Join us in this episode as we learn how Hill, despite a lack of support, climbed his way from farm life in England to investing in property overseas. We learn what sparked his motivations to pursue property, how he got extremely lucky on his first investment as a young man, and what happened when his luck turned the other way.

Timestamps:

1:49 | Hill is Grateful for the Time he can Spend With his Family
4:37 | His Early Education was Very Traditional
6:06 | Hill’s Parents Moved to a Remote Part of England and Began to Live off the Land
10:41 | Hill was put Into Grammar School, However he Didn’t Feel it was the Right Place for Him
13:22 | His Parents Weren't the Most Supportive of His Education
20:26 | Hill Used to get £2000 per Year From the Government
22:57 | Hill got the Inspiration for His First Investment From His Student Landlord
25:44 | Hill did Things a Little Differently to His Peers
29:13 | It was a Girl who Eventuated His Move to Australia

Resources and Links:

(14:58) What happened to me is because I didn't really have very much as a child, I kind of created this yearning for nice things, you know, I just fell in love with beautiful cars or nice things in life.

This is Property Investory where we talk to successful property investors to find out more about their stories, mindset and strategies.

I’m Tyrone Shum and in this episode, we’re speaking with property investor Giles Hill, wh has renovated and developed properties for more than three decades. He shares how he bought his first investment property as a student for over three times the cost of his parent’s house, how he managed to live there rent-free, and much much more. 

Being a family orientated guy, Hill spends a lot of his time on the domestic side of things, since he has the time and freedom.   

(00:40): Currently, I focus on property and family life, which I'm very fortunate to do so. In my property business, I help others achieve wealth through property investments and I have quite a clear strategy, which has worked for myself. I’d like to help and assist others to achieve similar success.

(01:09): A typical day for me is pretty relaxed, you know, I like to start the morning with a walk or swim or a little bit of yoga, I spend some time with my kids and get them off to school and I probably do some household chores. I'm the person most responsible for running my house as my wife has a very busy job. Once that's done, my day typically involves meeting prospective clients, potentially looking at properties or checking to see how development projects are progressing. 

(01:41): I'm also meeting with my referral network and the people who I get most of my business with, who I work with in my virtual team.

(01:49): That's great. It sounds like you've got a very relaxed family life, with work based around that. Is that how you initially designed your business? So that it was based around that kind of lifestyle?

(02:02): It was probably not that strategically planned. I think it's just something which has changed as life has changed. You know, I had children later in life than a lot of people and I hadn't really planned what that would look like going forward. But I've been fortunate to be able to adapt the way I live to suit how I want to live and how I want to spend time with my family.

(02:23): That's great. Can I ask how old your kids are?

(02:28): My son's birthday was this week, he's just turned 12 and my daughter's birthday is next week and she turns 10.

Hill grew up in a very small and traditional village in the middle of England where everyone knew everyone. He experienced a simple country lifestyle.

(03:17): I went to my junior school or primary school locally to where I was. It was a tiny little school, like one of those little ‘Peppa Pig’ sort of schools. I remember there were 53 children in the school in total and that included kindergarten up to the age my son is now, which is high school. There were 11 children in my year and I was the only boy.

(04:01): That would have been quite interesting. So, did that change over time?

(04:08): Shortly after I started high school, my parents actually relocated us to another part of England, to Cornwall. So for people who aren't familiar with England, if you look at the map of England, Cornwall is right down in the left hand bottom corner, that big toe. But that little village school had an interesting education system for many years. Prior to when my sister started to go to that school, It had been run by a Headmistress who had a little house next to the school.

(04:37): It was very classical in its approach within and the school itself was just divided into two big classrooms. That headmistress retired after probably 50 years and she was quite a strict disciplinarian. We then had a new teacher come in who was kind of funky, this would have been in the late 60s [or] early 70s. The new headmistress had a completely different approach to how children should learn, she was a kind of a free spirit. 

(04:37): We were pretty much left to our own devices, doing what we wanted to do and learning as we went, but unfortunately, I don't think we learned that much. It became a bit of a challenge by the time we went to high school and we were classed or streamed with children who had perhaps had a more stringent or structured primary school education. So I think it was a little bit of a challenge to catch up again after that.

(05:29): Was the move from your original town to Cornwall a big change for you? Because as you said it was a much smaller town to begin with.

