 Welcome back everybody to the 50 day property challenge. Again today, we have Matt Al from Metro FM and Janet Ricketts, singer, songwriter and all round fantastic artist with us. They will talk today about this week, what they've learned in the 50 day property challenge. We've just gone through five days of learning and they have already started their property journey. So you will remember last week, we interviewed them to understand what it is they were looking for, what they wanted to do and how the EDPF property academy and private property could assist them in building their own property portfolios. So this week we learned quite a bit but I will leave it up to the two Janet and Matt Al to tell us all about what they learned this week and then I'll ask them some questions about why they're doing this and how they're gonna do it, et cetera. So Janet, let's start with you. Give us an idea of what you learned. We spoke about a few things, your why, your how, we spoke about property as an investment opportunity and we also spoke with Ben at private property. What did you learn this week that would be of value to you and help you in your journey with this 50 day property challenge? So for me, what I learned firstly is there's a big difference between investing in a property that you want to live in versus a property that's going to make financial sense for you in the future. I think one of the biggest things for me was also understanding that as someone who is renting out a property, there's a lot on your shoulders to take into consideration whether it's the contract that you develop to the maintenance of the property and keeping that relationship with whoever is renting with you, because obviously you want people to rent for a long time. That for me was to stand out things that I learned and I think for me it was very important to understand why I wanna build my property portfolio and how I wanna go about doing so. And I'm still researching, still checking what's gonna make sense for me, but the last few days have made it a lot clearer for me in understanding how I wanna go about doing everything. All right, excellent. Thank you for that, Jared. Matau, I'm gonna ask you the same thing. What did you learn this week about why you wanna do this about property as an investment and what you learned from Ben? Cool, thank you so much, Nigel. Yeah, I think it all starts with understanding the why. I think that was the key core of the week, actually fully understanding and defining that for myself why it is I actually wanna do this, being a creative in a space where many can be fickle, sometimes many comes in floods, but then how do you actually put that money into something that will be for long term, not just for my gain, but also for the next generation. I think also the how to go about this because one thing for me that was a key stand out for the week was the fact that a lot of people buy the property they live in as an investment, but I think the main thing I learned this week is how to buy property to be cash flow positive from the minute you making the purchase because then it's an investment. Otherwise it still becomes a liability for many, many years. So that was a key stand out for me. The other thing like Jared spoke about is really just how to manage the space because once you've got the property, there's still a lot of work that goes into it. You still need to maintain good relationships with your tenants. You need to vet your tenants. You need to make sure you're getting the right tenants. Make sure your contracts are also right. There's just so many underlying or like hidden aspects that you also need to be a part of the journey, especially if you want to be a good landlord because in essence that's what you become when you're a property investor. And then the other thing that stood out for me was I guess the private property app which we learned about just the other day, how to actually navigate the app, how to use it and how to be able to spot what's a good deal. I think I noticed the fact that standard banks example, there's like repossess properties that might be a better deal, but it's also important to make sure you actually go view the place because I've seen with some of the images it's quite limited. So I think that's the one part that I'm really looking forward to next is from the app actually going into the spaces to see the property. But yeah, overall it's been a very fruitful week. Learned a lot. That's absolutely awesome. I'm glad that you guys learned a lot from this week. We don't often have time, a lot of time together. You guys are both busy, I'm also busy, but this week was a very fruitful week in my opinion. So since you brought it up, Matt, I think maybe let's talk about your why. Normally when you get into anything, especially in business, and if you don't have that driving force, the thing that drives you to do what you do, then very often you'll fail because without a why, you have no reason to wake up in the morning. A very close friend of mine, TJ, the other day posted on Facebook and he said if you don't have a reason to get up in the morning, you better find something to do because at the end of the day, you need to have a motivation to wake up. So let's talk about your why. Matt, tell us why it is you felt that property investment was important for you to do number one, and what is that thing that drives you and keeps you going? Thank you so much for the question, Nigel. I think my why is really simple. It's the fact that in life, life is really uncertain, let's be honest. And I think the lockdown was a big reality check for a lot of people in the sense that we live in a day and age where you really cannot live on one source of income anymore. You need to find ways of having multiple sources of income. You also need to find ways in which you put your money in things that will be fruitful, not only short term, but also for the long term. So short term wise, my why is for me, the benefit of me being able to one, have an asset that I know is gonna be giving me income every single month if it's cash for a positive right. It'll be paying off the mortgage. It'll be paying off the levies and hopefully we still got some change. And then long term, it's obviously considering the fact that we're trying to build generational wealth as well. I think property has been a very, it's not a big discussion and I'll be honest, especially around a lot of black tables. Like we don't sit at the dinner table and we discuss property, or even just out on the weekend, we don't sit and discuss property. I wanna