Harder working money

You are on a property forum so I'm guessing you want to invest in property. Yes?

There are many different areas to property investing. Do you know what you are interested in? Do you have goals?

Maybe read a few property books to see what some of the strategies are and what interests you.

I found financial advisers to be useless. They just push managed funds.

Start with how much capital you have, borrowing power, your risk profile. Where do you live and if buying property do you prefer to buy close to home? There are many investment groups and meetups where you can chat to people without paying high mentoring fees. Maybe go to a few free courses. eg Think and Grow Rich in Property.

Hi wakebrown,

You mentioned that your strategy to this point has been renovate and hold.

When you renovate, one would presume you have added some value to the property.  A couple of years of "holding" ought to have added some capital growth too.  Have you looked into how much the renovated property is now worth compared to what you owe on it?  If the difference is already large, you could consider "refinancing".  Basically, let's say Bank A currenly has the mortgage on your property.  You say to Bank B hey, I would like for you to pay the loan out with Bank A and rid me of their services, and I would like for you to start the loan all over again with Bank B.  I would like an LVR of 80%.  So you can keep 20% of whatever you deem the property's current value to be, and please give me the remaining 80% in an offset account, and I shall scurry along and use it to fund the deposit on my next IP.

Apologies if I stated the bleeding obvious, but I thought I would mention it in case you were not aware you could do it in this way.  It is called leveraging equity but it must be financed very carefully.  You do not want to get into a position where you are cross-colateralized (which essentially means that for one particular mortgage, the bank has noted down that TWO of your properties are security for the one mortgage.  So if you mess up with your payments, they take two houses off you rather than one.  Nasty. 

You need a good mortgage broker to help you get it right.  Then it is so easy it you'll find yourself rubbing your eyes thinking "where did all this imaginary money come from?  i didn't even sell my house, and yet the bank gave me a big pile of cash!"  In other words, you do not have to sell to realize your capital gain as you mentioned in your post above.

Jamie M (Jamie Moore) and Qlds007 (Richard Taylor) are two very well respected brokers on these forums.  Get in touch with one of them if it is relevant to your situation.

Apart from that, make sure you keep the rent on your current IP at market value.  The more rent you get, the more "serviceability" you will have to fund your next IP.

Keep us posted on how you go.  Good to see your mind churning away trying to squeeze more value out of your position!

Arguably I would get myself a local crew who know the areas, zonings, property markets, etc. If you are wanting to develop property as a long term strategy, I would invest to speaking to the local councils about zonings, minimum requirements depending on what you want to do, download the local council's DA guide. You can also get some good and free advice from town planner. A good town and local town planner will be one of your biggest assets.

Having said all that, firstly determine how much time you have to dedicate to the game and what type of investor you are (sounds like you are quite aggressive which makes sense since time is on your side).