Ten with Ty - Steve Palise

About The Guest(s):

• Tyron Hyde is the CEO of Washington Brown, a property depreciation expert.
• Steve Palise is the founder of Palise Property, a property investment company. He is also the author of two books on property investing.

Summary:
Tyron Hyde interviews Steve Palise, a property investor and author, in the first episode of his podcast series, "Ten with Ty." They discuss various topics related to property investing, including Steve's background, the benefits of investing in commercial property, and the importance of leveraging and time in building wealth.

Steve also shares his best and worst investment experiences and advises young investors. The conversation concludes with a discussion on the legacy Steve wants to leave and the definition of success.

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Key Takeaways:

• Steve's best investment was his first property, which provided a significant return and served as a springboard for his portfolio.
• His worst investment was a low-priced apartment that required cash payment, and missed out on leveraging opportunities.
• The most valuable investment advice Steve received is that no one becomes financially free by working for someone else.
• His ideal portfolio mix includes property, business ownership, and tangible shares.
• For a 20-year-old with $20,000, Steve advises investing in property or starting a business to gain experience and learn from mistakes.
• With $500,000 at 50 years old, he suggests investing in low-risk commercial property and focusing on a pay-down strategy.
• Steve believes success is being true to oneself and finding happiness in personal passions and experiences.
• Losing money can be a valuable learning experience, especially in the younger years, as long as lessons are learned and applied.
• In commercial property investing, incentivising tenants can increase the likelihood of them taking up lease options.

Quotes:

• "No one becomes financially free from working." - Steve Palise
• "You can achieve a lot in a short amount of time." - Steve Palise
• "Success means being true to yourself." - Steve Palise

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Tyron Hyde is the CEO of Washington Brown Quantity Surveyors

Chapters

• 4:03 Q1: What's your best investment?
• 5:20 Q2: What's your worst investment?
• 8:17 Q3: Most valuable investment advice?
• 9:22 Q4: What’s your ideal portfolio mix?
• 12:50 Q5: Investing $20K as a 20-year-old?
• 15:19 Q6: Investing $500K as a 50-year-old?
• 17:25 Q7: Advice to your 20-year-old self?
• 19:40 Q8: What legacy do you want to leave?
• 23:53 Q9: What does success look like to you?
• 25:27 Q10: Best strategy NOT to lose money?
• 26:43 Surprise Bonus Question

Transcript

Tyron Hyde | Hi, I'm Tyron Hyde, the CEO of Washington Brown, and welcome to my new podcast series called Ten with Ty.  If you want to learn what this podcast series is about, there's an introductory podcast you can download from all good streaming services. I'd like to dedicate this podcast to Sonny Dave, who was an editor who died during the making of this podcast. Rest in peace, Sonny Dave. I miss you.

Tyron Hyde | Welcome to the first episode of Ten with Ty. I'm very excited about this project that I'm launching into.

Tyron Hyde | And my special guest tonight, the first guest I have, it's Steve Palise from Palise Property. Steve's actually written two books.

Steve Palise | Hey, he's got copies of them.

Tyron Hyde | I do actually have them. Residential Property Investing explained and Commercial Property Investing explained. So what I like about Steve is he's not just a residential property buyer, he's also a commercial property buyer. And if you ask me, the commercial property buying space is a lot more technical. So it is that next level. Now, before we get into the Ten with Ty questions, Steve, just a little bit of background about yourself.

Tyron Hyde | I believe you're in London. You're about to have a baby, is that right?

Steve Palise | 28th. So it's coming pretty soon. What are we, April 5th at the moment? So what's that? Seven weeks away.

Tyron Hyde | How exciting. You're in London. You're buying properties all around Australia. What's that been? How's that been for business? How have you managed that, et cetera?

Steve Palise | Surprisingly, it's actually helped my business. So I actually came over here with the premise of just like, probably taking on less clients, but just enjoying myself a little bit. But I've actually opened up another window of chatting with people. So, like, normally when you do the nine to five and you play phone tag with the clients because they're busy at work and things like that, I'm now available from 2 pm till midnight.

Steve Palise | So anytime I offer people 2 pm till midnight, they actually choose five, six because they want to get at home, have their partner on the phone, or put the kids down or have a bit of a chat later. So it's all open up another window of chatting to people, which is really cool.

