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Advice On Property Investment In Australia - Meet Margaret Lomas

February 9th, 2008

My guest today is Margaret Lomas. Margaret Lomas is a well known, highly successful, Property Investment Guru in Australia. She currently owns more than 34 properties across Australia. She runs a very successful financial advisory company called ‘Destiny Financial Solutions‘. This company assists clients to achieve prosperity using direct property investments as the vehicle. In 2006 Margaret Lomas won the ‘NSW Telstra Business Woman Of The Year‘ award. Now for all my readers outside of Australia, this is a most coveted award - it is the award given to the best business women in the country.Margaret Lomas’s business journey began from very humble beginnings. She and her husband built their property wealth from nothing. When they started they had five kids and zero wealth. But through commonsense, dedication, hard work and a strong will to be successful, they have now built a multi million dollar company and have accumulated a multi million dollar personal property portfolio. Margaret has also written five best selling property books. I have read three of her books. I highly recommend her books to anyone who is interested in property investment. I have great admiration for this business woman. She has inspired me in more ways than one. Despite all her successes she still continues to be an extremely down to earth person - and that in itself is a huge inspiration.
Read and be inspired…..

You started Destiny Financial Solutions. You worked hard on it and it was doing well. And then you took it to the next level – the level which won you Telstra Business Awards. A lot of small business owners want to take their business to the next higher level but it’s not always easy. What do you think helped you to take your business to the next level? Was it a change in the way of your thinking or employing right people…What was it?

I have always been a person who does not take a great deal of risk. This is probably because, when you have 5 children you have such a great responsibility to feed and clothe them that they must come first. Making the decision to expand a business requires you to be quite selfish in many ways, even if you feel you have pure motives (like we did, believing we wanted to help more people).For me the decision to expand was about the need to reach a greater audience with important messages about property investing. In fact, our local branch here on the central Coast had a good reputation and we were quite prosperous without having to do a proportionate amount of work. It wasn’t enough for me or my husband though – we wanted the country at large to be able to get independent advice of good quality from people who had real integrity. Because of our disliking of debt, we funded the expansion from (meagre) company profits, and it was many, many years before we even got close to the incomes we were earning prior to our expansion. It was during those times that we had to hold fast to the dream and remind ourselves of our motives (helping others) to continue and not just throw it all in!Employing the right people came later – it can be hard to share your dream in a way that you capture the passion of others and in this market (high employment) a small business which can only afford smaller wages can have difficulty attracting good people. We found a few, made many promises about the ultimate reward in staying with us, shared our vision, and those people are still with us today.

Who is your biggest inspiration and why?

I am continually inspired by most people around me, and I try to find something inspiring each day. My husband Reuben, inspires me with his commitment to me, our family and our business. Our current staff inspire me because they share our passion and continually go over and beyond the call of duty simply because they believe in us. Our branch managers inspire me because they work long hours for the pleasure of seeing others get ahead. And my children inspire me because they are all good, independent people with a great love for our family, even though society has said they should be dysfunctional because they have been through divorce and had a working mother!

You have five kids and an extremely successful business. It’s always hard for working women with kids to create balance in their lives. If there is one tip you can give to women about staying organized, what would that be?

Give up thinking you are every going to get 8 hours sleep again – in fact, give up thinking you need it. Instead be thankful for whatever you do get and know that a waking hour is provided to you so you can achieve something new. It is on those days that I wish I had more time/rest/hours in the day that I don’t cope as well. On those days when I know that I have all I am ever going to get and I might as well utilise it as best I can that I achieve more!Be sure that you get your kids to learn about responsibility early on. My children are 22,20,19,15 and 13 and they all do their own washing. Why? Because they would have no clothes to wear if they didn’t! They can all cook too, which can be useful when dinner time comes!

If you had a chance to start your business all over again what would you do differently this time?

I do think I would go into debt for my dream. We could have done what we have done a bit sooner had we asked for financial help. Instead we used whatever money we were creating and that makes for a slower road.Mind you, that is not necessarily bad. We started with only a few branches and sat for a few years trying to iron out the bugs and get it all right before opening more. In hindsight, I do believe this was a good strategy.

When you are looking to invest do you first look for a property in your price range, then research that suburb/region for its future growth Or do you first research and pick the region and then find a property that fits your criteria in that region?

This is a hard question. I like to use Australia as my search area and start with perhaps a fairly open price range and then start whittling down from there. If you spend too long in one region doing the research, and then get to question 15 (of the 20 must ask questions) and find the area is not right, you have wasted a lot of time on that one area.

What do you think are the key ingredients of your success?

Firstly you must have a big business mentality. When we started, we had a desk in the bedroom. We still answered the phone using a corporate greeting and really did visualise ourselves as being a big business from day one. We ensured we had comprehensive systems in place even when it was just the two of us, and always asked ourselves questions like ‘What would AMP do? What would the St George Bank do?’ when planning our next moves.Next you must have a long term vision. If we had been in this for short term profits we never would have come the distance. Not once did we ever focus on small issues which may have impacted on weekly or monthly profits. We just plunged ahead, spent whatever we had and committed 100% to this business. In the early days, there were many weeks where the staff got paid and we did not, and we got by using our personal debt capacity.The other few important things include – only do something if you really love it (because working hard doing work you hate will make you bitter and you cannot be successful if you are bitter!); Do whatever you do better than anyone else does – you don’t have to be the first at anything but you do have to be the best; know your competition and always add value to your service or product and, most importantly, START TODAY. If you think about it too long you may never get started.

What’s next for Margaret Lomas?

I want to be a fiction writer. I have started my first book and each chapter I write I read to my husband – he cries and laughs in all the right places so I am hoping it comes off.Writing a novel is so much harder than the books I write now – I can write one of those in just 2 weeks because I have all the information in my head. A work of fiction requires far greater time commitment, which I don’t have right now.Of course I would also love to have an educational Property Investment TV show – but I have tried and tried to get the networks interested and they say that there is not enough interest in Property Investment to do a whole show!

Sites Of Interest

http://www.edestiny.com.au/

Visit Margaret’s business websites to get more information about her property investment advisory company…

This interview was published on 10th February 2008
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Advice On Property Investment In Australia - Meet Margaret Lomas

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