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Doing the bathroom work and sanding and polishing the wooden floors in the whole house? How many square metres is that?
Sounds like you're broadening the scope a bit!Tony B, what part of the country are you in?
Scott,
what do you mean by get back to where we were just 2 years ago?
That property is going to be this relatively expensive for many years for example?"x"
She left us a kiss!
Good point Bespoke, thanks.
My father in law still has a UK state pension in the UK, he draws this out in Australia but there are increasing restrictions. He does not pay extra tax at present but then it probably hasn't crossed his mind to check if necessary.
Not sure how this would all work with private pensions.Y,
Well, you hit the nail on the head about the terrible buying system here in the UK, it is a major contributing factor to so many failed sales, gazumping and gazundering. We got gazundered a year ago and ditched the attempted sale, only for the market to drop massively, we saw £35k knocked off our selling price. This has severely damaged our position. Still, the only real selling price is the one that goes through. We are starting to have problems in the current sale – hopefully I can sort these out soon.I'm re-assured and made nervous in equal measure by your experience that house prices in Adelaide don't generally drop. Advertised prices certainly haven't dropped much if at all, but then advertised prices in the UK have not dropped as much as we believe the real selling prices have dropped.
Because of the bad exchange rate coupled with the price drop in the UK I was in one sense hoping that Adelaide prices would soften, at least within the wndow of our first year or so, hopefully giving us an opportunity to get our home. On the other hand it is re-assuring that we stand a better chance of not seeing the house we do buy devalue as they are now doing n the UK.$350 to $400 a week sounds like a lot to come out of a monthly budget, probably comparable I'm estimating to the UK. Seems over here a very rough rule of thumb is that you'd need 50% equity to break even on rental price of an investment property to break even. A small 2 or 3 bedroom terraced house in my area is £1000 to £1100 per month to rent, value of the house would be in very rough region of £250 to £300k
Does anyone have a link or list of typical monthly outgoings for a family to base what I need to earn therefore can afford to buy or rent? I have a very guesstimated idea, but no real evidence of utilities, childcare costs, insurances, car running costs etc that I need to work out "affordabilities".
These sort of expenses seem to be built into the mortgage calculators on lenders websites.Regards
DarwinThanks for your comments KY, you've given me a couple of points to ponder.
Renting out the house in the UK doesn't really stack up unfortunately, the "buy to let" mortgage required would swallow my equity almost totally to get to a position where rental would more or less break even. Shame I can't "legally" keep the domestic mortgage for rental as the % rate would make it much more viable.If the UK sale goes through (long story but no guarantees in UK law – VERY bad system over here) we'll almost certainly leave the UK and rent in Adelaide until we've really settled on the area we want and I've hopefully nailed some way of getting a half acceptable exchange rate (terrible right now). The UK as a whole feels like it's just dying right now.
Yes, I've noticed rental does seem fairly reasonable in Adelaide, though I have to make a few mental conversions and assumptions from my UK perspective. $350 to $400 pw seems to rent a fairly nice house. Looking at it very, very simplistically I suspect adding a few zeros to the weekly rent cost gets you to something like the selling price of the property you're looking to rent. Still seems to be a shortage of rental properties in the areas I'm looking at though. Thought this would drive up prices more.
On your other point, quite a few properties I added to my shortlist on RealEstate.com weeks or even months ago appear to still be there unsold. Would have thought this lack of movement might force reductions, however small.
Again to throw the UK comparison in there, we are experiencing the lowest recorded number of completed sales they've ever recorded. Ouch.I'm in London, trying to sell up and emigrate to Adelaide.
Ignoring that the UK has already had a house price slump, which is continuing, and now our GBP is just crashing in value the plan was to sell up our modest UK house and buy a nice home in SA, in the early days a couple of years ago I thought I'd be able to buy a house and an IP for the kids!
Don't think I can afford it any more, 2 years ago I had a paper figure of nearly $400k to bring over, today it would be around $250k to $260k.
I'm likely to be one of those migrants you mention who won't be bringing my money over to Australia any more, it's looking more like financial suicide every week.What I'm surprised by is that Australia seems (from my very specific perspective) to have survived realtively unscathed from the global downturn so far. Sure your dollar is no longer nearing parity with the USD, and everyones shares have taken a beating, but all things considered you're still waiting for the hammer to fall – if indeed it does. Will China's needs save your bacon?
I'm generalising rather a lot here, again from a very focussed perspective, but many Australians are still talking about house prices levelling rather than falling. I suspect you may have a delayed reaction but surely serious downward pressure must hit Australia in the coming months?
London has virtually no spare land, you should see what they do when what you would consider a postage stamp sized block comes up for sale. Flats are looking more like 3/4 scale dolls houses. If a pub or a petrol station closes a block of tiny low quality flats pops up in it's place.
Or at least that is what has been happening, the building industry is grinding to a halt now.
You are still the Lucky Country at the moment, and you've still got space – more than you may realise compared to us Brits.
Good luck to you, I hope the downturn doesn't clobber you the way it's clobbered us.Keep talking about it though, because finding accurate or insightful news from Australia is very hard from here – any tips where I can look?
I'm commenting from the UK, as I haven't mnaged to migrate to SA yet,but from here it looks like Australia is hanging out a remarkably long time from being sucked into this crisis. If China starts consuming less and mining areas go down surely they'll be among the first to come back up when China starts up in earnest again? Worth hanging out a long while to see how it plays?
Excellent, thanks for the tips!
48.5% could be a bit of a problem. I'll check out the links.
Wow, SophieJones it sounds like you've been very lucky – or the positive karma thing is working out for you!
I don't yet own any IPs but I have a more cautious view of human nature!Anyone done any comparisons between the average wage and the average house price over a few decades?
Let me know if you have any interesting charts to look at! Would make interesting comparisonsInteresting seeing this from the UK, about to put my own UK house on the market again after a messed up sale a few months ago. The idea is to emigrate to S.A.
Long story short, a gazundering offer we received only a few short months ago, before the recent financial storm, now looks like a missed golden opportunity…. Going back further, 2 years ago I could have sold my small house in the UK and with the relative property values and exchange rate – if I'd understood the market at that time – we could have practically retired to Australia into a decent sized house and a very small mortgage. Can't do anything like that now! Wondering how safe Australia is economically, surprised to see such a lack of confidence after such bullishnesss even recently, but I guess in the end this credit crunch really is hitting us all.
Even with the mining boom and much better fiscal controls on the banking industry Australia is still not totally immune it seems.
I still think you are safer than us Poms though, and good luck to you, we're in bad shape and just starting to realise it.Strangely, your pessimism about your own property market gives someone like me the faint hope that if a bit of luck goes my way we can still "Pommiegrate" to your great country, will need to be careful with the exchange rate timing, and hang in for your own property market to slide a bit.
Watching Steve McKnights recent videos, your recessions of the 80's and 90's timed in exactly the same as ours. I seem to remember they lasted a long time over here, not a couple of years, but several long years.
