Archive for the 'Find me a Property' Category
Why is it that some homes sit on the market for a year while others sell like hot cakes? Frustrated sellers will blame a bad market, while a good real estate professional will tell you that many times, a slow sale is often attributed to the listing price.
If a home is overpriced, buyers will stay away. But, if the price is competitive with similar homes in the area and ‘shows’ better than the competition, it will have a better chance of being sold quickly.
The secret to pricing a property correctly is perfecting the technique of comparative shopping.
Although comparing houses with different styles, square-meteridge and locations is challenging, it’s still one of the best methods to use when determining a home’s market value.
A home’s worth is most effectively evaluated through a process known as Comparative Marketing Analysis. Taking a look at assets, such as a swimming pool, bigger than normal living spaces, a fantastic view, adjacent city parks and other attractions, your home can then be compared with similar properties that have sold in the area within the last six months.
Typically, the agent is able to recommend a realistic price range that will ensure you top dollar and a reasonably good response.
It is suggested that factors such as the amount of time needed to sell your home can alter the agent’s price recommendation dramatically. If you’re under time constraints because of unexpected job changes or moving agreements you’ve made on another property, this will narrow your chances of selling the home for top dollar in the market.
Assuming you have sufficient time to market the home, here are a few small steps you and your agent can take to finding the right price for your property.
* The best comparisons can be made with similar homes that have been sold within the last 45 days. Any longer and other factors, such as the economy, could cloud your view of how much your home is really worth.
* Another good benchmark is to review the selling prices of homes that have just been sold and are pending closes. This is information that most real estate agents should be able to share with you.
* Being open and honest about what you see as the home’s greatest strengths and biggest weaknesses will also help an agent get a better feel for how to best evaluate (or assess) and market your home.
* Think of your home as if you were the buyer. If your home is listed at the right price, you’re well on your way to a speedy and fruitful sale.
* When evaluating development sites you need to remember one key thing – always leave enough in for the other guy. Development is a business, based purely on the numbers, cash on cash return, ROI, annualized return are all important as are risk profiles etc. If you have a property with development potential, you need to start with the end in mind. What is the end product? How much will it sell for?
This figure can be derived by applying the previous process. Once you have established what your end product is and that you have a market simply subtract all expenses. This is where most people go wrong, they are simply not aware of all the costs, more oten than not they under estimate by hundreds of thousands of dollars. This is obviously extremely dangerous and no development should be entered into lightly.
Thorough research and analysis is required, as well as the project needing to be driven hard and on time. As time is money in development and time blow outs will eat into your profits.
The best thing to do is seek professional advice. The team at Plan Assist will help you with any aspect of your real estate needs, visit www.planassist.com.au
Property values in Sydney suburbs with rail links to the CBD have outstripped those in suburbs without, says new research.
PRDNationwide has discovered that prices in suburbs near railway stations leapt by 12% in 2009 – whereas those in areas without rail links only grew by 8%.
“Population growth continues in Sydney and this has prompted a high demand for places located near public transport facilities as the capacity of roads to cater for the influx of residents, particularly during peak traffic times deteriorates,” said PRDnationwide managing director Jim Midgley.
The research says the median sale price for properties near railway stations increased to $730,000 during 2009. The highest median price was recorded on the North Shore Line Line, with $1,325,500 recorded over the same period.
However, PRDNationwide points out that while growth has been impressive in the short term, both suburbs with and without train stations recorded equal median price growth 3.1% over a five-year period.
Source: Kevni Eddy 6/7/10 www.brokernews.com.au
UPDATE: The Minister for Lands, Tony Kelly, confirmed today the new tax would begin on July 1 and had been formulated as a NSW budget measure.
The tax will be levied on the buyer.
TENS of thousands of NSW home buyers a year are set to be hit with a new tax that will cash in on the improving property market and boost state government coffers by an estimated $90 million annually.
Quietly released by the Minister for Lands, Tony Kelly, amid the wash-up of the federal budget, the new land transfer charge will be imposed on the sale of residential and commercial property worth more than $500,000.
The announcement has outraged property groups, which branded it ”just another stamp duty increase”, while the opposition has criticised the timing of its release as ”sneaky”.
