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My wife and I looked at Plantation Palms, but it wasnt for us – but it is high on our list of potential IP places in Mackay. There is a good mix of land sizes, close to schools and some shops, parks, 5 mins drive to beach, and about 10-15 mins to city.
Cuttersfield, Ooralea would be a good place to start, though you will be staring down a $600k property from new. I have seen several good older properties that will have thier value brought up by this estate.
Can I ask which builder you went with?
I live in Mackay, have 3 properties here, plus also currently building our new PPOR.
I have a look at the property guides/windows, and ring an agent probably once a month if I see something that catches my eye, but at the moment, many properties are still seeking inflated prices.
Capital growth over the next 5 years looks promising at the moment though, with the mines steadily starting to spend again and (hopefully) another boom around the corner. I think 10 yrs is a little hard to predict in this area.
Areas to watch at the moment is probably Ooralea (close to Industrial Hub of Paget) and Mackay City/East Mackay (for increasing development opportunities), and for steady growth to a lesser extent probably West Mackay.
Rents have flattened out over the last 12 months, but again, with the mining drive, I think rents will start to increase steadily for the next couple of years.
Where are you building?
We are currently building our new house. Slab finished this morning, so payment #2 will come out Monday. Exciting times. Still 6 months to go before expected completion, so we have some time to pick and choose colours, tiles, kitchen etc, but my wife is getting in early looking for cheaper deals for fitments etc with the end of financial year approaching. My uncle is building the house, so he is helping us save as much as we can so we have some good equity straight up so I can purchase again possible around christmas time.
I own and manage a protective coatings business. Our bread and butter work is abrasive blasting and painting, but we also work in a couple of niche areas like industrial tiling, polyurethane spraying (Rhino Linings Industrial Dealer), scaffolding, epoxy flooring, and other protective coatings, plus we do small amounts of fitting and boilermaking. We do both site work, and I have 3 sets of sheds (all in the same street would you believe) where we have an abrasive blast booth, paint booth, tiling sheds, office and storage
Its actually getting to be a medium scale operation, and is very much family run. My wife is the Workshop Leading hand, My brother heads the Abrasive Blasting Division, my sister in law is the Financial Controller and I have 2 Site Supervisors, plus 6 full timers and a dozen casuals. I oversee the whole operation, do all the estimation and organisation of jobs. We are very busy, all of the time. We have some very good blue chip clients; Xstrata, Sedgman, Macarthur Coal; Thiess; DBCT, Multotec Australia and many good ongoing contracts with engineering companies.
It keeps us busy! Hard at the start, but we have the finger on the pulse now. I try not to work these days too much, but I still do the odd day here and there where needed, and still dont mind doing the hard yards (jackhammering old industrial tiles off, scaffolding and polyspraying are jobs only for the hardcore!).
Ive joined this forum pretty much because I need some type of outlet. Over the past 4 years I have become so obsessed with my business, that many of my (neglected) friends have moved on and I need to talk to like minded people about things I am interested in – like PI!!!
Working for yourself is extremely rewarding. My wife and I are your age, though we have run our own buisness for the past 4 years. I started completly from scratch and had to work from the ground up. I wouldnt say we are on cloud 9, but probably at cruising altitude. I would suggest though having something to fall back on, or gradually work into your own business by just 1 person working in it to start with, jsut so you have some stability in your income from the other. I say this as we were in the deep end from the start, but we managed and now we get far better income.
We see PI as a sideline to our lives, though I do have many aspirations to own a few more properties in the next few years. We have bought new properties, renovated old properties, bought off the plan, and currently building our new PPOR. Our current house will become a IP, as we will just buy and hold for now.
Good luck with it all!
If I read this right?
You are going to try and renovate a property that you have bought for 30% under unimproved value of the land determined by council? And spend $70k+ on renovations, plus 1 week labour from yourself (50hrs x $50/hr = $2500), plus 10-20% contingency = $100k?
You would be better off levering off the equity already from the land valuation, and using the borrowing capacity that you obiously have to renovate – to knock the house down and build a new, small similar style home that wouldnt be a standout in the street.
A renovation like this, as mentioned above, would be a full scale operation and would require probably 10 weeks work. I say this as you cannot have 5+ trades working at the same time – there is a particular order they must come in and work at, with several trades required for a second visit after other trades have done thier bit. If you have not much experience in organisation of renovation/building projects you will have some troubles getting trades to come back to do the last small fiddly bits.
Some of your costs mentioed above seem reasonable, but some may be a little off the mark. For example – bathroom/kitchen renovations can blow out extremely as you may discover costly plumbing issues that are sight unseen. Restumping can also have its pitfalls as they generally have to re-engineer footings to comply with standards today. Also electricians, depending on who you get might not even touch your property if the current wiring is poor, and will demand to do a whole house rewire as they have to put thier name against it as being completely safe, even vouching for past trade practices on the house.
I know its exciting to find a 'bargain', but sometimes that could cost you more in the long run. Ask yourself is it worth the stress to make this work when there may be a more appropriate property out there for your skills? How much do you think you stand to make (% wise) on immidiate capital growth so you can move onto the next purchase?
Just my 2c
pinkboyThese 'developers' always have thier ways to sucker people into thier web. The way they are able to offer the last property in a stage has some very clever science behind it;
Scenario: You get the opportunity to purchase the last property in the stage. What is so good about this property? They tell you it is a bargain, as the next stage on offer has prices $10k – $20k higher for the same type of property/land etc.
Question to ask these type of 'developers'; 'If the properties are going to perform so well, how many do you have in this particular estate?' The better ones will tell you they flog all the properties off as that is how they destined the development for them to make the reasonable quick buck. This crew (or the guys I talked to in particular), let me know they had 3,4,5 properties each in the development on hold for them until they can sell enough so they can afford 'thiers'. Heres the catch – when the next 'sucker' takes the bait above, one of these properties 'on hold' are freed up as the next 'last property in the development'. Clever giving the potential customer the satisfaction that they have properties in the estate and 'back themselves' and thier development, and make the potential customer all warm and fuzzy!
Great marketing and fairly foolproof to the untrained eye. Gotta give some credit for creativity!
You've doged a bullet, now take this opportunity to do your own research and not let someone 'do all the homework for you'!!!!
I know the exact company you are talking about. I went to thier 'seminar' in my hometown. Shifty mob. They invited me for a private consultation with thier 'finance guru' and showed me around all thier properties. I went only for a bit of fun and some time out from my business. I say they are shifty as when they were punching in my numbers of property values, LOC's, other current assets etc – they were fudging around with 'predicted interest rate rises' so that my available situation was about $20,000 more than properties thay had on offer. Perfect for them, and they were calling out across the room that 'Mr. xxxxx' would qualify for 'x property' in front of the other few couples in the 'qualified' field. They were trying hard for me to purchase the last property in 'Stage X' of that development.
If an offer seems to good to be true…..you know the rest….
And if they are so good at predicting the next 'capital gain boom', why then does that stop you from buying some land in that particular area, getting your own builder, and pocketing the 'holding cost', plus the advantage of construction loans etc.
The part where you say 'the Government wants to help you save for your retirement' – an ITVW is hardly a secret.
You have been given some good advice above.
I am in Mackay. Where did you buy?
