How Sydney family has $1.7m property portfolio spanning across three states

A Sydney couple who were concerned investing in property “was a scam” has since created a vast portfolio in just four years.

A Sydney couple who was concerned investing in property “was a scam” have since created a portfolio worth $1.7 million in four years, spanning across three Australian states.

Sweta Khandelwal and Shailesh Kumar arrived in Australia in 2014 from India and were unsure about how to invest their money.

“We had a limited amount of money,” Ms Khandelwal told news.com.au. “In India we have many more ways of doing investment. There’s a stock market, fixed deposits. Here, we didn’t have much experience.”

The now 37-year-old said she and her husband, 40, were “on the lower side” of pay rates and bided their time.

In 2019 — by which point they’d had a child together and both become Australian citizens — they bought their first property in Macquarie Park, in the city’s northwest, for $550,000.

Just a few months later the Covid-19 pandemic hit and as new parents, they wanted more space but they found themselves only able to afford a two-bedroom apartment in Sydney’s fringes.

“It was very far from amenities, childcare, activities, we did not want to move there,” the mum recalled.

Sweta Khandelwal and Shailesh Kumar were at first not convinced about investing their ‘limited’ money in property.

Ms Khandelwal and Mr Kumar decided to “rentvest”, where they continued living the lifestyle they wanted as renters, while turning their first property into an investment.

Still wanting to grow their wealth, they enlisted the help of Sydney buyers agency Get Rare Properties, run by Rasti Vaibhav.

Under a new strategy, they gave up on buying anymore properties in Sydney.

Instead, in August 2021, at the height of the property boom, they bought a house in the Hunter Valley, in country NSW, for half a million dollars.

The couple secured the four-bedroom, two-bathroom property using a combination of lenders mortgage insurance (LMI) and equity from their first property, as well as savings.

They even got a discount and bought the place before it went on the market.

Emboldened by this purchase, they have since gone on to acquire two more properties.

Their property in Hunter Valley, bought for $500,000.

The couple have a five-year-old daughter.

In January last year, they snapped up yet another property, this time in Baldivis, on the southern periphery of Perth in Western Australia.

Through their buyers agents, they negotiated it for a price of $417,000, which gave them a $18,000 discount.

Thanks to their other properties growing, they also had more than $80,000 worth of equity to draw from to pay the deposit on their new Perth investment.

Just four months later, in May 2022, they bought their fourth property, this time in Glenvale, in Toowomba, Queensland.

Their investment property in Baldivis.

This is their Queensland property.

As before, this one was off-market, with a $30,000 discount, coming to a grand total of $475,000.

“We used equity, we did not have to pay anything from our pockets,” Ms Khandelwal said.

With interest rate rises, the couple have let their property portfolio sit where it is. Even with increased mortgage costs, the rent on each property covers all its expenses.

“We do have a plan to buy the fifth property,” she added. “We want to build a portfolio of around $3 to $4 million in the next few years.”

The family is currently renting in Sydney’s northern beaches.

Originally published as How Sydney family has $1.7m property portfolio spanning across three states