Forum Replies Created
Hey David,
We were in a similar position about 3 years ago, we built our PPOR in Adelaide and then realised that it maybe wasn’t such a great idea. So we sold up and started renting a 2bd unit. Benefits of doing this is that our rent at this stage is less than what a mortgage repayment would be, is partially tax deductible (because we have a home office set up for our business) and we can use all of our money investing in real estate, what we view as ‘good debt’.
Owning our own home is still a goal however, we decided that being financially free was our number 1 priority so living in our own home can wait.
I guess best thing to do is sit down and work out a plan for yourselves. We do have an real estate group with forumites from here that meet once a month, always a good and fun thing for networking and speaking to other like minded people of all levels.
Good luck and let us know how you get along.
Kim
Kim Anand
[email protected]“Money Can’t Buy you Happiness but it Does Bring you a More Pleasant Form of Misery”
Yep meeting still on. Great way to spend valentines day hey!
i think agenda still to be finalised at this stage but if you email [email protected] he will add you on the distribution list
Kim
Kim Anand
[email protected]“Money Can’t Buy you Happiness but it Does Bring you a More Pleasant Form of Misery”
Hi,
Through pressure going about things the ‘normal’ way my husband and i bought our first home 2 years ago and after speaking with some experienced investors realised that we might be better off renting so we sold up our brand spanking new house (it was painful [blush2]) and opted to rent.
Advantage is our rent is partially tax deductible because we have a home office whereas the mortgage repayments on your own home aren’t.
It was a sacrifice but we figured a sacrifice worth making because we’ve been able to borrow alot more money than what we could have if we had our own personal mortgage.
Hope this helps.
Kim
Kim Anand
[email protected]“Money Can’t Buy you Happiness but it Does Bring you a More Pleasant Form of Misery”
Hi Rexilla99,
I think if its a straight forward investment property you want tenanted, given you interview and research before selecting who you think is the best property manager for the job, i think you should give the time consuming job to a property manager. The advantage of this is not only freeing up your time but property managers may have a database of potential tenants looking for your sort of property to rent.
Having said that, we manage all our properties because they’re all student accomodation…so several tenants rather than just the 1……..and the way you find and secure the tenants for these sorts of properties is different and plus we think we’ve mastered our technique of securing these sorts of properties relatively quickly.
Your time is precious, i’d hand the job to a reputable property manager if a straight forward rental. Spend your time find more properties to buy and make money from.
Kim
Kim Anand
[email protected]“Money Can’t Buy you Happiness but it Does Bring you a More Pleasant Form of Misery”
Ebay has always beeen really good to us!
Kim Anand
[email protected]“Money Can’t Buy you Happiness but it Does Bring you a More Pleasant Form of Misery”
Hi,
Not sure how other investors value land but we do it as we would valuate a house.
Look at the sales history reports for land sold in that suburb (you can get this off RP Data or UpMarket or if you haven’t got subscriptions to these just ask a real estate agent to print one off for you…some are reluctant to do this but most shouldn’t have a problem). Then find the most comparable block of land thats sold and when we look for comparables, we not only ensure that its in the same suburb but also in close proximitiy to the target land because if an arterial road seperates the 2, this could influence the price.
We work out the square meter rate for a few similar comparables and then find the average per square meter rate and apply to the size of the target property.
Hope i didn’t just confuse you but hope this helps.
Kim
Kim Anand
[email protected]“Money Can’t Buy you Happiness but it Does Bring you a More Pleasant Form of Misery”
Maybe a section which allows you to enter in some income that you may possibly get during the reno process eg. if you’re subdividing but retaininig the exisiting house, you would most probably want to rent it out. Also if purely a reno and you finish ahead of schedule, you may decide to rent it out whilst waiting for it to be sold. So with this you’d also need to include things like tenant insurance, occupancy rates (guesstimate) etc.
Some other thoughts:
Total Reno costs (broken down to the very nitty gritty)
Home insurance
Sales Costs eg. Advertising and Agent feesKim
Kim Anand
[email protected]“Money Can’t Buy you Happiness but it Does Bring you a More Pleasant Form of Misery”
I’m dying to know the answer!
From past posts, it appears that you can’t get a property thats been purchased outside of the Trust, into the Trust without incurring all these hefty bills.
Please do tell![wacko]
Kim
Kim Anand
[email protected]“Money Can’t Buy you Happiness but it Does Bring you a More Pleasant Form of Misery”
Hey Longshanks,
We self manage some of our properties and have until recently given tenants our BSB and account number for them to deposit money into our account however the bookkeeping and chasing up of rent was a nightmare until we discovered Ezi Debit (www.ezidebit.com.au) They essentially are a third party that direct debits the rent from the tenants account and you get access to an online service where you can print off reports and all. Its fantastic and doing it this way has more than halved the time we used to spend on chasing up rent and keeping an eye on things. Just keep in mind that just because you’re paying another company to do this you should still keep an eye on things to make sure the debit dates and $$ are accurate.
Ezi Debit will direct debit the amount you want however frequent you want. They charge $2.20 to set up an account and $1.10 for each transaction so if your tenants are paying monthly it works out to be a little bit cheaper for you as opposed to paying fortnightly. You can choose to have the tenants pay for the transaction fees or you can choose to pay for it. We personally chose to pay for it because its a minimal amount and at the end of the day is benefiting us moreso than the tenants.
Hope this has helped.
Regards,
Kim Anand
[email protected]“Money Can’t Buy you Happiness but it Does Bring you a More Pleasant Form of Misery”
We fully furnish ours with everything they would need such as bed linen, powerboards, desk lamps etc.
Its furnished to the extent that they can just move in and not have to worry about going out to buy anything.
