Set for Life: Lloyd Edge

The last time The CEO Magazine spoke with Lloyd Edge, the Founder and CEO of Aus Property Professionals shared his rise from music teacher to multimillion-dollar investor and bestselling author.

He described scaling both Everest and Kilimanjaro, wearing every hat in his budding business and designing a life worth living.

Just a year later, Edge’s story feels very different. When he arrives for the interview, he wastes no time getting up to speed. In fact, within the first five minutes, he has already covered the company’s national office expansion, a Dubai pipeline, his latest book, a property management acquisition, new software and premium services and his growing team.

True to form, he does all of this without notes, without pause and without a hint of self-congratulation. But it’s his why that immediately stands out, making it clear how he can keep going at such a breakneck space. Edge isn’t running on little sleep and big ideas for the money.

Instead, he’s doing it to serve.

"Business is all about helping people, right?" he says. "If you put people first – not profits – success naturally follows. So for me, it’s always about asking how we can make something better to help the people we’re working with."

Thinking bigger

The notion of putting people first has guided Edge since the beginning of his journey with Aus Property Professionals. Now, it’s helped to fuel another year of extraordinary growth.

The company has expanded from its Sydney roots to establish offices in Brisbane, Melbourne and Adelaide, supported by significantly larger research, administration and marketing teams. Edge says its workforce is roughly twice the size it was 12 months ago.

But while the business has indeed scaled quickly, he insists growth has never been about chasing size.

"My ambition is not to become the biggest," he says. "It’s never been about being the biggest. It’s about being the right size to offer really great service to as many people as possible."

His approach mirrors the investment philosophy that made him successful in the first place. Rather than follow the crowd, Edge goes a different route, identifying opportunities before they become obvious.

"I don’t invest in the same markets that everyone else is investing in at the time," he explains. "Instead, I look at the future potential of a market, the infrastructure, the data and then I buy into markets before other people know about them.

"Once other people know about that market, I’m already off buying somewhere else because once everyone knows about it, it’s too late."

On-the-ground expertise

Edge applies that same logic to his business. Unlike many buyers’ agencies operating from a single location, Aus Property Professionals now employs staff across key markets.

"We now have staff located around the country," he says. "We have local experts who have intimate knowledge in every market where we’re buying – we’re not just sitting in one city office and telling people where they should buy without actually being there."

Indeed, every property Aus Property Professionals recommends to a client must be physically inspected by a company representative first.

"A lot of buyers’ agents don’t do that," Edge points out. "They base it on numbers and data alone."

But he believes that is a risk – and it’s one he’s not willing to put his clients through.

"If you don’t know the area well and you’re buying based on data, you could be setting yourself up to buy a less-than-ideal property," he says.

"Sometimes the data isn’t painting the correct picture. You could go to a street and discover something undesirable, making it an area you’d rather not buy in."

Chasing opportunity

With this approach unlocking new opportunities by helping owner-occupiers, downsizers and families find forever homes in cities where they may have no local knowledge themselves, Edge now has his sights set on property management.

He’s currently acquiring a rent roll, which will become part of the wider Aus Property Professionals ecosystem. The move not only adds another recurring revenue stream, but more importantly, it’s filling a gap in the market.

"Property management services tend to let people down," Edge says plainly. "I’ve noticed this hole in the market and believe we can do better in the space. We can look after tenants and landlords better than what I’ve seen."

Down the track, he’s also investigating a Middle East expansion.

"I’m interested in getting into the Dubai market because while a lot of high-end property transactions take place, buyers’ agents aren’t yet a big thing there," Edge explains.

"When you're looking at growing a business, you need to look at where there's a hole in the market, where there's a need for something and then go after that."

The plans are progressing cautiously due to geopolitical instability in the region, but for Edge, they represent another part of the journey. His mind, after all, rarely stops.

"I don’t get a lot of sleep," he says, with a laugh. "My mind is always racing with new ideas and ways to improve things."

The personal touch

Naturally, as the business has evolved, so too has Edge’s role within it. These days, he finds himself spending less time inspecting properties and more time overseeing strategy and managing teams.

But unlike earlier in his climb, Edge now has a leadership team he trusts to make decisions. That said, he admits he still hasn’t stepped away entirely from the client experience.

"I try to speak to every client in the business," he says. "We’re still small enough to have a personal touch."

It’s one of the reasons he’s invested heavily in technology designed to strengthen relationships rather than replace them. For years, strategy has been at the center of Edge’s philosophy. He has never viewed property as simply buying an asset. It starts much earlier than that.

"For me, it’s always been about long-term goals. Where do I want to be 10, 15, 20 years down the track?" he says. "Then I reverse engineer my strategy around that."

Wealth-building in real time

This way of thinking has now evolved into one of Aus Property Professionals’ most significant new developments – a proprietary software platform that allows clients to model their investment strategy in real time.

At its core, Edge says it’s a goal-mapping and accountability tool. Clients enter their target passive income, time frame and financial assumptions and the platform calculates how many properties they need, what growth rates are required and how long it is likely to take.

