This Post is Excellent thanks jontapp. I'd love to see this turned into a sticky. Great info

Speaking to most builders your currently looking at $800 m2 to build or extend. not including price of laying a slab

Hi Tomara, I've found magazines like Your Investment Property magazine very helpful with information like. Also my parents lived in Bracken Ridge up until 2-3 years ago and still have there house there as an investment. They purchased it only 2-3 years prior to that. Bracken Ridge has performed well for them. for the last 12 months they have had no out of pocket expenses on this property and are returning a small cash flow from it. However, I can't personally comment on whether this increase will continue.

blingbling if the percentage of growth you have listed in your initial comment are an average over say 10 years, then your second property choice would be the wiser option at 12%. However if these growth percentages were only taken over that month or even year, then little faith can be placed in these. With property, you want to look at long term growth. ie 5-10 years instead of 2-12 months due to the speed in which property in relation to other investments can be bought or sold. Simple maths (my new best friend) tells me that your $160k property will be worth $224788 in 3 years and your $80k property in the same amount of time will only be worth $103602. A 64k profit is exponentially better than a 23k profit… if you can afford the 160k property. So in 3 years time that's almost 3 times the amout of equity you have available to use in purchasing more property.

Using a 10% deposit, in 3 years time you'd be able to borrow $640k compared to 230k