About Anissa Cavallo
Founder, Eda Property
I’m Anissa Cavallo. I founded Eda Property after eleven years in Australian property and a career before that in financial services. The short version: I built a property portfolio from nothing, lost most of it in a divorce, rebuilt it from my parents’ house with two kids, and now run an advisory firm because I think most Australians are being sold property when what they actually need is advice.
The longer version is below.
Where I came from
Before property, I worked in financial services. I trained as a lawyer, moved into product, and spent years inside Australian investment houses building financial products and advising large industry funds and private banks. That meant sitting across the table from institutional money and learning how serious investors think about risk, structure, and time. It also meant watching how products are designed, sold, and marketed, including the gap between what a product looks like in a brochure and what it actually does for the person buying it.
I started buying property in my early thirties, alongside the day job. The first ones I bought I overpaid for. The next ones I researched. Over the years that followed I built a multi-property portfolio in my own name, all leveraged, all working.
When it fell apart
In 2018 my marriage ended. The divorce wasn’t tidy. By the time it finished I had lost almost everything I had built. The portfolio was gone. The cash was gone. My credit was hanging by a thread.
In 2019 I moved back into my parents’ house with my two kids. I was forty-something, sleeping in a bedroom I’d moved out of two decades earlier, working out how to start again with a balance sheet that no bank wanted to look at.
I spent that year reading everything I could find on property and finance, talking to investors I respected, and writing a plan for what I would do differently the second time. The first portfolio had been built on confidence and momentum. The second one had to be built on strategy and risk control because I genuinely could not afford another mistake.
Building it back
By 2021 I had the first new property under my name. By 2024 I had seventeen, built from a standing start in under five years. I’m not telling you that number to impress you. I’m telling you because it’s the only honest way to explain why my advice sounds the way it does.
I now actively trade my own portfolio, which is why the number changes. That is not what I tell my clients to do. Trading sits at the high-risk, high-cost end of the spectrum, and most investors have neither the time nor the appetite for it. The strategy I build for clients is long-hold, ten to thirty years, designed to compound through cycles. My personal experience with both styles is what gives me the confidence to tell each client which one suits them.
Why I started Eda Property
The reason Eda exists is simple. While I was rebuilding my own portfolio I watched friends, colleagues, and previous clients of mine get burned by people calling themselves property advisors who were really salespeople paid by developers. I watched intelligent professionals end up holding apartments in oversupplied markets, paying tax-deductible interest on assets that weren’t growing.
These weren’t naive people. They were trusting. They had asked someone they thought was independent for advice, and that person had taken a five percent commission for steering them into a particular building.
Eda Property is what I wished I’d found when I was starting over. Fee-for-service, no commissions, no kickbacks, no developer relationships. You pay us, we work for you, and the property we recommend is the property that fits your strategy, not the one that fills someone else’s stock list.
The “magic moment” clients talk about
Something I’ve noticed from the work, and that clients have told me directly: the first strategy meeting tends to land differently than people expect.
A lot of clients have walked out of that meeting and called it their “magic moment” or their “light bulb moment.” It’s not a phrase I’ve put in a brochure. It’s what people say to me unprompted, often weeks or months later, when they’re describing why they decided to work with us.
I don’t think there’s anything mystical about it. Two things tend to make the first meeting land the way it does.
The first is that I care about getting your strategy right, more than is reasonable for the fee involved. That’s partly personality, and partly the fact that I’ve been on the wrong side of bad property advice myself. I know what’s at stake. When I’m sitting with a client, I’m thinking about their money, their family, and their thirty-year horizon. Clients feel that and they remember it.
The second is the way I explain things. Property and finance get over-complicated by an industry that benefits from the confusion. I spent years inside that industry building financial products. I know exactly which parts are genuinely complex and which parts are dressed up to look complex. My job in that first conversation is to make the genuinely complex parts simple, and to call out the parts that are only “complex” because someone wants you to need their help. Most clients leave the first meeting with a clearer view of property than they’ve had in years of investing.
If that’s the kind of conversation you’re looking for, the strategy call is where it starts.
Who Eda is for
Eda works with property investors across Australia. Most of our clients fall into one of three groups.
People buying their first investment property who want to make sure the first one is the right one. The borrowing capacity you have at the start of your investing life is the most valuable asset you’ll ever own, and wasting it on the wrong first property compounds across every property you’ll ever buy after that.
Investors who already own one to three properties and have hit the borrowing capacity ceiling. The way out isn’t another property. It’s a portfolio strategy that addresses cash flow, structure, and asset selection together.
Buyers using SMSF, trust, or company structures, where the wrong setup at the start is difficult and expensive to reverse.
We work Australia-wide. The right property for your portfolio may not be in the state you live in, and that’s often the case.
A note for women and single parents
I work with a lot of women, and a lot of single parents, and I’m going to be open about why.