Common areas also have lounge, dining table and chairs, fridge, dishwasher, washing machine, crockery, cutlery plus we give them a few extra things around the house to make their time more enjoyable there.
Kim
Kim Anand
[email protected]“Money Can’t Buy you Happiness but it Does Bring you a More Pleasant Form of Misery”
Notice boards at unis has worked well for us. We’ve only ever had to advertise in the Newspapers once or twice and we didn’t get a single phone call out of it so we’ve stopped doing that.
We also get a few through word of mouth.
Yes this time of the year is not the best time to start as Uni is coming to a close in the next few weeks and many international students do go back to their home countries for the holiday period.
However, it may be an idea to advertise in the paper during this period as there wouldn’t be alot of students floating around the uni’s xmas/new years time (understandably so).
Hope this helps.
Kim Anand
[email protected]“Money Can’t Buy you Happiness but it Does Bring you a More Pleasant Form of Misery”
Hi Dannyboy,
Not sure what sort of subletting you’re referring to? Are you wanting to rent a house with yourself having the head lease and from that sublet the individual rooms or are you looking at buying a house and subletting the individual rooms?
We’re doing a bit of both and yes its extremely hard work and alot of patience is required however, the rewards can be great. Its very time consuming however, on the up side its a form of renting out your house that will give you more income.
99% of our students are International students and we’ve never had any probs with them. It might be that we’ve been really lucky but we’ve not yet had a problem with any of the students.
We use a third party company to do the direct debiting as we ourselves aren’t permitted to direct debit the rent from their account but this has worked out for the better because the company we use provides reports to us for every debit they make so record keeping wise its cut our book keeping down by 50%.
One thing we’ve found is because there are so many people living in the house, its alot more difficult to share the cleaning of the common areas so we pay a cleaner to come around once a fortnight to clean the kitchen, lounge, dining, hallways, bathrooms and toilets.
Hope this information has helped you out in some way.
Cheers,
Kim
Hi All,
We’re renting out a a couple of houses at the moment to students by the room. We have found that students tend not to know much about cleaning and the evidence is clear from our inspections but its not too bad because we call them up on occasions to remind them to clean because we’ll be visiting soon and 9 times out of 10 they do clean. Actually we’ve produced a roster for this particular house and 2 students have cleaning duty for 1 month at a time. It seems to be working well.
Our other place that we’re managing is a 7 bedroom house and thats been a great experience. This particular house we’ve included the utilities in the rent as well as provided wireless broadband to each bedroom at no extra cost. This house has been easier to fill than the other because of the “all inclusive” rent type deal that we’ve offered.
As we rent to mostly international students, we realise that they go back to their home towns during semester breaks which we’ve covered in our contracts with them. We offer a discounted rent if they want us to hold their rooms (usually 70% of the rent) and so far thats worked ok. We’ve found its just not financially worth it for us to hold the room for them whilst their overseas and get no income because some of them stay away for the entire summer of up to 3mths. We haven’t bothered finding short term tenants either because the time and effort in that is too much for us because we still both work full time.
Kim
I’m not sure if this will help but we recently looked at a house facing a main road which was on septic. Because it was on 3700m2, we were thinking of putting 6-8 homes on it but to get the sewer they had to get it from across this main road where development has already occurred (this side of the main road were all on septic)…anyway, the cost was going to be around the $500K mark which would blow all our profit out the window.
I think the difference is in this case is the house was on septic.
Kim
Just a quick reminder that this meeting on Tuesday will be the last opportunity to pay the $10 (per person) deposit to attend the xmas dinner at Katts Restaurant on O’Connell St Nth Adelaide on the 27th November 6:30pm.
Should be a great night so don’t miss out[biggrin]
Just a quick reminder that this meeting on Tuesday will be the last opportunity to pay the $10 (per person) deposit to attend the xmas dinner at Katts Restaurant on O’Connell St Nth Adelaide on the 27th November 6:30pm.
Should be a great night so don’t miss out [
]Yeah thats what SGIC told me, they dont care whether its being occupied or not but as long as its on the market, they won’t insure it because apparently the risk of something happening is alot higher. I of course rang back on 4 different occasions and got the same story.
I have managed to get in touch with a broker and he had the worst time in the world trying to find someone who would insure our house, he finally got in touch with a friend who works for an insurance company and did him a favour. Wouldn’t be able to get it just by ringing their standard customr enquiry number because the operators just wouldn’t have the same sort of powers, its either a yes or no for them but luckily this broker has managed to get our place insured. I don’t know what people would do if they’ve got their house on the market and its not occupied [ohno]
I’d recommend anyone who’s got their place on the market to ring their insurer to double check that they are in fact insured. It was a scary few days for us.
Kim
Hi there,
The AREIG (Adelaide Real Estate Investors Group) meets only the second tuesday of every month….good place to network and talk to like minded people. Theres no cost involved whatsoever, just a meeting place to share ideas and learn. Next meeting is next Tuesday (the 14th Sept). You can contact our “chairperson” Ray Summerton (forum name is Summo) for more details.
Kim
Hello Everyone,
Just a quick reminder for those who would like to attend the AREIG xmas dinner which is to be held at Katts on O’Connell St North Adelaide on the 27th November, you’ll need to place a $10pp deposit. Since its getting reasonably close, i will need to pay the deposit relatively soon.
Thanks and hope to see you all at Tuesday’s meeting.
Kim [biggrin]
Hi Luke,
I’ve been getting sales history data from the real estate agents themselves. Some are unhappy to provide (most actually) however if you sweet talk them a little then they may be happy to assist. Its not a good idea to ask the agent thats selling a house that you are interested in purchasing because its kinda like a conflict of interest for them so just ring up another agent for the data and say you’re looking at selling your house or buying a house in suburb “x” and in most cases they’d be happy to do it for you.
Kim
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