Virginia Graham Riches: Hi, I'm Virginia Graham, author of Flirting with Finance and host of the Property and Mortgage Insights podcast. Each episode I sit down with the experts behind smart property decisions — buyers, agents, legal professionals and finance specialists — to explore the smart ways to buy, finance and manage property.
Virginia: Today's episode is a little different. I'm dialling in remotely via Riverside, while two special guests join us live in the studio. First, Phil Riches, a senior mortgage consultant from Finance on the Coast and my business partner — many of you know Phil from past episodes and client stories. But today the spotlight is on someone else: a true professional, a long-term client, and someone with decades of experience in global financial services, Steve Hair.
Virginia: Steve started his career at the Sydney Futures Exchange at just 17. His work has taken him from Sydney to London to Singapore and back again, navigating everything from the GFC and Brexit to Covid. But this isn't just a story about Steve's career — it's about the shift from going it alone to embracing expert advice, and how that led to some of the most important property and finance decisions of his life. Steve, Phil, great to have you both in the studio. Let's dive in.
Steve Hair: Thank you very much. Futures is where it started — though as a 17-year-old I had no idea what futures were. Go back a few years before that and I was always going to be in banking; as a 10- or 11-year-old it was either captain the Australian cricket team or work in banking. Banking won out — not cricket.
Steve: I've got my mum and dad to thank — one of six kids, and the deal was that once you finished school you paid your own way, so I needed a job. One of my elder sisters had a friend at an investment bank, Traders, who were looking for uni students to work in futures. I was given a number to call the head of futures and reluctantly did — and found myself studying maths and finance at uni while doing about ten hours a week on the side at a futures broker. It was an interesting introduction to financial markets. I knew what banking was; I didn't really know what financial markets were. That changed very quickly.
Steve: The futures exchange back then was open outcry — what you see in the old movies, a bunch of people just yelling at each other. It was mayhem, but a lot of fun. My job at the start was to go down at the end of the day, pick up the tickets and process them. HR these days would have a field day with how things were back then, but I'd played a lot of cricket with older guys, so the banter on the floor wasn't new to me. Very quickly I realised that's where I wanted to spend more time.
Steve: I didn't map out the whole career — I thought I'd be a trader or a risk-taker — but I've gone from role to role in a non-trading way. My career has really been in relationship management: giving access and service. I was an interest rate dealer at ANZ, and then worked at Salomon Smith Barney in private client advising. Back then none of it was as automated as people think — at the end of the day you still worked off paper tickets, just like the futures exchange.
Virginia: And do you remember what year it actually changed from the trading floor to electronic?
Steve: It progressed from around 1999 into 2000. There was a night session called SYCOM that went electronic first, as a bit of a test, and the guys who traded it got a head start — going from the floor to screens before the rest of the market. The Sydney Futures Exchange was one of the first to change the way trading was done. They used to have 'sport boxes' where you could feel what the market was doing; now that it's all electronic, you can't. The trading floor is a very quiet place these days — you still get the big moves when something unexpected hits, but it's very different from 25 years ago.
Virginia: Before you met Phil, what were you aiming at financially — property investing, structuring things differently?
Steve: Pretty normal, really. Owning a family home in Australia was always number one, and that grew into investment property. For me the investment has always been about property. Working in a bank, there have always been restrictions on trading shares or futures personally, so I kept clean of that and looked at property as my investment opportunity. I dabbled in and out of property over the years, but meeting Phil was really about organising the financing on our family home.
Phil Riches: When we were first introduced, one of the things that struck me was that you were a professional residing overseas. Not long before, I'd realised it was smart to pick some niche areas to operate in — self-managed super fund lending, and Australian expats residing overseas. Banks look at an Australian expat in many different ways. Some won't lend at all; the risk to the bank is currency fluctuation, so some are very prudent about offshore income. We were looking at the family home and a potential investment property, and the key was setting it all up correctly now, understanding you would eventually return to Australia.
Steve: Looking back, I made my first purchase around 2005 — bought and sold on my own, no financial advice, definitely no mortgage advice. There were a few reasons. I'm in finance, so I thought, 'I know this, I can do this.' There was an element of thinking I'd save money doing it myself, and a bit of ego — show my family I can provide and run this. The decisions I made before meeting Phil were okay, but naive. They weren't disastrous, but I hadn't thought about how to structure things or what life stage I was at.
Steve: I was up in Singapore looking at an investment property and contacted a property agent for advice. She got me involved with a buyer's agent — Good Deeds — who helped transform my investment decisions. They asked who my mortgage broker was, and I said, 'Well, it's me.' They were like, 'What are you doing? You're in Singapore, you're not across all of this.' That's when my eyes were opened to what I was missing — and they introduced me to Phil.
