Financial Crash Proves the Catalyst for Investment Success.

Sometimes life delivers you a bad deal and there’s nothing else for it but to knuckle down and turn your luck around.

Our clients Marc and Sue were in their early fifties and heading into the latter years of their working lives when they found themselves in a position they’d never envisaged, thanks to the effects of the global financial crisis.

Before the dark clouds of economic change gathered, they had been looking forward to being in a strong position financially in retirement. The GFC changed all that, as they lost 40 per cent of their super.

Such a financial hit would be difficult to handle at any age, but especially when you’ve got a limited number of working years left to rebuild your nest egg. So, aged in their early fifties, Marc and Sue approached OpenCorp needing a solid plan to restore their savings.

They knew they needed to do something differently, and they knew property was a good investment, but didn’t know where to start.
OpenCorp helped to devise a strategy to acquire properties as quickly as possible within the borrowing capacity they had. So, using their own home as equity, they started off with one property in Melbourne and one in Brisbane in early 2014, then set about buying a property a year for the next 3 years.

Their eventual portfolio of five properties were spread across Melbourne and Brisbane – and they managed to hit the growth curve of both of those cities.

Their strategy was simple: hold the properties while they generate a passive income for them. One was sold to reduce the debt on the others, but this tactic worked well enough that they’ve both now retired, only 10 years after they started.

The timing was good based on where the properties were, capitalising on the strength of the markets in those two locations. So, Marc and Sue were getting exposure to different capital cities, while making sure they had built in buffers to protect them from interest rate rises.