Grant Smee — Epic South Africa, Property Investing

What's involved it is and my special guest this week and what's involved, by the way, proudly brought to you by Epic South Africa, my special guest from Epic South Africa is Grant Smee. Hello, how are you Grant? - Very well, thanks David. - Good, it's great to have you on the show again. Every time I sort of like wipe my eyes out, it's like, it's time to speak to Grant again because it seems like just yesterday that we chatted, but in fact, it's a month from all since we chatted on this show. Grant and Epic South Africa have been the sponsors of this show. And since we've been chatting, I've had a couple of people that ask about all sorts of property related questions. Give me a little bit of your property in case somebody hasn't heard before, just your property pedigree, if you would Grant. - For us, I suppose, you know, the last 16 years of my career have been focused on the property sector, particularly property investment. I started out in 2005 investing in property and expanded that property investment business into a services business. We're sort of looking after other owners' assets and their properties. And that was all in the UK. And then in 2011, return back into South Africa, continued investing in property and continued also helping investors look after their properties, educating people about how to buy property and expand their portfolios.

And that's been a part of 15 years as an entrepreneur. - Oh, okay. So some experience there and you've weathered COVID and things like that. So obviously you're doing something right. Grant, let's talk a little bit about this because, you know, when I first heard about investing in property, et cetera, et cetera, in the old days, what you had to do was, you know, get a job, get a wife, get the house with the white picket fence and the 2.4 children and you were set. These days, a lot of people don't even go into owning houses. There's been a whole thing where people would rather rent and where do you start off with if I would like to consider investing in property? Because, you know, for me, somebody said to me, "Read, rich dad, poor dad." And I did, and I understood nothing. - You know, I think that piece of advice you got given there is read is probably the best piece of advice you got. Maybe not necessarily a rich dad, poor dad. I think, you know, although it teaches great fundamentals in terms of finance and really breaks down the basis very, very well, doesn't give you an insight into the mechanics of how to buy, how to analyze an investment, how to decide whether a deal is a good one or a bad one.

So you certainly need to educate yourself first. And whether that education is through, you know, reading books or going online, you know, there's lots of resources out there that you could use. Certainly that's the first step you need to take is educating yourself. Part two to that process then is deciding what are you trying to achieve in terms of your property investment strategy? So are you looking to create an annuity income, so that monthly income, or are you looking to create large lump sums of money, which you then want to reinvest in other assets or holidays, for example. So you need to decide first educate and then decide what you're actually trying to do. And your goal then determines the strategy you follow in terms of your property investment sort of pathway. - Yeah, all right. But now, you see, this is where a lot of people, when they start off, they go, okay, I've been told I need to invest in property. Now I've got maybe one way or another, I've got a little bit of extra cash here. I want to do it and off they go and they buy a property. I mean, for me, I initially heard, okay, you have to own your own property. And then it was like, okay, if you're gonna own another property, maybe get a holiday property.

Then all sorts of tax implications came in. There's so much of this sort of investment thing, 'cause it slides so easily off the tongue. I'm a property investor, but it could be, or just maybe to me, it's fairly complex. So shall we, and I know I sound like I'm harboring on this point and belaboring the point, but I've now read the books and I now go, okay, all right, I know this is what I want to do. I know I want to build up my properties, for example, until I can retire and live off the income of those properties. Then what? I mean, where do you start? Is budgeting and, 'cause I'm still trying to get to how you get enough money to then start scaling your property investment. - Yeah, so I think the important thing here is running down the route of just being a property investor and trying to scale into a portfolio that creates this massive amount of wealth. It isn't possible for most people. A lot of people don't have, like you say, a lot of capital to invest into property initially. The banks are limited in terms of their lending they can give you because of the National Credit Act and responsible lending. They have to look at your affordability. So there's actually a lot of sort of elements that come into being able to scale your investment.