(05:38): It was interesting, because we went from being in a little village to being in a much more remote place. It was a big life change, as far as, in that village in the midlands, we were like most of the other families. But, when we went to live in the middle of nowhere in deepest, darkest Cornwall, we were very remote. My parents bought an old house with about an acre of land, so a fair chunk of land. 

(06:06): They basically took on a lifestyle of self sufficiency. So they didn't go to work, we didn't have very much money and we didn't go on holidays. But we were self sufficient, as far as growing our own vegetables and having goats, ducks and chickens to contend with. 

(06:22): That is so cool. You think about that now, where everything is so modernised, everything's so industrialised, we get our food straight away from the supermarket. But going back to a time when we actually had to farm our own food, grow it and so forth, it makes you really appreciate how long things do take. At the moment I'm even growing some carrots and some tomatoes in the backyard and you're just so used to picking it up off the shelf in the supermarket.

(06:47): You realise that there are so many different seasons, the timing and so forth. You learn to appreciate life a lot more. I think that is something that we all miss. We kind of go, 'Oh, I really want that fresh, organic lifestyle back'.

(06:58): Yeah it's funny, we have a little vegetable patch here at our house in Sydney, which is a lot of fun. I think it's great for the kids to see that. But there's a flip side. I think as a kid we went into being in a remote state of living which was lacking in interaction with other people. I don't think it was the best way to go and I think as you get a little bit older, you just want to be with other people and you want to get out of that situation. So I probably left home as soon as I could after that to try to go and explore the big wide world.

In hopes of escaping the rat race, seeking more space and a much quieter and humble existence, Hill’s parent’s made the decision to move. 

(07:47): They grew up in Leicester, like post-war Leicester. Our village was 10 miles or 16 kilometres outside of the city of Leicester. But they just felt that there was a massive amount of change and they didn't like what they saw going on. It was a time of major growth within the UK.

(08:20): I’ve heard a lot of stories from past guests on the show, who talk about the reasons why they’ve moved. In some cases they had moved six times in two or three years with their parents due to their jobs. This is a little bit of a different perspective in life to be able to see why they moved. It’s so interesting [to see that they just wanted a] fresh change. Are your parents still alive at this point in time?

(08:44): They're still alive and interestingly, that property which they would have bought maybe 45–46 years ago, needed a lot of work on it and they never went back to employed work. They just worked on their own land and on the renovation of that home. I started to learn and became somewhat curious about property construction at that stage because I had to help my dad with the renovation and work on the house. In fact, they're still working on that house today. A never ending project.

(09:27): At what stage did you actually leave the nest, I guess you could say, and start to explore the big world?

(09:47): It was a little bit unfortunate. So when we moved from Leicester to Cornwall, we were at an age where I just missed out on doing what was then called, the 11+. They used to stream children and if you were successful in the 11+ test, then you would go to a grammar school or a more academically focused school. If you weren't successful, then you went to a school which had more technical or vocational centred courses. 

(10:14): I didn't take the test because in Leicester, where I was schooling at the time, they'd already abolished it. They moved to a new way of working, which was comprehensive education. But in the county of Cornwall, they were still operating in that older model. I was at the secondary school in Leicester for one term and so they wrote me nice reports because they didn't really know me. I'd only been there for the term but consequently, people read that and thought I was a bright kid. 

(10:41): They put me in the grammar school, which obviously was much to the delight of my parents and my grandmother. People thought that was quite prestigious. However, it probably wasn't the best place for me because academics were not my strength. Also, because of that slightly disjointed primary school education I'd received where you essentially taught yourself, I just struggled. 

(11:04): I [definitely] struggled in that school. I would have been better off in a more technical school. The only subjects which I excelled in were woodwork, metalwork, technical drawing and ceramics. So I had a strong aptitude in those subjects. On the other hand, I struggled with maths, physics, chemistry, Latin and the other subjects which we had to do within the academic framework for the grammar school.

After finishing high school, Hill’s pursued a higher education. Although he admitted to struggling with a more academically centered curriculum, he followed the herd, so to speak, and followed that same academic basis.

(12:29): It was called A levels. I did biology and chemistry and you weren't allowed to be a part-time student, so I had to fill in the time. That's when I started to do ceramics and some of the more technical drawing type subjects which I excelled at. At the end of that period I wasn't quite sure what I wanted to do. Unfortunately, my father’s view, according to the way he and my mother worked, was to do as little work as possible, which is why they decided to get out of the work life, and go and sit on a piece of land growing vegetables in Cornwall.

