Hi all,
I’ve just read Steve’s new book and it was brilliant! It’s given me the inspiration to diversify my investments as I was always fearful of the property market. My brother and I are considering going into partnership to begin building a decent property portfolio.
As we begin our quest to start to gather information to evaluate potential deals, I am wondering where is the best place to start? I am in need of data to show where the rental demand is in Adelaide, in particular the median rental prices per suburb. Is this information available for free?
I guess everybody has been in our boat where you have to start from scratch and we are complete novices! However we have extensive and practical knowledge of the building industry and we are sure renovating houses ourselves will be relatively easy. I would just really like to know the way to get the information we need to pinpoint where the growth areas are.
All help will be appreciated.
G’day Hewson.
Basic info like this is provided every month in Australian Property Investor mag. There is a different focus every month – this month’s issue is Unit Prices for all states and next month’s will be Median Rents (S.A. included).
Here’s a link to a .PDF scan you can download if you’re interested. It’s of the table in the December API mag featuring median rents and yields in SA. The link should be valid for about 7 days:
http://download.yousendit.com/E1B8DAC53E35017B
I’m not sure where data in this kind of form is available for free on the ‘Net (feel free to enlighten me, anyone) though some pay sites allow you to do free postcode searches which provide basic info. If you want to pay for info you can get some solid statewide research from Residex (www.residex.com.au). Other sites include http://www.propertyvalue.com.au, http://www.reports.rpdata.com.au and http://www.homepriceguide.com.au.
I’m not advocating the quality or reliability of the info on these sites, just pointing out that it is available.
Cheers,
Art‘Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.’ – Albert Einstein
Thanks Art,
I’ve noticed on realestate.com.au you can do a suburb profile and find out some info but as you said, but this means sifting through areas suburb by suburb which makes comparisons harder. Also, to what extent do you rely on this data? As Steve says research is critical and I would hate to make a large financial decision without knowing the data is right.
Thanks again hopefully someone else may have something to add.
No worries. I haven’t used Residex personally but from what I can tell they have a pretty strong reputation. I’ve heard their CEO, John Edwards, speak a couple times (and interpret data) and I have to say that if I was looking to narrow down suburbs within a certain State I would give serious consideration to purchasing their data. I think a State profile is around $150 or so and that’s a small (tax deductible) price to pay if you ask me.
The thing about the realestate.com.au data and the data tables like the one I’ve scanned for you is that they only give you raw figures with little or no interpretation. Unless you have a couple other tools up your sleeve (like historical data, council planning data and the like) these figures can’t give you the whole story. The money you pay to the experts (be they online or not) is going towards the time spent interpreting and decoding the data for easier investor digestion.
On the other hand, if you are still debating dipping your investing toes into the real estate world I can sympathize with being wary of dropping cash on research based purely on spec.
I would suggest looking through the forum archives (painfully slow though the server might be) and then asking a couple, more specific questions of the forum.
Here’s a previous Residex-related thread: https://www.propertyinvesting.com/forum/topic/17371.html
And an older one on researching: https://www.propertyinvesting.com/forum/topic/12780.htmlCheers,
Art‘Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.’ – Albert Einstein
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