So the education is vitally important and getting started is part two. Properties are unfortunately one of the things you're also gonna learn on the ground. So again, identify your strategy. So do you want a cash flow strategy or do you want to generate capital? And then to start actually investing. And I think the important thing to note here is property investment is not a get rich quick scheme. It's not gonna get you out of your job in the next three to five years. It's not going to create this massive amount of wealth. We're gonna be driving in the Lamborghini in four years time and gonna be traveling overseas. It really needs to be underpinned by something else. So you need to be creating cash flow and channeling that cash flow into your longer term investment asset being property. So property is sort of a longer term space. You do have a choice of going into the services side of property. So for example, being a developer. Now, what I want to make clear is that going into property development is not the same as investing in property. Investment in property is buying and holding and getting a return. Whereas developing properties, for example, is actually a separate business entirely where you're taking an item, you're manufacturing, you're adding value to it and then you're selling it, so you're re-selling it.

So it is a different space. So we need to also define separately property investment versus for example, property development which is a separate service and separate business on its own. - Okay, and then I would assume then the concept of property flipping which seems to be something a lot of people are also banding about at the moment is more that services side. So you'd buy a property that you see has potential, you would do it up and then you'd sell it for a profit. - Yeah, actually, and again, it's a completely different sort of business model and it's a completely different sort of thing away from investing. Property investment is buying an asset, holding onto it, making a return from it over a period of time, whether that is three years, five years, 10 years, that's the process. Flipping, as an example, is just literally a function of property. So property is an underlying asset, but it really, you're running a separate business entirely, almost like a retail business or a wholesale business where you're getting an art menu, you're fixing it up and you're selling it. So definitely completely separate. The important thing also is I separate these two because the risk sitting in property development and property flips is far higher than it is in buying and holding, but the potential return is also a lot higher in property development and flipping than it is, or the immediate return at least is far higher than it is in the buy and hold sort of strategy.

So again, it really comes down to when we talk, so what people do when they talk about the property market is they generalize massively. So we talk about, you know, you watch the news and they talk about the property market. My question always in that instance is which property market are we talking about? Are we talking about Cape Town or are we talking about Joburg? In Cape Town, are we talking about northern suburbs, southern suburbs? In Joburg, are we talking about, for example, the east end, are we talking about the north end, west end, where are we talking about specifically where this property market's booming or dying or stagnant, which property market exactly are we talking about? When we're talking about even the northern suburbs of Joburg, are we talking about freehold houses, are we talking about section of type or properties? Are we in fact talking about warehousing, we're talking about commercial work, you know? So we really need to sort of start getting into the granular level of what properties we're specifically talking about when we want to invest, when we want to look at data, when we want to look at returns on properties, when we want to start thinking about flipping properties we want to develop, we need to really get down to what exactly are we talking about when you're talking about the property market firstly?

And that happens in the property investment side as well. Become a property investor. Okay, cool. Am I buying storage units? Am I buying a piece of land in, you know, in Porfata? What am I buying specifically and what am I going to make a return on? So again, I think that's the biggest problem when we talk about property, is that we're not speaking about something that's familiar with people. If I start talking to about the road down the street from, oh, sorry, the house down the street from you on the same side of your road, you'd understand the value of that property, you'd understand whether there's potential return there, you'd know that it's in good condition, bad condition. So you need to start talking about stuff that you know, this is this big mass generalization of the property market, which sounds like this massive, you know, scary thing. - Fantastic stuff. Well, it certainly is starting to make things clearer for me as well. This is what's involved, proudly brought to you by Epic South Africa. My special guest from Epic South Africa is Grant Smee. We'll dive deeper into these various options when we come back. And we're back with my guest Grant Smee from Epic South Africa.

Epic Grant is a place where you can learn these kinds of things. So people can sign up, talk to like-minded people, we can go through some various trainings, et cetera, et cetera. That's what we can all do at Epic South Africa. - Yeah, that's right. I mean, we've created a community of property investors and entrepreneurs and the intention was for the shared value, shared experience. We, as Epic South Africa provide sort of fundamental training in terms of property and understanding how to run the numbers, how to look at a deal, how to analyze value, you know, how to decide on strategy. But the real value in the space is actually the networking, yeah. Having the ability to speak to the group and find somebody that's investing in kruzdorf and understanding what they're doing and why they're doing it. Particularly if you're sitting in Bloemfente and you can't get to kruzdorf to look at that deal. You know, so I think that the networking and the sort of access to network side of things is vitally important. Adding to that, we have our panel of experts that provide value inwards. So we have attorneys, bonders and journalators. All the guys that you might need to expand on your property portfolio, or just ask questions if you're having any issues.

