< 9%
Own one investment property
Less than nine in every hundred Australians ever buy a single investment property. Most never start.
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The framework · Public version
Location first. Properties second.
A property is a multi-decade decision. We treat it like one — data before instinct, criteria before emotion, walk-away discipline before close-rate pressure. This page walks you through how Coppick approaches a deal, before we ever look at a listing.
96%
Never get past three
Of those who do invest, the vast majority stall at one, two, or three properties — often because the first one was wrong.
0.2%
Reach four or more
Two-tenths of one percent of Australians ever build a portfolio of four or more. The odds are against you. Strategy is how you change them.
First principles
What we believe before we look at a single listing.
A property is not an investment because it has four walls and a roof. Whether it builds wealth depends on a small number of decisions — most of them made before you ever walk through the door.
Belief 01
Location does most of the work.
The suburb you buy in is responsible for the lion's share of your property's growth. Picking the right street or the right house matters far less than picking the right area at the right point in its cycle.
Belief 02
Walking away is the asset.
The discipline to say “this one isn't it” — even when a deal looks close — is what protects clients from purchases that cost decades to recover from. We bias toward fewer, better. A property has to clear all five must-haves or we walk.
Belief 03
Independence is structural, not aspirational.
A flat fee paid only by you means no incentive to push you toward a more expensive property, no kickback for referring you to a specific broker, no commission from anyone but you. The structure is the alignment — not the slogan.
Belief 04
Portfolios are built, then consolidated.
The strategy is rarely “buy ten, hold ten.” It's more often: buy a handful of high-quality assets, let time do its work, then sell down a few to retire the debt on the rest — leaving you with fewer properties owned outright, generating cash flow rather than carrying it.
The framework
Five stages, in order.
Coppick's full methodology runs across 30+ data points that sit behind the paid engagement. This page is the public shape — the five stages every deal moves through, from briefing to handover.
Stage 01
Strategy.
Before any property is on the table, we work out what this purchase is meant to do. Are you building cash flow? Long-term growth? A retirement consolidation in fifteen years? Each answer pulls the search in a different direction.
This is also where, working alongside your mortgage broker, we make sure the strategy fits your borrowing position — so the search is anchored to what you can actually fund. Your broker advises on the finance itself; we build the property strategy around it. A clean strategy is worth more than a clever property.
Stage 02
Where.
Queensland alone has well over a thousand suburbs and towns. Coppick narrows that down using consistent, data-led filters — economic depth, supply and demand balance, vacancy and rental health, long-term fundamentals.
The end state is two or three suburbs that survive every filter. Not a list of forty. Not a "good vibe" feeling about somewhere a friend mentioned. Not the suburb at the top of last month's growth ranking.
Coppick won't touch: towns under 20,000 population (with limited exceptions for diversified-economy growth towns), single-industry mining towns, and flood or fire risk zones. The exclusion list is as disciplined as the inclusion list.
Stage 03
The five must-haves.
Inside the chosen suburbs, every property is filtered through five criteria. All five have to be present. Miss one and Coppick walks — even if the deal looks close.
- Yield floor of 3.5% gross minimum. Below that, the deal has to clear an extraordinarily high bar elsewhere.
- Value-add potential. A real path to manufactured equity — renovation, subdivision, granny flat, cosmetic lift. A property with no upside is a pure market-timing bet.
- Land-to-asset ratio of 60/40 or better. Land at least 60% of the total value, building at most 40%. Land appreciates; buildings depreciate.
- Solid home that passes building and pest. Cosmetic findings are negotiable. Structural ones aren't.
- Bought under market value. A genuine margin of safety on price — discount to comparable sales, vendor motivation, off-market access, or a property the market is overlooking.
These five are the visible headline. Behind them sit the 30+ additional data points Coppick applies during the paid Strategy Session and Full Buyers Agency engagements — structural, location, market timing, financial, and regulatory factors. That depth is the work clients pay for.
Stage 04
How much.
Coppick doesn't trust bank valuation apps and doesn't trust the agent's listed price. We build our own comparable market analysis — recent actual sales, like-for-like configuration, similar land size, similar age — and rank each comparable as inferior, similar, or superior to the property in question. The result is a defensible price band, not a guess.
Negotiation runs from that anchor. The first offer is the anchor — we don't raise price once it's set. Concessions go on terms (settlement length, conditions, deposit timing), not on price.
Coppick generally advises clients against auctions — they reward emotion, exclude due-diligence clauses, and turn an unconditional contract into a thirty-second decision. The opposite of the discipline this framework is built on.
Stage 05
Settle and structure.
The decisions you make around the property — how you own it, when insurance starts, who manages it — quietly determine how much of the upside you keep. Coppick coordinates with your accountant, conveyancer, and broker so the property lands inside a structure that suits your strategy.
Tax structure, ownership entity, and depreciation schedules require licensed advice from your accountant and a quantity surveyor. Coppick coordinates them. We don't replace them.
What we refuse to do
The discipline cuts both ways.
The framework above describes what Coppick does. This section describes what Coppick won't do — even when it would close a deal faster or earn a higher fee.
01
Recommend a property that fails the criteria.
If a property doesn't clear all five must-haves, we walk — even if a client is keen on it. Even if it's been months on the search. The criteria exist precisely because they're hard to apply when emotion is in the room.
02
Take a commission, kickback, or referral fee.
Not from developers, not from lenders, not from the broker or conveyancer we introduce. The full income from your engagement is on the engagement letter. Nothing arrives from a side door.
03
Pretend to know what we don't.
If the data is incomplete, we say so. If a market is uncertain, we say so. Confidence is for the criteria. Honesty is for everything else.
The framework is yours · The application is the work
This is how we think. Putting it to work for your situation is the engagement.
The framework on this page is the shape. The thresholds, scoring rules, suburb shortlists, and contract clauses sit behind it — and applying them to your borrowing capacity, your timeline, and your goals is what a strategy session is for.