Bargain Buys

Hi everyone,

I was having a discussion with a friend last night about what really constitutes a bargain buy in property.

We generally excluded renovating, developing etc as these are thing you do to add value rather than have that value already there in the purchase… if that makes sense.

We came up with a short list containing some fairly obvious ones and some a bit more unlikely but still possible. Here’s the first four we came up with;

• Buying well below market price due to a number of reasons (pretty obvious one!)
• Negotiating extended settlement terms in a hot / rising market so you can benefit from the capital gain with little or no money down in the deal
• Buying prior to a favourable rezoning of the site or locality that would increase values
• Buying just prior to a postcode change to one where property values are much higher (this happened just near me about 10 years ago when parts of 3170 changed to 3150 and gave the owners an instant 10% – 20% gain!!)

So I’d like to throw it open to see what other aspects of a purchase you think could also make it a bargain buy…. I’m sure there are a number of great items we could add to the list based both on theory and real life experiences. [grad]

In fact, why not share your best real-life bargain buy as well so we can see where the bench mark really is!

John Blackburn
http://www.propertybooks.com.au