What makes it unique is that clients retain lifetime access and can adjust the model themselves as their circumstances shift – a job loss, growing family or a change in the market. Regardless, the strategy updates around them.

"If your income goes down or things happen in the economy, it might take 15 years instead of 10 to meet your goal," Edge explains. "So our software will show them the assumption over 15 years. But it’s live software and very user friendly, so clients can go in and update everything themselves."

The platform also tracks the real-time value of each property in a client’s portfolio, triggering alerts when equity milestones are reached and prompting conversations about refinancing or a next acquisition.

The result is a client relationship that stays warm without constant manual contact, and one Edge insists keeps Aus Property Professionals front of mind at precisely the moments that matter.

Beyond property

Alongside everything else this year, Edge somehow found time to pen his fourth book. Released in July 2026, Set for Life – dedicated to his wife Renee – is unlike his previous works.

Where Positively Geared and Buy Now focused specifically on property investment strategy, Edge says Set for Life takes a wider view. The book covers budgeting, superannuation, generational wealth and how to think about financial security across every life stage.

"Set for Life is really about how to set yourself up for life and for generational wealth," he says.

"It speaks to a broad audience and has something for those in their 20s going for their first property, people in their 30s with a bit more money and in their 40s when they’re pretty established. Of course, it also speaks to those in their 50s too, who are looking to consolidate retirement."

The book, which is available in all of the usual places books are sold as well as airline lounges, was written to appeal to every reader who picks it up.

Hiring well

While Edge continues to move from strength to strength, he admits it hasn’t been without challenge. And the one challenge he returns to without prompting is the art of hiring well.

"Getting the right team members is a constant challenge," he says. "It’s hard to find people who fit in with our culture and can meet our standards of client service."

However, the ones who have gone on to become part of the Aus Property Professionals family usually have one thing in common.

"Often my best staff, in terms of our agents, have been the ones that I've trained up from scratch," Edge says. "So they might’ve started as my executive assistant, then became a buyers’ agent and from there, I trained them myself."

It’s a relatively patient approach in an industry that prizes speed, but Edge isn’t looking for quick wins – he wants longevity.

"Building a good team culture is really important," he stresses. "You’re building people you can trust and people that treat the business like it’s their own."

Flexible by design

The company operates on a full work-from-home policy, which is a practical necessity given its national footprint. But it’s also a genuine commitment to flexibility, which Edge says has generated unexpected returns.

"Productivity is actually better," he insists.

When team members no longer have to make the commute, they’re happy to stay logged on a little longer to finish up their work for the day. This model has also opened doors for parents returning to work, particularly women coming back from maternity leave.

"There aren’t many companies out there that are happy to offer part-time work," he points out.

At one stage, around 80 percent of Aus Property Professionals’ workforce was women.

"And it's still pretty close to that statistic," he says. "I've found that women tend to be more analytical and data driven. They’re the ones that really work well in this field."

A father of two young sons, Edge says he’s happy for staff to go to school carnivals or spend time with their kids as long as the work gets done. Even he now takes Fridays off for quality family time.

"It allows me to be more present," he says. "I can pick my kids up from school and take them out on the jet ski. I can take them to martial arts training and things like that. It’s nice.

"Even though I’m running a business, it’s important to me to be present for my family – after all, they’re what I’m doing all of this for."

Giving back

For all the momentum in the business, it’s Edge’s work in Kenya that arguably reveals the most about his character. Through the LeBoso Caring and Regenerative Society Foundation, he funds school fees and teacher salaries at St Sophia School in Southern Kenya.

He has also helped concrete classroom floors, install proper furniture, build fences and upgrade sanitation facilities – improvements that have enabled the school to gain official registration with the Department of Education and access to a modest stream of government funding, which was previously out of reach.

The roots of that commitment can be traced back years before Aus Property Professionals was founded, during time Edge spent with communities in Nepal near Everest Base Camp.

"They had nothing, but they were always so happy," he recalls. "Whereas here, we’re always stressing about something whether it be traffic or our mobile phones.

"I thought, one day I want to be able to do something to help this community."

Defining success

Edge feels pride in getting to a point where he’s taken care of his family, and now he’s able to extend support to causes and see tangible progress taking shape to better others’ lives. After all, to him, success means little if it only benefits one person.

"There’s only so much money one person needs," he says. "I believe when you create wealth through business, you should give back."

It’s a lesson he’s trying to pass on to his children.

"My seven-year-old often says things like, ‘Can I buy this toy and take it over to the kids in Africa?’" he says with a smile.

Filling up with pride, Edge says he hopes to one day climb Kilimanjaro with his boys and show them those communities firsthand.

"I want them to be humble," he says. "It doesn’t matter what you have in life, it doesn’t make you any better than the next person."

As the conversation comes to a close, Edge shares the message he most wants people to take away from his interview. He doesn’t mention growth, wealth or market cycles.

"I want people to be inspired," he says. "It’s not really about me."

Perhaps this is why Edge’s chapter feels so different from the last. A year ago, he was the entrepreneur who had made it. Today, he’s thinking about something much bigger – not just how to build wealth, but how to build a life worth passing on.