The Bank Collapse That Shaped How I Invest.

In a recent podcast conversation, I was asked where my passion for property actually started. It didn't start with a spreadsheet or a strategy. It started with a loss. In the early 1990s recession, my parents sold a property, put the proceeds into a bank, and a few weeks later that bank closed. They lost the funds. As a child watching that happen, I started asking questions that never really stopped.

The Recession That Shaped Everything

I grew up wondering why that happened to my family. That question sent me down a genuine rabbit hole, years of reading, studying credit history, banking, and property, trying to understand the mechanism behind it all. I always found a lot of direction in people much older than me, people who had lived through and shaped what the property market was and where it had been.

I didn't come into property from school. I went into retail first, managing people in a service-based industry, and property was a calling underneath all of that for a long time. What I bring to clients today is a combination of the lessons from that era, nearly 20 years of my own investing, and the mentors around me. It's why patience and a long-term view aren't just talking points for us. They're the reason the business exists at all.

Why We Don't Bet on Organic Growth Alone

Over the last decade we've watched the major growth cycles move around the country. Sydney and Melbourne boomed from 2010 to 2016, before the Royal Commission paused a lot of that. More recently, Western Australia, South Australia, and Queensland have taken over as the growth engines, largely driven by the cost of land rather than the dwelling itself.

As an investor, you can't keep betting purely on organic market growth. We look at managing cash flow and manufactured growth, meaning how you actually hold and improve a property through any market, rather than relying on the market to simply lift the value for you.

Navigating Tasmania's Own Correction

Our own property market here in Tasmania tapped out around March 2022. Over the following three years, we ebbed and flowed somewhere between a 12% and 15% decline, depending on the data set you read. Clients had to sit through a period where the rest of Australia was booming and Tasmania wasn't, and that's uncomfortable to watch from the outside.

But the lesson we've carried over 20 years of investing is simple: buy for the long term, have a genuine property strategy, and manage your finances and cash flow so you can see through those periods. We were still generating good returns for clients through that stretch via manufactured growth opportunities, and clients who held through the last two years have done extraordinarily well in terms of equity gain in the last six months specifically.

Nobody has a genuine crystal ball on where the market goes from here, inflation has been stubborn and interest rates and government incentives for first home buyers are still creating some frothy conditions in parts of the country. What we do believe is that the flight to regional and remote locations we've seen over the last five years is likely to shift back toward CBD-centric locations close to jobs and transport, in cities like Sydney, Melbourne, and Hobart.

The Biggest Mistake We See: Time

If I had to name the single most common mistake in this industry, it's time, or more specifically, not giving a decision enough of it. Investing doesn't need to happen tomorrow. You need the time to understand the right property strategy for you, the time to build the right plan, and the time to execute on the right property once you've found it.

The best deals I've seen for clients over the years have come through patience. You don't have to beat the market. You don't have to be first. It's about making sure it's the right property for you, and that takes time. The mistake I see constantly is people rushing into a knee-jerk decision driven by FOMO, which is easy to spot once you've been in this industry long enough.

The One Thing You Can't Fix

The other thing I wish more people understood is that opportunity in property really comes down to three things: property type, location, and zoning. Location does the heavy lifting. If you get that right, you can fix almost everything else about a property over time. Location is the one piece of the puzzle you genuinely cannot fix after the fact.

A surprising number of missed opportunities in this industry come from agents, ourselves included at times, simply not recognising what a location means for the long-term life of a property. That's exactly where we try to add value for clients, spotting what a listing agent may have missed.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is "manufactured growth" in property investing?

It refers to growth you create deliberately, through renovation, better management, or strategic improvements, rather than growth that simply comes from a rising market. It matters most during periods like Tasmania's 2022 to 2025 correction, when organic market growth wasn't available.

How much did the Tasmanian property market fall after March 2022?

Based on the data available to us, the market softened somewhere between 12% and 15% over the following three years, depending on the data set used, even while other parts of Australia continued to grow.

What's the most common mistake David sees investors make?

Rushing. Making a decision without giving it enough time, often driven by FOMO. The best outcomes tend to come from patience: taking the time to build the right strategy and waiting for the right property rather than the first available one.