Man, 36, crazy property list on $70k wage

In their spare time, Justin Zhu, 36, and his wife Ning, 35, have been investing in property – on top of their day jobs. Now the pair have six homes to their name.

The Sydney couple have been quietly chipping away at their investment strategy for the past decade, buying their first property when they were in their mid-20s.

“I came from an immigrant background – my parents came over from China in 1991,” Mr Zhu told news.com.au.

“[They were] blue collar workers – Dad worked in a factory and Mum worked in childcare. From an early age I learned the importance of saving.”

Mr Zhu credits part of the couple’s success to luck, after their first property ended up being in a suddenly widely sought after area that rapidly gentrified.

The equity from this property then allowed them to leapfrog to the next – and the next.

The couple also followed a stringent saving scheme and chose look outside Sydney to invest, which also made their current position possible.

The strategy has been so successful, in fact, that Mr Zhu gave up his psychology profession and now works in the property industry as a mortgage broker.

In 2013, at the age of 26, he and Ning (who was then his girlfriend) snapped up their first property in Sydney in the inner southern suburb of Zetland.

At the time, Mr Zhu was an intern at a psychology clinic, earning less than $70,000 a year, and it had never occurred to him he could be a homeowner.

However one of his colleagues bought a home, which piqued his interest and prompted him to start researching, including buying books on the matter.

He and his wife, who worked in IT, scrounged together $140,000, which covered the deposit, legal costs and stamp duty, and scored a $550,000 one-bedroom apartment.

“I had a secret double life, investing property on the side,” he said.

“I got taught to save really well,” Mr Zhu said. “A lot of my friends ended up going to schoolies after Year 12, but I worked at a cafe straight after school. The pay wasn’t great; I had to get up 3am.”

However, this ultimately contributed to his ability to be a multi-property homeowner before the age of 40.

A year after their Zetland buy, the couple dipped their toes back into the property market.

This time they looked further afield and bought interstate, nabbing an old three-bedroom house in Logan, south of Brisbane, for $250,000.

“Nothing in Sydney made sense – it would have been negatively geared,” Mr Zhu said.

The entire deposit was paid through the equity of the previous property.

Logan was such a success that the couple ended up buying two more properties in the regional hub.

In 2017, the pair moved out of their Zetland apartment to become ‘rentvestors’ – a practice which sees the property owners move into a cheaper area while getting renters into their original home.

Two years later, in 2019, Mr and Ms Zhu had a child together, which slowed down their property journey. But with the arrival of the Covid-19 pandemic, they soon realised they had hit a gold mine.

“From 2020 to 2022 [the real estate market] went bonkers. All our properties doubled [in value],” Mr Zhu said.

The couple waited for Ms Zhu to return to work after maternity leave and then they nabbed two properties in Perth at the beginning of last year.

“We ended up buying our fifth and sixth properties, within six months of each other. They’ve both done really well.”

During the boom, they also bought another property in Marsfield, northwest Sydney, as their forever home. A few months earlier, they sold the Zetland property, which helped fund their new purchase.

“Property investing as a strategy is relatively simple. It’s not a get-rich-quick scheme – we’ve done this over 10 years. It allows people to grow their wealth consistently over time,” Mr Zhu said.

“It’s a long-term game.”

All up, they have six properties.

The total dollar figure of loans they have taken out to accrue their vast portfolio was $3.3 million. “We’ve paid off quite a bit,” Mr Zhu said.

Due to appreciation, their investments have risen to $5.2 million in net worth.

Despite interest rates rising for the 10th consecutive months this week, plunging many mortgage holders across the country into dire financial straits, Mr Zhu says he is in a good financial position.

Although five out of his six properties are on variable interest rates, he says the rent more than covers the mortgage. He also makes interest-only repayments which reduces the amount he has to pay.

“As a landlord, I don’t move my rent to market rate,” he added. “As long as the tenant has been paying rent on time, it’s not fair to jack it up all the way.”

Mr Zhu has since started his own brokerage business called GG Loans.