Jacob and Simon Camilleri, transforming the Australian property investing landscape, chartering the terrain of Australia's underregulated property market. Determined guides for aspiring investors and home owners, and bringing their expertise to property investment, their mission is clear: improve the quality of life through real estate while shielding property buyers from scams and spruikers. Their life's work revolves around empowering others to unlock the full potential of a successful property portfolio, and this is made possible through their co-founded buyer’s agency JSC Property Investments. Their motto is simple: People before profits.
Jacob and Simon Camilleri, Buyers Agency
Introduce yourself! Please tell us about you and your life, so we can get to know you better.
As brothers born just eighteen months apart, we were raised in a secluded farming community with the closest small village being Braidwood, NSW (Australia). In our early years, we struggled financially, but we were raised to appreciate the importance of good health, family, and looking after your community.
Upon completing our schooling, we both began our careers within the Australian Defence Force—Simon joined the Australian Army and I (Jacob) joined the Royal Australian Air Force. We both had technically demanding roles that required us to relocate all over Australia, and during our time the core values of the Australian Defence Force became ingrained in us from an early age.
After a year or two I discovered that military life didn’t align with my passions. It was during my time in the Air Force that I was handed a book on property investing, which sparked my initial interest in real estate at the age of twenty-one. I became infatuated with the desire for the pursuit of financial freedom through real estate — and I imagined a future without the stress of uncertainty or career direction. Property became my way to design a lifestyle that aligned with my passions, and not be stuck in a job I didn’t enjoy until retirement.
I committed endless hours to research and eventually took the leap of faith into the property market. I gathered a modest portfolio before leaving the Air Force behind to begin a life with more family time and more freedom.
Meanwhile, Simon thrived in the dynamic environment of the Army, enjoying the camaraderie and the fast-paced nature of helicopter missions and serving overseas. Simon committed a decade of service until he decided to change things up, take the plunge, and resign from the Army to co-found JSC Property Investments.
Simon now lives in sunny Brisbane with his partner Kim, newborn son Jack, and loyal companion Zane - a five-year-old dog, wolfhound cross bull-mastiff. Simon is deeply passionate about physical and mental health and has a huge drive to help others improve theirs. He resonates with the struggles faced by veterans during the transitioning process into civilian life, and he’s very active in seeking out opportunities to offer support wherever he can.
I also live in Brisbane and dedicate most of my time to the family business. Outside of work, I live pretty modestly. I’m writing a self-help/educational book to help people find guidance or direction in their lives and how to find your passions amongst the noise of a fast-changing world. Aside from that, I spend time with friends or family or do some volunteering for the local charity as a driving instructor helping people get their hours up to become fully qualified.
Can you provide a brief overview of JSC Property Investments, including its founding principles and mission? What inspired you to start this business?
As an Australian property buyer’s agency, we started JSC Property Investments to improve the quality of life through property investment. The business was founded to guide property buyers in the right direction and to use the property as an effective tool to bring more freedom and choices into people’s everyday lives. The property industry is littered with spruikers, scammers, and countless traps that can derail someone’s entire investing plans. People can’t afford to learn property investing through trial-and-error, and so our mission is to help people create multi-property portfolios safely and improve their quality of life through property investing the right way.
What types of property investments does your company specialize in, and what strategies do you employ to maximize returns for your clients? Are there specific markets or types of properties you focus on?
We’re a little different from most other companies because we don’t accept hidden commissions to on-sell specific properties, and we charge a flat, fixed fee. These two factors allow us to be completely unbiased as to where and what we buy, and how much is paid for the property, which leads to higher returns and a more ethical outcome for the client. We’ve structured it like this so our greatest incentive is property performance – the better the property performs, the sooner the client is likely to want to come back for another purchase.
We specialize in targeting combination capital growth plus cash flow-focused properties in large economies that will provide outperforming growth rates to achieve the best results in the shortest possible time. We also target cashflow-based or capital-growth-specific properties if they happen to be suitable for the specific client. By targeting the larger towns and cities, we have long-term stability in growth and the best chances of long-term success. We combine this with selecting the currently undervalued suburbs due for short-to-medium term growth, which can be achieved by analyzing data and market trends, macrocycles, and local market dynamics. Once the location is determined, we look to achieve a great deal either on or off-market, and regularly buy under market value for an extra short-term equity boost.
Do you have any success stories or testimonials from clients who have benefited from your property investment services?