The other benefit is it's actually forced me to run my business like a business where in Sydney I was running around with a chicken with my head cut off. Now I actually have to trust my employees and have firm structures in place to kind of get it moving. So it's, weirdly enough, it's actually improved my business. We've grown, like, the last year. We've got ten staff now, so it's doing really well. And again, it's part of that, having good systems, processes and things like that.

Tyron Hyde | Well, I can certainly relate to that, Steve. As you know, my wife and I went to Bali and lived in Bali for a couple of years before COVID. And if you ask me, one of the true tests of running a business is if you can run it remotely.

When I was about 22, I was a seminar junkie. I saw a guy one time by the name of Brad Sugars, and he was on stage. He started that Action International coaching franchise business. He said something like, if you got to go to your job or your business, if you got to go to your business every day at six in the morning, get home at seven at night, you don't have a business, you got a job. You know it's a job, right?

Steve Palise | It's even worse, Tyron, because what happens is you actually can't have a holiday because you have to turn up. I remember when I first started, like, you go on holidays, but you stuff to check your phone, every two hours just to kind of keep the wheels moving. So, yeah, like you said, but you carry on.

Tyron Hyde | And so what I'm doing with this podcast is, because I've done pretty well over the years, and I'm hoping to leave something for my daughter, a book that I'm going to go around, ask the smartest people I know. These ten questions, the ten questions I'm going to ask you, Steve, are going to be timeless. They're not questions like, where would you buy now? They're a bit, hopefully made you think a bit more.

Tyron Hyde | Are you ready to play Ten with Ty Steve?

Steve Palise | Definitely. I love this concept as well. Like I mentioned, I told my partner and because of, obviously we're expecting the kid soon, straight away her brain was like, that is a brilliant idea. I'm looking forward to it. So more excited than me running a business. She was more excited over this.

Tyron Hyde | That's really sweet. Thank you for being encouraging. And thank you to your partner for being encouraging. I really appreciate it. Anyway. Time to play Ten with Ty. You ready? Okay, I've got a buzzer here I'm going to press.

Steve Palise | Okay.

Tyron Hyde | Question number one, Steve, what has been your best investment?

Steve Palise | All right, so my best one was my first property. So I bought a little house in Blacktown, which is just another suburb next to where I grew up in Wentworthville. Very low socioeconomic, but it was 230 grand. That was then. This is in 2012, so it was my first one. It was all I could afford. I was like, just out of university as an engineer and could just afford that. Got into the market. The reason why it was the best one for me was firstly, I got into the market quickly, so markets grow long-term. So that was the springboard and the seed that let me kind of grow my whole portfolio because it went up from 230 to about 300 grand in the first year and a half.

Steve Palise | And I was just like, bloody hell, that's like five years worth of working on the salary I'm on. And I've just made it from signing a piece of paper. So it was the big light bulb moment for me. It was just like, got in early, stuck to the fundamentals, had a good outcome. And then that's where I've based my whole portfolio on.

Tyron Hyde | And Steve, do you still have that property?

Steve Palise | I actually still got it. I probably should get rid of it, it's done its cycle. It's probably at the end of its cycle for now, but again, nostalgia one. I like that. I'll probably keep it forever if I'm honest. I just like the sentiment of that's where it all started.

Tyron Hyde | Question number two. What has been your worst investment?

Steve Palise | All right, so my worst investment was probably my best buy in quotation marks. So what I mean by that is, so I actually bought, I think it was number three in my portfolio. I bought an apartment in Cairns for $30,000.  One-bedroom apartment, $30,000, rented for $180 a week. So, on paper, I'm like, brilliant. I've just got myself, like $120 a week after you pay body corporate fees and stuff like that.

Steve Palise | So I've got myself $120 passive income per week from buying this. The reason why it was my worst buy was I had to pay cash for it. So, actually, at the time, I had, like a fairly new Subaru Liberty, which was my little kind of project car. And I remember finding that property. I looked at the car and went, sorry car, you got to go. I've got this thing that could actually pay car repayments instead, and I could transition later. So I bought that. But because the banks wouldn't lend to it, I had to use cash.

