How To Build A MASSIVE Real Estate Portfolio From Scratch In 2025

Are you really overwhelmed with how much information there is out there and all you really want to do is get started? Well, in this video, I want to break down exactly what you need, the five essential steps or things that you need to look at before going ahead and buying your first investment property. If you're interested in what my thoughts are, then definitely keep watching. Hey guys, my name is Ravi and welcome back to Personal Finance with Ravi Sharma. Can you hear it? Smash that subscribe button because I talk about real estate, personal development, and all things financial freedom. Now, I bought my first property at the tender age of 21, 22. And I say that because it was around the time I was buying, but I was also settling and it was a delayed settlement. I purchased my first investment property in regional New South Wales and I've never looked back. There have been so many times I have been shit scared around what could possibly go wrong. Is someone going to burn down my place or are the tenants not even going to pay? But in order for me to go and share everything that I've learned over the last 10 or 11 years, I want to come back to the basics, which is, hey, I just want to get started. Now, I know you may watch my videos or you watch other people's videos and you're like, I just want to get to financial freedom. I want to have multiple properties. How do I get there? You have to start with the core in mind. The foundation is by far the most important. And the secret is that if you nail this, it's a lot easier to get to financial freedom within the next three years. I can show you that video exactly how to do it in the next three years. Comment down below saying, Ravi, in three years, and I'll make that video for you guys. All right, so you're starting from scratch. What do we do? Step one is the strategy. And what we want to look at in this strategy is you need to figure out what your North Star is or why are you even doing this? And that's the most important question. In order to figure this out, we can go through a couple of things that can prompt you into thinking why. First thing is passive income. A lot of people get into real estate because they watched American content saying you can get positive cash flow, you should buy real estate and continue doubling down. Even in Australia for a short period of time, we were able to just purchase a property and straight away from day one, you were positive cash flow because the interest rates were so low. Now, what you need to figure out is not the passive income today. You need to figure out what the passive income is that you desire to get to in the next 10, 15 and 20 years time. And the reason I say that is because real estate is a long game, but so is your career. And if you're signing up to working full time, you're doing that for at least 40 years. So if I can show you a strategy to do it in less than 15 years and retire and do whatever the F you like, I think you're signing up for that. Now, the next thing is you need to figure out by what age do you actually want to achieve this? Now, you may think you just want to get there as soon as possible, but are you willing to endure the sacrifices that it takes to get to that? And I'll give you an example. If you're someone that is 30 years old right now and you think I want to get to financial independence and retire early by the age of 40. Well, okay, you're trying to do something in 10 years time and yeah, it could be possible. But what are the sacrifices? And some of those sacrifices might be time and lifestyle. Let's focus on time for now. You might have to put extra time after work to work on projects and prove yourself to get a promotion. That promotion will lead to more income and that income allows you to borrow more money. Alternatively, you may decide to spend all your weekends or evenings to work a second or third job or even start on that side hustle. And the sacrifice you put there is time because it's going to take time for you to do those things. Now, you might be going, hey, I don't mind, I don't care about that. But when you have the friend's birthdays or you have the family gatherings that you can't attend because you're working, I'm telling you it's going to affect you. And that's why I say look at your time horizon and be really logical about this. Because as I said, you're signing up to 40 years to work anyway. So if I can just wipe off two years, you're still winning. And the next part that you're going to sacrifice is your lifestyle. There's going to be social events you can't attend because you're trying to save money. You may not go and prioritize your health because you can't pay for the gym membership because you're trying to save every single dollar. And maybe the food you eat is very basic. Now, I'm a basic bitch when it comes to food, so it's all right for me. But even for me, I like to have the occasional El Janas because I'm over the KFC. But let's be real, I can't get over KFC. What you need to figure out is what is your KFC? What is your North Star? And if you figure out that, hey, I'm not willing to put in the time and the sacrificing of the lifestyle, then just simply do one thing, which is change the age that you wish to get to these goals. The next thing is retirement. And that's the