GoFundMe appeal: Israel Folau has $5m property portfolio

Israel Folau and his wife Maria. Picture: Instagram

Israel Folau — the sacked Wallaby behind an audacious $3 million GoFundMe campaign — owns a portfolio of eight properties worth more than $5 million.

A Margin Call investigation of Folau’s wealth suggests his is the most brazen use of the online fundraising website since the campaign to raise $100 million to make 20-year-old model Kylie Jenner a billionaire.

The 30-year-old Folau — who had raised more than $500,000 when we last checked — has clearly caught the property bug, a common phenomenon among Australia’s best paid sports personalities.

Cricketers David Warner and Steve Smith are similarly committed to bricks-and-mortar.

The now unemployed rugby union fullback lives with his netball playing wife Maria Folau in a five bedroom, 5 acre property in semirural Kenthurst, in Sydney’s northwest Hills Shire.

He paid $2.1 million for the property back in 2015, hardly a stretch back when he had a $5 million contract with Rugby Australia.

The other seven properties are owned by his acquisitive Folau Investments Pty Ltd vehicle.

Earliest in the portfolio was a humble four bedroom house in Boronia Heights, in Logan City, south of Brisbane, which he bought for $340,000 in April 2010.

Months later, Folau Investments Pty Ltd acquired a second property, another four bedroom house in Kellyville, also in Sydney’s Hill District, for $773,000.

Next up, a more modern four bedder in neighbouring Stanhope Gardens, for which he paid just over $1 million back in March 2015.

Weeks before Christmas 2016, Folau snapped up a trio of lots of land in Austral, next to Leppington in Sydney’s southwest. They each cost $374,900 or $1.12 million all up.

And last to join the portfolio, a one-bedroom apartment in Little Bay, on Sydney’s South Coast, just below Maroubra. Folau Investments paid $960,000 for that bolthole back in February 2017.

So all up that’s an outlay of $5.6 million.

Would it be unchristian to suggest that, just maybe, the multi-millionaire sportsman could have sold one of the string of investment properties before passing the can around for $3 million?