hi kay, PM me your email address and I’ll send you some pics of mine, all under 30K. A picture paints a thousand words…

cheers-
Mini

here’s to the mappers not only succeeding, but living to tell the tale and writing a book about it. here’s to steve. here’s to them dropping in here now and again to tell us stuff. here’s to people understanding that ‘changing their lives’ is not compulsory – once you think all is as good as it gets, you are perfectly willing to rest on your laurels. here’s to everyone.

cheers,

Mini

*drinks*

hey hey hey muppet,

you mad mathemetician, you…
whaddya mean?
I have been posting essays like mad for weeks now….search for posts from me, and you’ll see…

cheers-
mini

bear.
sorry to hear your woes.

i know you meant well.

I think it’s like little kids. If you say to kids, make yourself at home, and they play cricket inside and break your ming vase, and you get mad, it’s because they didn’t understand the implied bits.

i think with strangers (as well as kids) things need to be spelled out. This is what I expect from you. this is what you can expect from me. this is how much it will cost you. this is the way I safeguard myself in case you don’t honour your part of the deal. this is how you will be safeguarded in the event of me not honouring my part of the deal.

If you do the work ‘on spec’ and don’t get paid unless all the planets are aligned, then it’s you that needs a document protecting you.

this could be a formal JV agreement. It could be a deposit, and a ‘work order’. but it needs to be spelled out.

I’m bird-dogging now for $$$, I have three clients, one I found 3 properties for before Xmas, one client I found one for, and one I’m looking for at the moment. The deal between me and the client has been tweaked each time. I think in general, the first deal with a new client is the most time-consuming, as you are building trust (but not necessarily getting paid for it.)
Once trust is established, you can go out there and get on with subsequent deals really effectively.

I got my clients because they came to me. it had never crossed my mind to bird-dog for someone until someone asked me to. In a way, those clients referred themselves to me. those are the best ones. you know they’re serious, because it was their idea.

Do you know for sure that you were shafted by your own ‘clients’ on these deals? Can you find out, either through council or through the agent, who the vendor was?

Have you considered qualifying to become a RE agent, seriously?

cheers-
mini

i agree with westan

[]

westan!!!

What can I say!

I could try…I suppose….

“I wanna know when the next instalment of the MAP is gonna be on TT…”

so do i, desperately….

“ps and I’d be happy for the public to leave the inflated property sector… go on, go away… shoo now…”

This is so bizarre because although we’re kind of joshing around, you *are* coincidentally a media-person (like, an Important one) who happens to coincidentally have the same ‘attitude’ that I may have accused the media of having recently. (which is, ‘property: thumbs down’)

I no longer know which is joking and which isn’t.
*confused, but smiling*

cheers-
mini

Richmond, I’m sorry, that was cheeky/naughty of me.

Yes, I’ll admit September 11 was the first time I realised the news was biased….

But I agree that it could be just mere *coincidence* that ACA and TT are running more ‘property: watch out’ stories at the moment than ‘yay! property” stories.

Then again, it *could* be a dark conspiracy to condition the public to leave the inflated property sector of their own accord…

*tongue firmly in cheek*

cheers-
Mini

I have this feeling that the property craze is going to fade. We’ve had a time of low interest rates, FHOG, even musos, taxi drivers and their parents doing property investing seminars, renovation shows on TV resulting in a frenzy of renos-for-capital-gain, unstable world times where people are scared of currency fluctuations and the sharemarket and want the security of a tangible asset with an actual intrinsic value, rather than a ledger entry – so you’ve had people pulling money out of other asset classes that haven’t been working for them, and into property.

I think the interest rates/inflation rate/our currency rate compared to other countries’ currencies are all linked, and something the government controls, looking at what’s happening elsewhere in the world, to keep our economy in check. Because if the Aus dollar (or the Kiwi dollar) is too high, exports suffer.

I think that in the present economy, if the government think that too much of people’s money is in property, and therefor that not enough is going to go into businesses/the stock exchange/other ventures, they will continue to raise interest rates, slowly-ish over time so as not to do too much harm or cause panic all at once. A kind of softly-softly bit by bit thing.

I think the governments basically just weigh up the economy in general, and decide if they want to slow it down or speed it up. So they’ll do what they do, and as a consequence (because I think interest rates might go up more) every time they do that, a portion of people will get out of the property market. Or decide to put off getting in to the property market.

The other side of the coin when interest rates rise to borrow is that you earn more just keeping it in the bank.

So let’s say they rise, not only only does it now mean that it’s less likely you can afford to buy another property (let alone find a cashflow positive property) but why would you take that risk, if you can make the same amount if you leave it in the bank and whistle a happy tune?

It will make property look like an even worse investment. But I think what will happen is that banks will have all this money to lend out, and less people wanting to borrow at a higher rate, so it will be easier to get finance. They’ll be throwing finance at you!

So I reckon, it makes it a great time to get ready to buy. Right at the point where everyone is running screaming from property. (which will happen in waves, a wave every time there is an interest rate increase.)

The reason that there aren’t many CF+ve properties around is because ‘everyone’ has been looking for them. When ‘nobody’ is looking any more, there will be millions of them around again. And less buyers… so, bargains.

Let’s say that in Sydney the yields are around 2-3 percent at the moment, where you could rent an 800K house in Paddington for $400 per week, or a $300K unit in the burbs for $170 per week.

Actually, i think you will be able to pick up the 800K house for 700K pretty soon. And the 300K apartment for $250K. So what does that do to the yields? Especially if we hike the rents a bit, seeing as there seem to be less rental properties available these days (funny that…)

So you now will start to get (as prices ‘soften’, I think the ‘dont-panic’ term for it is – ) yields rising right up again. And pretty soon, another year, another interest rate rise a percent or two, you will get loads of 15 percent yielding properties again in country towns and maybe some 8-9 percenters in the cities. (kind of like Auckland a year ago.) And not as many people buying because they’ve all gone off property, and besides ‘interest rates are too high at the moment, we’re going to rent for a bit longer’ causing further demand for rental properties.

I think that the cycle of property makes perfect sense, and if you can see all the ways of making money from property, you might dig that now is not the time to do a reno for capital gain, but it might be a good time to start looking for buy and hold cashflow positive yields again, that you can hold for 7 years
or whatever, when we’ll see another wave of property shooting up 20 or 30 percent a year.

That’s my kind of understanding of where we might be in the cycle.

cheers-
Mini

PS And I still didn’t answer the question… how am I gonna “harvest opportunities” and also “mitigate risks” – by continuing to buy CF+ve properties yielding a minimum of 15 percent. (I recently helped a ‘client’ (yay, my first) find three properties, two with sitting tenants yielding 16 and 17 percent, and another vacant but with an expected 19 percent return. not bad eh.) Today, I just missed out – by one day – on getting a property for potential client number two, (drat!) that had a 30 percent yield. (four flats.) As for myself, I’m debt free property-wise, and as soon as I can clear that annoying credit card debt that’s lingering, I am going to present my squeaky-clean taxes-paid self to the lenders and go looking for my next property.

wow, who knew, I have been ‘offset gearing’ my life for years, without knowing it had a name. Thanks sis. Being a freelance independent contractor, working from home, with several different businesses operating under the one ABN, means you can depreciate, claim a portion of your rent, travel exp, clothing and meals (for my line of work) – all the things sis mentioned – amongst other things. I guess I look pretty low-income on paper. Thanks to the ATO, that’s just the way it works if you’re self-employed. Employees and people on salary just don’t get the same tax breaks as business owners (do they?).

cheers-
Mini