Steve Palise | But I also wasn't at the end of my serviceability with the lending, with banks. So I put about 35 grand into it because, like, stamp duty, legals, all that type of stuff. However, if I put that 35 grand into say, another Blacktown one, like my first one, and leveraged it to 200, 300 grand, now, that would be worth 600, 700,000, and I would have made a much bigger return. I'd have less, slightly less cash flow, but it's about leveraging for me. So it was the wrong property at the wrong time.

Steve Palise | I shouldn't have bought it. I didn't do badly for it. But I learned leverage is your friend. That's how you make the real money, is you play with someone else's money and you leverage the dollars. It was just headache after headache after headache.

However, I tell people I can put up with headaches if it's making you money. Like, I get a lot of investors, they want to get rid of a property because it's always cost me maintenance, blah, blah, blah. But they might have made $200,000 from the property, but they're whinging about the $2,000 maintenance each year. And that's a small issue. But again, it was just I should have leveraged. It was wrong property wrong time.

Tyron Hyde | I think there's something to be said for not thinking that, because the property is so low priced, that it's a good investment. One of my worst investments was a property I bought in the UK client came to me, and he was buying these properties for about 30,000 pounds and getting a pretty good return. Like, it was like 10% at least and I thought, I better get on this bandwagon. So I did. I used his buyer's agent up there, and it was hopeless. The property was in the middle of nowhere.

Why did I do that? I just thought on pen and paper, it looked good. But I think there's something to be said, where some people say, don't buy a property close to your home. Go afar. There's also something to be said about the fact that don't buy property where have no idea what the area is like. That was my lesson.

Steve Palise | I had a friend do the exact same thing but in America. He went and bought in Idaho. And like, same thing. 30,000 $40,000 houses a year. Good rent out of it, but to collect the rent, you have to send someone around with a gun.

Tyron Hyde | Ten with Ty is brought to you by Washington Brown, the property depreciation expert.

Tyron Hyde | Number three. What has been the most valuable investment advice you've ever received?

Steve Palise | All right, I like this question. Mine's probably 'no one becomes financially free from working'. What I mean by that is you can't work on a per-hour basis. You can't have to turn up at seven and work till seven. That's not financially free. So you're either going to need a business that actually works for you, like you don't work in the business or a salary job where you fund the investments that will make money while you sleep.
So that's mine. No one becomes financially free from working.

Tyron Hyde | You know, my brother-in-law said to me when I was younger, he said, Ty, you'll never become rich working for someone else. That makes sense to me. Yes, sure, you could become the CEO of the NAB or Macquarie Bank, but really, what are the odds?

Steve Palise | But again, you're still working for an hour. So you've still got to put that money to something. Yes, they could probably save a huge nest egg and then retire and live off that nest egg and whittle it down, but they're still going to make smart investing decisions.

Tyron Hyde | Now, I'm really curious about this question with you, because you've got the skill set of commercial and residential property. So what I want to know is, if you had your ideal portfolio mix of commercial property, residential shares, crypto, whatever you're into, what would be your kind of ideal portfolio mix Steve?

Steve Palise | Yeah, so I'm obviously a property lover, but that's in my wheelhouse. That's where I've read hundreds of books on it. Listened to all the podcasts. That's where my skill set is. It's not in those other ones like shares. Obviously, if I was an expert at shares, you can make a lot of money for that. But I obviously love property being the majority one kind of asset because it's tangible and it's a finite resource. So, yes, you can buy shares that have a certain product that's a finite resource, but they're not making any more land. We've all heard this before, so we've literally had wars over land for thousands of years. People want land. So if you can own a big portion of it, you're going to be all right long term.

Steve Palise | But to answer your question, my probably perfect mix would be, have property as a background. So, tangible necessity of life asset. The other one would be business, like we mentioned before, running the business and being able to effectively still make money while not being in the business. And then, I'm not a huge fan of shares like certain ones, yes, but most of the shares at the moment that do really well don't actually have a product. Like, they're like Spotify's and Amazon's and stuff like that, where overnight could be bought out, switched, changed, new technology, et cetera. So I'd focus it on the tangible type of shares.

And then the other one for me is probably owning a couple of other types of businesses. So get like, a dentist or some kind of necessity-type businesses and have a mix that way as well. So that way all my eggs aren't in my own business.

