Five years ago, Sidd Sureshbabu bought an investment apartment in Sydney. It barely budged. Today, he owns four properties across three states worth $4 million, with $1.4 million in equity gained. He still works full-time.
The difference? He stopped trying to do it alone.
For the Meadowbank couple -Mr Sureshbabu, 38, an executive manager at a large tech company, and his wife Liz Siqueira, 37, a GP- their dream of retiring early while building passive income seemed out of reach five years ago.
“We were sort of dabbling in it by ourselves without too much knowledge,” Mr Sureshbabu said. “At the time, you think you’re making a sound investment purchase, but if you look at the performance compared to some of these other ones we’ve more recently bought, it didn’t perform as well.”
What changed in 2021 was enlisting buyer’s agent InvestorKit. Their first purchase was a $610,000 property in Ferny Hills, Brisbane, a suburb Mr Sureshbabu had never heard of. Five years later, it’s worth $1.285 million.
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“Time is now people’s most valuable asset,” said Arjun Paliwal, CEO and Head of Research at InvestorKit.
“Three-quarters of our clients are too busy and have analysis paralysis. This is a half-million to million-dollar decision.”
Mr Paliwal said most aspiring investors fall into three traps: doing nothing because the task feels impossible, buying cheap units in suburbs they know that typically underperform, or endlessly saving thinking they need more money than they actually do.
All three scenarios mean years of opportunity lost.
InvestorKit’s formula includes data-driven research, thinking beyond backyard borders, and targeting primed growth markets before they boom.
“We reverse-engineered a portfolio plan,” Mr Paliwal said. “We don’t need 10 properties in 10 years like the slogans say. For this case, it was four.”
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The couple now own properties across Queensland, South Australia and Victoria, purchased between $550,000 and $950,000. None in their home city of Sydney.
“We would look at the potential yield over time -the growth yield- and the rental yield. The price had to fit in our price point to ensure we weren’t overextending ourselves, and we weren’t paying for a massive mortgage we couldn’t afford,” Mr Sureshbabu said.
That Ferny Hills success gave them confidence to buy three more times with the strategy of geographical diversification.
“There’s been little to no years over the last 40 years where the Australian property market has performed similarly at the same time,” Mr Paliwal said. While Sydney stagnated, their interstate properties soared.
But Mr Paliwal warned against chasing rental returns over capital growth.
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“You don’t need cash flow to build wealth. You need cash flow when it’s time to retire,” he said.
“1 per cent on an $850,000 purchase is really only $150 a week. $150 of extra income does not change your life nor does it change your borrowing capacity as much as people think,”
For those wanting to start, Mr Paliwal recommends a purchase budget of $650,000 or more to access houses in good growth areas, with $80,000 to $100,000 in savings for a 5 per cent deposit plus costs.
The couple’s goal is to generate enough passive income to retire early and leverage their equity to buy a home in Sydney.
“Sydney is home for us. Ideally, we want to leverage the performance of these properties through the equity to buy our own place in Sydney and to reach that early retirement.”
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Originally published as Sydney couple reveal how they built a $4 million property portfolio
