem”, particularly by bringing in new builds to market and renovating older homes that were dilapidated and run down.
“We are 100 per cent providing that solution,” he said.
Property manager Skye Taylor agreed that landlords “should not be demonised for owning multiple properties” given the majority of rentals were owned by private landlords.
“Without these investors, the rental crisis would be significantly worse as there would be even less homes to rent,” she told Yahoo Finance.
While many of the investors in the boat party video owned multiple properties, Taylor pointed out that a significant portion only owned one and there wasn’t this “huge number of landlords playing monopoly” as the video may suggest.
Australian Taxation Office data found about 70 per cent of investors own one property, with less than 1 per cent having six or more.
“I was effectively a labourer on minimum wage and just working my butt off and I was trying to make it in semi-professional soccer as well,” he told Yahoo Finance.
Gordon said he saved his money and wanted to “create something” with his wealth and his hard work. It was his dad who suggested that he use his savings to buy a house.
“I was 19 when I bought my first property making $39,000 a year. It took me three years to save that first deposit and then I just really got bitten by the bug,” he said.
“I renovated it, I figured out how to release equity and then go buy another one. And then effectively kept working strategies and trialling different things and really kept building the portfolio from there.”
Gordon said he could have retired "years ago" but loved the job. ·Source: Instagram/Supplied
Gordon said he replaced his income when he was 27 and was able to leave his labouring job. After being “burnt” by a buyer’s agent, he decided to become a buyer’s agent himself and has continued to grow his business.
Gordon said his 108 property portfolio was worth in excess of $60 million, with a gross income of over $2 million.
“In my own journey I was very driven by trying to get out of the rat race. I was a very low income earner, I don’t have a trade, I don’t have a Year 12 or HSC or anything like that, I never went to university,” he said.
“I knew that hard work and being smart with my money was going to be what would get me out of it.”
Gordon shared that he could have retired “years ago” but he loved what he did and didn’t actually see it as work.
Gordon said many property investors were just “average Australian income earners and just trying to create something better for themselves like I was able to do in my journey”.
