When Mark found his way to an I Love Real Estate event, he’d come out of a failed family business, was about $180,000 in debt, sitting on a pile of credit card and personal loan balances over $110,000 and had already had a heart attack and three operations, ending up with four stents.

Every unknown phone number felt like another demand, another bill, another crisis. He was earning good money in IT – around $160,000 a year – and yet was dying inside, literally and figuratively.

He could have just put his head down, chipped away at the debt for five or six years and hoped his heart held together.

Instead, he made a different decision: “I’m going to invest my way out of this. But this time I’m going to do it properly.”

That’s where our paths crossed. He liked that my spreadsheets added up and my strategies made sense. He loved that the end game was giving back, not just hoarding.

And you’ll see it as we go: his journey is as much personal growth as it is dollar growth.

Pre-ILRE: The Off-The-Plan “Education”

Before he met the community, Mark did what a lot of educated professionals do when they’re scared and overwhelmed: he outsourced his judgement.

He didn’t trust himself, so he relied on “experts”. That led to four off-the-plan apartments – Eureka Tower in Melbourne, plus places in Lara, Tamworth and Brookvale – most of which barely moved in value. The only one that really helped him in the end was Eureka and that’s because he actually did the numbers himself on that one.

When he sold it about ten years later, it had gone from $320,000 to $520,000 and became the line of credit that kept the wolves from the door while he regrouped. The others… let’s just say they were a live demonstration of why blind faith is not a strategy.

Negative equity. Negative cash flow. Failing business. Failing health. It was all leaking out through his body until his heart literally screamed, “Enough.”

That was the wake-up call. And instead of settling for survival, he chose to learn how to do property on purpose.

Project One – The $1,000 Deposit Toe-Dip in Bairnsdale

His first proper ILRE-informed deal wasn’t a glamorous high-rise or a fancy townhouse. It was a simple two-lot splitter in Bairnsdale.

He found a single block he could buy for $120,000, negotiated forty-five day terms and paid the $1,000 deposit on his credit card because that’s all he had.

His JV partner was a project-builder sales rep he met at his very first Bootcamp – someone with local contacts in Gippsland, particularly a land surveyor, planner and civils contractor who knew the area backwards.

Mark managed the money, the loan and the contracts; his partner brought the on-the-ground team.

It took twelve months. They subdivided, sold both lots for $164,000 and walked away with about $13,000 in profit. On paper, that’s not a game-changer. In real life, it was enormous. They had proved the process, proved the JV and proved that Mark could manage a small project to completion without blowing up the bank.

The key lesson he took from Bairnsdale was that the strategy worked – he just needed more lots next time. So he went looking for eight to ten.

What he found was twenty acres.

Project Two – Stratford: The Ninety-Lot “Subdivision Degree”

Stratford is a little town about ten minutes past Sale in Gippsland. Mark’s partner came back one day and said, “I’ve found something, but it’s not eight to ten lots.” It was a twenty-acre site with a lapsed DA that council was very keen to see revived. Ninety lots. Five stages. A retail value of around $6.9 million and construction costs of $4.5 million.

Most people would have run a mile. Mark ran the numbers and then did something even more important: he looked at the team. The existing JV partner knew the area. They brought in two more partners from the same project-builder world.

They already had a great relationship with a civils contractor who could handle the scale. Mark brought finance, legals and contracts expertise. Together, they had an A-team. Without that, he says now, he would never have touched it.

In the very first team meeting, he got a taste of how important it is to know your worth. One of the new partners had apparently said, “We don’t need Mark on this deal; the three of us know everyone up here.” Mark was warned to expect that question.

When it came – “So Mark, what do you bring to the project?” – he didn’t flinch. He replied, “I’m here to cover your three arses. You can’t sign build contracts for your employer and the land contract at the same time. I’ll hold power of attorney to sign the land contracts; you sign the build contracts. That keeps it arm’s length and legal.”

Conversation over. He was in.

What was meant to be a three to five-year project turned into seven. There were drainage challenges – flat land sounds easy until you realise the sewer and stormwater need fall, so they had to trench up to six metres at the front of the site.

There were planning headaches, consultant wrangling and a painful decision not to proceed with Stage Two when the market “took a breather”, which cost them a year when demand roared back.

But there were also big wins. Council had installed a sewer pump station on the block before they bought it. Mark insisted on getting written confirmation that there would be no clawback for those costs, saving the project around $400,000.