Given the returns and huge success so far, we've received many testimonials and positive reviews! We regularly monitor the markets we have purchased in for clients to understand the Return-on-investment (ROI) and the incredible returns they have achieved. Over 2023, the average property growth rates for our client’s properties were 31%, where the average Australian house price rose by 8.1% (CoreLogic Australia). We’ll continue to monitor the growth and rate of return over 2024 as further property sales continue to affect market prices.
We managed to achieve these returns by having the experience and understanding of correct asset selection, negotiation, regularly buying below market value, avoiding the competition through off-market or pre-market properties, and conducting all the necessary due diligence to ensure no roadblocks to the performance of the investment. Our clients truly see the success of our strategy once the growth and returns are realized, and that’s why we steer clear of hidden commissions to push brand-new property where the poor results are eventually noticed.
How does JSC Property Investments approach risk management and due diligence when evaluating potential investment opportunities?
Risk and due diligence are often misunderstood in real estate – there are guidebooks and checklists for inspecting properties, there’s Google Maps to view the property online, and flood maps are usually easily accessible through local government websites. You can do online searches to find the underground pipes and cables and analyze the micro demographics of the suburb and street to determine who the property might appeal to in the current market. You can easily search for average vendor discounting, vacancy rates, and days on market of a given suburb and city. A buyer can have this information and more but might not understand how to use it to achieve outperforming results.
Risk minimization is everything, we want to sleep well at night knowing that we’ve done everything possible to ensure the least amount of risk for clients. Every property considered needs to be meticulously checked and analyzed to ensure the lowest possible risk – especially because we’re dealing with millions of dollars. If we miss steps in the process then this increases risk and potential stress and can be detrimental to the future performance of the investment.
Tell us about your greatest career achievement so far.
We’ve put our heart and soul into setting up JSC Property Investments, spending at least twelve months in preparation before actively buying property for other people. The enormous results seen so far by our clients combined with the positive feedback we’ve received on our educational social media content, is an incredible achievement for us. Completing my book Shortcut to Freedom: Making Millions through Property Investment, was an achievement that aims to scale our message of how profitable property investing can be if done the right way. Simon’s entrepreneurial spirit has led him to create an international side hustle business selling a nootropic supplement called Peak Resolve designed to reduce stress and increase concentration in adults. It’s incredibly impressive.
If you could change one thing about your industry, what would it be and why?
Possibly the most dangerous aspect of this industry is the ability for anyone to become a buying agent or a property sourcing specialist, do a short course, and recommend poorly located brand-new or off-the-plan properties to inexperienced property buyers. Many people think these properties make great investments, but they're mostly usually complete duds. The agent or specialist usually receives an enormous commission from the sale which gets added onto the purchase price, which leaves the buyer to massively overpay for a poorly performing asset. This incentive creates a significant bias where the sale of the brand-new property is a higher financial incentive than the success and performance of the investment for the client, which seems highly unethical. A poorly performing investment asset can extend an investor's timeframe by many years, and this existing bias is not in favor of the consumer.
In the dynamic field of property investment, how do you stay updated on industry trends and market insights? How does this knowledge contribute to your decision-making process when advising clients?
Industry trends don’t have much weight on the asset types we buy. One year to the next we will see different property types outperform, make the news, or receive all the hype – inner city apartments, houses in new estates, and small regional or coastal towns. These investment types or locations may perform great in a given year, but on a long-term trend, they significantly underperform and can be extremely volatile. The major Australian property data websites can be a great tool to confirm the historical performance, and keeping a close eye on the market over many years reaffirms what asset truly outperforms over the long term. Interest rates will change over time, inflation will come and go, and this will affect the supply and demand for housing in the regional and capital cities of Australia.
Market insights are crucial in remaining up-to-date and maximizing opportunities. Keeping in touch with the market and consumer sentiment will affect our target locations and negotiating power. The lower the consumer sentiment, generally the more negotiating power and better real estate deals. If property prices are rising rapidly and sentiment is improving, the increasing demand will likely continue to increase the prices. Whether we are looking at the Brisbane property market, Adelaide, Perth, Sydney, or Melbourne, sentiment plays a huge part in how we negotiate the best possible deal.
Other trends such as negative gearing, capital gains tax (CGT), stamp duty, Lenders Mortgage Insurance (LMI), property depreciation etcetera are all rules that can change over time. We see a lot of buyer advocates jumping on the newest trend to promote ‘how to save on tax’ and target investment properties that are so volatile to small legislative changes. We have to avoid properties that are at risk of slight changes to these rules for long-term property success.
We also choose to be members of the Property Investment Professionals of Australia (PIPA) which helps us remain updated with the ever-changing real estate landscape of Australia.
