Podcast episode

How Trent Went From $7,000 to a Multi-State Property Portfolio

24 July 2026With Arjun Paliwal & Jack Fouracre

About this episode

Most property investors imagine their biggest obstacle will be finding the right deal. Trent's story shows the bigger challenge is usually what happens after a setback wipes the slate clean.

At 42, Trent holds six properties worth roughly $5.5 million across Queensland, South Australia, Victoria and Western Australia, sitting at around 80% loan-to-value ratio. Four of those six were purchased in the last two to three years. But a decade ago, following a difficult divorce, he walked away from a previous portfolio with $7,000 to his name and an old Camry.

His journey raises a question many investors quietly wrestle with: what actually separates people who rebuild and scale from those who stall out after a setback? For Trent, the answer wasn't a smarter spreadsheet. It was a shift from buying properties one at a time to working backwards from a long-term exit strategy, paired with the mental resilience to keep going through cash flow pressure, rising rates and family sacrifice.

What Happened

Trent's investing story starts at home in Toowoomba, where his parents began acquiring a small number of investment properties during his childhood. That early exposure to property as a wealth-building tool was cut short when his parents divorced and the assets were split, a loss that, with the benefit of hindsight, would have been worth many multiples of its original value today.

Trent bought his first property with his father at 23, a two-bedroom unit that he held for seven years and sold for a modest gain. The experience taught him a lesson that shaped everything after it: unit stock in oversupplied markets can sit flat for years, while houses in the same period can double. A second, more painful setback came a decade later, when his own marriage ended, assets were divided, and he restarted with almost nothing.

What follows in the conversation is less a property story and more a case study in decision-making under pressure. Trent rebuilt through a combination of disciplined saving, a better mortgage broker, and eventually a buyer's agency relationship that introduced him to portfolio strategy rather than single-property transactions. The episode traces how those pieces combined to produce four purchases in roughly two years, spanning markets he says he would never have considered on his own, including Mount Gambier and Perth.

Key Takeaways

Why the First Property Rarely Performs the Way Investors Expect

Trent's first purchase, a two-bedroom unit in a block of four, was "perfectly sound" but delivered almost no growth over seven years. The underlying issue wasn't the property itself but the supply dynamics of the unit market at the time. When apartment stock is abundant and easy to build, individual units struggle to see the scarcity-driven price growth that houses in tightly held streets can achieve. It's a reminder that property type and local supply conditions matter as much as the decision to invest at all.

The Real Cost of a Portfolio Reset

Divorce, redundancy and asset splits aren't just emotional events; they're financial ones with long tails. Trent's timeline shows a five-year gap between losing his previous portfolio and buying his next home. That gap represents lost growth that can never be recovered, even if the rebuild itself goes well. It's a case for structuring ownership, insurance and legal protections in ways that reduce this kind of downside risk where possible.

Strategy Means Working Backwards From an Exit, Not Chasing the Next Deal

The distinction Trent draws between his earlier buyer's agent experiences and his current one is specific: previous providers offered "game plans" showing projected growth lines, but no framework for exit timing, loan-to-value targets, or when to consider a shift into commercial property. A genuine strategy starts with the end goal and works backwards, setting decision points years in advance rather than evaluating each purchase in isolation.

Diversification Across States Reduces Reliance on Any Single Market

Trent's portfolio spans Queensland, South Australia, Victoria and Western Australia. He's candid that he would never have independently chosen markets like Mount Gambier or Perth, both of which have performed strongly. The lesson isn't that any one of these markets is inherently superior, but that limiting a portfolio to a single city or state ties outcomes to that market's specific cycle, supply pipeline and economic drivers.

Cash Flow Pressure Is the Understated Cost of Scaling Quickly

Four purchases in two to three years came with real trade-offs: both Trent and his wife took on additional work, and lifestyle spending was deliberately deferred. This is a detail often missing from portfolio growth stories. Scaling a portfolio isn't just a function of borrowing capacity; it requires ongoing cash flow management and a willingness to delay other financial goals.