He structured a deal where the civils contractor became a partner and agreed to be paid only at the end of each stage when settlements came in.

At one point, after Stage Two, Mark took a screenshot of the account showing a million dollars sitting there before the civils invoice was paid – a surreal moment for a man who once dreaded unknown phone calls.

And then there was the NBN win. Because he happened to be working for NBN at the time, he discovered a policy change that meant they would now run fibre to new greenfield sites with as few as twenty lots, instead of the previous hundred.

Stratford’s subdivision qualified and NBN ran nineteen kilometres of fibre at no cost to the project. It changed the whole town from fixed wireless to proper broadband and Mark is still prouder of that than the money.

He also quietly arranged for the streets to be named after local soldiers who were missing in action and never made it home. It was his way of giving back to a community that had trusted his team to reshape its edges.

By the end of Stratford, he had what he calls “a degree in subdivisions” and the confidence to tackle almost any size project – and the scars to know when not to.

Project Three – Bendigo: One into Four, Seven Years and a Market Rescue

After ninety lots, a one-into-four subdivision with three new units at the back should have felt like a holiday. Instead, it turned into another seven-year marathon with different lessons.

The plan was simple: subdivide one block into four, build three units behind the original house, sell the house and units, pay out private lenders and walk away with a healthy chunk. Initial build costs were pencilled at $295,000. They actually landed closer to $468,000. The three-year timeframe stretched to seven.

He discovered the styro-panel construction system wasn’t going to be the cheap silver bullet he’d been promised. He discovered that architects can specify expensive site cuts and retaining walls that a practical builder later decides are unnecessary, turning a “site cut” into a simple “site scrape”.

He learned that builders can exercise discretion on “as built” plans – raising a finished floor level to sit on rock rather than excavating it – as long as the final plans lodged reflect what’s built.

And he found out, the hard way, that if you let a planning permit quietly expire and more than six months go by, you can’t just extend it; you’re back at square one.

By the time the project wrapped up, COVID had hit.

The planned sell-down looked risky, so he refinanced instead. Fortunately, values had climbed. An 80 per cent LVR loan on the finished properties gave him enough equity to pay out debts without selling.

Eventually, he sold the front house to ease negative cash flow and is now selling units one by one at much higher prices than originally forecast.

Bendigo reinforced three truths for him: do thorough due diligence, keep asking questions and never again outsource crucial thinking to anyone – architect, builder or JV partner – without understanding it yourself.

Project Four – Warrnambool: Ninety-Six Apartments, Sprinklers and Staying Power

If Stratford was his subdivision degree, Warrnambool was his PhD in “Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.”

He and a builder partner bought four residential blocks totalling about 8,200 square metres in a great location. The original vision was ninety-six apartments. Working with council and independent reviewers, they refined it to sixty-eight premises: fifty-eight apartments, seven townhouses, three shops and a community hub, delivered over four stages.

The strategy was to fund the land, planning and Stage One through private lenders, then move to commercial or bank funding as the project proved itself. Stage One was a four-apartment building on the corner, completed and settled in late 2022.

Stage Two delivered twenty-seven apartments across two buildings, with settlements through 2024 and early 2025.

Stage Three – the seven townhouses, fifteen more apartments and the community hub – is now under construction, with most already pre-sold and settlements planned for 2026. Stage Four will round it out with a final twelve apartments and three shops, including the commercial property Mark intends to retain.

It sounds linear on paper. It hasn’t been.

Commercial interest rates rose. Private loan costs dragged on far longer than planned. Build costs escalated. Then came a million-dollar lesson: when Fire Rescue Victoria decides your building is four levels, not three, you must have sprinklers.

The building surveyor had assessed Stage One as effectively three storeys, relying on some technical interpretations to avoid sprinkler requirements. Fire Rescue disagreed. They treated it as four levels.

Retrofitting sprinklers into a finished building, commissioning a performance solution, getting it approved and then implementing it – all while interest on the construction facility ticked over at around $70,000 a month – hurt. It forced a faster sale of one building through channel marketers and compressed his margins.

There were also JV tensions. He’d done a good job documenting the joint venture at the front end, working with specialist lawyers to cover every “what if”. Where he fell down, by his own admission, was the exit.

When it came time to terminate and restructure, it was all handled via email, without a formal deed of settlement and release. On a project this size, that’s asking for pain. One of his loudest lessons from Warrnambool now is: always close a JV properly, through lawyers, no matter how friendly it feels at the start.