And those are, again, guys that are part of our network and have been for several years now. - Now, you mentioned a couple of interesting things in the break before, when we were chatting previously, and some of those were like, you know, property needs to be broken down and it's about location. And one of the things you mentioned though, was buying land or property for development. So the question I'd like to put to you, which has been asked to me is, where does one start? Let's say I have a property that I'm in the process of paying off the bond and I'm making all those payments. You know, my credits rating is fairly good, but my auntie Flo who lives somewhere in sort of (indistinct) or (indistinct) has passed away and she's left me a little bit of cash. I want to now start with the property thing. Is looking at just a piece of land? Is that a good place to start? - So the answer, the quick answer, without understanding more detail about the piece of land that you're looking at is probably no. And there's several reasons for that, the cost of building these days is high in comparison to buying existing property. The time between building and actually having a tenant occupy that property, there's a cost, there's a carrying cost to that.

Whereas buying existing property, you can refurb for example, a far quicker and have a tenant paying your rent for sooner. And then if you are going to go the route of larger development, you then have this issue around zoning and waiting to zoning and then planning permission, which again, adds time and holding cost to you. So the answer without sort of having real detail around property or specific land is that it's probably less of a good idea if you're getting started out. And a better idea for you to look at either your existing property that you own, for example, if you own a home and let's use Cape Town example, there's been a relaxation of the local bylaws where you're able to have three residential properties on a single residential one, you're allowed to have three separate portions or pieces of accommodation on that property without having to go through a rezoning process, you just need to get your plans approved. So if I had a large property, let's call it the 800, 900, 1000 square meter piece of property where the existing house is located conveniently, I could potentially either split that property in half or split the property in three or convert the garage as well and make three separate pieces of accommodation where instead of receiving, for example, 15,000 rent a month rental on the single property as it stands currently, by splitting into three, I could potentially, for example, receive 8,000 rent per unit and therefore get 24,000 rent a month on exactly the same space.

So what I'd suggest is either you look at properties that you own currently, that you can maybe be optimised their return through splitting or increasing the rental somehow, or when you buy, you always look at the properties where you can optimise. Now, that's very difficult in sectional title, but it is possible where you, for example, will rent your rental property or you'll say you buy a property that's a two bedroom flat and you might rent the two bedrooms out individually and maybe there's another closed room and it's a diamond, for example, to rent as a third bedroom. That's possible as long as you stay within the rules of the sectional title. But again, you increase that rental so everyone else is getting, for example, 10,000 rent a month and you might be achieving 12, 13,000 rent a month whilst splitting it down. So that multi-let commune type approach is something that I think is important for people to consider when they're getting started. So increase the cash flow to those properties in your existing portfolio or ones that you are looking at more than what everyone else is getting after the market and you'll be in a very, very good position. And just one last note from that is you just need to look at what the commercial guys are doing.

Now, if you look at the way office space is going now, office space is no longer 3,000 square meters. You know, office space is a tenant will come in, rent the 3,000 square meters, break that down into 100 square meter pieces and rent that out individually to smaller businesses as shared workspaces, for example, or whatever their structure is. And they add a margin on top of the rental and make more money. So it's that flexibility and that multi-use space, which is I think the new way investment's gonna go. - Yeah, well, that makes a lot of sense because I mean, and we've spoken about this before in this, I can't say post COVID world yet, but in this world where we've adjusted to COVID, those massive big office buildings and complexes are in all likelihood gonna get broken up into smaller portions. The other question that was asked of me, Grant, is what about student accommodation? And you touched on that with the commune thing. And I'll give you an example in the part of the world where we live in Pretoria East, there's rumors and rumblings of a university being built. And people are going, well, if you've got some extra cash, but you know, get flats, buy a flat, build a flat, get involved there.

