RORY SALAZAR | Finance | CONTACT
A property power couple in their 30s have earned more than $150,000 a year flipping houses.
For Husband and Wife team Kyle and Jess Ward, the last few years have been a wondrous blur of romantic weekends away determining a buying budget over champagne, assessing their financial situation with oysters, and contacting their mortgage broker to seek ever more funds.
These things were a type of foreplay for the profit-minded pair, which inevitably led to the main intercourse of buying the next fixer-upper, fixing it up and flipping it out into a booming property market.
It seemed like the good times would never end. That was until the recent auction of their tenth renovation in Betoota Heights, when the unthinkable happened.
There on the ground, The Advocate can confirm that with purchasers fearful of the crashing property market, bids did not meet the reserve price, and the home passed-in.
Normally this would be fine. However, reports are that because the high-achievers had overstretched themselves financially, buying multiple houses simultaneously and at the top of the market, they now require a vast amount of capital to keep up with minimum repayments on loans that have variable rates ballooning in correlation with the RBA’s rate hikes.
Not long after the failed auction, The Advocate understands the couple pled with the highest bidder to buy the home at a price well under the reserve.
Eyewitness accounts hold that the couple went into shock later that evening as they ran the numbers and confirmed that they had sold the home at a…this is difficult to say…a capital loss.
That shock soon gave way to something else entirely, namely hate. Not for themselves but for each other. As the capital loss gnawed away at their souls, the pair soon decided to file for divorce.
How fickle love is.
Before the night was out, the future divorcées were on the phone to their lawyers, conniving of ways to become the sole beneficiary of the assets they had stupidly put down in both their names.
The Advocate sat amongst the spouses and their lawyers during an ugly divorce settlement meeting later that week, and while most of the language used during the proceedings is too indecent to print here, there were some tender moments of nostalgia that reminded this masthead of the power of love.
“We were flipping houses since we first met,” said the spinster-to-be, Jane as she gazed vacantly through the cold metal table separating the pair and their legal experts.
The husk of a former husband briefly met her eye, lamenting that he “thought it was love that held us together, turns out it was just strong capital gains.”