And yet, even with all of that, the project is on track to deliver around $3 million in profit, with Mark’s personal share in the order of $2.2 million, including the commercial equity he’ll hold long-term.

If you want a definition of resilience, that’s it.

The Family Home – Basketball Courts and Borrowing Power

In the middle of all these “degree-level” projects, Mark also quietly upgraded his principal place of residence.

He bought a tired home on the Peninsula for about $950,000 and went to work: stripping carpets and drapes, staining and polishing beautiful oak floorboards he discovered underneath, repainting everything, replacing guttering and restoring the roof, converting the garage into a studio, installing heating and cooling and generally turning it into a place that matched the life he was building.

The backyard now has a basketball area, in-ground trampoline and brush fencing, plus a sunrise view that makes you forgive the tradie dust.

A revaluation at around $1.5 million let him extract roughly $220,000 and redeploy it into deals, while still living in a home he loves with Kai. That’s what a smart PPR reno is meant to do: improve lifestyle and balance sheet at the same time.

Aspendale – Fourteen Luxury Apartments and a Tough Call

Not every deal in Mark’s story has a happy ending on the spreadsheet. Aspendale, on Melbourne’s bayside, is his reminder that even with endorsed plans, you can’t skip deep due diligence.

It was a blue-chip site with approved plans for fourteen luxury apartments. He negotiated the price down from $4.1 million to $3.55 million, brought in investors to fund the deposit and pre-build costs and lined up a 65 per cent LVR loan for settlement. The soil tests and high-level costs looked fine. He went unconditional in mid-2022 and dived into the engineering.

That’s when the wheels started wobbling. Structural engineers wanted deeper soil tests – six metres, not four – and found water at that depth. They re-categorised the basement as a “wet basement”, requiring larger bored piers that pushed into car parks and landscaping.

Council viewed those changes as major, forcing a planning amendment and fresh advertising. Neighbours objected. The whole thing went to VCAT, costing another eleven months and a small fortune in professional fees and holding costs.

Interest rates rose repeatedly during that period. The investors had already been in longer than planned. Mark made a character-defining decision: rather than ask them for more money, he would personally cover the extra two years of holding costs to protect their capital and, if possible, still get them some profit.

He fully expects to be out of pocket three to five hundred thousand dollars by the time Aspendale is resolved.

It’s not the “hero story” slide. But it tells you everything about why investors keep backing him. He values trust and integrity above a single project’s profit. And to fund that commitment, he did something very clever. He went back to what he knows best.

East Gippsland – A Ten-Lot “Back to Basics” Subdivision

To generate the extra chunks he needed to plug the Aspendale hole, Mark returned to the sort of deal he can now run in his sleep: a straightforward subdivision with strong fundamentals.

In East Gippsland he secured a 7,655-square-metre site with a single dwelling, gentle slope, wide driveway suitable for a two-way road and, importantly, service connection points at both the front and rear. Most of the trees were planted and could be removed. It was a textbook subdivision site. He came in as the servicing and money partner, leveraging consultants and relationships honed on Stratford and Warrnambool.

Planning approval came through in May 2025. As he refinances for civils and gears up to start works, he’s clear: this one is about clean execution, predictable margins and no unnecessary drama.

Sometimes the smartest thing a sophisticated investor can do is exactly that – a good, boring, profitable project.

Gippsland Golf – Thirty-Four Lots and a Club-House Friendship

From there, he stepped sideways into another regional subdivision – this time a seven-acre site running along a golf course in Gippsland.

The land was in a precinct structure plan, which meant no public advertising and no VCAT circus.

Developers had offered the vendor around $3 million. Mark and his JV partner secured it for $1.5 million, plus $500,000 in vendor finance, by understanding what the owner really wanted: speed and certainty.
They offered a two-month settlement with $200,000 upfront and a short vendor-finance tail, while other developers were insisting on twelve-month terms to protect themselves.

The site falls naturally towards the golf course, so all the subdivision stormwater can feed into the club’s water reserves. The club is thrilled – they’re effectively getting free irrigation – and in return they’ve agreed to include a year’s membership for every lot buyer.

Mark plans to match it, so each purchaser will receive two years of membership. He is even exploring sealing the golf club carpark using his civil contractor’s economies of scale, because he knows that a thriving golf club improves the desirability of his lots.

It’s classic Mark: not just carving up land, but building relationships and ecosystems where everyone wins.