Tyron Hyde | Yeah, I tend to agree. Shares have a place, if you ask me, they have a place in my portfolio, sometimes I wish they didn't. But the one thing I believe in is investing in yourself. How much can you really change Commonwealth Bank's share price? By opening a new account? But you can certainly change a property, add value to it. So, yeah, I guess, invest in yourself would be one of my mottos.

Steve Palise | So that's one reason I like property as well. Once you bought it, unless you're doing a value add, you're not checking it every day to see it's alright, You'll check it every six months to check the value. But I remember I used to be an engineer. Some of the guys there would have, like, $20,000 in shares, and they'd be on it every day looking at the price.

Tyron Hyde | You can constantly access how much it's moved that day. I'd be up all night, I couldn't sleep. Sometimes I'd be watching, waiting. What did the Nasdaq do today? Or sitting there on COMMSEC, refreshing, refreshing. Like, what for?

Steve Palise | Go educate yourself. And that's probably one of the things I find with shares is, property people will educate themselves. They'll listen to thousands of podcasts, read books, read articles. Shares, they're not spending the same amount of hours. They kind of read an article here and there, and they kind of do it. Or they trust someone to invest the money for them, which is also unknown. I know I'm saying that effectively as a buyer's agent, but my general rule of real estate even, is never trust anyone in real estate. Like educate yourself. Pay for a service. If you want me to go find you a good property because you're time-poor or you don't have the education, things like that, that's fine. But you must understand it. Otherwise, you're just trusting someone else with your wealth.

Here's a quote for your daughter. No one cares about your financial future as much as yourself.

Tyron Hyde | I love that. That's very true. No one will care about your financial future as much as yourself. Very true. Steve. Taylor, if you're watching this in the future, write that down. It's a very true statement.

Tyron Hyde | Anyway, question number five, Steve. Let's say you're 20 years old, you've worked at Maccas for a couple of years, and you've saved 20 grand. How would you advise yourself to invest that $20,000 today?

Steve Palise | This is actually my favourite question because this obviously was me when I was 20 years old, and I actually had about 20-25 grand for that first Blacktown property that I bought. So, I'm going to answer this in two ways.

So, option one. Option one, if you can leverage that 20 grand and get a property that hits the fundamentals, so it's still got to have, like, affordability, population growth, good infrastructure, livability scores, et cetera, et cetera. Go into residential property, leverage up as much as can, 80, 90%. Get into something because you've got time on your side. You've got 45 years before official retirement. That is. So that's going to be fine long term.

Steve Palise |The other option, which is also something that I probably should have done as well, is don't buy a property. Go start a business. So, learn some life skills in terms of running a business, sales, making money. Like, I don't care what it is. Just go out and try to make one dollar. So put in some money and try to make $1 profit. Then once you've made $1 profit, try to make $10 profit, and et cetera, et cetera. Don't be afraid to fail. Like, if you lose $20,000, you're going to absorb that pretty quickly over the next five years with your salary increases and your job and things like that. So, for me, I regret not starting a business sooner and becoming financially literate with running a business.

Tyron Hyde | Yeah. Don't be afraid to fail. I like that. This is probably the only question I think I have a definitive answer for. I think at the end of this, when I've done about 20, and I'm probably planning on doing one a month, so it'll be a while. I'll probably get my wife to interview me, and I'm pretty sure I'm going to have the same answer for this one. So, probably the one that I'm going to give away.

So I reckon if I'd advise my daughter 20 grand, if she had 20 grand to go and travel to go overseas, go to Europe for a year and try and live on that $20,000 for one year without hassling your parents for money. I'm not to say so she doesn't hit me up for money.

Steve Palise | You'll learn what your passion is as well. You'll start to learn what things you like and don't like and see niches in markets. I did that, what you were saying during university. So university, every three month holiday at the end. So I did a five-year engineering degree. I went away, so I've done now 50-plus countries. And I did it just in  little three-month stint. So I could still work and do university, go away. Again, obviously regret doing the gap years and stuff like that, but you got to draw the line somewhere.

Tyron Hyde | All right, let's flip it. Let's say number six. Let's flip it. So let's say now you're 50 years old, both parents have sadly passed away, and they've left you an inheritance, say $500,000. How would you advise yourself to invest that money? Because you can't advise other people, it's not financial advice. But how would you advise yourself to invest that money as a 50-year-old, Steve?