get to a space where having property conversations is a normal thing. It's something that we do as people. And I think also because of the fact that I'm in the entertainment space, money is gonna flood in, but that money can flow out as quickly as it floods in. So wanting to put it in something that I know for sure long term, I'll still be able to look back and say, my money is invested in something that is solid, that is secure, but obviously that all goes with getting the right education behind it. And if I must also make it a bit personal, one of the other reasons I'm so, so passionate about this is the fact that when I was in corporate, I did have the opportunity of buying two properties in that time. Still wasn't sure if it was the right way to go about it, but I think with the learning that I'm getting now, I will be able to apply that in the properties I currently have. But the reality check was the lockdown where as an entertainer, I had no gigs. You know, like everything just shut down. And one of the things that kept me afloat was the fact that I had rental income. And I think from a legacy perspective, if that is a knowledge, I can impart or share with other people ways in which you can also still maintain or still have cash flow coming in. I definitely believe that property is one of the best ways in which to do that. So that is my biggest why, that property conversations must become normal and it should be a place where I actually saw stats that I think in the country, I will verify this that recently the most properties were bought by young black females. So it's slowly evolving, but I think we can get it to a point where it's more inclusive for us as a whole nation. So that's definitely part of my why. Absolutely amazing. Wow, that is a great story. And I think we all resonate or your story resonates with all of us. And you don't need to check the stats. I can confirm that it is definitely true. So 100% spot on. Thank you very much for sharing with us. Jared, same question to you. What is your why? Why are you doing this? For me, a big part of this why is the fact that people that come from the community that I come from, the Cape Flash, don't have a seat at the table when it comes to these conversations, not because they don't want to. It's just ignorance of not doing enough research to understand how property can work for you. As Matt Al said, for a lot of people, property has become a liability because there wasn't a lot of thinking that came into play when deciding on the kind of property that was invested in. And I think for a lot of people in my community, I would say people of color, it was just about investing in that one property that you're going to live in and that you leave behind if it's paid off for the next generation to inherit. And here is an opportunity where we can not only educate people in South Africa, especially our youth as we hear the stats are changing, which is great. But it's also an opportunity to, yes, to educate yourself, but to leave that legacy that is empowered. That it's not just about waiting on the inheritance, it's about having that buying power and adding to that and allowing the finances to work for you in a way that you could set your children, their children's children up to be able to really be part of this changing landscape of property ownership. It's a big thing for me. And I'm excited that I'm learning, that I am gaining this knowledge and that we're sharing with the public. So thanks to EDPFA and private property. I think people don't realize how huge this is. It's really a shift and a change for us as a people. And so it's exciting times and enlightenment. And I think we know better, we can do better. And so I'm really, really excited to be a part of this conversation that we are changing the way property ownership works in our country. I agree with you fully there, Jared. And as you know, and we spoke about in your original interview, I also come from Atlanta, Bridgetown to be specific. And you're right. We never spoke about these things around our table, you know, and so on. And people need to be educated. People need to understand and know that they actually can purchase property, that they can be investors in property. And that waiting for that inheritance shouldn't be the be all and end all of property. Because I can tell you from experience, once that inheritance comes, especially if you're a big family, before you know it, the money's gone. Because you can't all live in the one house. So 100% correct date. We need to look at property as an investment vehicle and not just the place to live. I think in the, it's about thinking about retirement. I know as youth, we're thinking about the now, we're thinking about living the most now and doing the most now. But I think it's all about sitting yourself up. We forget that we're gonna get older. When there's gonna be a time where we have to retire. And what that looks like is really defined by the choices you make now. And so that's a big drive for me as well, is to know that as a musician, I won't always be the artist of choice as I get older. And so at least I know that the money that I'm getting now, I can put to good use and plant that seed so that I can reap the fruits at a later stage. Absolutely. And on that note, we'll take a bit of a break and play the pipe. So we'd like to thank you guys for joining us thus far for this first part of our wrap up for the week. Keep tuned and we'll talk further about the why, the how and also how to use the private property app in order for you to become a property investor as well. So thank you for joining us so far and we'll see you after the break. Welcome back everybody to the 50 day property challenge. This is the second part of our second session with private property. Come and join us every Friday at 8.30 on the private property Facebook page, as well as on YouTube, where you will learn about property investment within 50 days from our special guests, Janet Ricketts and Matt Owl from Metro again. So guys, in the earlier session, we spoke a little bit about your why. Now I'd like to talk about the how. How are you actually going to do this? What is it that you learned this week about how to go about purchasing your first property within 50 days? And then we'll talk about the private property app a little bit. Since we started with Matt Owl first before, Janet, I will ask you to go and tell us all about how you believe you are going to start your property journey in these 50 days. For me, it's all about searching, searching, searching, understanding what's out there