Mornington Peninsula – Two Townhouses Now, Three Soon and a New Home

Closer to home, he has pulled the focus back to smaller, elegant projects.

On the beach side of the main highway in a blue-chip bayside suburb, he has a corner block under a JV with an experienced builder and servicing partners. Council has already approved an additional crossover, which lets them create a lovely northwest-facing alfresco area behind the second townhouse.

Demolition starts the day after settlement and the plan is to have slabs down around Christmas and the build finished by late 2026. The projected profit is around $300,000 – a very nice outcome for something he jokingly calls “a little easy one”.

In parallel, life has shifted again. Family changes mean Mark is now looking for his own principal place of residence. True to form, he intends that to pull double duty as both home and project: a block on the Peninsula where he can build three townhouses, sell two and keep one as his base.

Twelve months to secure DA during the settlement, ten months to build and a clean, simple JV with a money partner.

He laughs about being a slow learner, but the truth is, this is him applying everything he’s learned about scale, risk and sanity.

More Important Than Property – Kai, Cambodia and Crossing Oceans

For all the millions in deals, the thing that lights Mark up most when he talks is not a feasibility. It’s people.

He runs two ILRE meet-up groups – one in Melbourne and one on the Peninsula – and spends an enormous amount of time having coffees, taking calls, unpicking challenges with other students and gently steering them away from some of the potholes he’s already fallen into.

Being a Platinum buddy is not a line on his CV; it’s how he lives.

He’s been to Cambodia twice with RAW Impact and took Kai there two years ago. There’s a photo of Kai from that trip that he calls “the best photo we’ve ever got of him” – pure joy, covered in red dust and grinning from ear to ear. If you ever want to understand why we do what we do with charity, look at that kid’s face.

He donates to Fred Hollows because his own eyesight is rubbish and he knows what a gift clear vision is. He supports the Big Freeze through the Danihers because he’s an Essendon tragic with a big heart. He plans to work more closely with women’s and DV housing charities when cash flow from Warrnambool and the subdivisions frees up.

And then there’s his own bucket-list gift: sailing. He’s done multiple Sydney – Hobarts and Melbourne – Hobarts, crossed Bass Strait more times than he can remember and always wanted to cross the Pacific.

When he heard about my boat and our longer-term plans, he put his hand up for the Atlantic crossing first, because sometimes the detour is the way. He and Brian are heading off in January and yes, I fully expect spreadsheets on board.

Through all of it, Kai remains the central why. Mark wants to be the best father he can be, not just in what he provides, but in the example he sets: that you can work hard, build wealth, stay kind, give back and not lose your humanity along the way.

The Scoreboard – And the Real Win

When you stack it all up, the numbers are staggering.

From “bugger all” – his words – he’s now sitting on a projected $5.6 million portfolio, with positive cash flow of around $86,000 a year and more to come as projects settle and long-term holds stabilise. He has gone from negative equity and negative cash flow to a position where, once the Warrnambool shops and studio are configured well, he’ll have multiple income streams and serious options.

He has also gone from full-time IT employee to full-time developer, walking away from a thirty-eight-year corporate career in July 2022 to back himself entirely in property.

But if you ask him what he’s proudest of, he doesn’t say “Stratford” or “Warrnambool” or any particular number. He talks about still “putting his own oxygen mask on” while helping others.

He talks about the friends and investors who’ve walked alongside him. He talks about standing in a street he created, with houses full of families, fibre running to their doors and street signs carrying the names of men who never came home.

That’s the real win.

Because Mark’s story is not just “man does big deals”. It’s a story of a bloke who went from debt, depression and a heart full of stents to a life where his money, his skills and his time are all aligned with the kind of human he wants to be.

And if there’s one lesson I’d want you to take from him, it’s this:

You don’t have to wait until everything is perfect. You don’t have to be fearless. You do, however, have to be willing to grow – in your mindset, your skills and your courage – before the money follows.

Mark did that. He grew first. The rest, eventually, caught up.

Now the question is: what are you prepared to grow into?

“You have to grow before the money will follow. And it’s so true.”

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These stories and the results in them were captured at a specific point in time. The real estate market and the investing strategies used to succeed are constantly changing. The achievements and results of these investors may have changed since these stories were recorded. Each of these investors engaged in in-depth training, coaching and mentoring to be able to achieve these results. Their results are not typical and should not be taken as a guarantee of the results you may achieve. Your personal results will be in-line with the training, education and hard work that you personally conduct.

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