The A Team Property Group CEO, Sasha Hopkins, talks about success through property investment, his journey from property consultant to investor and mentor and how his group is helping everyday investors build wealth through property investment.Jessica Amir: Thanks for tuning in to the Finance News Network. My name is Jessica Amir, and today I'm with The A Team Property Group CEO, Sasha Hopkins. Sasha, welcome to the network.
Sasha Hopkins: Thank you, Jess. Thanks for having me.
Jessica Amir: First up Sasha, can you give us an introduction to the company and can you also tell us about your background? I understand you purchased 12 properties by the age of 26, so tell us about that journey as well.
Sasha Hopkins: I moved out of home really early at 17. Was forced to realise or learn exactly how the real-world works, and in the real world, I knew very quickly that I needed to have money to survive. I tried the share market, lost a bit of money in the GFC, like a lot of people. And then by the next logical step was property investment. Once I started to learn a little bit more, how it worked, I got the property bug, I went to events, I paid for education, for assistance, and then I really, really started to find my flow in purchasing properties between the age of 21 to 26.
Yeah, it was a very fast journey. I was fortunate enough to start working in the industry as well, as a property investment mentor, and that also really helped accelerate my learning and my ability to build my own portfolio, and then come age 26, I was in a position where I could replace my income so to speak, and not necessarily have to keep working and that's exactly what I did, and that's when I started The A Team.
At The A Team Property Group, we educate every day Australians on how to build a successful property portfolio through a range of different mentoring training facilities, et cetera, and then once the client feels ready to invest and educated enough, we'll then actually hold their hand to accompany them with the right strategy based on where they're at right now, where it is they're wanting to get to. Then, we'll guide them every single step of the way, through the finance process, firstly finding the property, finance, settlement, construction, even find them tenants and then continue to work with them in reviewing their situation in their portfolio to make sure that they can keep working towards their goals at a rate that they're comfortable with.
Jessica Amir: So, tell us about your education and training services.
Sasha Hopkins: First and foremost, we put out a huge amount of free training via Facebook, Instagram, pretty much all social media channels. That's really to firstly gauge awareness, but help people understand and get inspired that you don't have to be ultra-high net worth or a rocket scientist to be able to succeed in property investment. You just simply need to learn the fundamentals and have people that have done it themselves to be able to guide you.
The mentoring side of the business is really having routine check-ins at particular time intervals, or timeline success, whether it might be achieving finance, settling on a property, getting tenants. There's different checkpoints as such, that will review a client's situation. Check in to see has anything changed in their life? For good or for bad. Do we need to adjust towards the goals that they're now looking to achieve? Have they had a baby? Are they down to one income? Do we need to amend or adjust the strategy that we would have set with them upfront?
Once we get really clear on their goals and understand potentially what may have been some of the challenges in the past, we can then actually create what we call a life change plan. A life change plan is really something that we created, took about 11 months. It's our in-house type of projection which allows us to pinpoint where the client is at right now financially, what is the end goal in terms of an annual income, and then through the in-house three step formula that I've created that our clients follow, we can actually show by purchasing this type of property in year one, year two, year three, this type and so on, and then investing into our development projects, we can actually show them a road map on how they can achieve that annual income goal that they're looking to achieve over a 10 or 15 year period.
Jessica Amir: Earlier Sasha, you talked about the three-step process. Just share what that involves.
Sasha Hopkins: The first phase is targeting high growth properties. Once you have three high growth properties, that will typically allow you to generate enough of a deposit to be able to then buy a property each year. Let's say $500,000 times three is $1.5 million of property value. If that grows at a rate of seven per cent, it's approximately $100,000 of equity each year.
We can then target the next phase which is phase two being higher yielding properties. So, higher yielding properties will typically be 6 per cent rental return or above. That will also allow us to increase our borrowing capacity a little bit, to then be able to continue to grow our portfolio. At this point in time, once you've completed phase two, you might have three in phase one, two in phase two, and then from there, that basically makes up our foundational buy and hold property portfolio.
At that point in time, the portfolio might be worth close to $3 million and then we take any equity, because that portfolio's now self-sustainable, paying for itself, we can then take the equity and invest it into property development projects. That's when we can actually start creating an income stream if invested through the right entity or structure. Of course, seek advice from an accountant. However, that is how we can then start creating a supplementary income stream to either boost up our income, or actually replace our income.
Jessica Amir: Wonderful. Sasha, if you wouldn't mind sharing some of your clients' success stories with us.
Sasha Hopkins: I thought I'd share you a client success story from each of those three phases. Phase one being high growth, we had multiple clients purchase 2016 time, where they purchased between $450 to $500,000 in Melbourne, and at this point in time, or even say 18 months later, the majority of those clients had equity growth anywhere between $100 to $200,000. These may have been first time investors, they may have been single males or females, young families. The beauty about it is they may not have had any idea how to invest, but they've gone and achieved pretty amazing results in a very short period of time. Main thing is that they knew how, because we helped them.
The next phase, phase two being high yielding properties, we've had properties that have been able to generate up to a 7 per cent rental return, and that can mean $300 cash positive in your pocket every single month. Sometimes even more. Pretty amazing things that are not only paying for themselves, but also creating an additional income stream. And then being phase three, property development, look, there's countless success stories of nearly all of our clients achieving between 40-50 per cent returns on their money [in 14-24 months], which as you can imagine, that's going to go a pretty far way towards either growing your wealth or increasing your income.
Jessica Amir: Well, thank you so much for the introduction. It's been amazing. But before we let you go, how do people get involved?
Sasha Hopkins: First things first, you can go to our website, TheATeamPropertyGroup.com.au, or you can send us a message through our Facebook page, or of course, get in touch with your adviser and see if property investment would be right for you. No matter what, though, property investment does require commitment.
Jessica Amir: Absolutely. Sasha Hopkins, thank you so much.
Sasha Hopkins: Thanks.
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