Is that a thing that makes sense? Obviously you would need to do some homework and find out that they actually are building a university. - Yeah, so I mean, everything comes down to research and information, you know, and I think in this day and age where we're in the, ultimately in the information and data age, you don't have an excuse for making decisions without having, you know, the information at hand and making informed decisions. Student accommodation is for certain people. Some people like student accommodation and they can make some good money there. And for others, it's not exactly their space. I find that it's quite a fad at the moment and that people are flocking to it as the sort of golden goose. And I worry that people are flocking to it without fully understanding the implications of going into that student accommodation space. And all they're hearing is from government firstly, but also from different sources saying, well, there's so much demand that you have to get into the student accommodation. It's where you're gonna make money. I'm not saying it's a bad investment, but I've got a few issues why I personally won't invest in student accommodation. First and foremost is most students or most tenants that come into student accommodation only pay for 10 over 12 months.

So that you get 10 months rental over a 12 month period. So you've got two months as you need to cash flow separately. Now understand that the additional rentals normally rolled up into the 10 months, but from a purely a property investment sort of position, it's not the ideal scenario to only be receiving 10 out of 12 months. Secondly, you're traditionally putting non-income owners into your property. So the student generally is not the person paying rent and not the person responsible for the rent. And the person that's usually responsible for the rent also has their own bond and own expenses separately. So from an affordability point of view, they're under massive pressure. So in terms of student accommodation, you're receiving slightly lower rentals because it's sort of a lower end investment. It's only receiving 10 months. And you also have the person standing shorty for that rental, generally speaking being more risky because their affordability is really low because of their own costs in terms of their own living. Now, I understand that there are student grants and student funding and workspace, but again, those payments have proven to be inconsistent. So you need to be able to fund yourself through delayed payments from government departments and non-payments for three, four months, and then you receive money.

So it's one of those spaces where, and I know there are people making big money in student accommodation. I just think it's the guys that are doing it at volume, at scale, and they have managed their businesses very, very well. I don't necessarily know that it's a big opportunity for individual investors to go in and buy one flat and rent it out to a couple of students. I don't think that's the space we're gonna make money in student accommodation specifically. - Yeah, you know, my immediate thing would be just the name, student accommodation. You know, it's like, I know students. You know what I'm saying? - Yeah, well, we were students, weren't we? And we know exactly what we were like. So it's one of those things. - Anyway, we are chatting to Grant Smee from Epic South Africa. We'll be back with Grant in just a bit. This is What's Involved. And we're back with my special guest, Grant Smee. What's Involved is proudly brought to you by Epic South Africa and Grant Smee from Epic. So again, we discussed the student accommodation thing. One of the questions that was posed to me. The other one is, somebody said to me the other day, yeah, please, please ask Grant when you speak to him again.

If I've got some money, let's use Auntie Flo again, then she's left me some money. And there's a couple of mates who've got some money. Is it worthwhile going into, getting into property investment that way? Is that a thing? 'Cause I know we touched on something called fractional ownership before, which I think is a little bit in my head. It sounds a little bit like timeshare. But this seemed to me that they were coming from a slightly different perspective, almost like an investment consortium. Yeah, so certainly 'cause all consortiums, those are separate from fractional ownership. Fractional ownership is you buying into a company that owns a property and there's sort of different levels of control there. Maybe one thing, the premise of all my property investment space is that I like having control over the property, over the investment, over decisions around that investment. So I'm quite particular there. So our art, again, personally, would never go into a fractional ownership space. But syndication and consortiums are certainly something that's worthwhile considering. Particularly if you've got a group of friends and you don't wanna have these big groups, group of friends who can sit down, have a logical conversation around investment and map out exactly what you're trying to achieve with this property investment consortium.