Under the proposal, the portion of the sale amount between $500,000 and $1 million will attract a tax rate of 0.2 per cent, before the charge rises to 0.25 per cent for the portion of the sale above $1 million.
The median Sydney house price is about $600,000, which would attract a charge of $200, while the tax on a property sold for $1.2 million would be $1500.
According to figures provided by the Department of Lands, almost 30,000 residential and commercial property sales of between $500,000 and $1 million were settled in the past 12 months. More than 10,000 properties sold for more than $1 million in the same period.
Aaron Gadiel, the chief executive of the developer lobby group Urban Taskforce, said the new charge amounted to a 4.5 per cent increase in stamp duty for the top end of the property market.
He estimated that a developer looking to acquire a $10 million development site for new housing would be hit with an extra cost of $23,000.
Mr Gadiel said that it ”flies in the face” of the recommendations of the recently released Henry tax review, which criticised transfer duties.
”The Henry review said they were unfair; they hit some members of the community harder than others and they could cause economic distortions and reduce business activity,” he said.
The acting NSW executive director of the Property Council of Australia, Glen Byers, said that the tax was introduced ”without consultation, without explanation at a time when the investment climate in NSW is fragile”.
It is understood that legislation for the new tax will not be introduced before the next session of Parliament, which begins next month.
The government is not indicating when the tax might begin, but a spokesman for the Treasurer, Eric Roozendaal, said the revenue forecast to be generated by the tax would be included in the state budget on June 8.
The announcement was labelled ”sneaky” by the Opposition Leader, Barry O’Farrell, because it was buried in a press release which focused on new security measures for land transfer documents.
Mr Kelly’s release suggested part of the tax would be used to fund the security measures.
A spokesman for Mr Kelly said revenue from the charge would flow to the Department of Lands, not the Office of State Revenue, as was the case with stamp duty.
However Mr O’Farrell said: ”This is another attempt under the cover of a federal budget to get some bad news out from the state budget, well away from polling day in Penrith.”
Figures provided by Mr Kelly’s office suggest that the proposed NSW charge is at the lower end when compared with similar charges imposed by other states.
Based on a sale worth $750,000, the spokesman said only Western Australia charged a lower ”registration charge” of $260, compared with $500 proposed in NSW. In Victoria, the figure is $1350, in Queensland it is $1623 and in South Australia it is $4759.
Article Source: 13/5/10 SEAN NICHOLLS – STATE POLITICAL EDITOR
Source: The Australian, 
Frank Gelber – Economist
WE need to build more housing. A lot more. And we will, but we probably won’t build enough.
There is a severe shortage of stock and that will mean rising prices. The question is by how much they will rise. And how the Reserve Bank contains price rises.
This cycle has a lot longer to run. But already we can see it will be prematurely curtailed by rising interest rates.
The long-awaited property upswing is only now starting. Prices around Australia have risen strongly over the past year.
Forecasts of a collapse have been dismissed. Owner occupiers and investors now regard housing investment as safe.
Concern has swung to the problem of affordability, doubly affected by the combination of rising prices and rising interest rates. But this is just the beginning. Both housing prices and interest rates have a long way to go. And affordability will get a lot worse before this is over.
As prices and interest rates continue to rise, people will need to match their aspirations to what they can afford. Existing homeowners will ride the cycle. Upgraders or downsizers will have the capital gains to help finance the next purchase.
But, as the upswing continues, first-home buyers will buy smaller, perhaps older houses and units in less salubrious suburbs. Some may well be locked out of the market. And as rents continue to rise, investors will return.
Increased prices will stimulate new building. Price rises and volume rises have been a boon for state governments which are heavily reliant on stamp-duty revenues from conveyancing.
Hopefully, they’ll have learned the lesson that they make their money from the volume of transactions rather than by extracting maximum return from each.
If you get too greedy, you affect the volume of sales and revenues fall, not rise. NSW learned this lesson when it killed the goose in the post-2001 housing boom by raising infrastructure charges on new development, thereby putting a floor under housing prices. When the RBA burst the housing price bubble by raising interest rates at the end of 2003, housing prices fell by 10 to 15 per cent. Construction collapsed and NSW has been under-building ever since. That’s why the shortage of stock is so extreme in NSW.
