In the short term, certainly.

But it doesn’t look easy to me, so I suspect only the most dedicated will stick with it long term. When the bubble bursts, the hunt will be on for many people to find the “next” big thing – back to shares?

cheers,
Darren.

I live in Brisbane’s South and we bought our first house almost a year ago. We wanted to buy earlier, but we were given some bum finance advice and stupidly didn’t shop around enough to confirm it was in fact wrong. Anyway, we bought reasonably well, and after some low cost but high impact upgrades our house is worth double our purchase price. This is great for our equity, but interestingly, the rental returns if we were to lease the house out, have probably only increasd by 15% in the same time period.

The vacancy rate for this area is quite low and demand for rentals probably higher than average. We would probably have a small cashflow positive situation, given our initial purchase price 12 months ago.

Looking about the market as I do on a very regular basis, I really don’t see cashflow positive returns. These fantastic captial gains won’t last forever, and I do not want to be the last one holding the contract befero the market bursts.

I think interstate investors who come to Brisbane for short visits are very brave to evaluate the market in such a short time. Agents have buyers queueing at the door so the likelihood of making successful low offers seems very limited to me.

As another poster has mentioned, their may be iopportunities int he lower incoerm areas such as Archerfiled, Acacia Ridge, perhaps even Woodridge or Loganlea. I remeber evaluating a $35000 unit two years ago returning $115 a week. My family put me off, appalled at the ethougth of buying in a “less desirable” area. If only I had stuck to my guns I would be laughing all the way to the bank now.

Anyway, these are just the disjointed thoughts of
Brisbanite. It’s not easy finding cashflow positive properties in Brisbane, and after reading Steve’s book, I’m more interested in good, long trem cashflow than the fickle trend of capital gain.

cheers,
Darren.