A migrant couple who have bought more than 100 properties across Australia have warned that uncertainty over recent government property reforms could drive up rents.
Sydney-based property investor Victor Kumar of Right Property Group said fear over changes to capital gains tax and negative gearing, not the reforms themselves, were the biggest market threat right now.
He warned that panic‑driven decisions were already distorting prices and if confidence continued to slide, rents would surge nationwide, deepening the rental crisis.
Mr Kumar and wife Reshmi are migrants from Fiji who came to the country with just a few thousand dollars to their names.
Mr Kumar purchased his first property in 1998 and now their portfolio, built over the past three decades, returns $2.1m in annual gross rents. About 27 per cent of the value of their portfolio is debt.
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Sydney-based investors Victor and Reshmi Kumar. Picture: Supplied
“I have been buying properly since and also selling down some,” he said.
“From commercial, residential blocks of units, granny flat sites, pretty much done everything.
“I’ve got some joint ventures as well, but if we’re counting the deals, then it’s 103 (properties).
“It was a good place to leverage my money, where I could get the bank to fund most of it and once I had a couple of them under my belt, the equity released from each property was empowering me to get to the next one.
“By employing some really good strategies, I was not dependent on tax breaks, I was always investing within my means, not going too fast, but also not going too slow either and not chasing fads.”
Rather than retreating, Mr Kumar said strategic investors are quietly repositioning by shifting to multi‑income assets, accelerating subdivisions, and delaying low‑yield purchases until yields improve.
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Mr Kumar currently owns 103 investment properties
“Obviously any properties that are already owned are quite valuable because it has the negative gearing attached to it, but someone entering the market now, you just have to buy within your means and look at it from raw numbers, not tax padded numbers,” he said.
However, Mr Kumar said the federal budget tax changes could hinder many Aussies from getting into the property market and also impact tenants with rising rental prices.
“When your costs are going up, of course, you will increase rent and so when your rents increased, then that means that you’re not able to save as much for your deposit and if you’re not able to save as much for a deposit, you’re not able to get into the property market,” he said.
“So it really isn’t as thought out and planned as one would expect and certainly when you look at it from a grassroots level any change in that will impact the holding cost of a property (and) simply get passed on to renters.”
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Many are pointing to budget changes that could increase rental prices for tenants. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman.
Mr Kumar said the budget changes are “not going to help the people it aims to help”.
“If I were in politics, I’d probably say, okay, one rule for everyone and that would probably mean that there’s no grandfathering,” he said.
“If you’re truly trying to help the economy, then you’d remove that, if you’re truly trying to help the first homebuyers or the homebuyer’s full stop then you may want to take a slightly different approach of actually empowering a lot of the developments by taking away the red tape.
“If you look at the Southwest Sydney corridor, just the price that you pay for red tape is circa $150k to $170k for a standard house.
“That’s how much you pay the councils, the local government, the water board and all that just to build a house.”
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