Mental Resilience and Support Networks Affect Long-Term Outcomes as Much as Market Selection

Trent points to his wife's role in helping him process worst-case scenarios and stay grounded through rate rises, inflation and global uncertainty. The broader point applies beyond any one relationship: sustained investing, particularly through volatile periods, depends on having a stable environment and process for managing stress, not just picking the right assets.

Choosing a Broker and Buyer's Agent Is a Strategic Decision, Not an Administrative One

Trent's early lending experience with his existing bank left him frustrated by rigid criteria. Switching to a broker who understood his circumstances more thoroughly became, in his words, a turning point. The same pattern repeated with buyer's agents: the value wasn't in sourcing a property, but in the depth of market research, transparency, and long-term planning behind each purchase.

Portfolio Snapshot

Total properties: 6
Approximate portfolio value: $5.5 million
Loan-to-value ratio: approximately 80%
Properties purchased in the last 2-3 years: 4 of 6
States represented: Queensland, South Australia, Victoria, Western Australia

Actionable Lessons for Investors

Understand the supply dynamics of a property type before buying, not just the suburb; oversupplied unit markets can underperform for years even in growth cities.
Build a strategy that defines exit points, target loan-to-value ratios, and future decision triggers (such as a shift into commercial property), rather than relying on growth projections alone.
Treat diversification across states as a way to reduce dependence on any single market cycle, rather than a purely defensive move.
Plan for the cash flow demands of scaling, including the possibility of additional income sources, before committing to rapid portfolio growth.
Choose brokers and buyer's agents based on the depth of their long-term planning process, not just their ability to help settle a purchase.

Trent's portfolio didn't grow in a straight line, and that's arguably the more useful part of his story. A costly first purchase, a difficult divorce, and a five-year rebuild all preceded the four properties he's added in the past two to three years. What changed wasn't luck or timing alone, but a shift toward a defined strategy, a wider geographic footprint, and a clearer sense of the trade-offs involved in scaling deliberately.

For investors weighing their own next step, the takeaway isn't that setbacks are avoidable. It's that a portfolio built around a long-term plan, rather than a series of individual purchases, tends to hold up better when circumstances change.

If you'd like help building a long-term property strategy designed around your goals, book a discovery call with InvestorKit.

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Transcript

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This transcript was generated automatically and may contain small errors.

Taking action is one part, financial capability is another part, but the winners of these, you know, long-term investments are those who hold throughout and acquire more. And to do that, there requires a certain level of mental stability, mental resilience, enjoyment along the way, and if you don't have someone on your journey that can bring that, because it's very hard for anyone to be a complete person on their own. And so when someone like does that, that's a game changer. Nerd alert! Property nerds, the home for data-driven property investors, where we uncover Australia's hot and cold markets, latest headlines and trends.

We're back for another investor story episode on the Property Nerds podcast, and this time I'm joined by one of our valued clients at InvestorKit, Trent. Now, Trent joins us with a property portfolio that we've helped him expand. We've helped him purchase four properties in the journey together, getting diversity across South Australia, Queensland, Victoria, and all part of the key InvestorKit formula of diversity, growth, and working to a portfolio plan. But not only are we going to get into some of the purchases, but we're going to get into Trent's why, how Trent got started, and what he's done to be able to scale the portfolio, and what he's doing ahead with the portfolio. So if you want to get into the mind of a property investor to understand how they got to this, where they're getting to, and how our team at InvestorKit comes in amongst us all, well, let's jump into today's podcast, hear directly from Trent as we jump into another investor story.

Trent, welcome to the show, my friend. Thanks, Arjun. Good to be here. Mate, I feel like before we get into the portfolio, the property, or InvestorKit, I want to give the listeners and watchers a little bit about your journey to getting here. And building a multi-property portfolio is special, but when it comes to people, they have different inspirations in life.

They have family, they have events in life, they have dining table chats growing up, they have inspiration from other friends. When it comes to investing in property and making this a vehicle or making this a part of your journey, where did this journey and inspiration start for you? Was it at home? Where did it kick off? Yeah, definitely originally, I think it started at home.

