Tamara had followed the script perfectly: work hard, rise through the ranks, become the one in charge. And she did it brilliantly.

For thirteen years she ran her own Ray White office, guiding a thirty-strong team and becoming the name everyone in the district recognised.

Then, at the end of 2022, she made the bold move to sell the business.

The photos from that time are classic real estate: the whole sales team around her pool, Christmas parties with big smiles, culture dialled up to eleven. On paper it looked like a clean, triumphant exit.

Inside, she felt completely lost.

The income stopped. The phone stopped ringing. The identity she’d worn for over a decade – “Tamara the local real estate queen” – vanished almost overnight. She knew she wanted to be a developer.

She knew she was meant to do more with property. But she couldn’t quite see how to bridge the gap between “good real estate agent” and “confident property developer.”

She believed she had about eighty per cent of the puzzle from her years in the game… and was missing the last twenty per cent that actually ties it all together.

Then, as she likes to say, Facebook was listening. A little blonde woman started popping up in her feed talking about positive gearing, development and doing property with purpose.

Click, click, click. “Where do I join? Where do I pay?”

That’s how she found us. Or, depending on how you look at it, how we found the version of Tamara that had been waiting to step forward for years.

The Big Family Home: A Soft Landing and a Stack of Equity

Before she ever met me, Tamara did what many smart agents eventually do: she bought herself a great principal place of residence.

She settled on a large family home with a pool in September 2022, just before selling the business and then went to town on it. New kitchen and bar, new flooring, three updated bathrooms, new laundry and powder room, landscaping, new spa, new lighting, new curtains, built-in study and dining and much better storage. This wasn’t a quick lipstick job. It was a proper, live-in, love-it renovation designed to both improve the family’s life and quietly bank some capital growth.

The important part here is that she didn’t flip this one. As an agent, she’d seen too many people renovate beautifully, sell too quickly and then pay for the privilege of starting again. She wanted to actually enjoy the home and hold the equity.

One of the themes you’ll notice in Tamara’s story is that she doesn’t just chase deals. She builds foundations. This house is one of them.

Project One: The Cheap Regional Reno That Hurt So Good

After selling her business, with no regular income, Tamara did what a lot of people do when a big chunk of cash lands in their lap: she tried to “put it to work” quickly.

Pre-ILRE, she bought three units on one title in a tiny isolated coastal town in Victoria, about five hours’ drive from home. Population around ten thousand. It was cheap. It was ugly. And in her words, she thought, “I’ll renovate it and rent it out. Multiple incomes. Easy.”

Then she joined I Love Real Estate in February 2024 and Platinum in April. With new eyes, she realised she had effectively bought herself a high-effort, low-demand project at too great a distance. The reno standard was probably too high for the local market. She subdivided the three, renovated them all and then faced the challenge of trying to sell three similar, slightly “fancy” units in a small town where the buyer pool was thin.

Did she make money? Yes. She walked away with a profit and a positively geared holding period. Did it cost more than she expected? Absolutely. Did she learn a truckload about not overcapitalising, about distance, about time on market and about regional realities? More than any theory could have taught her.

That’s the beautiful thing about this project: it was both a financial and an educational win. It paid her to learn what not to do.

Project Two: Four Units, One Big Town and a Much Smarter Flip

Armed with better strategy and a coach who wasn’t afraid to give her a push, Tamara went hunting for a smarter chunk deal.

She found four units in a large regional town of around a hundred thousand people in New South Wales. They were already strata titled, owned for years by the same older owner, but being sold in one line. Perfect.
She negotiated a longer settlement so she could line everything up, brought in a local builder to oversee most of the work and separate trades for concreting and painting. This time she deliberately picked a location where demand and trades weren’t going to be her enemy.

The driveway became a saga of its own. What looked like a simple “pull it up and put the same back down” turned into a compliance and drainage adventure.

The cracked concrete turned out to be a symptom of bad drainage and by the time it was all fixed, the driveway had cost about fifty thousand instead of the planned twenty. A fence fell down. Services needed more work than expected. The usual fun.
But she held her nerve, kept her reno standard aligned with the area (not her personal taste) and used online auctions to sell.

Being an early pioneer of online auctions during Melbourne’s first lockdown – with one of the first virtual auctions in the country two days after everything shut – she knew the process worked and could deliver unconditional contracts quickly. All four units sold within about four weeks, right where she needed them to land.

That project delivered a chunky profit of around $166,000 and, more importantly, a surge of confidence. This was proof that when she combined her agent skills, coaching and proper feasos, she could execute a clean, repeatable, profitable strategy.

Project Three: The JV Reality Check in the Outer East

With two personal projects under her belt, Tamara stepped into a joint venture with her long-time business partner from the Ray White days.

