There’s a group which meets monthly holding a meeting mid Feb. The booking is yet to be confirmed, but there’s a thread running on Somersoft at:

http://www.somersoft.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=13958

I expect that there will be a rise in Feb. My reasoning is that there was record Christmas spending in December.

I think that the fixed rate drop is a correction on a knee jerk reaction a few months ago. Whilst I believe that we are in for more rises, I don’t see them going up too high in the coming year.

You need to establish your unit as your PPOR. I don’t think that the law requires you to live there a specific period of time. Thanks to a loophole, you can then move out for up to 6 years and still call it your PPOR (but you can only have one at a time).

You’ve probably already done enough to establish it as your PPOR with utility bills etc.…[Read more]

Body corporates are only required when there is more than one owner. If you own the entire block, there is no requirement for a body corporate.

Whole blocks tend to get advertised the same way most property does, but for obvious reasons they are targeted at investors. They are getting very rare these days. They either give good returns, or…[Read more]

Rates are directly used for maintaining roads etc. If the population is small, rates may have to be high to support the upkeep of services in the area.

My observation has also been that rates in smaller country towns are significantly higher than the capitals.

For the most part I don’t think property will fall dramatically in a bust situation. There will be exceptions, but quality properties with reasonable returns probably won’t take a nose dive.

I think that what we’ll see is a protracted period where prices don’t move much at all. Property investing will become uninteresting and watching prices…[Read more]

May I suggest that future meetings not be on a Saturday afternoon. I’m often looking at houses at that time.

I had to laugh at the TT stories. They were definitly pushing property as a risky investment in the current times. It was only a month or two ago that they did a very positive story on Steve and his success. It funny how quickly they change their tune.

The second story about the landlord with problem tenants was also amusing. I got the…[Read more]