When I was rebuilding from my parents’ house in 2019, I couldn’t find an advisor who treated me like a serious investor. I was a single mother with two kids and a damaged balance sheet, and the property industry mostly looked through me. The advisors I did find wanted to sell me a new build apartment with a marketing brochure and a promise of “passive income.”
I know what it feels like to be on that side of the conversation. To be the only woman in a room full of men explaining negative gearing to you. To be a single parent juggling school pickup with a bank meeting. To rebuild from a setback most people don’t talk about openly.
If that’s where you are, you’re welcome here. Eda is built around the kind of advice I wished someone had given me, and the standard of respect I wished I’d been given. You don’t need to apologise for where you’re starting from. We start where you are, and we build from there.
My team
Yvette Chegwidden | Property Adviser
Yvette is our property adviser and the person most clients work with day to day on the buyer’s agent side. She joined Eda after several years working in property, and she grew up in a family of financial experts. Her father was a financial adviser, and that early exposure shows in the way she works with numbers. She doesn’t get rattled by spreadsheets, and she makes sure clients don’t either.
She’s a single mum and runs her own business on the side, which means she understands the real-life pressures most of our clients are juggling. Her work style is the opposite of pushy. Patient, meticulous, and so organised that nothing falls through the cracks. Clients consistently tell us they feel calmer working with her, which matters in a process where most people start out anxious.
Her creative outlet is floristry. She runs a florist business in her spare time, and the same care she puts into arrangements shows up in the way she handles client files. She loves the work, and you can feel it across the table.
Shelley de Jong | Settlements Manager
Shelley takes over once you’ve agreed to a property. From there she holds your hand through settlement, construction (if it’s a new build), and handover. She deals with the developers, builders, conveyancers, and trades on your behalf, and she acts as your representative at every step until the keys are in your hand.
This is the part of the buying process where most clients feel most stressed. Settlement timelines slip. Builders go quiet. Defects appear at handover. Shelley is the person who makes sure none of that becomes your problem to chase. She’s calm under pressure, and she does not let things drift.
She’s a grandmother of seven, a happy person, and a straight shooter. She won’t dress up bad news, and she won’t pretend a builder is doing the right thing when they’re not. That bluntness is exactly what you want in the person sitting on your side of the table at settlement.
Brodie Seals | Client Services and Marketing
Brodie is the person you’re most likely to hear from first. She handles client services, marketing, and the steady administrative work that keeps everything running between strategy meetings and settlements.
She brings more than two decades of experience in real estate marketing and office management, including ten-plus years as a Marketing Manager at Peard Real Estate in Western Australia, a year and a half at Advantage Property Consulting in Melbourne, and earlier roles in real estate administration at Ray White. That depth of property-industry experience means she knows how to communicate with developers, agents, and clients in a way that keeps things moving without drama.
Brodie is also a professional photographer in her own time, and she loves flowers. That visual sensibility shows up in everything that goes out the door at Eda. She’s married with children, and family sits at the centre of her life.
Amanda Leigh Walker | Process and Operations
Amanda runs the operational side of Eda. She doesn’t usually appear in client meetings, but the smoothness you experience as a client, the speed of communication, the way nothing falls through the cracks, comes down to the systems she builds and runs behind the scenes.
Her background is unusual for a property advisory firm. Amanda co-founded Lord of the Fries in 2004 and spent the next two decades scaling it from a single food van in Melbourne to a national chain of close to forty stores. That kind of operational experience is rare in the property industry. It’s also the reason Eda runs more like a serious business than a solo consultancy.
Originally from Canada and now Melbourne-based, Amanda brings a calm, structured approach to the work that holds the whole firm together. The standard she sets for processes, communication, and follow-through is one of the reasons the rest of us can focus on the strategy and the deals.
Amanda also brings something less expected to a property advisory firm. Alongside the operational expertise she runs a deeply spiritual practice. Reiki, incense, smudging, the full toolkit. She cares as much about how a space feels as how it functions, and the pairing of structure and groundedness is part of what gives Eda its character.
How we work with you
We work with you in four ways, and most clients use a combination.
A written property investment strategy that maps your goals, borrowing capacity, target asset profile, acquisition timeline, and risk plan. This is where most engagements start.
Buyer’s agent service to source, negotiate, and complete due diligence on individual properties on your behalf, once a strategy is in place.
Ongoing portfolio review to catch the moments when refinancing, equity recycling, or selling becomes the right move. Property strategies need to be revisited as your income, rates, and legislation change.
Education and self-serve resources for the times you’re not ready for full advisory, including guides, frameworks, and calculators that help you make better decisions on your own.
For the long version of how Eda thinks about property strategy, what to look for in an advisor, and the risks every investor needs to plan for, read our Property Investment Advisor Australia page. It covers the methodology in detail.
