He may not have the top hat, cane or bushy grey moustache but George Markoski has become a real life Monopoly Man like in the widely played board game.
The property investor who was obsessed with Monopoly as a child currently owns 39 properties spread around the country and lives off hundreds of thousands in rent money.
It’s a position he has reached starting with little money and instead relying on a combination of market smarts, hard work and long hours spent researching.
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Mr Markoski, 50, said some of the techniques he used to get into the market and profit from rising real estate values are easy to replicate – but require patience.
Property investor George Markoski, with wife Christina, owns 39 properties.
“My approach is a little different, I’m very stats driven,” he said. “There are 16,000 suburbs in Australia, sometimes they are going up and some are going down.
“There will always be good and bad but we are fortunate that there is so much (research) to get an objective view of every suburb in Australia.”
Mr Markoski bought his first home in the 1990s while working as a small-business owner. It was a house in central Adelaide snapped up for about $180,000. It’s now worth just under $1 million.
The purchase was the culmination of a childhood dream. “I wanted to buy ever since I started playing Monopoly as a five year old,” he said.
Mr Markoski had a $180,000 a year passive income by age 37.
“My family struggled to make ends meet and I knew I’d never be inheriting a fortune, but I saw property had made a lot of people into millionaires.”
His next purchases followed in the late 1990s with more houses in Adelaide and Perth before he hit a brickwall.
“I was in my 20s, I didn’t know what I was doing,” he said. “Every property was negatively geared and before I knew it I was working seven days a week just to pay them all off.”
He added that his fortunes changed when he shifted his loans to interest-only and focused more on the timing of his purchases.
He recognised that home values in most areas tended to stay flat for many years but then went through short, sharp periods of growth. If he invested just before the growth phase he would profit.
His first purchase was in central Adelaide.
“They say real estate is all about location, location, location. It’s a load of crap. It’s about timing, timing, timing,” Mr Markoski said. “If you buy at the right time you can double your money.”
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Each successful purchase was used to leverage into his next property. As the value of his homes increased, he could refinance his loans, pull out equity, and use it as a deposit for his next property.
Using this technique he had 10 properties and a $180,000 a year passive income by age 37. That income continued to grow with each new property. Mr Markoski said: “I don’t need to work now, my properties make my money.”
