Edited 25 Aug 2017 17:26, 4 years ago, edited by don_dunstan

Yet another "get rich quick from real estate" story from News.com.au about a former McDonald's worker who has a property portfolio that is worth (so he says) $2 million with just six years of work.  Easy innit - just be a property millionaire and leave the rat race behind...?

In the first place, Eddie Dilleen's hard luck rags-to-riches story is not quite as it seems - in the first place he is actually spruiking his own brand of property investment advice as per this website here and this disclosure didn't appear once in the News Ltd article. In the second place, Eddie's hard luck story of starting out impoverished in Mt Druitt sounded a bit too familiar and you don't have to Google very far to find that he's been telling the same story to Domain, Smart Property Investment and Property Investor Story - so really there wasn't anything very new in the article except that the News Ltd reporter asked Eddie some pertinent questions that he seemed to struggle to answer:

He said his current rental yields were sitting at about 10 per cent, so even if interest rates went as high as 8 per cent, he would still be okay.
“I always always have landlord insurance in case any of my properties are ever vacant for longer periods of time to cover myself in that aspect too,” he said. “Although I’ve never had any vacant for more than a few days.”

Correct me if I'm wrong here but I'm pretty sure that landlord's insurance policies only cover you for tenant damage not for economic loss from a property being vacant. And I'm sorry but I really don't believe he has a 100% occupancy rate all the time - that is simply not the experience of people I know who are in the property game, not even in boom times can you always get 100% occupancy. And then there's this:

He currently earns a salary of $65,000 a year working in sales, and his debt is about $1.3 million. His properties bring in $130,000 a year in rental, and after expenses including mortgage payments, rates, insurance and maintenance, he nets about $20,000.
Mr Dilleen is not fazed by tightening lending environment or talks of a housing bubble. His goal is at least 50 investment properties and a passive income of at least $200,000 a year. “I definitely know finance will be hard,” he said. “There are always options. [There will be] more rules they put in place, you’ve got to find ways around.”

There's a lot of 'what-if's in that equation but in the event of it going pear-shaped it won't be his problem anyway - it will be the Big Four's issue and then ultimately the government's problem as the financial guarantor of the Big Four.