Aussie who owns more than 300 homes drops bombshell

Daily Telegraph

29-05-2025

Australia's most prolific real estate investor has dropped a bombshell.
The Western Sydney-based investor, who owns more than 300 properties worth nearly a quarter of a billion dollars, has admitted that he doesn't believe his staggering holdings are enough.
Nathan Birch said he was disappointed with the size of his portfolio because, having just turned 40, he is not yet a billionaire – a goal he was hoping to achieve before reaching this age.
And now he wants more property. Plenty more.
Mr Birch, who started his empire by snapping up large tracts of rundown homes in some of Australia's poorest city areas, said he is planning to remedy his situation with another home buying spree. The plan is to buy 100 properties in a month.
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'I wanted to be a billionaire when I hit 40,' he said. 'That's not going to happen, but I will get to a billion at some point.
'My goal is have 10,000 properties one day. It's for grandkids. I hope that when I die, my life will be like a corporate entity.'
Mr Birch added that he understood that his plans will likely divide opinion and that many would accuse him of elevating the housing crisis by snapping up homes that could be going to first-home buyers.
'I've been quiet for a while but I plan to buy much more this year,' he said. 'There will be a whole bunch of people who won't like it. Some people will say 'how dare he?'
'I've just come to accept that not everyone agrees with it … Even my mum, when I got to 200 properties, she said 'don't be stupid, don't buy more'.
'The thing is, my actions are based on numbers. This is what keeps me focused.'
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He added that he relished the personal challenge of trying to find good investments. 'It used to be about ego,' he said. 'I used to take w*nker photos in front of cars. I became a brand in a way.
'Ten years ago, I realised that kind of stuff wouldn't improve my life.
'I've always just loved property. When I was 13, a lot of the other guys my age would look at magazines full of girls. I just paged through pictures of houses.'
The investor, who grew up in a single-income household in Sydney's Mt Druitt area, once popularised as 'Struggle Street', said he did not have a huge inheritance or wealthy family to support his ventures.
Mr Birch explained that he made his first investment aged 18 using money saved from various high school jobs and gradually built up his portfolio with some clever buying tactics.
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He later established a highly successful buyer's agency and property management business that supported his investments. 'If you include everything for clients, I've bought about 20,000 properties,' he said.
But his plan is to purchase 100 properties over a month in a similar way to how he built his property portfolio in the beginning: exploiting a banking mechanism known as leverage.
HOW AN EMPIRE WAS BUILT
Rather than stump up cash for each deal, he instead draws out equity from his existing properties through refinancing deals, which then fund the costs of purchasing new properties.
Most of his properties are cheaper than the norm, with many bought for around the $200,000 mark.
These properties usually rent for a high price relative to the cost of his loans – normally to the point where the rents cover the full costs of repayments and other ownership expenses.
It's usually enough to satisfy the banks, who continue to provide him credit for his deals because the holding costs of keeping his portfolio are low relative to his income.
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Another key pillar of his methods is that he targets homes in low socio-economic areas that are selling through rushed off market sales. This allows him to buy under the market value.
He said buying under market value makes his loans lower risk in the eyes of lenders, but it also means he has 'instant equity' upon purchase, which he can later use to, again, leverage into the next property.
Armed with these tools, Mr Birch used to be one of the most prolific property investors in the country, buying up 200 properties by the time he was 31 years old.
THE DEBT POSITION
He said he has slowed down in recent years and shifted his focus to snapping up large motels (paid in cash) – and he has used the profits from these businesses to pay down much of his debt.
Mr Birch credited this approach to reducing the bank debt on his properties to just $16 million.
He has an additional $11 million in other debts, leaving his total debt position against his properties at about $27 million.
'I've spent a lot of time restructuring my portfolio and that's why my net worth is high compared to the debt … soon I will be pulling out a lot of the equity to buy more.'
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Mr Birch said buying over 300 properties was not easy.
'I got to a point pre-Covid where banks wouldn't lend to me. I had to pay in cash. Over time, it caught up with me. I had to sell off a few in 2017 and 2018. I had to swap a lot of properties and there was a lot of land tax.
'That's why I got into motels – to improve my cash flow, but it crippled me. It's been a wild ride. There have been days when I vomited up food because of the stress, and I usually handle stress really well. Sometimes it gets to you.'
Mr Birch said family members had tried to talk him out of growing his investments over the years, just because of how large his holdings had become.
'My mum is fearful. She was excited for the first few properties but then she said 'you'll go bankrupt'. There was some kind of Britney Spears intervention stuff.
'All this noise from people who loved me were thoughts. They weren't real. Many of my family members didn't know how all this debt stuff worked. Now my mum says 'I don't know how you do it, but you know what you are doing'.'
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