Hey Goodenergy,

We recently purchased an interstate IP and have had our PM take care of all the repairs we have needed. They are taking a pretty big slice of our rent so they might as well work a little for it.  Depending on the level of control you like, you could choose to have them run everything past you before they act or set up a repair limit for them to work under. In our case we allow them to progress with any repairs that cost less than 1 weeks rent without contacting us. 

What ever your comfortable with I guess. 

G'day Devo,

I'm not going to be any help to you unfortunately as I'm from Perth. I have however been contemplatling the same questions you posed – Would be very interested if you could post or PM me with what you find on your travels.

All the best.

1 IP no PPOR yet

Purchased for $303,000 this year rents for $290pw 

Everyone starts somewhere I guess

Hi Mark,

You will find allot of people more knowledgeable and experienced than me on here, but thought i would post my ideas all the same. I am from Perth and up until recently had no properties to my name. I would have loved to have bought my PPOR in Perth, however with the boom, I was priced out of the market. After considerable thought I decided to purchase in SEQ in fear that if other states follow Perth's lead I may miss the property boat all together for the foreseeable future. This obviously involved allot of reading and research and if you go this way I would recommend making a trip to your chosen region to check out the suburbs. I did this at Easter and it really helped.

If you are looking for a property investment, I believe that there allot of areas that will outperform Perth in the short to medium term and if you use a property manager the practicalities of the property being so far away should be some what reduced (also from my understanding property manager are allot cheaper over east – we get robbed here).

Anyway – All the best with what ever you choose.

Hi Spudsta,

I'm also from Perth and found myself in the same position recently. I would have loved to purchase in my home state, but as you know the prices are just crazy if you don't already have a property behind you. If we stretched ourselves financially we could have purchased an undesireable unit in Perth but given that this would not be suitable as our PPOR, we figured we should look for the best IP we could get for our money regardless of location. We narrowed our search down to SEQ and have now had an offer accepted on a 3 Bed cottage in a nice suburb (awaiting settlement).

I wasn't comfortable in buying 'suburb unseen' and am very grateful that I made a 3 day trip to check it out. This was the best thing we could have done as it changed our suburb preference. We were lucky and inspected our property during the trip, however I wouldn't have minded buying 'property unseen' after I was comfortable with the suburb. If I was to do this I would have looked for a place that is already tenanted as this gives an indication of condition and you aren'tdependant on Agents opinions on rental values.

I'm very much a novice as this is my first property, so don't take this as a recommendation just what I did to my first rung on the property ladder.

Cheers

Hi Guys,

Just thought I would post my opinion on the site for what it is worth. I am a newbie and was not familiar with the previous site format. I must however admit that the current site has been invaluable to me in my first venture into property. I am happy to say that I am expecting settlement on my first IP in the coming weeks and would not be in such a position if it wasn't for this site or the members. Thanks must be directed to Steve and his team for the current site and obvious endeavours to improve it.

I look forward to seeing the site continue to evolve and thank everyone involved for there efforts.