The fall in residential construction over the past decade was a primary reason for the weakness of the NSW economy.
The other player is the RBA, which appears petrified of a housing price bubble and, with prices already rising and about to rise a lot further, the danger is that it will be too aggressive with interest rates. The RBA can stop price rises, but the collateral damage will be on housing construction. It needs to be careful.
This is not about levers and levels. Interest rates are a trigger. For a long time, rising interest rates appear as though they are not working and then, suddenly, the housing market collapses.
We’ve seen this scene played out time and again in Australia.
It’s the shortage of housing, partly caused by the RBA’s 2003 action, that has built up the current latent pressure on housing demand and prices. We don’t want to curtail housing construction: we need the housing.
If we are to stimulate building, further house price rises are inevitable. The real objective is to contain the extent of price rises, keeping housing affordable.
The key is on the supply side. It’s no accident the housing recovery has been strongest in Victoria, where land is relatively cheap and readily available.
Facilitation of medium-density development in inner areas makes sense. We have a ready source of reasonably priced land throughout our inner suburbs and it is already serviced, making it cheaper to develop.
We have a number of excellent examples of residential and mixed-use redevelopment of industrial sites scattered around Australia. So far, too few.
Certainly, we need to build a lot more stock to satisfy demand. And that will entail price rises.
Meanwhile, the RBA will continue raising interest rates as the economy strengthens and, later, to contain emerging demand-inflationary pressures. It would be foolhardy to target the housing sector too aggressively.
We’re building about 140,000 dwellings compared with an underlying demand of 190,000. The shortage is worst in NSW where building is about half that of the underlying demand.
All considered, we think the upswing has another three to four years to run. By then variable housing interest rates will be about 9 per cent. And the downturn will come before there is a surplus of residential stock, particularly in NSW where the shortage is so extreme there won’t be time to build enough. This is the beginning of an upswing that will build momentum into a boom before being cut short by rising rates. We’ve seen it all before.
With the property market heating up, we are seeing quite a few buyers pipped at the post. The G Word (Gazump) is popping up again, and people are not sure what just hit them.
What does Gazumped mean?
Being Gazumped occurs when you verbally agree to buy a property, and then the seller (vendor) talks to someone else behind your back and sells to them, usually at a higher price. The next thing you find out is the vendor has exchanged contracts with someone else and you have lost the property.
But what about all that emotional energy, time & hundreds of dollars spent on pest inspections reports, solicitor costs, building reports, and moving plans? For those who have experienced this in recent weeks, we are certain you will not let it happen again.
What can you do to beat gazumping?
Exchanging contracts is the only way to beat gazumping. Unfortunately, a sale ain’t a sale until contracts are exchanged. English property laws dating back to 1677 require a binding agreement to be an “exchange of contracts”. The only exception is an auction whereby the highest bidder is bound to purchase the property after the auction.
What Can I Do NOW to Prepare for a quick property purchase?
The best thing to do is build a team of professionals ready for the big moment. They have done this 1000′s of times versus your 2 or 3 transactions, so make sure you leverage from their experience.
Here is a list of people to have on speed dial in your mobile phone:
* Accountant - know which name you are going to buy the property in, or what structure.
* Mortgage Broker – obtain solid finance approvals (learn the difference between pre-approvals, conditional approvals and final approvals). Find out your borrowing capacity.
* Solicitor or conveyance – They will read the contract for you and advise you on legal dscisions. ask the agent to send the contract as soon as possible to your solicitor, and have them in advise you through the “exchange” process. Also, know when you can use a cooling off period to give you more time to get prepared.
* Pest Inspector and Building Inspector - Apart from having guys crawl over the property for cracks and critters, find other consultants to check anything else that is flagged in the contract i.e. flood zoning, bushfire zones, heritage consultant, RTA reports for future roads through your house, conservation areas, mining subsidence, powerlines. There are consultants in every field to help you check out your property.
If you need help finding these people, call Plan Assist on 02 9449 2333 and find out who we recommend. We have a full list of consultants in any field.