When it comes to building your property portfolio, buying the right asset is only half the battle. Managing it like a pro is what really sets successful investors apart. 

In this special bonus episode, Ben dives into the must-know fundamentals of portfolio management, especially for those who are just starting out or have recently acquired their first few investment properties. 

He unpacks: 

  • Why your portfolio should be treated like a business 
  • The essential data points you need to track (and why they matter) 
  • Exactly how positive and negative cash flow impacts your strategy 
  • Common tax traps and ownership structures to get right from the start 
  • Why spreadsheets alone aren’t enough, especially once your portfolio starts to grow 

If you’ve ever asked yourself:
👉 “Am I doing this right?”
👉 “How do I actually manage all of this?”
👉 “Is there a smarter way to track performance across multiple properties?” 

This episode is for you. 

Ready to Manage Your Property Portfolio Better?

Check out Moorr’s brand new MyPROPERTY feature — built by property investors, for property investors. 

Now you can view and manage your entire portfolio in one powerful, cloud-based dashboard. 

Make sure you join Ben for a LIVE webinar tomorrow (30th July 2025 at 12.30pm) where he’ll walk you through MyPROPERTY, show you how to set up your portfolio correctly, and answer your questions in real time. 

Reserve your spot here >> 

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Transcript

Ben Kingsley
Good day everyone, Ben here on this bonus episode, this Tuesday episode of the Property Couch podcast. And I’m gonna talk to you today about all things relating to managing a property portfolio. Often I get asked around, you know, from clients and also people who are thinking about how they set up for success when managing their property portfolio. So this little bonus episode is all about that. So what do people wanna know?  

And so what I normally start with is the insights. So the insights area is going to be really critical, but to get insights, obviously I need data. So what I do is I’m gonna talk to you about cashflow impact. So, you know, when I’m effectively putting my information in, what is the cashflow impact? Am I gonna be contributing cash to the portfolio? Is the property portfolio gonna have passive income?  

I also want to know the tax impact. And then off the back of that, I want to see the performance results. And so the way in which you’ve got to think about this is you’ve got to think about it like running a little business. So inside this business, we’ve got a property asset. And so we need some information around that property asset. The first bit of information we need is when did we acquire that asset? What price did we pay for that asset? Also potentially is going to be helpful in the future is the date of the contract of sale, and also the date of settlement. And the other critical part that we need to know here is ownership. So to get all of those other insights around tax impacts, around performance, you need to declare the ownership percentages. So you can buy 50-50, tenants in common, joint tenants, whatever that looks like, you wanna be able to record that. And so we have the property asset.  

Then you gotta start thinking about, well, I’m running my small business; I’ve got income coming in and I’ve got expenses going out and I might have debt associated with that. So when you think about that, it’s really simple. You need to have your rental income that’s linked to that property asset. Then you need to have your expenses. And so when it comes to running investment properties, the ATO has a great list of expenses that you potentially are going to incur in terms of operating not only an individual property, but also a portfolio of properties. So you would then start to allocate what you believe to be your anticipated or budgeted expense against that particular property.  

Then finally, if you’re borrowing money, you need to connect and link all of your loans. And in some cases, depending on what type of investment advisor or investment savvy mortgage broker, often if you’re going to release equity from your existing home, what’s gonna happen is you’re going to have one loan split that’s usually gonna be around 20% or 25% of the value of that property. And then the other loan split is usually gonna be 80%. But what’s interesting about that is the loan on the property that’s the existing property is going to be released against that security, but its purpose is actually for the investment property. And when you think about the 80% loan, that’s gonna be not only secured by the new investment property, but it’s also gonna be the purpose of that money as well. So those two things matter.  

And off the back of that, you’re going to then get to what we refer to as your debt tracking. So what debt levels are you starting with? What’s happening with those debts? What’s your loan to value ratio? And how are your loans structured? So when you’re looking at loan structuring, you wanna look at the breakdown of your loans and how they’re set up. And we refer to that as basically your lending structure. So if I toggle between knowing what the purpose of the funds is for and also knowing what the security that they’re secured against, that’s gonna help me when I talk to my accountant and looking at my tax impact as well.  