Steve Palise | Yep, so I like this because it's juxtaposed to the 20-year-old, where you've got lots of time on your side, where you got the spare 25 years. You've ideally got, like, maybe 10-15 years before you want to retire. So, like you said, it's going to come down to your risk profile. Obviously, you've got less opportunity to make mistakes. If you make a mistake, there's less time to make it up. But if you're looking to build a passive income, I would leverage it into commercial property.

Steve Palise | But again, you got to assess the risk for the individual kind of client. But I'd put it into a really low risk, like commercial property. So, 500K. Well, you can leverage that into about a 1.5 mil commercial. So either buy like a multitenancy kind of commercial, like a whole block of warehouses or retail strip or something like that, or three little 600K ones, or two 750K ones, for instance. So you're diversifying the locations and assets. And then over the next 15 years, do a pay-down strategy. So pay them off, be completely debt-free when you're 65, and then you'll have about 100K passive income.

Steve Palise | So you can do a similar strategy with residential. However, it's a lot harder to pay off in 15 years, and you won't have anywhere near the same passive income. You'll probably have a third to half the passive income. So you can choose the strategy based on, kind of, your risk profile.

Tyron Hyde | I guess some people are scared of commercial property, though, are they? There's not as much information about it up there, is there?

Steve Palise  | There wasn't information on it. I wrote my book because there was zero books on the market. There were no commercial podcasts or articles. It was kind of left to the high-net-worth investors or business owners. But that's changed now. I've sold what 10,000 of my books. So people are getting well versed in commercial, which I think means there'll be less risks in it because people aren't going to have the war pulled over their eyes.

Tyron Hyde | All right, let's move on. Question number seven. Steve, let's say you find the DeLorean and you can go back in time and find your 20-year-old self, Steve. What would you tell yourself about investing that you're going to experience for the next 50 years? What would you tell yourself?

Steve Palise | All right, so I've sort of alluded to it before, but time and leverage. You've got time on your side, like, you've got lots of the years ahead. And when you're that age, it doesn't feel like you've got long. Like when you're 20, you're like, oh, no, I'm going to be 30 soon. When you're 30, you're like, I'm going to be 40 soon. And when you're 40, like, oh, jeez. Retirement is not that far away. You can achieve a lot. Like, in the last three, actually two and a half years, I wrote two books, started a business, moved overseas, hired ten staff.

Steve Palise | You can actually achieve a lot in a short amount of time, so you've actually got truckloads of time. But then the second part, which I mentioned, is leverage. If you can use someone else's money to magnify your returns, that's bloody powerful. That is where real wealth can kind of come from. However, like disclaimer, you can also magnify your losses, though. So again, like before, make sure you're well educated, and your investment vehicle of choice is a low-risk one as well.

Steve Palise | But one of the things I tell people for leverage and property is, here's another fun fact. In the last 30 years, every single residential property in each capital city has quadrupled in value. So, if you've got 30 years on your side, you can quadruple your money. And you're not putting in that whole money, though, because you leverage at 90%, 80%, you could, like, literally magnifying the thing by 16 to 32 times.

Tyron Hyde | That's a fun fact, alright. I've experienced where the reverse can happen in magnification or leverage, especially with shares, because with shares, you can borrow less as a ratio, but the share market can go down a lot quicker, and the banks can move a lot quicker. What do they call it? They can margin call you. And it's scary. And sometimes you make really good investments in that way. But when everyone's snowballing, you have to either put your money in or sell stocks. So that's something to be wary about with share investing and leverage if you ask me. And I've experienced it twice.

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Tyron Hyde | Number eight. What legacy do you want to leave your family or your community, Steve?

Steve Palise | Yeah, I find this question the hardest one to answer because there's no right answer. I can always answer which type of property is the best property or how to invest and things like that. So it's going to be person-dependent. So for me, to be honest, I just want to be known as a nice guy who had a crack and experienced life. For me, I enjoy travel, I enjoy giving back, I like socializing, all that type of stuff. So, I basically just want to give to charity, work in the community, mentor some aspiring business owners, educate people on property, because that's my wheelhouse.

Steve Palise | But then, obviously, I've got kids on the way. I just want to bring up kids with kind values. So that's the basis of my answer to the question. One of the things I always hear investors say, though, I think this was the premise of the question as well, is a lot of people say, I want to leave a financial legacy for my kids. And that's why a lot of my clients come to me, and they say, I want to buy five houses because I want to leave houses for my kids so they have a better life than I've had, et cetera, et cetera.