The structure was simple. Her old partner was the money partner. Tamara was the doing partner. The plan was to renovate the front house, subdivide the block and build a single-storey three-bedroom, two-bathroom plus study home at the rear in an outer eastern suburb they both knew like the back of their hand. On paper, this was meant to be the “textbook” JV.

Reality had other ideas.

Build costs blew out by more than ten per cent. Town planning and subdivision costs escalated. Council moved slowly and painfully. A tenant had to be evicted; rent stopped coming in long before the debt did.

To top it off, a “natural stream” no one had properly picked up in the initial due diligence triggered another fifteen thousand dollars in reports and an extra eight weeks of delays.

Holding costs climbed. Her JV partner grew understandably impatient, needing funds back for personal reasons. By the time they reached their turning point, the project had become emotionally expensive as well as financially tight. The decision they made is a powerful lesson in itself.

They chose to protect the relationship first. They agreed to tidy everything up, sell, take a small profit and move on, rather than squeeze each other and the deal trying to make it something it no longer was.

Joint ventures, as we teach again and again, are not just about money and legal structures. They are about people. Knowing your partner’s priorities, timelines and risk tolerance is just as important as knowing the zoning and the sewer lines.

“Even though you might have read all the books, done all the training and come to all the conferences, until you do something, you don’t know how to do it, in my opinion. So you have to do it.”

Project Four: The Cute Beach House Built for a Downsizer

By contrast, her next project feels like sunshine.

Tamara bought a small, slightly ugly but perfectly located house in a little coastal pocket within walking distance to the beach. Average age in the area is about fifty-four; it’s a downsizer’s paradise.

The agents told her very clearly: three bedrooms and two bathrooms is where the demand sits. The house only had one bathroom. She decided to extend.

She painted the red cedar white – because white paint is still the best reno tool ever invented – redesigned the layout, lifted ceiling heights, moved some walls and added a second bathroom and a study.

She kept her ideal buyer in mind the entire time: a retiring couple, cashed up, wanting something easy-care and beautiful they can lock up and leave between trips.

This project is also a family affair. Her son Tom is an apprentice carpenter and his boss is effectively acting as a site manager, coordinating trades and keeping an eye on quality.

That frees Tamara up to run more than one project at a time, even if it means paying a little more for oversight. It’s an elegant shift from “doing everything herself” to “being the developer in charge.”
When this one is finished and sold, it will deliver both a healthy chunk of profit and another notch of proof that she can design with the end buyer in mind, not just her own taste.

Project Five: Dad’s Legacy and the Storage Cash Cow

When Tamara’s dad passed away at ninety-three, after eight hard years following a major stroke, she knew she wanted to do something meaningful with the inheritance he left her. He had lived the classic self-funded retiree life – investing, travelling, enjoying his independence – and he had always nudged her to do the same.

She briefly flirted with the idea of a beach house. It would have been lovely. It also would have parked his legacy in something that cost money, instead of something that made it. After some deep conversations with her coach, she landed on a very different choice: self-storage.

In 2025 she bought a fully occupied storage facility in regional Victoria for around $740,000.

Thirty-two modern sheds, built in 2023, fully automated security and access and, crucially, existing plans and permits to double the number of sheds to sixty-four. A young couple had built it up and agreed to keep managing it for her through their management company, making it almost completely passive.

Stage two will cost about $300,000 to build and, once leased, is expected to create roughly $740,000 in uplift and about fifty thousand dollars extra profit each year. When complete, the facility should be throwing off around ninety-six thousand dollars a year in passive income.

For someone who had “no income” after selling her business and was living off redraw, that single asset changes everything.

She knows, with absolute certainty, that her dad would be proud. Not just because of the numbers, but because she honoured his mindset: invest, create income and give yourself freedom.

Project Six: Mornington Peninsula Townhouses in the Sky

Storage has become her chosen path to passive income. For excitement and challenge, she turns to development.

Her dream project sits on the Mornington Peninsula: a site she found during a walk when her intuition told her to “go that way.” The block has ocean views and she has secured a ten-month settlement.
The plan is for three high-end, upside-down townhouses with lifts, stone and weatherboard beach-house styling and big ocean views aimed squarely at cashed-up downsizers.

She and Kylie will keep the front one as their home, or sell if strategy demands it. Either way, all three will have water views, which is exactly how you maximise value in that location.

No developers were doing anything locally when she went to contract, which means that by the time her project hits the market it may well be the only new stock of its calibre in the area. The expected profit is very healthy and, just as important, this deal stretches her in all the right ways: finance, design, approvals, presales and mindset.

This is not a “maybe one day” dream. She has already structured her finances, lined up her storage income and is pushing the previous projects through to pave the way. It is, quite literally, the house that has been sitting on her vision board for years coming into physical form.

Project Seven: A JV with Heart – Helping Family Heal

One of the most beautiful chapters in Tamara’s story is the joint venture she’s doing with her ex-sister-in-law and her husband, Jen and Rick.