and what's gonna work for me. And I think I have an idea, but it may change over time, depending on price range and how I want the property to work for me. But I think a lot of research and definitely through learning that you have to go and actually see the property. Don't go just rely on pictures, because they can be deceiving. Some people are trying to just sell properties quickly. So they put old pictures up and then when you get there, somebody thought it was. And just research for me is key and understanding how I wanna invest. But I'm just really open to anything right now because this is a new conversation for me, you know? And sort of identifying all these things like the how and the wise have all been a new conversation for me to have. And so, I mean, during the process of learning, but definitely that's the first point of course for me is just doing my research and understanding in terms of price range, what kind of property owner I wanna be and how I want to arrange it out and how I see this working for me into the future. Yeah, so one of the things that we spoke about in your initial interview was about having a little bit of money put aside because you're an artist and you don't always know when the gigs are gonna come. So you have to put some money aside and you start to prepare. So that's already you one up on most people because most people don't prepare that way. Most people just hope that they can fall into something great like an inheritance like we spoke about earlier and then hope that they'll have a good one from me. Definitely and I think it's important for people to understand that it's been years of saving, you know? It wasn't just, okay, years of money. It's been a couple of years. I mean, probably a decade of me saying I eventually wanna buy property. So I need to start putting money away whether it was a 500 grand, whether it was a 1000 grand, whether it was even a 200 grand, just putting it aside and knowing that over time it's gonna become this deposit that you can use. And I think for me, that was the important thing I'm also learning is that when you've got a great deposit it solidifies the deal quicker and it just sets you in good stead with actually just acquiring the property faster so. So that was also a big lesson. And I'm excited that I did that nine. I urge everybody out there to start, you know and give yourself a time frame and understand X amounts of money from your salary put it away because it might sound like a bit of money but at the end of the day in five years time or in two years time or in fact next year there's a bit of a deposit that you can put down. Fantastic. Yeah, look at the end of the day also it's a property as we always say is a long-term investment. It's not a quick scheme. So you need to have that mindset that things are going to take time. So like building up a deposit, you know for some of us we want to do it quicker. So we get into things like, you know being able to do sourcing deals and basically what that means and we'll speak about this later in the first few days if you don't have your own money then you go out to source deals and you on sell those deals to potential investors and you make a commission on being able to source and package that deal. And in so doing you'll be able to build up some deposit and then eventually you'll be able to purchase your own property. What you've done over an entire decade that is so impressive, the patience it must have taken to not use that money over 10 years when emergencies came up. Yes, I mean as in Dublin you said before I mean when the pandemic hit it was quite a struggle for a lot of us artists. So you look at that pot and you kind of go maybe I can use it now maybe I should just not do this. But it's something to be said about just saying focus on that goal and understanding that it's not about now it's not about satisfying what even needed is now it's about thinking about when I'm 60, when I'm 70 knowing that I've set this portfolio out for myself that I can retire comfortably that's exciting to me. And as I said before I urge everybody to think that way too. Yeah, awesome. All right, Dublin, Matt Elke tell us about your you already purchased two properties and we spoke about that again in your interview. So you really at the stage where you want to build on your portfolio and not start something new. So tell us how you are going to go about building on to your existing portfolio. Okay, so I think it starts with first setting a realistic price range. I think that's also the key starting point of this is the amounts that I'm looking for. I think the how is also what type of property is first also understanding that do I want to rent out to maybe potential in a student area in a, you know, is it like holiday residential? It's also just being able to define that for yourself. Like actually how am I really, really thinking about this? So first answering those questions for yourself. I think also something else that I learned in the past week was Jared was very fortunate years to, you know, have saved up money for so long, but the truth of the matter and the reality of a lot of South Africans is not everybody has that money to, you know, had been saving for 10 years. So I think some of the how I also took from the past week is which I know we're still going to touch on further is how do I actually secure funding for property investment with someone else's money? You know, not necessarily my own number two, it's what is some of the admin and the documents that I personally in my life need to have in place? I know we touched on certain documents. Like, like if you're working, if you're fully employed, you're going to need your pay slips. You're going to need a good credit score. Like those are also long-term things you need to plan for because you might be sitting in a position where right now your credit score is not doing great maybe because of the pandemic. Now that's the plan you need to set out for yourself that, okay, over the next three months, I'm getting back to, you know, solidifying my credit score so that I'm in good standing for creditors to potentially want to allow me to, you know, get money if I'm using the financial institution route. I think the other how that really stuck out for me was like Jared mentioned, it's not just about looking at pictures. It's me also physically being active, sitting out a day in my calendar to say, okay, I've viewed X amount of properties, I've contacted so many agents, but I need to go see them. I need to be sure that what I'm seeing on the pictures is what's really