The importance around these types of structures is that you have two things. One thing that's very important is an agreement in place, which dictates how you invest, how you get money in, how you get money out, and particularly how somebody who might want to exit the consortium can exit, which is fair to all parties. So you need to have that all up front. I mean, it amazes me how many people will get married with a prenup contract or an anti-nup contract, but will go into these property investment consortiums and never have an agreement in place. So you're going to marriage, which is supposed to be for life with an exit plan, but you don't go into an investment situation with any sort of exit plan or agreement on how to exit this thing, which is vitally important. So, you know, business partnerships and particularly underpinned property can sometimes be more difficult to get out of than your actual marriage, which is a crazy thing. - So you can do this consortium thing, 'cause I think that would then give you obviously more buying power if you had, I don't know, whatever anti-flows the inheritance was, 50, 100, 200, a half a million, a million, whatever the case may be, you'd be able to buy, your buying power would be greater there.

One of the other things though is, and again, this goes back to the starting it. If I'm feeling a little kind of unsure about getting into this property thing, you've discussed turning, and that makes a lot of sense to me, turning your own property, seeing if you can have, you know, how you generate more income from your own property. Is it worthwhile then saying, okay, well now, I've got a house that I'm buying, it's like, or bought, it's 50 or 60% paid off, I'm now gonna go and get a bond on another piece of property, whatever that may be, it could be, it could be a, you know, in a complex, it could be a freestanding home. Is that an option, you know, 'cause often, you know, you've heard, I've heard somebody mention to me, the best kind of money is OP, which stands for other people's money. And I'm like, yeah, I don't know if the banks are not necessarily the most wonderful, fun-loving people to have in terms of that. Is that an option? - Yeah, so look, I mean, I think it really comes down to, the real value in property is leverage, and levering your asset against and getting more funding. So certainly, that's something that you definitely need to consider. Now, if you think about the professional sort of property investment businesses out there, they generally will work on a between 50% to 60% leverage where they can only lend against 50% or 60% of the value of the property.

So for example, of their balance sheet, only 40% or 50% can be debt that they owe money. So I think that's a really important sort of thing to keep in mind. You don't wanna be in a situation where you're going to get a whole lot of 100% mortgages. You know, you're just sitting in a space where you've got then this asset that is leveraged to the health. And if you can't fund that for whatever reason, you've got no breathing room or no space to move, maybe you still need to sell that property. If it's financed at 100%, you need to sell that property. You're still gonna have to pay a whole lot of costs to get out of that property. You're gonna still have to at some stage, fund it out of your own pocket. So going into a space where you get further funding, I think is the right thing to do. And that's how you will scale your property more further, but making sure that you aren't getting 90, 95, 100% finance, but rather going space where you may be getting a 70 to 80% bond is a far safer route to go. But then also making sure the property you're buying, the rental that you're receiving can actually fund the repayment of that debt. You don't wanna be repaying that debt from, for example, another property.

It's sort of broadly impeded to pay poor. And that's something that I've seen often, and this is across the board. This is in property investment, in business investment, guys will go and buy certain assets and they'll use other assets cashflow to pay those assets down. My feeling is that the assets you buy should be able to look after itself, sort of wash its own face, be able to pay for itself and pay its debt down. And then you build that way. I think the problem you have with robbing pizza to pay poor is once Peter's cashflow is impaired for whatever reason and COVID was the perfect sort of storm in this situation, you then have a situation where the first business or asset quantity profit itself, and now no longer can the second, then you're actually in twice as much trouble as you were had you not done that. - 'Cause I'm just thinking now, and to me that is what would make me a little bit nervous 'cause I know a couple of people that due to inheritances, due to selling of businesses, whatever the case is that they've done, they've now managed to pay their house almost all the way paid it off or most of the way. And they're going, well, okay, let's just ask the bank for some more cash and let's get involved in another property.

And obviously to me that would be like, okay, but then what happens if you can't pay? Because when you mentioned earlier on the asset that you buy should be able to take care of itself, you do need to take into account those unforeseen things as well, because I guarantee that as soon as you've gotten yourself your shiny new property and your shiny new tenant, things, it's Murphy's law, things start to break. And if your rental is only just gonna cover that, surely that's a problem. - Yeah, absolutely. So some part of our process when we run the numbers is we actually build in buffers everywhere. So to make sure that you've got space for the unforeseen circumstances, the gears are bursting and the gears are bursting although it's covered by insurance, it's still in excess. The tenant loses his job, which I mean, we know in this day and age is no longer, there's no longer certainty around employment or somebody running a business. So the tenant loses his job, so his situation's massively changed. He can't pay directly for two months. What do you do now? You've got the sponsor pay. So when we're running our numbers and we're preparing to invest in a deal from our side, we build in buffers everywhere to make sure that there's enough space.

