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Hi Angie,
If what you’re doing isn’t having the desired result (and it isn’t) then it would be worth changing what you’re doing.
Given there are 2 vacant, & they’ve been vacant for a while, then obvious questions occur, like: is the property attractive? Is it clean, does it have reasonable facilities, are there maintenance things that need doing, is there anything you can do internally like painting/fixing/a bit of spiffing up that could make it nicer?
Try another agent? Give keys elsewhere? The current results speak for themselves, so I certainly would – a couple of months of vacancy is simply too long.
My strong suggestion is that you first invest some time & effort in educating yourself. Without taking the time to find out more, and learning what’s important and what’s not, you’ll just be ‘flying blind’. Even if someone did tell you buy in suburb X and Y and Z… YOU need to have some idea yourself of why those suburbs are good (or not) and why you would buy there. Buying without knowing why is an almost certain recipe for disaster and financial loss. Can you lose money in property? You sure can if you don’t know what you’re doing!!!!!!
You need a strategy first and then a plan for how to carry it out. Capital growth? Cashflow? How much? By when? Is it realistic? Wanting to buy them all inside 2 years is great… can you do it realistically? How?
Whether houses or apartments are ‘best’ will depend on your strategy and your finances. Different people may hold strong opinions on them. One successful investor I know specialises in 1 bedroom apartments in an inner suburb and does very well out of them. Another never buys apartments and only ever buys new houses… there is no ‘best’, it’s what will work best for YOU.
Same goes for Real Estate Agents – they are good, bad and very ordinary. If you’re going to get into property, then you’ll be dealing with agents. If you treat them like dirt, then don’t wonder why you don’t get much from them. Their prime loyalty is not to you, and neither should it be – that’s like expecting the car salesman to be loyal to you instead of their employer. Why would they? The agent works for the client who is paying them to sell the property.
They’re not out there to make you rich, they’re busy trying to do it for themselves, and fair enough. I know a couple of great agents – they’ve helped me make a heap of money by a/selling property for me at a great price and b/buying property for me at auction also at a great price and c/telling me about deals that have made me money, but only because I put in the time to let them know I’m serious, and I treat them well… AND I also do my own research & homework, so that I can double-check everything they say to me and I know then when it really is a good deal. Yes, there are some bad ones, and yes I’ve heard horror stories, and yes, I’ve had some look me in the eye and tell me stuff that just wasn’t so. Maybe they knew it, but often they didn’t. You need to know at least as much as they do, if not more. But when an agent tells me that a site with plans on it to build 2 units is going to make me $50,000 ‘no worries’ – I know enough to tell them when that isn’t so, and exactly why not, and thus why I won’t be buying it from them at that price.
So… time to get busy reading – there’s a stack of good books out there, easily available and quite cheap. Read through this forum, and Jan Somers’ http://www.somersoft.com.au (both fabulous sources of info and they already have the answers to a lot of your questions). And then, when you’ve done the homework… you can ask some better questions. Hope this helps.
