Sounds like an ideal situation Simon, if it's self managed! Not practical if you are managing 65 of them

What is the attendance at the inspections like? How many enquireis per week is she getting from the internet? We have had situations like these before where it just did not make sense to us why a perfectly good house is not renting.

Sitting and waiting is the worst thing you can do as properties go "stale" tenants think there is something wrong with them and they do not bother!

You need to find out what the problem is, ask the agent to follow up on all enquires and ask why they were not interested! Price too high? Bad location? Something they didn't like? Agent's application process too difficult? Enquiries are a great source of information, use them! You need to find out why so that you can do something about it.
The price may NOT be the reason so reducing the price without knowing is probably not a good move.

In one of our difficult to rent properties, we found that the location was too far for the target market we were advertising to (it was a house on the beach set up as a student accomodation), we changed the wording of the ad to say that there is life beyond the university campus. Lifestyle by the beach to get away from uni work etc… It worked!
But we would not have known that if we did not ask!

Hi gold coast girl, I subscribe to TICA if you want I can check to see if you have been black listed!
 send me an email with your full name, date of birth and drivers license number and I can do a search for you.

You cannot list bad personalities either

Where do you have it advertised?

realestate.com.au is a must, we get 99% of enquires from there.
Try a signboard if you have to but as a second option to the internet.

Advertise open inspections in newspaper and on the internet.
It should only take 3 to 4 weeks at most!!!

Simon do you actually let them out of the lease and allow them to come back to the same room?

We don't do that! We tell them that the only way the room will still be available when they return is if they keep paying the weekly rent same as any other tenant, you can't allow tenants to stop paying rent just because they are away on holidays.

Some choose not to so we treat it as a vacancy and advertise the room for rent. In most cases the room is filled again before the students return from overseas, we offer them other rooms if we have any available or they look for something else. Once the lease is over they have nothing to do with us!

I guess because we are a property management company and managing investments for other people, we need to take the harsh line and reduce vacancies any way we can!

Hi Mark,

If you have properties in Adelaide, we can find you a tenant buyer and set up a lease option as part of our property management services! There you go, positive cash flow!

I'm assuming that's what you meant, please excuse my ignorance if I'm totally off the mark

Unless the developer is going into liqudation and properties going for an undervalued price. I would not buy anything off the plan. I like things that you can add value to after renovating or subdividing. You cant do that with new properties.

Do a comparative search for sales in the area, you'll find that new properties off the plan tend to be priced above the median value for the area, that means that there is very little room to grow. You will be at the mercy of time to get an appreciation on your investment and there is nothing you can do to increase the valuation!

Older style houses on a large block are a better investment (well I think so anyway!), even if they do have less tax benefits and attract stamp duty!

Hi Novo,

We set up multi-tenancy accomodations (or student accomodations) as part of our property management services. Rather than repeat myself, please have a look on our website, there is a brochure titled "information for investors" that has some information about this type of strategy. Email me [email protected] if you can't find it and I will send one out to you. It is SA specific but you can still get some general ideas from it.

One thing that we have found with many clients is that no due diligence is done before buying the property. You need to keep in mind that it is just a TOOL used to increase cash flow and just like you don't use a hammer for every job, multi-letting cannot be applied to every property.

We have had clients come to us with a 3 Br house in a very high rent area say $350 to $400 per week rent and want to do a student accomodation on it. If rooms can be rented at $150 per room per week, and there are 3 rooms, that is only $450 per week. Then there are furniture costs and utility costs of around $100 per week. That means that they are just breaking even by using a tool that is much more complicated than renting a vacant house to one tenant.

Please always consider what the normal rent will be and only set it up as a multi-tenancy IF IT MAKES SENSE! 

Hope this helps.

Hi Kidja,

Here are some questions you could ask a property manager. http://www.adprop.com.au/cgi-bin/page.cgi?id=288 
We have obviously put them together for our SA clients but hope that you can get some good ideas out of it.

The hidden fees charged in property management sometimes can outweight a cheap percentage or gross rental charged.
Some agents may charge a low 7% but then charge you for the privelidge of signing up the same tenant, for showing tenants throught the property, for representing you at the tribunal, for routine inspections on your property etc…

Please feel free to compare our fee structure (on the website) to ones you are looking at hiring. It is not directly comparable as we are in SA but it may give you an idea or somewhere to begin.

All the best!