My parents, so I grew up in Toowoomba, so you know Toowoomba, it's a great market actually. Doubled over the last few years. There you go, and then some. Regional town in Queensland, about an hour and a half west of Brisbane. And I was one of four, so very working class family.

Mum's a nurse, she was a midwife actually, and dad was a public servant, so just a generic pen pusher for the government or whatever. And I wouldn't say we had much money growing up. As I said, one of four kids, we had one bathroom. They did own their own house, but probably when I was in my late single digits, like eight, nine, they started to get a bit of equity in the house they'd owned for 10 or whatever years, and they started to acquire a couple of additional properties. My dad had always been property mad.

Really, my dad has been talking to me about property probably since I was old enough to really get kind of money and stuff. Always, I don't think he's the best property investor, but also was definitely very much a source of inspiration. And it's kind of a double-edged question because it was very much my parents and my dad in particular, but also unfortunately my parents when I was 14, 13, 14, got divorced. And so another motivator was actually, again, I was by that stage at a no illusions, we didn't have a lot of money growing up. And so that was the first time I'd ever seen our family acquire wealth, two, three, four properties there.

And then the marriage breakdown happened for a number of reasons. And unfortunately, all the assets went, everything got carved up. And that would have been in probably like 2000. And we all know what the market's been doing for the last 25, 30 years. We'd all be millionaires by now.

I wouldn't be working. So kind of like the reflective, not even kidding, like those properties are worth God knows like 10, 20 times what they were back then. So the motivator and inspiration was also seeing their marriage, unfortunately, and all the wealth that went with it and how their lives ended up in retirement, very different. Well, you know, I often find just in life in general, it's sad, but the truth is pain causes more change or pain causes more inspiration than hopes and dreams do. And so you see the same when we speak with investors who've had that bad decision in their portfolio, like the Melbourne apartment from 2014.

And so we see the same thing. The inspiration doesn't come from what's possible because the world or humans in general are wired with skepticism. And so then what ends up happening is it usually happens from, oh, I did that and I don't want to do that again. So on your journey to learning about InvestorKit, was there some mistakes that you'd made prior? Was there some things that led you here to go similarly?

It's with pain. I want to stop that and I want to fix it. Or was it all successes and you just wanted to amplify it? No, I mentioned before, actually, while you're asking another question, I've definitely made some mistakes myself. Like I told you about my dad, how he was my big source of inspiration.

I bought my first property with him when I was 23 or 24 or something around there. It was a two bedroom unit in Toowoomba, at which time, you know, I didn't know anything. I was just a kid excited to buy a property. I never thought I'd own a house. I never thought I'd make more than 50 grand growing up.

So I went shopping with dad. We looked at maybe 10 units, bought a two bedroom unit, block of four. It was fine, perfectly sound, but it didn't make any money. I held that thing for like seven years. I think it made like 20 grand.

I think the purchase was maybe like 201. I think I sold it for like 230, seven years later, which, you know, now in the fullness of time, when I think about those lost years in the market and where even a small deposit could have gone with a decent house. What year was that? That was 2009, roughly. 2009, right.

So, I mean, I don't mean to rub salt into the wounds, but I mean, if we take a house in Sydney for three, 400K, just that hundred more, or a house in Melbourne for two to 300 or 350 to 400 in the outskirts, would have doubled in the five to six years to follow. I mean, Toowoomba doubled, you know, five to six, 10 years to follow. But the point is two bedroom units didn't double, houses doubled. That's right. You know, units, you had to be very lucky at that time with a two bedroom unit to make any money.

Because again, like I know now, if I had gone and looked, I would have seen this enormous glut of vacant, ready to buy two bedroom apartments. And because there's so much supply, you know, it just, that never changed. And I don't think it's changed since. Yeah. Now let's fast forward because we'll unpack the middle a little bit, but let's take the back end of that starting journey to the today on the portfolio.

How many properties are we at now overall? And give us a bit of a feel for the portfolio, the overall value and how many properties we're at at the moment. Yeah. I just had a look actually preparing for this and you're not going to believe this. This makes me sound truly irresponsible.