(13:22): My parents didn't have any mentors or anyone else close to us. We had no cousins, no friends or anyone else to really give me much influence in life. So consequently, I also perhaps grew up thinking that taking the easy option or doing as little as possible was a good thing. I think my dad told me to tell the career’s teacher that I wanted to get paid as much money as possible for doing as little as possible, which didn't go down particularly well with my teacher.

Coming up after the break, we hear about Hill’s early career goals.

(14:16): He was finishing school at four o'clock every day going for a surf. He had like 12 [or] 14 weeks of holidays a year and that seemed to have some appeal.

We learn about his change of direction fresh out of university.

(16:53): So I embarked on that career and I just loved it. I loved the camaraderie of the team environment, I enjoyed visiting business owners.

Hill shares how he managed to live rent-free in his first investment property.

(25:44):  This is what resonates with the guy from Plymouth, I decided to go and buy a house. So, I bought a four-bedroom house as opposed to a one-bedroom apartment.

And that’s up next. I’m Tyrone Shum and you’re listening to Property Investory.

Hill didn't receive much of a push from his father to carry on his education, so he took matters into his own hands.

(13:51): When I was doing my A levels I met a teacher there who was teaching the ceramics or pottery class, which is one of the classes I did to fill in my timetable. They seemed to have a pretty cushy life. It was only a young guy, but he was enjoying what he was doing. He was teaching kids who were at school because they chose to be at school. They had moved into those years of school where you were there by choice.

(14:16): He was finishing school at four o'clock every day and going for a surf. He had like 12 [or] 14 weeks of holidays a year and that seemed to have some appeal. So I left college and I went to do a four year degree to strive to be a school teacher—it was a Bachelor of Education Honours Degree—I did it in the city of Plymouth, which is also in the Southwest part of England. I did that for four years.

(14:47): Nice. So the appeal of having a very cruisy life where you could just finish up work at four, go for a surf and stuff like that, were you able to still achieve that as a teacher?

(14:56): Well I did it. What happened to me is because I didn't really have very much as a child, I kind of created this yearning for nice things. I just fell in love with beautiful cars or nice things in life, nice homes and just luxury things, I think they just had a massive appeal to me. 

(15:24): What happened was, when I was doing my degree, which was four years, each of those years you went into a school and you’d teach for three or four weeks. Or, in the final year you'd spend a term in a secondary school teaching and it was a really, very powerful learning experience. There's so many different things that you learn from that exercise. One of the things I did identify was that the teachers who I respected the most who were helping me learn, were typically teachers who had perhaps gone outside of the educational network, because there were teachers who’d go from school, to college and back into school. 

(15:59): Then there are those teachers who went from school, into the industry, and then back into school and these guys just seemed to have more life skills and much more interest. Some of them said to me, ‘Go and do something, go travel the world or get some skills and then come back into teaching, it's not a bad thing to do’. So that was part of the reason. Also, teachers historically were not particularly well paid. 

(16:19): They’re still not paid well enough, proportionate to the amount of training they do, and the importance of the job which they fulfil. But at the end of my four years, I decided to work and I went to try and earn some money. I joined a company which took on eight trainee sales people, they only recruited graduates who were on a graduate sales training programme. That was really exciting because it was closer to London, which was a more exciting part of England than the Southwest, where I'd obviously grown up and where I'd been studying.

(16:53): So I embarked on that career and I just loved it. I loved the camaraderie of the team environment, I enjoyed visiting business owners and talking about how technology or telephone systems, new types of technology could support their business. I had a lot of success, not relative to my experience. 

Hill decided to move into a totally different direction from what he had previously studied.

(17:40): It was an interesting time in telecommunications because for many, many years telecommunications had been state owned. So it was called ‘British Telecom’ and this was at the time when the market was liberalised and competition was introduced, back in the mid 80s.

(17:55): It was interesting, a lot of people were using old technologies. All of a sudden there were new technologies being brought into the country. I was one of the sales people running around to small businesses and showing them illustrations of the benefits that they could achieve by updating their technology, it was a lot of fun.

(18:13): That is a lot of fun. So what are some examples on how technology has changed so much? I remember the days when we had our home phones, nowadays we're just all mobile [users].