So you’ve got those as fundamental things. Once you put all of that together and you start recording the repayments around those loans, you’ve then got a complete picture of money in and then money out. Now off the back of that, you then have a tax treatment. So depending on what sort of level of money coming in and money going out, you’ll either have a positive return or you’ll have a negative return, which means that you’ve got to contribute money to maintain that business running that investment property. And that obviously also means that your tax may be impacted, which is often referred to as negative gearing. And what’s happening with negative gearing is there is a loss, and you’re able to claim that loss against your other exertion or income you’ve generated throughout the course of that year. So they are the fundamental insights that you want to be able to be recording, either on a spreadsheet or in a platform.  

In addition to that, you also want to make sure that as you’re running and managing your business, you need to see some of these other operational insights. So they consist of change of interest rates, that’s gonna impact your repayments. So anytime the RBA changes interest rates and your variable loan, that’s gonna basically change. But you also, in running your business, you wanna make sure that your rent is at market price. So you know, a good rule of thumb, under the current arrangements with all of the increased costs of running your private rental accommodation business. A good rule of thumb is rent should increase by 4% or 5% per year when you’re doing your annual reviews. And there are obviously tools out there that allow you to analyse rents of comparable properties. We have one in Moorr as part of the work that we do there.  

So they’re the core insights. So when I’m sitting back and I’m managing my property, that’s the sort of stuff I want to see around performance, the results that I’m getting from the balance sheet side of things. I’m looking at effectively what has been the capital growth, the equity that I’ve created potentially that I might put to future use. And then on the revenue expense side, I’m looking at the money coming in and the expenditure going out. So that gives me my operational or performance indicators. Then I want you to think about in terms of how you’re running your property, some of the critical dates and the important information in terms of getting into hygiene around that because inside some of your expenses, they might be regular expenses.  

And what an example might be that you’re due to do a smoke detector inspection or review or in some states and territories, you potentially have to do gas inspections for safety. So your client can have safe and quiet enjoyment of property. So that’s what I call important date reminders. And so those important date reminders, you should be able to do that in your spreadsheet or in the platform that you’re using, making sure that against, if that’s an expense item, you can put that important date reminder. And then obviously that should remind you of those important events coming up there. Other important date reminders in terms of tracking and managing your property successfully is rental reviews, your payments, might be coming out there. Certainly your regular inspections. So you might be doing six-month regular inspections to make sure your property is being well looked after by your tenant. You’ve got rental due and then you’ve got any of your property manager’s details. That is the fundamental operational important dates that you need.  

So I’ve just unpacked the insights around the data that you want to be thinking about and then those operational impacts. Now, when you’ve got more than one property, that amplifies the need for bigger reporting. And by doing that, you now need to be managing the portfolio of properties. And so part of managing a portfolio, you want to see aggregates of some of those properties, or you want to be able to break them down into different types of insights around what we just talked about. Cash flow impacts, tax impacts, overall performance. And that’s exactly why we have built the portfolio view inside the Moorr platform. Because just like when I’m looking at my share portfolio, I want to see a summary of my shares, I want to see the cost base that I bought those shares for, I want to see what their current value is. All of those things then give me those performance insights so I can track and manage my share portfolio. Well, now you can do the same thing under portfolio view inside the free Moorr platform.  

So if you are someone who’s one, thinking of investing in property, then do some education, learn about all these things that you need to be tracking, watch a couple of our tutorial videos around that. But if you are also an investor and you haven’t been able to work out how to build that in spreadsheets, or you’ve got old spreadsheets, ditch the spreadsheets. It’s time to move into the digital age where you’re in a safe cloud environment and you’re able to then import all of that data and then you’ll start getting these rich insights that will allow you to feel in control of your property portfolio; know which properties are performing better than others and get those rich insights. So that’s a wrap for the Tuesday bonus episode or bone-episode as I call it.  

If you want to learn more, there’s a couple of important things. One, we have a webinar that’s coming up tomorrow at 12.30pm, that’s the 30th of July, to register for that webinar to learn more about portfolio view and the MyPROPERTY pillar inside Moorr, go to moorr.com.au/webinar and you can register there. Otherwise, you can visit moorr.com.au/myproperty where you can learn so much more about all of the new property tools that we’ve built specifically for property investors. And I’m one of them. So it’s built for me in terms of managing my portfolio. I use this tool and it’s a great tool for you to be able to organize and manage your property portfolio. Until next time, remember, knowledge is empowering, but only if you act on it.