Happy new year and welcome back to the Soldier Tom blog.
We’re going to experiment with something a bit different this year.
Rather than simply providing general insights into property and finance, we decided we needed more of a unique angle.
Something more targeted, which isn’t as common, which genuinely helps people.
We consulted you, our readers, and the consensus feedback was that “practical advice to make more money from property” is what you want most.
There are already hundreds of books and blogs about making money from property, so we spent time over the break thinking how best we could add-value, beyond what is already available.
This is what we came up with:
Listen more, talk less
If you want advice on making money from property, why should the advice we deliver/you receive be limited to our own personal thoughts and experiences?
The power of the internet enables us to go well beyond this.
According to Census data 7.9% of Australians (1,764,924 people) own at least one investment property in Australia.
There’s over 1.5M people out there with stories and experiences!
The more of these real life stories we hear about and analyse, the more we can learn.
As an experiment in 2016 we are going to ask people to share their experiences investing in property with our readers.
We will reach out to certain people who might be interesting to talk to/interview (suggestions welcome), and we will encourage others to share their own stories, on their own accord, as well (click here).
But to be more specific, we’ve decided to focus on stories/experiences where the investor has either done very well or very poorly from a particular investment.
Often this is where everyone learns the most.
Here are two examples:
- What I learned from a positive experience… I bought an investment property in Bondi NSW in 2012, in three years it went up by 40% in value and I now have the opportunity to manufacture further growth by updating the kitchen and bathroom which were very old when I first bought the property. My advice is to buy median priced housing within 5-12km of the major capital cities, this is where supply is scarce (there can only so many properties with such close proximity to some of the world’s best cities) and demand is strongest (more people can afford housing at the median price point and these suburbs offer lifestyle benefits like shops/restaurants/cafes which are becoming increasingly desirable).
- What I learned from a negative experience… In 2011 I bought an investment property in the mining town of Gladstone QLD. Optimism around mine expansions and new port facilities was at its peak. The mining boom ended shortly afterwards and the value of my property fell by 50%. I couldn’t sell because there were literally no buyers. Buying property in a mining town isn’t a real estate decision, it’s a bet on global commodities markets. I know nothing about global commodity markets. Don’t be lured by the promise of positive gearing like I was, understand the market risk you’re buying into, and be comfortable with that.
We’re interested in what happened with the particular investment, the lessons learned, and how it has impacted what the investor would do next time.
Contributors have the option of either revealing or anonomising their identity, we don’t mind either way.
The end goal though is to learn from each story and over time develop a set of rules and strategies which can help guide future investments.
Different investors always have different objectives throughout their journeys so over time our rules/strategies will be tailored accordingly. For example one framework might be developed for a young investor with high income looking to grow the size of her portfolio, and that might be completely different from a couple in their fifties requiring a passive income as they start planning for their retirement.
Failing to plan is planning to fail.
The benefit of having a plan and set of rules in place means we can pursue opportunities which meet pre-defined criteria. And the better this criteria, the higher the likelihood that our next investments are successful ones.
You are welcome to submit your own stories here (it only takes a few minutes).
Thank you for your support and contributions.