(18:27): Historically, they'd had old fashioned technology, whereby it was a little telephone exchange located in the business. There would be someone there who was the switchboard operator and basically if you wanted to speak to the manager or director, they'd be putting out a plug from the telephone line and connecting it to the cable which went to his office. It was that old. They then became a little bit more sophisticated, where they'd be flicking switches to connect them.

(18:50): With this new technology, it allowed people to very quickly just transfer calls within a business environment. It's kind of cool that there was just such a significant change from what had been in place for many, many years. All of a sudden [this] significant change [was made]. Yeah, this was really the start of the kind of dotcom boom, as far as technology was concerned.

(19:12): Yeah, that is phenomenally fascinating. I mean, I've just remembered watching movies and stuff like that, where they have the switch operator. Ladies were usually just sitting there pulling plugs and plugging things in. Then obviously, their role becomes kind of redundant after a while when we replace it with switches, you know, the physical devices that just do it automatically. So they wouldn't have to be retrained to do something else. Or they may, you know, become redundant and have to go and upskill on something else.

(19:36): Yeah, I think there's always other opportunities and we still had a switchboard operator, it was just that they maybe had a headset and they could use a keyboard as opposed to plugging things in and out. It was just like they couldn't believe it. They could see if someone was on the phone or not just by looking at this device, whereas before, they'd have to call it and then they had no status of what someone's busyness was. 

(20:03): If they couldn't find the person or they weren't in the office, they could just page into the warehouse or something saying, ‘Call here for Dick Jones’, and he could go to any phone and pick it up. People were like, ‘Wow, this is incredible. This is going to save our business so much time and improve our efficiency significantly’. So it was kind of fun to do that. The great thing about it was that it just seemed like I'd been a student for four years.

(20:26): I used to get £2000 a year as a government grant because my parents didn't work and that was like the maximum bump you could get. That's what I'd live on. I remember, it wasn't all that long after that, I had some success in selling, I'm getting £2,000 a month in a paycheck. It just seemed like there was all the money in the world and I treated myself to a couple of things, some of which I still have today, just celebrating that success. But other than that, you know, I was a saver, I just never had access to any money to spend. That's probably what started me thinking about buying a property.

So how long was Hill working in sales before he decided to move into the property space?

(21:25): I kind of progressed to more complex sales or more senior roles. Ultimately when I came to Australia, I was running a team of 120 salespeople across Australia, so I moved into sales management. I worked in telecommunications, slashing sales for 25 years.

Although Hill had developed an interest in construction due to his parents' constant renovating of their home in Cornwall, he had no real influence to get involved in property investing until he began his higher education.

(22:01): I think the first time that something kind of stuck with me was when I was in Plymouth. We went into rented accommodation to study and I moved into a house. It was an old terraced house which would have been three storey, but it had been converted into a four storey by utilising the loft space. There were 10 students in this place, some were sharing rooms and there was a couple who had their own room. Most of us shared, I don't know how I managed that. They had a couple of different kitchens, and a little bit of space around those communal areas. 

(22:57): We used to call these building crackers because the [relatively young] guy who owned it used to wear these trousers which had the material which was called a crimperlean. You could hear him as he walked around the house and he’d only just bought this house and decorated it the year before.

(23:20): So he converted it into student accommodation and I got on with him. I was always curious and I always just talked to people. I was interested [in the fact] that he was a young guy and he had a nice car. That was probably what attracted me to him as well, just out of interest. He was just explaining that he had bought this house and he just bought a second house and was doing the same thing.

(23:43): So he was buying houses and letting them to students, which gave him guaranteed rent. In fact, the rent that I paid went directly to him. So you know, his rental income was guaranteed. He just kind of explained to me that we, the students, were buying him these properties. My early investing in the UK was slightly different to what it has been in Australia since I've been here. The rent you could collect would exceed the cost of the loan to hold that property.

(24:17): So that was quite common in the UK?

(24:19): Yeah, it was fairly easy to do that with just the ratio between the cost of the rent collected and the cost of the property, it made it much more favourable. That just kind of struck a chord with me that this guy was doing that. Fast forward, I don't know maybe four or five years, I completed my course, enrolled in this sales job as a trainee sales guy and [myself and the other graduates who came on board] started to have some success. We kicked some goals and got some good results.

(24:51): Then people started to look to buy property. I mean, this is in the mid 80s, there was still very much a mindset or a blueprint that you go to school, you get a job, you buy a car, you buy a house or get married and have kids. It’s much more flexible, much, much more of an open perspective on the opportunities of today. They were still very much like that. 