Steve: I came into it thinking I wasn't sure I needed it, but the information Phil gave me really opened my eyes. Banks treat expats differently and policies move up and down month to month. That's where Phil won my trust — by being the expert in his field. I quickly realised I'm not the expert, and I was very happy that realisation came when it did.
Phil: It's funny — because we're in finance, I'd never claim to fully grasp what you do, or accounting. We even remind our own accountant to talk to us as if we're not in finance, and it's massively helped our tax planning. Dealing with the subject-matter expert is great. I'm thrilled to have been on the journey with you for almost 15 years, through different banks, different properties, right up to the additions to your family home now.
Steve: There was a definite turning point. When I first started working with Phil it was a bit of a leap of faith — but being told by people I trusted that I needed a broker made it easier. Still, Phil had to win that trust, and the way he did it was very close to the ethos I keep for my own clients: access and service. In my job I'm not making trading decisions; I'm giving access and service, and that's how you win trust. Phil moved me between banks a number of times — something I'd never have done on my own — and whenever something meaningful came up, an email would pop up from Phil that was always a worthwhile read: rates, banks tightening on discretionary spending, cross-currency issues. It was never a numbers game for Phil; he valued long-lasting relationships, and that's what kept me with him.
Steve: Probably the best investment I made — outside getting married — was our family home on White Street, and it comes back to the trust I had in Phil. It was around Chinese New Year and we were away. I got to thinking it was about time we looked at a family home. Back in Sydney I looked online — we were thinking the inner west, maybe Balmain — and came across one property just to get a feel for prices. I contacted the buyer's agent on the Monday; the property was going to auction that Saturday. By Tuesday I told my wife we were going to bid. She thought I was crazy, but she trusted me — and I don't think she would have if I'd been doing it on my own.
Steve: We had finance sorted by the Thursday — Phil had me with options and ready to go. If I'd been doing it myself, or approaching a broker for the first time, it would easily have gone in the too-hard basket, especially from Singapore. At 2:30 on the Saturday afternoon we got the call from the buyer's agent: we'd been successful. It's crazy that it all happened in a week, off a property I just happened to see online — but that's our family home now.
Steve: We always planned to renovate, and the structure Phil put together gave me the confidence to go to builders and give them confidence too. We bought White Street back in 2015, so there's been a lot of restructuring since — Covid came in, rates changed — right up to the major renovation we're going through now, all while holding onto the investment property. That could have been tricky, but we structured it in a way that works for us.
Steve: When my wife and I stop and think about it, it's pretty crazy that I clicked on that one page, for that one property, when I wasn't even going to buy — I just wanted a feel for the market. That quickly changed to full steam ahead. Phil's known me long enough to know I'm generally calm and collected, but every now and again a switch flips. The impulse to look was backed by the trust and confidence I had in the experts around me. That's the big lesson I try to pass on: let the experts be the experts. Don't do it yourself.
Phil: It's been a really good long-term partnership. It's interesting how often people leave such a big, life-changing investment — their home or an investment property — to chance, or feel they have the knowledge to navigate it themselves. The way I like to work is to build trust, but also to really understand how each bank's credit policy is set up, and how those policies differ at any given time. Each bank has a 200- or 300-page document on how they assess the type, location, value and size of a property. Every postcode in Australia is categorised. And they all look differently at what you do for a living, whether you're onshore or offshore, and whether part of your income is a bonus.
Phil: We've got 50 banks on our panel and every single credit policy is different. Price matters — a property is a big investment — but understanding the credit policy, and making sure you're with a bank you can move and make changes with, matters just as much. I needed to understand what you wanted to do now, in Singapore, and whether you planned to return to Australia, then set you up with the bank most suited to your needs — knowing that might change over time. And it did, so we moved to the right bank at the right point.
Steve: There are real examples of what that looked like. A couple of times I got a bit big for my boots and said, 'Phil, I think we can get a better rate somewhere.' And you'd say, 'If you do that, you'll come out with the worst rate — you're already in a good place.' More to the point, you knew the credit policies and had the connections. More than once you told me a particular bank had discretion only for the first few days of the month, so don't even bother with a rate negotiation in the back half — it's gone. How would anyone outside the industry know that?
Steve: When we looked at the renovation and a higher level of funding, chasing the best rate myself, you advised that I'd be in the top one or two percent of the bank's book — okay, but not a great long-term place to be. So we didn't go for it, when I probably would have jumped in on my own. Having you as the expert across the industry, giving me those little bits of information, has really guided our decisions. That's the connectivity and access that's helped tweak the decisions we've ended up making.
Phil: That's really rewarding to hear. Thanks, Steve.