Steve Palise | But when people say that about kids, like, most people listening and watching to this Tyron, they're well above the poverty line. They're not in financial ruin. They've got a roof over their heads, they've got food. Their kids' norm is just going to be one level away. So then when they have kids, their next norm is going to be, I want to give them five houses, and they want to keep stepping up that way. Of course, you want a baseline of property, so you want, like, one or two properties where there's always a roof over your head, and you've got some financial stress taken away. But for me, it's relative. I don't like when people say, I'd want to leave a financial future for my kids because, again, it's all relative. Most people in Australia, we are a very wealthy country, and there's not many people below the poverty line.

Tyron Hyde | I think this will be one of the hardest ones I'm going to answer as well, because, as you said, there's no right wrong answer.

Steve Palise | On my discovery calls with clients, one of the kind of initial questions I asked them was, if I just gave you $5 million cash right now, what would you be doing? And then that strips back what their real kind of goal is or what they're trying to achieve. Because most of the time it's a simple answer. It's, I want to go travel the world or want to spend more time with my kids or want to work on a passion project or something like that.

Steve Palise | It's rarely, I'll go back to my law firm job and work 12 hours a day kind of thing. So it takes away that, and you can always scale it to the person. Some people it's a million dollars, some people, it's $10 million. And then that'll get the premise of what makes them happy, and then that'll guide me for if I have to build them a passive income. If they say, travel the world, cool. You can travel the world for 50 grand a year if you want. Let's aim for that.

Tyron Hyde | Yeah, I guess probably that, having the 1 million or 5 million goal, it's never-ending, is it? Like, where do you stop, and where do you start? I've got one of the richest men in Australia as a client, Harry Trickleboff. He's been a client now for over 25 years. He doesn't need the money. He's still buying sites that go for ten years, and he's 91, 90. Talk about the definition of optimism.

Steve Palise | The thing is, with financial freedom, at least you've got the choice of how much you want to do it. You can be like, cool, I want to grow this nest egg of a business. But still, like, I've worked from 15 countries in the last year. I can still do that because money is not the object.

Tyron Hyde | Surely, that's the goal, Steve isn't it? Surely, don't your clients look at you and go, well, if you can run your, what, 15 countries? You said, if you run your business like that, I want to work with you because you've got systems in place. I would have thought it'd be, you know, a benefit. These days, especially post-COVID. Who goes in to see a property buyer or a quantity surveyor these days?

Steve Palise | It's almost like I thought it was going to be the opposite. When I told people I was working from the UK, they were going to be like, I don't want to work with you. Most people they say, yes, that's exactly what I want. Make me have that life. And then they kind of feel trust. And also, do you really trust the guy who's 50 years old, who has $10 million in the bank, who's working nine till nine in the office in Sydney, slaving away, like, is he really that caring of your future wealth if he's still squirrelling away? So I get that, kind of, people sense that I'm not trying to 'sales' them.

Tyron Hyde | All right, up to number nine. I'm not sure if we answered it, but let's give it a go. What does success look like to you, Steve?

Steve Palise | Yeah, so okay. What does success look like for me? We sort of just answered it, but it's a good question. I'll go over what we just said. So, over the years, similar to you, as I earn more money, I thought that would bring more happiness. I thought, once I got three properties, I'd be happy, then once I got ten, I'd be happy. Then when I got 20, my happiness was actually going down every property that I accumulated because you kind of get that weird sinking feeling like, oh, I should be happier. I'm getting wealthier.

Steve Palise | But to be honest, I got more excited about my first three properties. That was the, yeah, I'm doing really well. Then, same thing, as I get wealthier and wealthier. Me making ten grand seemed like a huge deal, and I got really excited about that. Then it went to 100 grand. I'm like, okay, I got to make 100 grand per year, then get that. Now it's going by a factor of ten. Like, for me to be happy, I got to make a million dollars in a year. So, for the same enjoyment, I'm not getting any more kind of joy. And it's getting harder and harder to achieve.