(25:17): It was just a natural progression for those people. Once they got a little bit of savings behind them. Their parents or whoever was influencing them would be saying, ‘Yeah, you've got some money, don't waste it on a car, a depreciating asset, go and buy yourself some bricks and mortar’. So like the other guys I worked with, most of the people went out and they bought like one bedroom apartments or whatever they could afford, new developments or nice properties for themselves.

(25:44):  I think what resonates with the guy from Plymouth is that I decided to go and buy a house. So I bought a four bedroom house as opposed to a one bedroom apartment and I rented the other three bedrooms out to two guys I worked with. We had a lot of fun living in that house and I was living there for nothing basically, because the rent that I was collecting was covering my mortgage.

(26:09): I guess that's probably how I started it. A couple years down the track or maybe not even that long, I got a little bit tired of the sharing and I went and rented myself a one bedroom flat just around the corner.

(26:25): Have you kept that property?

(26:28): Yeah I kept it. I bought it in 1990 and kept it for 13 years, then when I sold it at 14 years, it had more than doubled in value in that time. When I bought it, it did feel like a bit of a gutsy move. It was like £92,000 at the time and that was probably three times the value of my parents house. It was a lot of money, but it was the right thing to do.

(26:58): Oh absolutely. I mean, it sounded like it was a great start to your property journey, to be able to find a property like that and rent it out to your mates and live there for almost nothing. It makes absolute sense and you guys had the time of your life as well.

(27:11): Yeah, we even did a little thing back in the day, which was quite funny. I actually had a phone system installed there, because I was in the phone system business. I then got one of the technicians to install it on the weekend, so this house had like 10 different telephones in it.

(27:29): So everyone had a phone in their room. We could call between each other and even used to print out a bill because it was a system which had been designed to go to the hotel, so everyone could use the phone. Everyone got their own fair slice of the bill and we had a lot of fun making calls from room to room. 

Hill clearly had a lot of fun during his years as a young investor, but what spurred his move to Australia and how did he manage the properties between the two countries? 

(28:01): I came out here in 2000, so nearly 20 years ago now. I'd been working in telecommunications, and I'd moved to work for a global company, which was based in the City of London. Again, this was a lot of fun and fortunately it was well paid. So I was able to invest in other properties in the UK. I bought a couple of units in London, which again, it's almost like as soon as you saved up enough money for a deposit, you could buy another property netted out, it was pretty much cash flow neutral. 

(28:39): Unfortunately, I don't remember it being particularly strategically done. I just happened to be buying in—and I often encourage investors not to do this—I was buying close to where I lived because I was lazy and it was easy. But that also taught me the lessons of how important that area is and buying in areas which are in high demand. Yet, scarcity of supply is always going to drive the prices up more readily than in other areas. I actually came to this training in 2000. 

(29:13): I started dating an Australian girl in London and she was due to come back. The industry which I worked in changed massively, I worked for a company for five years before that, which used to be called ‘Worldcom’, it’s called ‘Horizon’ now and is the world's largest telecommunications company. So you know, when I started working for them in London, there were 75 people in the business and then five years later, there were like 3000-4000 people. Culturally massive, massive change and it didn't suit me so much. 

(29:40): I quite like to be innovative and creative in the way in which I operated as a sales guy. I didn't care for the structure and the rules and regulations as much as when it was a smaller business, so it just seemed like a good time to have a change of scenery. It was an easy option for me, having not travelled extensively on my own, to come back with this girl to Australia and check it out. So we lived here in March 2000 [or] 2001, and yeah I just fell in love with this place as soon as I got here.

(30:19): And you haven't looked back since which is fantastic.

So inspired by Giles Hill’s journey, we will keep the conversation going in a future episode of Property Investory. We will discuss how he has acquired 13 properties over his property journey.

When I was buying a home, I was buying purely with my heart and with no real consideration for the investment potential of that home.

We’ll hear about how he navigated the issue of a tenant who refused to pay their rent...

I spoke to him. I tried to see if we could come to some sort of arrangement, then finally he moved out

His time in the development space and what he has planned for the future...

What became apparent to me was that the best ways to create wealth through property or to create or build equity, is to buy properties in locations which are going to outperform the averages. 

And that’s next time in a future episode of Property Investory.