Who Is Gavin J Gallagher?
Summary
Gavin is the Commercial Portfolio Director at Earlsfort Group, a family-run real estate investment and development business. He is also Managing Director at EastPoint Business Park where he oversees operations at this award-winning office campus, developed by Earlsfort Group.
Gavin oversees the group’s commercial leasing activities, in particular those within EastPoint, which comprises 40 acres of landscaped office park with 38 buildings totalling 1.5m sq. ft. Despite his busy hands-on role, he makes time for his personal interests of writing, speaking and mentoring.
Gavin’s Story
Gavin has been a property investor and land developer for over thirty years, commencing his career in the early 1990’s just as the ‘Celtic Tiger’ was kicking off. His career he seem him navigate three major market crashes or recessions, getting badly caught in the second one (the GFC 2008).
A prolific investor, Gavin has bought, sold, built and managed real estate assets from Midtown Manhattan to Downtown Dubai – four continents in total, living in the south of Spain, Doha, London and including several months in the West African city of Accra, Ghana.
Qualifying from university as an architect, Gavin was fortunate to discover the extraordinary potential of the property investment at a relatively young age. His first ever land development deal produced a 5x return in just 3-4 months – he was hooked.
He took the proceeds of that first land deal and combined it with debt to acquire a commercial property opportunity that he quickly transformed, resulting in a levered 3x return (15x his original investment). This deal was an epiphany of sorts, realising he had discovered a highly profitable formula – he spent the next 5-6 years repeating this process.
Gavin’s endeavours resulted in an extraordinary run of successful deals that allowed him grow his portfolio to more than 60 million euro in assets. But this run of success also led to a false sense of security and poor investment discipline, he replaced thorough research & analysis with gut instinct.
The 2008 Global Financial Crash was a major turning point in Gavin’s career. His highly leveraged portfolio plunged in value by more than 60% which resulted in his assets falling below the value of the debt used to acquire them. By 2010 his net worth had fallen to 16 million negative!
He spent the better part of a decade in damage control, attempting to dig himself out of a very deep hole. He often refers to that period as his lost decade and resolved to spend the rest of his life mentoring and educating other investor so they avoid a similar fate.
Whilst he would not wish his experience on his worst enemy, today he recognises that it made him a much stronger & resilient investor. Painful as the lessons were, they resulted in powerful insights that he now feels compelled to share with others.
Mentor and Podcast Host
In 2020 Gavin started producing his Behind The Facade Podcast, born initially as an experiment during the first Covid lockdown, he received a lot of great feedback and quickly realised this was the best vehicle to share his many insights on investing.
The popularity of the podcast led to various requests for coaching and mentoring, so in the summer of 2021 Gavin established his business & investing mentorship the Elite Property Accelerator where he educates investors on strategy, analysis, portfolio creation and how to pitch investors.
The principle promise of his program is to take you from an uneducated, uncertain and emotional investor, to a confident, mature and resilient investor with a robust portfolio that can weather any storm. Once a member you gain access to weekly accountability and a support network of like-minded peers.
Please reach out and connect with Gavin if you have any questions.
You can connect with him via LinkedIn HERE and via Instagram HERE
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