perfect segue is you need to figure out what age you want to actually retire. But more so, what are you going to do? If you're simply saying, well, I've retired. I've paid off all my debts. I make passive income, which is $80,000 a year. All of my expenses in my current stance is $50,000 a year. I want it life. Great, what are you going to do tomorrow morning? And that's what you're going to ask yourself is you need to figure out what it is that you are going to do on a daily basis because as humans, we will deteriorate if our mind is not stimulated. And I'm not saying stimulated by going out there and doing a job you hate. It's about finding what your passions are and really figuring it out. I think to a certain extent, this is why people who buy the lottery and then win are so sad all the time because they actually don't know what they're going to do tomorrow morning. And that's why I like the grind of taking time to retire, especially if you're investing into assets or you're going out there and building financial freedom for yourself because it allows you time to figure out what you like and what you don't like. And then eventually when you figure out what you love, you actually find retirement a lot earlier. And overall, you need to be asking yourself why you even want to do this. If you've just seen someone on social media saying I can do this, well, that's probably not a good idea. What you need to figure out is why does this suit you? And it might not be real estate, it might be stocks, it might be ETFs, it might be crypto, it might be Pokemon cards. It doesn't matter. What you need to figure out is why and the next part is going to be how we do it. So step two is your acquisition plan. You figured out the why, now it's the how. What you're figuring out is if I want to achieve a $2 million portfolio, how do I do it? Is it purchasing two properties? Is it purchasing four properties that are worth 500K each? And if it is, then where do you even find these things? Now, before you get onto finding the property and jumping onto realestate.com, what you need to figure out is what structure are you going to use to purchase these investment properties? Because people are focusing on, oh, I'm just getting the best deal and the best price. Great, but if you purchased it under personal, what ramifications does that have? Are you purchasing it under SMSF? Well, have you set up the SMSF before you're going out there and actually doing this? Or are you going to go ahead and purchase it under a trust? And what does that look like in terms of extra costs? Now, to go ahead and do all of these scenarios, you're going to need extra help. And that may be an accountant that's going to provide you the right tax advice, might be a mortgage broker to say, hey, based on your income, you're better off purchasing under this structure or you might be not able to buy at all. And so before you go out there and jump onto realestate.com, you need to figure out how you're actually going to execute this. And this is where I think a lot of people drop the ball because they see it's so easy to do because it looks easy on paper. I make some of these videos as well and I get comments saying it's not that easy. And I'm like, yeah, I get it. But that's because you don't have a system and you don't know what you don't know. So the next part to this is figuring out your finance. I'm not saying go out there and just listen to generic budgeting advice. I've said it as well myself, is don't spend more than you make. Like it's pretty simple, but that is not going to be enough for you to go and build financial freedom through real estate. In fact, you'll see so many content creators online. You'll see people share their stories and people you know yourself that may actually have it figured out when it comes to money, but they haven't retired. They don't have a multimillion dollar portfolio. They don't have multiple properties and it's because it's damn hard. And it's because they haven't done steps one, two and three really well. So with step three, I'm going to tell you the biggest hack here. It's to go and get a mortgage broker because if you can go out there and get a mortgage broker, you're going to leverage their skills, not just to find you the right deal, but also share with you some of the experience they have with people who've done it already. People that have gone out there and built the portfolio you want to go and build. So if you want to go ahead and actually listen to a mortgage broker that knows what they're doing, I'm going to leave a link in the description box below to the mortgage brokers that 90% of our clients are using right now and they specialize in investment properties. So you can go ahead, use the link and just book in a free call so you can discuss your options and what that looks like moving forward. It's going to be key to not just figure out your borrowing capacity now, but what does it look like after your first and second purchases? So many people just stop at the first one, not asking the right questions. If you go in there with a strategy, your mortgage broker can tweak it and go, okay, well, actually, do you just want to buy this one property or do you want multiple? Because if you want multiple, you need a different mindset and a different structure in order to be able to get there. And that's how people get stuck. Most people become a property investor by accident. They sit there and say, okay, well, my place that I once lived in and thought was going to be my forever home, is now too small. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to retain this property. I'm going to buy something else. And now I guess I'm an investor, right? That property is an investment property and it technically is, but is it the most optimized one? I would go on to argue, no. Step four is execution. We need to start buying these properties. The longer we spend outside of the market, we need to understand the market's moving with or without us. And in fact, the market does not care about your feelings and they definitely don't care about my feelings. If I feel like, hey, the market's actually looking a bit frothy, maybe it should calm down. Maybe there should be price corrections. Well, guess what? The market's going to do what the market wants to do. And traditionally, what we felt is usually the opposite of what the market is going to do. A lot of commentary at the moment is coming out and saying, well, no prices have gone up so quickly. Surely we need a correction. And if you look at the latest consumer confidence numbers from December, they're actually trickling down and you don't ever see a crash in any market when the confidence is at its lowest. What you want to be doing is when confidence is low, you want to be going out and acquiring as many assets as possible. But you need a plan and strategy. So that's where steps one and three kick in. Step four is maybe you figured all that stuff out. Maybe you figured it out yourself or you've got the help. Now you need to go out there and purchase property. Having purchased over a thousand properties for clients, I can tell you we've seen pretty much everything. Dodgy agents trying to pull something at the last minute, clients freaking out the night before settlement, or the shortfall of funds and settlement doesn't actually even happen. In amongst all that, you need a couple of key things that you need to ask yourself. What is your research process actually look like? And how fast can you move? Because this is very crucial. If you get into a market and say, okay, I'm going to research this one market or maybe there's two areas that I'm looking at and I'm going to spend the next three months researching, it's probably going to take you another three months before you actually purchase. So that's six months of the year that you're going to spend to go and research. Now that's pretty good because it took me about that time when I started about 10 or 11 years ago. But it's similar to going, well, if I can do the same thing faster and it's more optimized today, I'm winning against everyone else that's doing it the old school way. And that's how you have to operate in life in general. If you think there's a faster way to get somewhere, you probably need to figure it out. And if you figure it out in your business, you're probably going to make a shit load of money. If you figure it out at your job, you're probably going to get a promotion. Optimization is the key. So today, for instance, if I have the tools like my phone and I can search up things with AI compared to 11 years ago when the internet was only really on your laptops and people were spending most time on Facebook, I'm going to outperform that person 10 times over. And that's what you need to figure out is if you want to move at the speed that everyone else does, then take the average route, go down the path that everyone else takes. And that path could be six months on the good side, which is you looking at property, maybe you got your pre-approval and you're ready to go. And I can tell you this is the average because 66% of all pre-approvals lapse, which means for three months or six months, depending how long your pre-approval was, goes to absolute waste. People go and do the paperwork. They tell their broker, do all this work for me for free. I'll go out there and find property. They go and spend the next six months trying to find a property. Suddenly their pre-approval lapses and then they go to their mortgage broker and says, okay, well, I've got to do my paperwork again. But hey, my income's changed. Or hey, I bought a new car. Or hey, I've got a credit card. And now you can't borrow as much as you wanted to before. And more importantly, if you're looking at markets that has even the slightest bit of attention and the numbers make sense there, you can probably expect 10% worth of growth in that market over the period of 12 months. So if you're spending six months, not even in the market, you've missed out on 5% worth of gains. And to you, it may not sound like a lot, but to me, it sounds like a lot of money that you've left on the table. For example, on a 500K property, 5% growth is $25,000 worth of equity that should really be in your pocket. And that's why speed is so important when it comes to executing. You need to figure out what your budget looks like because you can't simply go out there and say, well, I'm gonna purchase anywhere I like. Have the budget in mind. And that's probably gonna be figured out when you're looking at your finances. And the next two is, how comfortable are you with the process? You can go out there and have an agent really screw you over. And I know there's a lot