happening because there's a lot of things pictures won't tell you. Like, you need to go press that light switch to check if all the lights are working. You don't know if the geysers work, you don't know if the stove is working. And those are costs that you might find yourself being trapped in having bought this property because you literally just went on pictures. So I think those are some of the main house for me. Yeah, just sitting out a clear price range for myself. So I know what I'm doing, defining what type of property investment I want to go for. For me, I'm definitely looking at like maybe student accommodation. The area of focus, you know, South Africa is large, but where do I actually want to invest? You know, that's also important. And familiarizing yourself with the area in which you want to invest in, it doesn't help that I'm in Pretoria or Johannesburg, but I'm buying a property in Durban. How do I even, you know, so it's also just making sure that I'm very well, like versed in the understanding of that area, especially if it's going to be a first time investment. So for me, because I'm building, I'm trying to build this portfolio, it's first rectifying any mistakes that I've made in buying the first two, make sure that I'm managing them correctly, which I have been, but now, you know, we just tightening the screws a little bit more. And then, yeah, I guess going forward, making sure that I as a landlord know how to, because currently I've been allowing someone else to manage for me, but I think with one of the clauses, I realize that actually I can save a bit of money if I manage it myself, but I didn't know how to. So a lot of that information also helped me, yeah. So I think, yeah, that's a lot of my how, yeah. Wow, okay, so in fact, those few things that we spoke about, we really just spoke about them briefly during this week. And as the weeks go by, we're going to talk more in depth about things like doing a due diligence on your property and understanding all the things you just said now about the electrical wiring, the plumbing, the roof, et cetera, et cetera. How often have we not gotten ourselves into situations exactly as you described, where you buy the house, you move in, and then you find out that the plugs don't work because the electrical compliance certificate you received was actually done by some friend of a friend of the estate agent or the owner, and actually the compliance certificate is meaningless. So you have to do your own due diligence. And we'll talk about all of those things. We'll talk about feasibility studies, et cetera, et cetera. So I think that's enough for now, except for the fact that we also spoke about the private property app and how to use the app to research property. So Jared, what did you learn from that? And Matt, I believe there was a property that you were quite interested in. I think it was a repossessed property that you saw that possibly we could do as a deal together. So Jared, your thoughts on the private property app? I think it's really cool. I think the interface is quite user-friendly. For me, it was quite interesting to see that you could really define that search to the kind of property where it's a flat or a house to how many rooms, how many bathrooms. And it was quite exciting because you really get a scope of the entire country of what's available, just by typing in the name. And for me, it really opened my mind up to going, oh, I'm not just limited to Cape Town. I can actually now think about, is it inter-provincial? Am I gonna go to Joberg and check out a property? Am I gonna invest in something in Durban? And I love it because obviously, all the information is there on the property. The agent's information is there. And so with the easy click of a button, I was connecting with various agents to try and solidify some viewings. Very exciting. And so I really enjoyed the experience. Fantastic. Dabbling, tell us about that deal that was on the private property app that we're looking at. Yes, so there was a property there. It was definitely repossessed because it was by Stanford Bank number one. But also what made it sound like such a gem, which when I view it, we'll see if it really is a gem, is the fact that, am I still, yeah, it's the fact that the price, right? I think it was a three-bedroom, right? It was a three-bedroom, square meters, quite spacious, but the asking price for it was quite competitive. Because the private property app, nice thing about it is that you actually get to see if you, like Jared said, you get to zone in on an area. So if I'm looking at Pretoria and I zone in, maybe Arcadia or I zone in Hatfield, I also get to see the average price range of properties within that area for a one-bedroom or two-bedroom or three-bedroom, just so that you know realistically what is the going rate. So the interesting thing about this one was the fact that it was a three-bedroom, but it was almost priced like a one-bedroom deal. I think it was like 300,000 or something. Yes, I was like 300,000 for a two-bedroom apartment, two parking bays, bathroom, kitchen. So yeah, I guess it's also just understanding why is the bank, why is it that little? Is the bank just trying to recover the money outstanding or is there something wrong? I need to go check it out. But it sounds like a really good deal. Back to your due diligence requirement. So guys, thank you very much for this week. It's been an exciting week of learning. And we thank everybody that was involved in teaching us about our why and our how and about the app itself. And guys, out there, the public that's watching us and listening to this podcast, whatever they call it nowadays, thank you for joining us. Thank you for allowing us into your homes and for allowing us to not just educate Matt, Al and Jared, but also you the public about property and how you too can invest in property within a 50-day period. So keep following us, keep watching us, keep watching us on YouTube, keep watching us on our website, edpfpropertyacademy.com and search us on YouTube and you'll be able to find us there, subscribe to our channel. And every day we will post what we have done on that particular day and you will be able to follow this journey with the edpfpropertyacademy, Private Property and our two special guests, Jared, Ricketts and Matt Al as they have started their journey towards building their own property portfolio. And we hope that you also will be able to do that. So guys, thank you very much for joining us. Join us again on Monday as we continue this journey of the 50-day Property Challenge. Why?