Mark Adams
GroupBuyer is an Australian-first property group buying company. We specialise in grouping property investors & home buyers via our monthly group zoom meeting and presenting groups of buyers to property developers for major discounts & rebates.
Tell us about yourself?
Hi I’m Ben, Founder of GroupBuyer. I launched GroupBuyer back in 2019 initially as a way to invite a selected few friends & colleagues to join me to invest in residential properties. Being a real estate agent working with property developers for over 15 years I knew there was an opportunity for the group buying concept to be introduced into the property industry (new project space specifically).
Working with property developers prior to launching GroupBuyer, they would always say to me “Ben, bring me a group of buyers and I’ll give them all a discount”. Back then this was a hard task to pull off so rarely happened.
As I looked into it further I found many Chinese communities who were buying up Australian real estate in bulk. They were doing exactly this! Coming together as a group and presenting themselves to property developers in order to negotiate a hefty discount. It just worked. Today, GroupBuyer has over 1,000 investor members and we’re running monthly events to group between 10-20 buyers for group discounts up to 20% saving individual buyers $100,000 on average ($800k property).
If you could go back in time a year or two, what piece of advice would you give yourself?
Get started on your ideas earlier. Keep a circle of thought leaders, entrepreneurs & investors around you and nurture relationships. Go all in.
What problem does your business solve?
Housing affordability is our main one. By bringing prices down it allows more people to realise their dream of home ownership.
What is the inspiration behind your business?
My number one goal is to help more people invest in real estate. We work with lots of first-time investors and it’s very exciting for me to see how excited they are. We put our members in touch with partnering financial services businesses and this gives them a road map to success. It’s a rewarding feeling.
What is your magic sauce?
Group buying is it. It really wasn’t rocket science and I’m surprised I was the first person to ever launch this is the real estate space. The online events were the key for us.
We tried traditional approaches and also the e-commerce approach however running online events where buyers can visually see each other (without having to meet each other) is where the power is. That was a game-changer for our business.
What is the plan for the next 5 years? What do you want to achieve?
In the next 5 years I anticipate growing our membership base to over 100,000 and being in a position to group buyers in excess of 100 every month. As we grow so do the size of our groups and as the size of our groups grow so do the level of discounts available. Onwards & upwards from here!
What is the biggest challenge you’ve faced so far?
Software development. It’s been costly. By that I mean to the tune of half a million plus. Terrible mistakes were made and time lost. But I’ve learned a lot from the first couple of years in business and I’ve put that loss behind me.
How do people get involved/buy into your vision?
We don’t actually promote in too many places. Of course we have our website and social media channels but that’s about it. Using these have brought us a consistent number of new members most of which understand the concept quickly and jump on. Being a free platform doesn’t hurt either!