of agents that watch. So what's up? Most agents are ethical, but there are a few, and I'm not just saying sales agents, I'm saying buyers agents as well, that are really unethical. And you don't wanna get caught up in some of that stuff because it could mean hundreds of thousands of dollars that you end up losing. And I'm not exaggerating here. I've seen examples, I've seen it in the market, and I hear a lot of stories. Now, I will go to say that you will never be 100% confident behind the decisions you make, whether it's a property we present to a client or whether you're going out there and doing it yourself. However, if you know you have the right A-team around you and they're guiding you through the process, chances are your confidence levels are much higher, especially when something goes wrong, because it will, than for you to just deal with it yourself and you run around stressing out and be totally turned off the whole process. So I'm gonna say you need the A-team and I've mentioned this in videos before. Now, if you do happen to do it yourself, you're looking at just pure numbers and you might think at this point, I've got all the value I want, I can leave now. Great, there's probably a good time for you to leave because the gold is coming very soon. Now, if you go out there and do this yourself, you might actually look at 10 properties. When I say look at 10 properties, you might inquire, you might be actually assessing, analyzing the market, might be looking at your due diligence on about 10 properties and that would be a really good day. Now, you probably won't do it consistently and that's because life happens and I know this because I tried to do it myself before or you can outsource the process. Now, there are many buyers agents out there. I can only tell you about what we do and what we do at Search Property is we would look at anywhere between 180 and 200 properties a day and you might think that's a really large number. How do you guys actually do that? It's because we have repeatable systems and we have about nine full-time people in our sourcing team. So there's a lot of properties that they're going through day in, day out and I'm gonna say every hour, I get deals sent across to me that I have to approve. There's a lot of stuff and volume that happens and with volume, we get a lot of data and that data is not available to you just as a normal consumer or client that goes out there and looks online because a lot of that stuff is generic and it's also outdated. The market's moving so much faster today than it did even five years ago. So you need to have principles and processes that actually adapt to that today in life, in real time. And by going out and speaking to agents and going out and looking at all these properties and conducting due diligence and analysis on them, you're gonna find data moving a lot faster when you're looking at this volume. So just simply looking at numbers, that's an 18X amount of volume that we can do daily and that's not even accounting for the days that you miss out because then you're looking at a multiple of 20 to 25X what a normal person can do. Now, why this is important is because it's all about speed and action which is what I've mentioned before and that leads me to step five which is you need to start. You can read a bunch of books and if you're interested in reading, you can actually order my book right now. It's called Retire Filthy Rich with Real Estate. It's an Amazon bestseller across multiple categories like mortgages, personal finance and real estate investing. Definitely go ahead and order online. Now you can go ahead and read that book and read other books. You can watch videos like this one but it's very similar to going out and getting educated around how to get abs. But if you're not gonna go out there and do some sit-ups, you're probably not gonna get there. That's why in order to start, you need to be ready and to be ready, you need a pre-approval, you need the deposit ready, you need the research done and you need to go out there and buy with confidence. Now, once you've done that and I know I've just glossed over the part that you execute and it's very difficult if you do it yourself is once you've done that, you need to repeat that time and time again which means you might've fluked it and you got lucky on your first property or maybe even your second property but if you don't know what you've done to do it well, you can't repeat that and that's where people will get stuck at your second and third properties because I've seen it time and time again. So you need a system that you can repeat time and time again. That's why we have many clients that have started with us with one property and now at six, seven and eight properties and it's because you have a system and you go, cool, if this number goes up, this number goes in, this is what we extract and that's what we end up with. And you repeat that cycle to then go ahead and build a property portfolio. Now, is $2 million worth of real estate still possible? Well, you'll definitely enjoy this video which is a video breaking down how you start with 100K to make it into $5 million. I definitely urge you to go and watch that one. I hope you guys have enjoyed this video. If you have, smash that subscribe button, like the video and I'll catch you guys in the next one. Thanks guys.