Jen has been through breast cancer. Rick is a police officer dealing with PTSD after years of service and the emotional weight of his wife’s illness. Finances, as you can imagine, have been under pressure.

They watched what Tamara was doing and then asked shyly, “Could we maybe do a deal together?”

Tamara and Kylie said yes – on the condition that Jen and Rick let Tamara do the heavy lifting. They provide the money. She finds the deal, structures it, manages the trades and delivers the outcome.

The property settles in January. Her son Tom will be on the tools, working for his aunt and uncle. Everyone is invested, emotionally and financially.

This isn’t just about profit. It’s about giving two people who have been through hell a path forward, a first big win and the confidence to believe they can build a different future. It’s exactly the kind of “wealth with meaning” that sits at the heart of what we do.

The Inner Work: Intuition, Numbers and Site Rules

If you ask Tamara what’s changed the most in the last couple of years, she won’t just talk about deals. She’ll talk about herself.

When she arrived, she was running largely on intuition. Strong gut, great sense of people, excellent feel for property – but very little in the way of robust, documented feasos.

At one point she sent her coach a storage deal she was excited about. Their coach asked a simple question: “Where’s the feaso?” Tamara said, “I haven’t done it. It just looks really good.”

That conversation landed like a brick in the best possible way. She realised that intuition on its own isn’t enough, especially when you’re working with other people’s money. You have to back your gut with numbers if you want repeatable confidence.

Since then she has doubled down on doing the work: detailed feasibility studies, re-listening to strategy webinars before each new deal, going to council to research similar projects and designers, asking more questions and getting clear on her vision so she can tell whether a deal truly fits or not.

She meditates most mornings, often with the little crystals she was gifted at one of our events. It keeps the anxiety at bay and her decision-making clear. She does Pilates to keep herself fit enough to handle long days on site.

She runs her development life with organisational software like a real business, with action plans, tracking and systems, because she knows she’s not just “doing a reno” here and there – she’s building a new career.

On site, she’s even put up formal rules.

After dealing with the odd egotistical tradie and a few thefts on regional sites, she now hangs “site rules” that set expectations for safety, respect and culture. She installs cameras from Bunnings and a dongle for internet and treats every project as a workplace.

The Numbers Now – And What They Really Mean

When Tamara first stepped into my world, she had some good assets but no regular income. She was living off redraw and eating away at her buffers. There was equity, but no clear path.
She thought she knew eighty per cent of what she needed to know; in reality, she probably had twenty per cent and was missing the eighty per cent that makes the machine work.

Today, she has almost doubled her equity position, set herself up with a storage facility that will soon pay roughly ninety-six thousand dollars a year in passive income once expanded and has a pipeline of chunk deals – from the Mornington Peninsula townhouses to future storage sites – that will both pay down debt and keep growing her wealth.

That first fifty thousand dollars of consultancy-trust profit has already improved her borrowing capacity and the next rounds will compound that effect.

More importantly, she has a plan.

She knows her storage facilities will be the backbone of her three-hundred-thousand-dollars-a-year passive income goal. She knows the flips and developments will pay down debt and create options. She knows she can bring Kylie out of full-time work into property with her, travel in their caravan, take the kids to Europe, show them their Austrian heritage and, at the same time, teach them about money, mindset, meditation and property.

From Lost to Developer – The Invitation

Tamara will still laugh when she says the word “developer” about herself. There’s a hint of imposter syndrome in there. But if you look at what she’s actually doing – multiple concurrent projects, self-storage, townhouses, JVs, structured trusts, site teams – the label fits.

She has reinvented herself from “unemployed ex-business-owner” to “full-time property developer” in a couple of intense, focused years. She has done it while coming out, recovering from a destructive relationship, grieving her dad, co-parenting teenagers, building a new partnership and volunteering as a leader on retreats for girls doing it tough and as Vice President of her local Foothills Foundation.

Her journey is not neat. It is real.

And that’s why it’s so powerful for you.

Because she started exactly where so many people start: with a feeling that “something’s not right,” an urge to do more with property and a whole lot of half-knowledge and hope. She didn’t wait until she felt perfectly ready. She joined, she learned, she acted, she stuffed up a bit, she learned more and she acted again.

If you see yourself in any part of her story – the lost feeling after a big life change, the urgency after divorce, the desire to honour a parent, the need to rebuild an income, the pull towards being your truest self – then let Tamara’s journey be your reminder.

You don’t have to know the whole “how.” You just have to get clear on what you want, back yourself enough to step into education and community and then start doing the next intelligent deal in front of you.

The rest, as Tamara is proving project by project, has a way of taking care of itself when you treat property not just as a way to make money, but as a path to owning your life.

“The big thing about I Love Real Estate, and I guess what resonates with me, is being able to give back and help other people.”

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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.

“You had me at positive gearing!”