For many people, investing outside the area they live in can be uncomfortable and quite daunting. This video discusses a few things to look for when investing in new areas, to help you quickly get up to speed.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
In This video, I just want to give you a few tips about how to understand a local area, like a local or in fact, by the end of it hopefully, a lot better than a local, right. Because if you’re going to be investing in a property, and you’re going to be putting your deposit plus a lot of your very important borrowing power into a property, you really do want to make sure that you’re back in the right horse, right. So look, some of the ways how I do this, I do this sort of macro-approach basically, and that’s, if you’ve seen some of my other videos, that’s where I’m sort of looking at a lot of desktop research, right. So a lot of that sort of stuff I get from the ABS and paid resources and all that sort of stuff. But then after that, say I’ve found an area that I want to have a bit of a look at, nothing really beats getting on the ground, okay. So when I’m on the ground I am a bit cheeky, and I’ll be speaking to quite a lot of people. I don’t sort of masquerade as anybody else, I’m quite upfront in telling them what I’m looking to do. But I find that in my experience, as long as you’re very friendly and upfront with them, people will tell you things. So it might be sort of the local shop, shopkeepers will talk about things, or the neighbours, or whatever it might be. And every now and then they’ll let something slip, that’s a bit of a nugget that you might not have found out about before, right. So it could be about sort of Council, some infrastructure, or whatever it might be, a new park, or whatever it might be. So you’ve got to then sense check that and make sure it is accurate and not just sort of whispers, but that can be helpful, I’ve got some nuggets of that in the past. Obviously, agents, you don’t want to just sort of rely on the selling agent for one particular property, but canvas as many as you can and just say, “Look, this is what I’m looking to do.” I want to speak to obviously sales agents, but rental agents as well, that’s the other side of the ledger. And understand what tenants are looking for, do tenants need a big garage? Are they mad about swimming pools? Or do they need to be close to this school, or that school or whatever it might be? So these sort of things, it’s really tricky to get without being on the ground. So I think that’s really important. Trade associations, council websites, these are things that you can definitely look at. And then you’re really looking at sort of the good streets and the bad streets. And a lot of the time you’ll get an idea from just sort of driving around, different times of the day, I recommend that, especially if sort of if it’s a high traffic area, or you’re concerned about certain things, you want to visit that in the morning, and not just escape peak hour. Also, if you’re close to a school and you want to understand how that sort of morning drop off and afternoon pickup, how that’s going to impact things. And then you can actually use some other things like ABS has a really interesting search function, where you can look at the things I guess, by sort of income distribution and stuff, and that can help you sort of look at I guess different areas of the suburb as well. In another video, I talked about Microburbs, and that’s got some really good information on there as well where, again, it’s sort of desktop research. But you can come back to that and you can sort of dig a little bit deeper, and sort of understand what’s happening in different parts of the suburbs. So, look for me, I don’t think that you can never visit an area, I find that really interesting when people are prepared to do that and invest so much money. So that’s certainly not for me. But equally, I don’t think you can just do sort of one trip, to really understand it like a local or in fact better than a local, so there’s a lot to take in. But once you’ve done all this sort of research, it should pay you back in spades down the future when it helps you make an excellent choice for a property investment, so I hope that helps.
