Hi Dazzling,

Thanks for your reply.

I am well aware that yes landlords are seeking to maximising their rental returns, what l was basically asking though are landlords willing to reduce rent if they have secured a long term tenant, say 3-5yr period? Personally, l would love to have a long term tenant & realising the savings of such, would be open to reduce the rent should the tenant ask or desire to negotiate it. But, as l don’t have an IP that’s easy to say. So, I was after the views from current landlords regarding this.

I don’t know where you got the notion that l simply walk into an r/e agents office and negotiate reduced rent on a property l haven’t seen & does not suit my needs?. That defies logic. Now because l am not a landlord l don’t know this as fact but is my feeling that a majority of tenants don’t even think about negotiating rent, and that can be said as people as a whole, people are generally too scared to ask ask for discounts or negotiate better deals on anything. My motto is, If you don’t ask you don’t know and you certainly don’t get.

So, If l end up negotiating a better rent with a landlord then yippee, but it’s not the end of the world if l don’t. I’m just exploring as many options in increasing my income & decreasing my expenses.

Yes as a future landlord, of course l desire to have maximum rental return, however l never said that l only want cf+ investment. I would much rather contribute a portion of my income to a neg gear IP than pay off useless personal debt.

So, I don’t think you read my initial post correctly and interpreted my “mindset” accurately. Yes, we do have high personal debt but we do not have a dream home nor a dream mortgage to go with it. Obviously if we did, then l totally agree with your comments, blind freddy can see that. We didn’t & we were not alone in the dream home, keep up with Joneses ideal. However, that was our mindset in the past, but l have obviously learn’t from past choices and decided not to travel down that path anymore. l know bitterly well what we done wasn’t the way to wealth and have learn’t my lessons well.

I have no problem with the rent & invest strategy, & the more l research l do the more hubby is seeing sense in not travelling down the dream home path anymore also. Sure, we’d love that dream home but we’re not sacrificing a massive part of our incomes (and a lot of other things) to support that dream. The rent & invest strategy allows us to live very comfortably & also invest in our long term future.

This is all part of my research and l would love to hear from anyone who has been in a similar situation to ours and find out about the good, bad & the ugly experiences of this strategy, so we too may consider things that we may have missed.

Thanks again for your reply dazzling, and like all advice and suggestions l get, it is appreciated but always taken with a grain of salt.

Cheers,

Indrielkat

indrielkat