So it should these things happen that you're able to come out the other side without too much damage. The reality here is people going to property investment think it's gonna be the perfect scenario. You just set it there, you buy, you've got this perfect new shiny property, you put this amazing tenant in and now you're just supposed to get your money every month and every year you put in a, I mean, we've seen this recently is try and apply your standard 10% escalation and I'm just gonna, now you're just gonna make hay while the sunshine's. The reality is it's not there anymore. Rental escalations are done to almost zero at the moment. If not, offering good tenants discounts on the rental just to make sure they stay in your property. Tenants aren't securing in terms of their jobs and their ability to pay. Businesses are not on securing their cash flow and are paying 50, 60, 70% salaries in some industries really to make sure that you run your numbers so clearly and that you're able to look after, make sure that you're able to fund a property should something entirely unforeseen happen. For example, a global pandemic just 12 months ago. - All right, we're running out of time. When we come back, Grant, we can just wrap up there and we can find a little bit more about Epic South Africa.

My special guest, Grant Smee, this is what's involved. It is proudly brought to you by Epic South Africa, more from Grant when we come back. And we're back, wrapping it up with Grant Smee. This is what's involved, proudly brought to you by Epic South Africa. So Grant, if I'm on the fence now and I've been listening to the show and I'm thinking, well, maybe I've got some shares that I've invested in and I've been looking at this property thing. We've talked about this in various causes before. It's the main thing is education, education, education. Is going to Epic South Africa and joining there, is that a good place to start? - Yeah, I certainly think, I mean, I created it because I felt that there was a lot of misguided information out there. There's a lot of Facebook advisors and social media advisors and dry advisors that don't necessarily give the best advice or give advice from a very sort of biased standpoint. They bought a property on a Gulf Coast state that never did well and therefore property investment as a whole is bad. So the whole idea behind Epic was really, first and foremost, when you're an entrepreneur, it's quite a lonely space. So we wanted to have like-minded individuals that could have a conversation and just engage with each other.

And the second level was just providing some almost objective advice in terms of, if you're going to invest in property, these are the things you need to consider with no bias towards a sectional type or free type of freehold, no bias towards area. Going to invest in Mossa Bay or George or KZN or Joburg. I mean, it's not about where or what you're investing in, but it's making sure you've got, you're asking the right questions and applying your mind correctly, taking all the facts into consideration to make sure that the investment you're going into makes sense and is gonna make you richer. I think that was more important to me. I saw, I've seen a lot of sort of property investors and I'm using Birds of Promise here who give advice and charge for advice who have actually never invested in a property. And it really hurts me a lot. So it's a space that I am passionate about. It's not my primary or my core business. It's a business that is just for the support of people that want to become property investors and really, whether it's one or a hundred, it doesn't matter. The point is if you need some advice and guidance and insight, some thoughts, or just the community, that's what Epic provides.

- Wonderful stuff. And yes, I can attest to the fact that Epic is very much Grant's passion project because as he said, the integrity, the ethics of property investment, I've seen so many people and I've been approached so many times about talking to people and going, listen, yeah, no, I need to market my property investment course. It's a two hour online Zoom meeting with me and I'd like $11 to $7 billion for it. And that gets to me as well, because there's a lot of people and we've discussed this before. They make their money telling people how to make money, not necessarily doing the thing that they're training you to do. - Exactly, exactly. - All righty. Okay, so Epic Grant, is it an annual, it's a membership? Is it an annual membership, a monthly membership? How does it work there? - Yes, it's a monthly membership. You just jump onto epicsalafago.com and there's a monthly membership. There is an annual option as well, but it's month to month really and you can join for three months and then make a decision and go from there. We've got our Facebook groups and our WhatsApp groups, which are regional and yeah, and then there's online courses available to the members as well as, I mean, our podcasts and worksheets and, sorry, spreadsheets for analyzing investments.

