This property investor learned her first lesson through her parents’ split

She then spent 10 years of her life in that house which overlooked Randwick golf course—a fortunate location that let Jillian and her brother get all the golf balls that came flying into their pool and sell them back to the golfers. A few years later, Jillian’s parents split up. After moving to Melbourne with her mom, she moved back in with her father in the Malabar property 12 days before he decided to move out and sell the house.

“The whole selling of the house I didn't even know about, and I remember thinking, ‘That's a really stupid thing to do, Dad.’ I was 19 at the time.”

“My dad thought, ‘Oh, I've only got $25,000 left on the mortgage, so I'll take my ex-wife now off the mortgage papers and just be a solo mortgager … ’ He didn't really look at the paperwork, he went straight to the bank,” she added.

The bank then told her dad that he needed to have a personal loan before they could grant his request. “The personal loans in the late 80's to early 90's were about 16 percent,” Jillian said.

Even if her dad knew that it was too high, he went on to sign the paperwork instead of leaving the mortgage as it was and sold the property.

“It sold pretty badly, and I just thought, even at that time when I didn't have that much experience in property, that it was a bad idea, what would that place be worth now?”

The property was consequently knocked down and rebuilt, but the size of the land, the neighbors, and the surrounding properties remained the same.

About five years after she witnessed the poor sale, Jillian got herself in a good position to start her own property investment journey. Right now, she holds three properties in her portfolio, which is currently worth $1.8 million. While she has faced new challenges on investing in off-the-plan apartments and joining property clubs, she remains grateful to have learned a valuable investment lesson early on.

“I just know I need to look at something different, you know? There's no point in flogging a dead horse, you need to go and get another horse,” Jillian said.

The property investor believes that the experiences she earned throughout the years have given her the confidence to explore more sophisticated wealth creation strategy in order to move her investment journey further forward.

“Our focus is building my business so that the income is actually kind of giving us the equity we lost along the way and we can still keep investing.”

Tune in to Jillian Bullock’s episode on The Smart Property Investment Show to know more about how she balances finances between investing and her business, what happens when property clubs go wrong, and how negative experiences only makes her determination stronger.