Friend of mine completed a renovation and will have property on market soon.When he originally purchased it it was on the market for 2 and a bit years.It was unhabitable for 4 weeks until he finished inside and then proceeded to renovate outside. He beleives he wil make double the money on renovation costs. Thats great for a few months work and on top of being your own boss!

Dom[biggrin]

Mkc,

Do you renovate houses for a living or part time?
Dom

Thanks for advice guys,

I have been watching with interest a work colleague sell his property buy a large old queenslander and has spent $50000 out of $60000 renovating. He tells me that while working afternoon shift he has spent days working on this reno.He looks worn some days but his normal job is far less demanding. He plans to sell it as soon as he finishes 1(1 to 2 Months). He seems to beleive that he will make inbetween $50000 and $80000 profit. He has spent a great deal of time doing it but he has enjoyed it and plans to do it again.

Its in redcliffe north of brisbane,it has no water views but a very popular area since the boom and is close to water. Will keep updates as they come.

Dom
[biggrin]

Hi people,

Check out this post on predictions.

The Australian sharemarket is a few hundred points off its March record, but over the past 10 years investors have reaped higher returns than their compatriots in any other asset class.

The Australian Stock Exchange’s annual Investment Report, produced this year by the Russell Investment Group, revealed a dramatic turnaround from last year, when property topped returns for the first time in the study’s 12-year history.

“In a sense we have gone back more to the historical norm,” said AMP Capital’s chief investment officer, Shane Oliver.

The study measures the returns, before and after costs and taxes, of shares, residential investment properties, listed property trusts and fixed-interest and cash accounts over rolling 10 and 20-year periods.

Shares generated slightly higher returns over both periods regardless of which tax bracket an investor fell into. “Real returns have been particularly strong for listed property, Australian shares and residential investment property over this period,” the report said.
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At the lower marginal tax rate listed property returned 12.3 per cent annually after tax for the 10 years to December 31 last year. Australian shares returned 11.6 per cent, residential investment property 10.6 per cent, fixed interest 6.7 per cent and cash 3.8 per cent – all well above the average annual rate of inflation of 2.6 per cent.

The news was good for those on the top marginal tax rate, with all asset classes except cash returning more than inflation.

The ASX’s deputy chief executive, Colin Scully, said the study was a useful tool for retail investors. “This report illustrates that diversification and perseverance are necessary for riding out the inevitable rises and falls of the market,” he said.

Intech Investment Consultants senior consultant Andrew Korbel agreed. He said it was important for investors to take a long-term view, to smooth out fluctuations.

Mr Oliver said the sharemarket’s resurgence was driven by booming corporate profits. Over 30 years, he said, shares and property generate similar returns, “but you can often go for periods of five years when one is better than the other.”

Mr Oliver predicted that, with the Reserve Bank maintaining its bias towards raising rates and house prices still overpriced by as much as 20 per cent, the property market would not mount a serious challenge to the sharemarket’s ranking within the next couple of years.

The sharemarket’s volatility this year has seen the number of margin calls increased, but the report found that those willing to borrow to invest have benefited from historically low interest rates over the last 10 years.

“The use of leverage over the past 10 years has increased both the after-tax return of Australian shares and residential investment property,” the report said. The strategy added about 3 per cent to returns.

The 1990-91 recession was centred in Melbourne. In 2004, the slump in Australia’s economic growth is hitting hardest in Sydney.

The statistics are unanimous. NSW is lagging the rest of Australia across the board: on job growth (especially full-time jobs), consumer spending, housing construction, business construction, and growth in population, demand and state output.

In 2004, the Bureau of Statistics estimates, the trend growth in demand in NSW was just 2.8 per cent, barely half the rate of the rest of the country. Its population growth for the year to September was 0.7 per cent, also just half the average of the rest. And, over the three years to June, output grew just 7.6 per cent in NSW but 13.3 per cent in the rest of Australia.

This is not good news for the rest of us. Sydney is Australia’s global city, its financial and service capital. One in five Australians lives there, and almost one-quarter of our gross domestic product is created there. It will be hard for Australia to get back to economic health while Sydney remains sick.

The question is: will it? Is the slump in NSW relative to the rest of Australia since 2001 due to a confluence of one-off factors, or is it something more long-term?
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Access Economics, a team of sharp minds, is optimistic. It sees the slump as almost at bottom. In the financial year just ending, it estimates, NSW will grow by just 0.9 per cent, the slowest of any state. But it sees a modest rebound ahead, with NSW more or less matching the nation’s growth rate over the coming four years.

Solid growth in Asia will pump up demand in Sydney’s financial and service industries, including tourism, it says. Engineering construction remains strong, and the Carr Government’s $30 billion infrastructure plans should keep it that way.

But there are other, as yet unreported, statistics that point to a more disturbing trend.

They show that the decline in NSW’s population growth has been overwhelmingly among those in their 20s and 30s, and in young children. And that slump has been largely in Sydney.

From 2001 to 2004, the rest of Australia grew by 542,000 people: 110,000 aged under 40, and 432,000 aged 40 and over.

NSW grew by just 156,000. But it actually went backwards among the under-40s, losing a net 11,400 younger people, while gaining 167,400 of the middle-aged and elderly.

Talk to them, and one reason is clear. Sydney’s real estate prices remain about three years’ average take-home pay higher than in Melbourne, almost five years’ higher than in Brisbane, and almost double average prices in Perth and Adelaide.

House prices in Sydney were always higher, because Sydney is where land is most scarce. But as successive real estate booms and home renovations almost doubled the average price of a house relative to wages, the affordability gap between Sydney and the rest widened.

Even after a steep fall in prices in 2004, the Real Estate Institute and AMP Banking report that, in the December quarter, the median price in Sydney was $89,500 higher than in Melbourne, $162,500 higher than in Brisbane and $204,500 higher than in Perth. That’s a lot of income to sacrifice just to get a foot on the ladder of home ownership. What drove Sydney’s prices so high? More unreported statistics help explain.

Between 1997 and 2003 NSW, with 34 per cent of Australia’s population, averaged almost 50 per cent of all lending to housing investors in the nation.

Between 1993 and 2003 the amount of money banks lent housing investors in NSW rose more than tenfold, from less than $3 billion a year to $33 billion, or 12 per cent of the state’s GDP. In 2000 and 2001, investors in NSW property markets borrowed more money than those in the rest of Australia put together.

Since the Reserve Bank raised interest rates in late 2003, new borrowing by owner-occupiers slumped briefly, only to rebound to new record levels. It is investor housing that has fallen. In year-on-year terms, it has slumped 15 per cent: from a peak of $72 billion to $61 billion in the year to March 2005.

But that slump has been very uneven. In the March quarter alone, lending to investors in booming Western Australia was up 26 per cent on a year earlier. In South Australia it was slightly higher, in Victoria slightly lower, while in Queensland it fell 11 per cent and in NSW 15 per cent.

Even so, NSW investors are still borrowing more than investors in Victoria and Queensland combined, and their share of the national total remains 41 per cent – compared with less than 30 per cent in earlier downturns. If Sydney’s housing prices need a painful correction to make the city affordable to young people, that could be a long way off.

I liked the add because it was positive and i like positive news. To me it does not matter if the market moves up or down to me as a investor it is always a boom.

Dom[biggrin]