Steve Palise | So for me, success just means being true to yourself. It can come down to happiness. Can find a passion that makes you happy. If your passion makes you money, cool. Even better. But what's an example? One of my happiest friends, he's actually a barber, so he works for six months, and then he goes and travels the world for six months. So I only get him for six months of the year. And he's been doing that for the last ten years.

Steve Palise | He is the happiest guy I know, and he's got zero investments. He's going to be stuffed at retirement, but he's going to have a bloody good 60 years.

Tyron Hyde | Okay, we're up to the final question, number ten. I guess this is what a bit of the crux of what this whole podcast is about, is leaving something for my daughter, a book, hopefully, that she can go back on, or your kids. And one of the big questions is how not to lose money? How don't you lose money? And, Warren Buffett is quoted as saying, rule number one, investing, never lose money. Rule number two: never forget rule number one. But what he didn't say was, how do you not lose? He didn't give us a playbook. So how do you not lose money, Steve?

Steve Palise | An unpopular opinion on this one, Tyron. I'm actually against the quote. I actually think, and we sort of alluded to at the start of the conversation. You should be able to lose money in the younger years. Try things, learn from them, but you have to learn from it. Like I said, start a business, put some money in the shares, put some money in property, try some things while you've got the bank of Mum and Dad to fall back on and you're kind of low risk. However, but like I said, to make money, and this is what I believe he's referring to with the quote is, focus on the long term. So as long as you're buying something with a finite resource and you're playing the long-term game, you might lose in the short term, but long term, you'll be all right. But I've got nothing wrong with learning from mistakes. That's how you get scale.

Tyron Hyde | Now, I love that you've turned that upside down. Now, there's something I didn't tell you, Steve. There's a bonus question. Question number eleven. I'm going to do this to each one's specialisation. So, with you, I've obviously picked commercial property, even though you're a residential and commercial buyer.

But there's something, whenever I want to buy a commercial property, there's one thing that's been worrying me or that I wanted to see if I could kind of circumnavigate or limit the downside risk of it. And that's with the option of the lease. So, say I was to buy a commercial property and it had a five plus five lease, right?

Tyron Hyde | For those of you don't know, that means you have a five-year beginning term and a five-year option after, and the option is up to the tenant to renew that option, not you, the landlord. So let's say you're in the first term of that lease, say it's only two years in. Is there any strategy or tactic that you can employ as a prospective buyer to see whether that tenant will actually uptake the option?

 Steve Palise | You've just got to incentivise the tenant. So this is where being a good property manager or having a good property manager will come into play. Most of the time, the tenant won't want to get kicked out of the property like that's their bread and butter and their livelihood. They want to be there long term, but they want to get a good deal. So if you, emotionally and financially need that security that they're going to take up an option, have a conversation with them. I've done that on many properties where I've asked them to take up another lease. So say, look, were you happy to sign another five-year lease, post this one, and you can offer them an incentive. Say, look, instead of giving you 5% rental increases, I'll give you 2% for a few years. So that way they see the benefit there.

Steve Palise | Funny enough, the options, even though they benefit the owner of the property, they're actually for the tenant. It's for this tenant to get some form of security. They're not going to be kicked out. So, like if you're, say, it's a retail one, it's a hairdresser. They've spent $100,000 fitting it out like a hairdresser. They don't want to get to the end of the five-year lease and then you'd be like, nah, stuff ya, you're out, I'm putting someone else in. And then they've got to uproot their business and move somewhere else. So most businesses want to stay there. So you just work with them, give and take, and then long term, you can both basically reciprocate their kind of rewards.

Tyron Hyde | Well, that brings us to the end of Ten with Ty, or is that Eleven with Ty? Anyway, thanks, Steve, so much for your wonderful answers to the questions. Good luck with the baby. It's a trip that you're about to go on, and it's a wonderful trip. So how can people reach out to you, Steve?

Steve Palise | There's not that many Steve Palises, which is good, so you can just type in Steve Palise. But paliseyproperty.com is my website. I'm on all the socials and stuff, but I'm very responsive. So if you send me a message, I'll get back to you within a day. Thanks for having me on. I appreciate looking forward to the finished product.

Tyron Hyde | And just a quick update on the baby situation. Stephen and Lisa welcomed a beautiful baby girl named Rhea into the world. Many congratulations to you all. Ten with Ty is brought to you by Washington Brown, the property depreciation expert.