So there's quite a lot of resources we've built up over the years that is available for our members, but it's a monthly subscription with no term commitments. - Fantastic, Epic South Africa. So it's epicsalafago.com is the place to go. Now, Grant, I know that you are an incredibly busy person and you're always got something on the go and something on the boil. Where to next? What is Grant Smee currently concentrating on? What do you see happening, where's your focus? Talk to me about that. - Yeah, so the property market has always been my passion. So it'll always be within property. So on the property investment side, that continues to be something we're exploring further and expanding and sort of growing partnerships and have one or two quite exciting, larger projects. And when I'm talking about larger projects, not larger developments, but larger projects in the property investment space on the go at the moment, which I have felt be able to disclose in the coming months. But then on the other side is I've seen a lot of value in investing in the professional side of property, which is the property services side. So the property asset management, property management and estate agency side.

I think because properties is so much about people and emotions about buying homes and there's a real need for continued expertise and professionalism within that space. And that's what I'm looking to continue to invest in and grow as a business. So I have a section type of management company, which we run, which we're trying to, in fact, we've got a team meeting this week. We're trying to re-imagine that space a bit more. I think it's very, very traditional and done in very much a rat sort of structure. And I want to sort of break out from that space in section type and just re-imagine that and add a lot of value to our owners. And then I have a franchise group, Only Realty, which we continue to expand and grow. And that's been really successful. And we're super proud that we've grown every year for the last nine years, including last year as a business. And even in fact, last year, my thing that made me most proud was the justification of our business model, where we, every single one of our franchisees, doors were still open at the end of the year, which was vitally important for us. And then I've expanded into more of a luxury type sort of offering with Frankie Bowles, which is a state agency that's been operating 17 years in both the corporate letting and luxury sales market, particularly in Stanton.

And I've just taken that team money over the last few weeks and super excited with the stuff that we're doing there at the moment. So yeah, sort of immersing and having immersed myself in property for the last 16, 17 years and continue to do that. And I suppose, just going deeper and deeper into it and just having fun doing it at the same time. I absolutely love what I do. And that premise of, you're not working if you love what you do is exactly what I love day-to-day, fortunately. - As you were mentioning now, in terms of the business in Stanton, a final question for you, you bought there. So, Stanton is still maintaining its value, maintaining its sort of luxury high end kind of vibe? - Yeah, I mean, it's one of those difficult things. I think people are so affected by short-term swings that they forget to look at the bigger picture. Look at where Stanton was 30 years ago and look where it is today. That value, that won't be wiped out in a 12 or 18 month period because of something which is extremely unique to the world and we'll never see. So I'm really of the opinion that we should be investing and preparing ourselves for the economy to, and doesn't have to turn around, but to continue growing in the future.

We're in a position where the economy currently isn't growing, it is struggling. And for me, although yes, it can go down further, there's definitely underlying value, particularly in Stanton. I mean, there's billions and billions of brands have been invested in there. There's people that have got a proper vested interest in making sure that Stanton has an area, comes out the other side, all shiny and sparkly. And I rely on the fact that there's some massive head offices there, there's some very, very small people in that space that'll make sure that happens. And I'm just gonna ride their way too quite honestly. They're a lot smarter than I'll ever be. So I'm just gonna rely on the fact that their expertise will get us out the other side. So yeah, I'm very much for one for right now, if you're in a position to invest, you should be. - Grant, it wraps it up for us. We do wish you all the best. We're gonna be chatting to you again next month and then catching up and seeing if you've got some more good news to share with us, but it does wrap it up. Once again, if you'd like to find out more and learn more, more importantly, it's epicsouthafrica.com. You can get hold of them and check it out.

Grant, thank you so much for chatting to us. We wish you all the best. - Thanks, David. - There we go, that just grants me from Epic South Africa. Wraps it up for us to each and every one of you. Take care, look after yourselves and thank you for listening.