Melbournes Adam Flynn builds $6m property portfolio from $15k

Adam Flynn was kicked out of school at 16 admitting he was “fairly destructive” but has now built a property empire worth millions.

The Melbourne man started working in real estate at 18 and by the age of 20, he was the top salesperson inside that business climbing up the company ladder from sales assistant to eventually being offered the opportunity to buy it just six years later.

He purchased his first property at just 21 back in 2001 with a 5 per cent deposit of $15,000, which “sparked” the start of his real estate journey that has led to his $6 million “dream” home.

Mr Flynn snapped up his first place for $215,000 but made a tidy profit of $900,000 from it.

“That was a property in Ferntree Gully in the outer eastern corridors of Melbourne and it was a little weatherboard house on 1100 sqm. I purchased that property and developed a further two units behind the existing house,” he told news.com.au.

“I spent $280,000 on construction costs as back then they weren’t near as high and it allowed me to build two units at the rear and from a resale point of view I had three properties.

“I sold the front house for about $255,000 and sold the rear unit for $600,000 and I sold the middle one for $550,000.”

Meanwhile, his career was also booming. At 24, he was offered a directorship after another real estate group tried to poach him and stayed in that role for seven years.

The 41-year-old then purchased a business that grew up to 700 per cent in the first year and expanded from one office to 14 in a three-year window.

The entrepreneur has also developed a system that is designed to take an agent with limited experience and have them writing approximately $1 million within 12 months,

Mr Flynn was also still hustling on the real estate development side too. After Ferntree Gully, there was a six unit site in the Melbourne suburb of Bayswater, which he forked out $500,000 for and then spent a whopping $1.2 million on construction.

“That house wasn’t liveable so that house had to be demolished, so the total outlay on that site was $1.7 million and the finished product was six units in total all valuing effective immediately at $450,000, so I was looking at $2.6 or 2.7 million all up, so roughly a $1 million return,” he said.

But his development strategy also saw him moving between different properties to live.

“At one stage my portfolio would have been 20 plus properties but … I was jumping around like a bit of madman, living in one of the units and moving out and doing another project,” he admitted.

It got to the point where he had moved around eight times in the space of 10 years, which the dad-of-two said was fine when he was younger but he got “over it”.

“My strategy went from owning a lot of properties and units to going into the prestige market,” he revealed.

“My philosophy was to hold on to an asset as capital growth. Historically it’s 10 per cent per annum, so every 10 years it tends to double.”

It saw him sell the majority of his properties to buy a quarter acre in Berwick for $500,000 to build a house for his Melbourne-based son and him to live in, as well as to further invest in his real estate business.

But everything changed when he came across a block of land on the Mornington Peninsula. It saw him sell the Berwick place that he had spent $1 million constructing for $2.58 million.

“I personally designed the property that I built in Berwick and when I designed that it was a bachelor pad to a certain degree and it wasn’t taking into consideration children and so it was a beautiful house but wasn’t really a family home,” he admitted.

Now, he’s currently building a five bedroom property with a tennis court and five-car garage on the Mornington Peninsula, which he owns outright

”When it’s complete, it should be worth around $6 million and my aim is for that to be my principal place of residence and be there long term, it’s the dream home,” he said.

“That $15,000 really sparked off all of this and it sparked off me building this monster on the Mornington Peninsula.”

Mr Flynn said he also owns a holiday home in Port Douglas in far north Queensland outright as well, so now basically only has two properties in his portfolio.

“It was good to have all these properties but there are mortgages on it. I just wanted to consolidate it all and have net free properties,” he explained.

“I’m a firm believer that if you have an asset that is worth a lot of money, for example the Mornington place which is worth $6 million, and there is 10 per cent growth per annum each year without me essentially touching the asset than that asset is going up $600,000 per annum without me doing anything.

“So the theory is once I have got that property set and don’t owe any money I am set for life.”

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For younger Aussies looking to get into the market he said they should do it as soon as possible and forget any talk of the property market’s bubble bursting.

“For all people waiting for the bubble to burst, I have never seen it burst in 23 years and I’ve seen the GFC and now the pandemic and other full on stuff and it’s never stopped,” he added.

“Just get involved as soon as you’ve got enough of a deposit whereby any lender will finance you and there is nothing wrong with borrowing money, especially at the moment with interest rates so low as capital growth takes care of everything.”

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