Making Property Management Easy

Managing property can be a bit of a juggling act and involves many moving parts. As a result, it’s vital to get help wherever you can to make life easier for everyone involved. So, if you’re looking to improve as a landlord, consider these tips that could help your business blossom.

• Do some groundwork before you rent to someone. This involves a little bit of due diligence on your part - screen prospective tenants. You should make sure they have a decent credit history, or else they will be much more likely to end in problems such as late or partial payments.

•  Use the law to your advantage. Make sure you document everything with your tenants, from a written lease to repair and complaint notices. The more evidence that you have, the easier it will be to ensure the right outcome with any tenant disputes.

• If your building has any hazardous materials, such as lead paint or mould, disclose this information as openly

Australia’s property market

There are many who believed that Australia’s property market would stall at some stage…but it hasn’t. There are always prophets of doom who are keen to tell you that it’s overheated or overinflated and it’s about to burst…but it doesn’t.

Every day millions of Australians and thousands of overseas investors are making serious money as their property portfolios continue to increase in value. Investing in Australian property makes supremely good business sense and the Chinese know it. Chinese investors are snapping up investment property in Australia like there’s not tomorrow.

Brisbane, Melbourne and Sydney are their primary hunting grounds with some interest also in Canberra and Perth.  They’re going hard, despite warnings from the Reserve Bank that the property market may be in for a little downward correction at some stage soon. Investment is flooding in from China and other parts of Asia like never before.

So, do we have a ‘housing bubble’ in Australia? Well it depends on who you talk to.

Self-managing your investment property

Self-managing an investment property has been a discussion point for ages. I remember a friend who was self-managing ten properties using the age old method of a combination of PC based software such as Word and Excel and plain old paper.
A lot has changed in the past few years. Let’s go back in time and review how things were done.

How things were done by a Property Management Company
The most important aspect of any property investor is to get tenant who paid on time and looked after the rental property.  This usually meant that a property management company having lists of previous tenants that they use as a starting point. Sure they did a great job in vetting and selecting a list of tenants.  But from the inventors perspective this meant that their options of getting a good tenant was very restricted.

Why is Brisbane Australia’s next boom city?

Not every Australian real estate investment road leads to Brisbane at the moment, but most of them do.  The Queensland capital is very clearly Australia’s next boom city for so many reasons.
Brisbane is a market full of opportunity for those considering investing in property. You’re in this game to make money and first and foremost you’re looking for strong capital growth. As soon as you get off the plane at Brisbane airport you can smell capital growth.

Median House prices in Brisbane are expected to rise by 17% over the next three years. The rental yields are consistently better than all of the other Australian capitals. The average rental yield in inner city Brisbane is nearly 6%.

The population of Brisbane is set to double to 4.6 million by 2031. Those who buy now are really getting in at the ground level of the boom. Houses and apartments in Brisbane are on average 40% cheaper than Sydney, 30% cheaper than Canberra and 20% cheaper than Melbourne.