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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. If you move out and plan to sell it, consider moving in again shortly before you sell.
You’ll want to talk to your accountant more about this.
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 they have been strata titled and sold off one by one. The really good deals often don’t make it to the web either.
Whilst they often give better than average returns, I’ve noticed lately that often the asking price of a block is greater than the sum of its parts would be. That is that prices in a lot of areas have increased such that if you were to buy the block and sell of each unit, you wouldn’t get your money back. Rates and expenses may also be higher than what you’d expect so do your sums carefully. The 11-second rule is still useful, but don’t invest solely on that!
Another problem with blocks of untils is finance. Almost all lenders will only look at blocks with more than 3 units as a commercial risk. This means at least 30% deposit and often significantly higher rates.
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 will no longer be a national sport.
During this period rents will start to rise again and property will start to show decent and in many cases positive returns. The nice thing about interest rate rises is that salaries go up, although affordability of property goes down. Thus more renters and higher rents. When rates drop a bit you’ve suddenly got property with excellent returns.
At that time, when property shows good returns (and combined with other economic factors) the overall interest in property will increase. That’ll be the start of the next boom period.
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 feeling that the landlord was trying to save a buck or two and self manage the property. Having had a problem tenant, I doubt the landlord would have this problem if they’d found a good agent to manage the property.
If these sort of stories, combined with the others circulating in the media (legit or not) serve to scare inexperienced investors and push prices down, that suits me fine. Property becomes more affordable, rentals become scarcer pushing rents up. More +ve cashflow property will become avaiable for those who are prepaired.
