Careful, strategic acquisition, from the first numbers to the keys, in a market full of noise and conflicted incentives.

Start where you actually are

Which of these sounds like you?

Five different situations, five different starting points. Pick the closest one.

The land you buy and the land you can build on are two different numbers.

An 800m² corner block advertised as “dual occ potential”. Take off the front and rear setbacks, both side setbacks, the sewer easement nobody mentioned and the overland flow path, and what is left to build on is 308m². The deal was never there.

None of that is hidden. All of it is public, and all of it is checkable before you commit. It is the first thing I run on any block.

Watch it come off the block, step by step →

The Two-Title Test

Two homes on one block is the build. Two titles is where the value is made, or lost.

Most of the money in this strategy is not in the second dwelling. It is in whether that second dwelling can one day stand on its own title, and whether creating that title is worth what it costs.

Illustrative of method, not advice about any particular property. Infrastructure charges, credit mechanisms and minimum lot sizes differ by council and are confirmed against the applicable planning scheme and adopted charges resolution for the block in front of us.

What the finished asset does

Two incomes on one purchase. It is one of the more reliable ways to build equity, and it rewards whoever does the arithmetic first.

This is often called manufactured equity: rather than waiting for the market to hand you a gain, you create one by putting more usable housing on land you already own. It is a well-established strategy, and substantial portfolios have been built on it. Whether it works on your block comes down to numbers that can be checked before you commit a dollar.

General information about how the strategy works, not a projection or a recommendation about any particular property. Valuation outcomes, rental income and lending assessments vary and none of them are within my control. Borrowing capacity, loan structure and equity release are matters for your licensed broker or credit adviser; tax treatment is a matter for your accountant. Feasibility modelling is prepared on figures those professionals confirm in writing, and the source and date are cited in your report.

You don’t have to decide about me on the strength of a website.

Handing someone north of $15,000 on the basis of how well they write is a bad idea, and you shouldn’t do it. So start somewhere small enough that being wrong about me costs you very little, and judge the work rather than the pitch.

From the first conversation to the first rent, plan on twelve to eighteen months. Each stage is invoiced only when you engage it, you stop whenever you choose, and you keep everything produced to that point. Timeframes and payment terms in full →

Research & modelling

Every lot that reaches you has earned its place on evidence.

I work in the opposite direction to a listing: market data first, then the street, then the lot. Far more lots are assessed than ever reach you, and the whole life of the asset is modelled over twenty years rather than reduced to a single yield figure. The model stays yours, and you are still using it in year fifteen.

The full research and modelling process, data source by data source →

A coordinator rather than another layer of sales.

Your broker, accountant, solicitor, surveyor and builder each see one piece of the deal. I hold the whole picture. That means briefing each of them on what matters, integrating their written confirmations into one feasibility, and catching what falls through the gaps between them. You get a single point of contact instead of a relay, advice from the right qualified source, and one person holding it all together.

You deal with me directly, rather than an account manager, a junior or a portal. The person who takes your first call is the person standing on your lot six weeks later, and the one reading every line your builder sends after that. A new-build acquisition isn’t a shortlist. It’s a hundred decisions that compound on each other, most of them made months before there’s anything to stand in and inspect.

The tools and the data sharpen the picture. They don’t make the decisions, and they don’t drive to the lot. I do. I walk the block, read the street, sit across from the builder, and speak to the people who know what is moving in that market. A contour surveyContour surveyA map of the land’s slope, showing how much it rises and falls across the block. It decides how much earth has to be moved and how deep the footings go, which is where site costs escalate. tells you the fall. Standing on the lot tells you what that fall is going to cost you to build on, which is the number that actually changes the deal.

The other half of this job is people, and that part no platform reaches. Getting a straight answer out of a duty planner, holding a hard line with a builder without souring the relationship you still need for eight more months, knowing when a quote is being managed rather than explained. I spent my working life before this leading teams across twenty-three stores, most of them people twice my age, where the whole job was reading a room and having the conversation nobody wanted to have. That is the part of this work that isn’t in a database, and it is the part I was doing long before I was doing it here.

One licensed, independent specialist. I have built this myself, with my own money on the line, and I weigh your decision with the same scrutiny I bring to my own. So you can make the biggest decision of your year from another state, and sleep at night.

Who this is for.

This work only goes this deep because the focus is this narrow, which does mean it fits some investors and not others. If you’re not one of them, you’ll hear it from me in the first conversation, before you’ve spent a cent — and that includes telling you the whole strategy is wrong for you.

Who it suits, and who it doesn’t →

The work, published, where you can check it.

Before you look at what this costs, here is what you would be weighing it against. Not claims about the work — the work itself, in public, where anyone can hold it up to the light.

What it costs, in plain figures, before you have to ask.

It is a lot of money, so here it all is before you have to ask. You know the whole cost before I know the property, and no figure moves afterwards — not with the purchase price, not with how long the search takes. Every stage ends the same way, with every number re-run in front of you and your call to proceed or stop.

New-build dual occupancyDual occupancyTwo separate self-contained homes on one block, and a defined use in its own right under Queensland planning law. Not the same as a granny flat or a dual-key home, which stay on one title and can never be sold separately — a house with a secondary dwelling is classified as a single dwelling house, not a dual occupancy. Whether a dual occupancy can ever be split into two titles depends entirely on how it is designed, approved and surveyed from the start. is the specialty. The discipline underneath it reads any land and any build, anywhere in Queensland, so the engagement can start wherever your position happens to be.

Not an argument that I am always cheaper. On the full acquisition service at $20,000, a 3% fee passes mine around $670,000 and a 2% fee at $1 million. Below those figures a percentage agent costs you less, and I would rather you knew that from me than worked it out later. But cost is the wrong comparison. A percentage fee rises every time you commit more of your own capital, which means the person advising you on price is paid more when you pay more. Mine is priced on the work. Negotiate $80,000 off the land and I earn exactly the same — and you keep the $80,000.