It's actually the first time I've ever properly run the numbers on like valuations within the last few months, total debt. We just settled on one on Friday. Just gone. Thank you. Through you guys, of course.

Wouldn't have it any other way. And yeah, that was a prompt to look at everything. And yeah, six properties, one, the PPR was purchased before I came on board with you guys. That was in 2019. We purchased our first investment property together.

I say we, this is my wife and I, probably two or three years later than that, it was a new build. So I got finished being built in 2023, I believe. And I was ready to go again. That one actually, I know a lot of people talk about new builds and to be honest with you, there's a reason I came to you guys at that point instead of going back to this company. And look, it's done really, it did really, really well.

Our PPR has never stopped doing well in Brisbane, you know, since we just got in at a really good time. But again, because of the, there were other property kind of losses leading up to this. I, yeah, so when I say our PPR, we essentially start again from, so I started again from nothing a few years before that. So there's other properties that are all gone for a couple of years. So the second investment property was a new build in Perth.

And then from there, I heard you on a podcast and I had some question marks over the company I'd used. It did perform well. By the time we'd signed on to a finished building, it already made like 20, 25%. But that's Perth. That's Perth in 2022.

You could throw a dart. 2022, 23. Yeah, you were doing a podcast on your sort of version, not the 2014, five years. So a big five-year full stop and like split in my investing. So that's how long it took to go from getting split up to getting my next PPR, five years of rebuilding.

And it was a lot of saving as well. So a lot of sacrifice along the way. And I might be missing the question, but I did want to say one of the things like I never lost inspiration partially because in that five years, I saw what the market was like. Again, 2019 was when we bought that PPR and I could already see where we were in Brisbane. Like I think we bought it for like 700 or something.

You couldn't have timed it better. You could just see it creeping up, right? I was thinking, okay, it's getting like, you know, half a percent a month. That's pretty good. Not bad.

You know, in another year, we'll be able to buy. And then obviously COVID happened. And remember half a percent a month in Brisbane in 2019. If you go back a few years prior, it was 2% a year. Yeah, that's right.

So people don't recognize the subtle shift is actually a big shift. I'd probably almost take 6% year on year right now for the rest of my life for every property. You can set your watch to that. No, sorry. So I guess in terms of like the process from there, I might have missed the second part of the question though.

No, I think it was more the challenges while scaling because I think when I unpack your journey now, if I just isolate the last two years, the last two years are interest rates rapidly go up, they come down, then they go up again. Wars globally, inflation up, down, up again, budget releases. But then the last two years has been the two or three years now where you've gone the hardest. And so whilst that's a successful outcome, if you flip it, what are the challenges over the last couple of years as you've gone this hard? Yeah, so definitely cash flow is one of the main challenges.

I mentioned sort of I'd changed a bit into a saver when I moved out. Well, my wife is very much a spender. And I think that's a good thing because she sort of taught me how to enjoy life again a little bit after the first wife. And kind of like, I met her overseas for a start. So the fact that I met her on an overseas trip probably should have been a bit of a sign of things to come.

But she sort of taught me to try to find that balance. And that's still hard. It's still hard to do all the things that I want to do with like, I'd love to build a new house for my family. I've got the shittiest house in our portfolio by far. And that's because I bought the worst house in the best street.

It's cliche or whatever. But my plans are very much around investing, not giving myself that comfort. So that's a challenge and a sacrifice. I'd love to spend that money, but I want to keep investing. Cash flow month to month, year to year is an ongoing thing.

Both my wife and I took second jobs in the last couple of years. Now I've just finished mine up because it just wasn't worth the time. I was losing a family. But yeah, that, because we started a family as well, five years, six years ago now. Thank you.

We got two. And that as well was just really challenging. Juggling a career, a family, a partner, a house portfolio, in what has been a tough market really in a lot of ways over the last five, 10 years. So if you think about that, there's two parts though that are on what I call the other side. Number one part is that there were sacrifices and you seeing this future that's brighter as a result of making those sacrifices.

What is it that kept you going through noting that future? And how did you make that reminder as you made sacrifices? Because these are the stories people often don't hear about. They don't hear about the sacrifices. They don't hear about the challenges, the time that gets lost in scaling to something greater when it comes to building wealth for the family that you're working for.

