Melbourne.

Live in a detached house with a backyard.

Prefer to live in a detached house with a backyard.

Age 29.

Good question, and if you get a wide enough selection of respondents, it'd be a good reflection of the type of accomodation people might prefer.

Sorry Marie, I didn't recognise the abbreviation. John's book is a good one, contains a good amount of logical information and doesn't take a rocket scientist to absorb it. Indeed he makes a mention of when to buy into certain segments of the property market. Obviously he doesn't lay down concrete dates and nothing is ever fool proof, but there are some key indicators to look out for.

It will be a number of years before the boomers finally sell out of their investment properties. The share market is shabby at best and we're far from a solid recovery to hit a new peak. As John says, the time to buy into 'final buyer markets', or as I understand, lovely posh houses or tree/ sea change properties would be now, or at least soon, before the stock market starts heading towards its old peak, prior to the proverbial hitting the fan.

That will also be the time when the boomers will also sell their investment properties, sit back and enjoy. If this is the case, they will be selling their properties when market sentiment is good and prices will be high with very high clearance rates. We won't be expecting to pick up a bargain in this sort of market, quite unlike what some are led to believe. In the aftermath, prices might become unattractive or an excessive amount of old investment properties hitting the market may cause interest to wane. Prices drop or stabilise and then eventually become attractive to buyers again, hence the property cycle.

This is looking pretty far into the future of course. Who knows what will truly be in store for us? Regardless, if you invest in solid properties that are well located and priced close to the median price of that particular area, I'll be very surprised if you didn't get an equally solid return over the long term.

The question is not so much whether the baby boomer have to sell but whether they can afford to sell. No doubt the retirement nest eggs of the boomers have been slammed hard by the GFC, losing much of its value and forcing the boomers to stay working for longer. I reckon the boomers would rather get some income from their jobs when they can while waiting for the value of their nest eggs to recover. Likewise they'll hang on to their investment properties.

When the sharemarket does recover and levels start heading towards the peak again, the boomers would retire en masse. And that's when they'll be selling their investment properties. The boomers have literally watched their nest eggs vaporise in a matter of months and they're in a bit of a pickle…too few working years left and facing too big a loss if they decide to sell up now.

On the flipside however, when boomers well and truly retire, they will either have to stay put in their current houses, or otherwise go for the frequently mentioned tree-change or sea-change. If you've already invested in one of the locations that is likely to be popular with the boomers, you're already well-poised for the movement of the 'gray wave' that's about to occur.

Although I'm not an expert in the area of Belmont, I did speak to one of my clients less than a month ago who was planning on moving over there. I had an interesting discussion with her about the area because I'm personally a big fan of some parts of the Geelong region.

She said something interesting which made me feel that I'm not alone in my assessment of Geelong: 'If you superimpose the map of Melbourne over the map of Geelong, Belmont is essentially within the 'CBD'!'

Geelong offers good value for money. Some people say that affordability has been eroding with the rise in prices over there, saying that the prices in some areas are now approaching that of prices in some of Melbourne's outer suburbs. I'd like to challenge the old way of thinking however and ask people to start considering Geelong as a CBD in itself, a smaller 'mini-Melbourne' if you like.

If you look at is this way, it'd be easy to see that things located within easy reach of the city center of Geelong and the coast are actually very good value for money. So instead of just thinking that Belmont is a hour's drive from Melbourne, start considering that Belmont is also within a few kms of Geelong city center. Some people laugh when I mention investing (and eventually retiring) in Geelong. They'd say, 'Why live so far from all your friends?'

Personally, I think Geelong will be super-hip within the next decade. All my friends will be there. People who have bought as near to the city center and the water as possible are well-poised for superb capital gains. Just look at what's happened to similar properties near Melbourne in recent times. Less than 10 years ago I remember visiting Geelong for the first time. It was a quiet little hamlet, not a soul in sight at Cunningham pier. The only other things I remember seeing were a bunch of bollards by the beach and a couple of yachts on the water. Today, the waterfront is crawling with people.

I am a vet by profession and was speaking to a drug/ pet food representative recently who went to Geelong to visit the vet clinics there. There's plenty of clinics in Geelong city (excluding outlying areas), and she tells me that all the clinics are very nicely done up. Intuitively, 'nicely done up' clinics only exist in places where there is demand for services. That tells me the people in Geelong also have money.

People don't necessarily live in Geelong just because it's a cheaper, poorer cousin to Melbourne. They live there for a change in lifestyle. People are getting intelligent, realising they need not buy a $350K house in a [rough] industrial area far from Melbourne CBD. They could spend the same amount and get a house in Geelong within 5-10 minutes drive from the city center and the water's edge.

Belmont prices range widely but it appears you can buy a comfortable house on a full sized block for about $350K that would comfortably rent for around $310-330pw and upwards. That's a yield approaching 5% and vacancy rates sit at 2.2% based on SQM's figures today. It's not one of the cool positively-geared properties that lots of people are chasing these days, but just consider the figures and location and do what's comfortable and right for you.

Thanks for the info. This is good news for homeowners. However it remains to be seen if lenders will pass on this rate cut in full to their customers.

As with any industry, there's good and bad ones I suppose. A while ago I went to an OFI to check out a house my parents might be interested in moving into for retirement. I was pretty tired then with listed prices being far below eventual selling prices. So I asked this agent something along the lines of, 'How much do you reckon this house is worth' or 'How much do you believe this house would sell for' or 'What are some of the figures from interested parties at the moment'?

I got a terrible response. The agent pulled out a pen from his pocket and said 'How much do you think I have in my pocket, and how much do you think I'm willing to pay for this pen?' What a crock. He must have looked at my face and thought I were an 18 year old kid pulling his leg. I was very insulted and have decided never to talk to him again. He still has my email address so I do get market updates from time to time, but that's pretty much where it's gonna stop. I wish him all the best with his career.

On the other hand, there are nice ones out there, like the one I bought my first home from. And there's others who maybe were not so nice before but are having to be very nice now because the market is quiet. I've had long phone calls with a couple of agents, just having a nice chat about the market in general and some suburbs here and there. One of them thanked me for spending the time on the phone. Agents are human after all, despite their flashy cars and all.

Well, the concerns you have are all fair. Times are becoming increasingly unpredictable. Today's knowledge could be tomorrow's foolishness. I think there's a lot of people out there who are willing to tell you, with a degree of certainty, what THEY believe is going to happen in the future. However, some will be wrong, and some will actually be half right. Ultimately you need to make your decision based on the information you have, be comfortable with your decision, and never to beat yourself up if the decision turns out to be the 'wrong' decision.

With property, I have read this countless times: Time in the market, not timing. So if you were asking for my opinion, I'd be telling you that now is a favourable time to buy, but expect competition still if you're looking to buy into quality property. Clearance rates are definitely down from a year ago. But if you look carefully, it's not surprising. Current sentiment and economic conditions play a role in reducing confidence and causing people to hold off buying. But also consider the relative lack of quality stock at reasonable asking prices and you can easily see why certain properties are just not selling.

When news is bad, that's usually a good time to buy. Didn't Warren Buffet blow a huge amount of money on a railway line at the time the GFC was in full swing? Most would have thought you would be insane to buy something like that in the middle of a recession. These guys succeed not only because they are gutsy, but also smart, investing against the mentality of the general herd.