hi just wondering if anyone could help i am researching small country towns….what should i look for mostly while researching????does the population matter if under 2,000…..i am looking to buy a house under 1000,000 and positive cash flow is a must…when it comes to the age of a population if a town is full of olderly people is this a bad thing or a good thing???…and even when it comes to working do you look for a place that has plenty of work or is this not a issue due to rent assistants any ones opinons would be greatly appreciated
Hi Kristine,
I can only really help from the finance point of view – if you are needing to borrow to invest it is quite hard to get loans in some postcodes, if you tell me the postcodes of the areas you are looking at I can let you know whether they are on the list that the two main lender mortgage insurers will look at or not. [^]
Regarding whether it’s a good idea, lots of people seem to be having success with it and yes if Centrelink are paying for the rent eg for a single mum with young children, you can ensure that you get paid first by centrelink making the risk pretty low.
Hope that helps.
[
]Hey there Kristine
I hav been targetting Country towns this whole year, and loving every bit of it…
firstly, if the pop is under 2000 ppl u need to ask yourself why that is? then there is the problem of getting finance, the main banks hav a threshold of 10000 i think, some abit lower at 7000.
To research in these areas you can do allot on the net, go to realestate.com and pop in the places, if the towns or areas are not listed do a net search for realestate agents in the suburb.
I looked at a place in manilla for example, on the above mentioned address, was making 210 pw and was only $110K (was 3 units in the one place)… but, manilla is on the other side of tamworth, the side where there isnt much else, exept more smallish country towns. if it were on the Singelton side of Tamworth it would hav been worth twice as much… the tennents were oldish, and hav lived there forever… the place was a mess and required alot of work, naturally an agent will not dwell on this point while on the phone! Manilla’s pop is also slowly decreasing… not a good sign.
Buying in towns between regional centres is a good way to start eg dubbo, wit a pop of 30K has 3-4 growing towns on the sydney side, ie Lithgow, bathurst, and orange (perhaps even Wellington – where a new prison has just been approved through council and will be finished in 2 years). but wen u pass dubbo u hit Narromine, where house prices are just over half that of dubbo.
Walk into an agent pretending to be a person looking for a rental to move into. if you get offered pages of vacant properties u will know that getting a tennent yourself will be hard.
If you hav found a place to buy, stay in the area for the night, speak to the locals, buy the local newspaper and read it front to back… your street may be at the height of a crime wave!
Observe the shops, are they open late? how many are closed or worse still boarded up? a place with many closed pubs means that at one stage there was a population sufficient to have them all open at one stage…Is there a uni close buy? is there the population to warrant one in a few years time?
what developments are being put through council? what large companies or factories are building there? is it a main route for truckers?
BUT u do need to get into your car and drive to the places personally thats for sure, take some music and a camera… i have done about 25000 km this year, but it was the best…
Hope this helps!
Jason
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