‘My rental income is $300,000 a year’

PHOTO: The couple have gone on to buy or build 19 more homes since their initial purchase.

He arrived in Sydney with just two suitcases full of clothes – but now he owns 20 properties and is looking to buy more.

A Western Sydney couple are eyeing off early retirement after buying 20 properties across two different states worth a total of $7.5 million.

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Bharat Patel and his wife Vaishali bought their first home in 2010 and in the following years their property portfolio has exploded.

They’ve nabbed 17 more dwellings since then, as well as adding granny flats onto two existing properties.

Since Covid-19 arrived on Australia’s shores, the couple have doubled their portfolio, snapping up 10 houses and apartments in the last two years across NSW and Queensland.

At the height of 2021’s property craze, the couple actually inked in two property deals on the same day.

For Mr Patel, he realised the power of property when he built a granny flat out the back of his Western Sydney home and started renting it out, which put extra money in his pocket.

“I was thinking ‘wow this is good’. If I could build another house I could get another income,” the 40-year-old told news.com.au.

One thing soon led to another.

Mr and Mrs Patel more than a decade ago when they purchased their first property.

Mr Patel came over to Australia from India to study IT, with just two suitcases to his name.

After finishing his studies, Vaishali joined him in Sydney and the two got permanent residency together.

In 2008, during the Global Financial Crisis, the married couple were considering buying property.

Mr Patel had always wanted his own home because, as he put it, “Rent money is dead money”.

But with the market spooked, they held off on purchasing a home and had their son instead.

In 2010 they decided to break their way into Sydney’s property market but it was a struggle.

“I was doing two jobs, one was in IT and then I was doing the fruit market at night,” the dad recalled.

His wife was out of work raising their son so the burden fell on him to earn. He would work 2pm to 10pm in a late afternoon IT shift, then 2am till 8am in the morning at the fruit markets.

But the long hours paid off – in July 2010, the couple managed to put down a 20 per cent deposit for a $322,000 two-bedroom house in Doonside, western Sydney.

Mr Patel graduated from UTS with a masters in IT.

Mr Patel acquired a building licence so that he could complete renovations himself, which shaved off half of the costs of building a granny flat, he said.

Once the granny flat was done, he got a renter in there straight away, making the place positively geared.

It took the new mum and dad several years to dip their toes back into the property market, not buying again until 2015.

They repeated the formula that worked before, buying a house in western Sydney and adding another building out the back.

This time, the couple had to use lender’s mortgage insurance for the down payment.

In the following years, the Patels used a combination of their savings – with Vaishali by this point running a successful childcare business – as well as lender’s mortgage insurance and equity to purchase ever more properties.

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