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Maybe you picked up this book because you're ready to buy a home. Or perhaps you can't afford to buy where you want to live, so you're looking for investment options to build equity.

You may be afraid to borrow money to invest. You can mitigate the risk by doing your due diligence (discussed in chapter 10), and by always buying in an area with low vacancy rates and lots of demand. That way you'll be sure to find tenants. In almost 20 years as an investor, I've rarely had trouble finding tenants for my residential properties.

If you're just starting your investment portfolio, you could look at a capital city like Adelaide, for example, or a strong regional city such as Orange or Toowoomba, where you can still find yourself a property for $450 000 or $500 000. With a 10 per cent deposit plus stamp duty and legal costs, you could get into that property for as little as $60 000 to $70 000.

If you're already a property owner and you've saved up a bit of money by putting extra into your existing mortgage, you can redraw that equity from an offset account and look at using it to get into another property. That's a great way of looking at things, and I go into it in more detail in chapter 3.

I spent years learning how to invest, but by sharing the strategies I learned the hard way, this book will help you get started right away.

Aside from leverage, which I'll talk about in chapter 3, the other fantastic thing about investing in property and applying different strategies to suit your various properties is that, even though you're essentially creating a physical asset, you can remain pretty ‘hands-off’ in the process.

I started investing while still teaching full-time. Later, when I had retired from the nine-to-five, I set up my buyer's agency business. So I wasn't researching properties for myself 24/7. I was doing enough research to find the right investment property; then once I'd bought it and put tenants in, I'd have a property manager managing those tenants and the property.

Buying and developing property involves enlisting a team of experts, like a property manager, from diverse fields. I call them my ‘dream team’ (more on them in chapter 2).

The dream team is there to help you successfully finance and purchase properties, and meet a multitude of legal and practical requirements, on time and within budget.

You need to do all the due diligence on the property you want to buy, but once you've signed the contract, you bring in professionals to look after it and you move on. You appoint a property manager, who will find and look after the tenants. If you're building a duplex, it's essential to have the right builder on board for what ideally should be a stress-free and largely hands-off process.

It's vitally important that you work with people you can trust to act in your best interests. When you surround yourself with reliable professionals, you can find yourself using them over multiple projects spanning many years as you build your property portfolio.

Nowadays I hardly ever hear from my property managers unless a particular problem arises, because they look after everything. So it's out of sight, out of mind. With trustworthy people looking after it, your portfolio pretty much runs itself.

So yes, even in your busy life, you do have time for this. By the time you've read this book, I'm confident I will have convinced you that you have nothing to lose by taking the plunge. There's really nothing stopping you from getting ready to buy now.