So what were some of the motivators internally for you to go even amongst all these challenges? Yeah, definitely. I mean, my wife and future family, right? Like, you know, I sort of had felt in some ways that I'd had like kind of my life I had to restart it again. And so having such a wonderful wife and well, she wasn't my wife then, partner, was a real source of inspiration, right?

Like when things got tough, I always knew, we always knew we wanted to get married. We knew when we met, you know, overseas, we wanted to get married more or less. You know, we talked about it funnily within the first like, you know, from long distance within the first six months because it seemed like the only practical way for one of us to get a visa to go and marry the other one, you know, it was like, oh, sorry, be with the other one was exploring a marriage visa. So my wife and or partner then was a huge source of inspiration because we would always, you know, talk about where we want our kids to grow up, how we want them to grow up, you know, where we want them to go to school. What does that look like?

So we always together, even though we're different in a lot of ways, we had a common vision of our family's future and we're living it now and it's a lot harder than the vision we had, but it's twice as rewarding. Yeah, that's, you can't underestimate that vision, what it does to, and look, I'm speaking from a man's perspective, I'm standing here, but there's something within you that when you have this greater vision for your family and when you have this greater vision for what you can do for them, and it's weird because it's like there's stronger motivations to do something for someone else at times than it is to do something for yourself. Yes. It's crazy how much that awakens certain people where like to do something for someone else outpaces the desire to do something for yourself. And, you know, on that, there's the other side of it too, which is the investing part that many people don't talk about.

Whilst it does hurt cash flow in partial parts of the journey, there is another part that I want to know if this journey with InvestorKit and investing in general has helped you with, which is how has this property investing journey shifted your lifestyle? What I mean by that is like, has it given you certain mental release, certain financial freedoms because you can map out what's possible, where it's going? Has it given you a different way you make decisions personally in life? What has it given you on flexibility, financial freedom, independence that maybe wasn't there before committing to a journey like that? It's definitely got me more excited about the future, like prospects of retirement, you know?

Like I would say, to be honest, for me, it feels like we're still right at the start. Like I know we've been at this together for six years now, but really, you know, I'm 42 this year. I feel like I've got another 20 good years ahead of me of like working or saving or do whatever I want to do. Gosh, sorry, I forgot your question. No, no, no.

That's all good, man. It was more just like, how has property investing unlocked the aspects of life of freedom, flexibility and that? I mean, I would say I'm thinking more about future freedom than current freedom. Like I'm not someone still who likes to buy themselves things. So I'm not, yeah, I sort of gave you the portfolio position there before.

We've done a lot of the heavy lifting fast, but to me, like it's very much a delayed gratification play rather than, you know, my lifestyle hasn't measurably improved in any way. In fact, I'm probably busier. You know, I've got kids, I manage the portfolio. I'm always listening to property podcasts and reading books on property and like looking at the market. So if anything, it's given me less time, but you know, you don't have to be a genius to see where the lines are going, you know, in 10 years time from now and, you know, short of a catastrophe.

So that's really inspirational about future lifestyle choices for me and my family. You know, that's why I do it, you know, and that's changed from when I started. I didn't really have a plan these days. Like I'm trying to like build this pathway for myself and my family to walk down together forever, basically, and enjoy it as much as possible, both the family and any success that comes with it. You know, on that enjoyment part, earlier on you brought up about how your wife also plays such a supportive role in reminding those key things.

You know, I had this very moment like over the weekend, maybe just been, all right, so it's just a few days back. And my brain, the way it works sometimes is that to get comfort with, and this is something like people don't know this about me as much, like from the outside looking in, they go, oh, Arjun, you're a risk taker, you're doing this. But the way I get comfortable with risks is such a strange way. I doomsday my whole life. Oh, yeah, me too.

It's like I pretend everything is like completely gone, going under, everything's horrible. I think of assets, I think of economy, I think of global thoughts, I think of my business, I think of everything just going bad. Family? Family, I mean, like, no, I don't think of too bad in those scenarios.

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