what would you do

Hi,

I have previously owned both vendies and a laundromat – go with the property. 
Vending machines –
*very high capital to get new machines
*takes a lot of time finding sites
 *if buying existing sites t/o is never anywhere near as good as what it is suppose to be
 *you have to be constantly available to respond to service calls
*most service calls will be someone has done something stupid (most of the time trying to rip the machine off) and always the day after you last serviced it
 *if you do it small scale more likely to have stock go out of date, you will get some flavours that you can only put into one machine
*large scale going to need to buy a van/truck (tried to do it with a sedan – i wasted so much time and money driving backwards and forwards)
*lots of competition – can very easily lose a good site.  Had one site where i had 3 machines total value of nearly $20k, employed a new manager whose partner ran a vending business and I lost the site overnight.  Then had 3 almost new machines (I purchased them 2 months earlier to upgrade my machines to keep the site happy) lost a fair bit selling them 2nd hand when I didn;t have time to find a new site.

Laundromats
*got to be able to open and close them each day.  I found they had to be open by 6am and closed at 10pm, any less you lose business, any later well the security tapes make for interesting watching when the camera and DVR dont get stolen
*Some people who use them are disgusting pigs leaving the machines in a condition that no one else would want to use them.  These people will tend to do this just after you open them.
*Vandalism – people are happy to do $200 damage to a dryer to save paying $2 to dry their clothes
*You will spend many hours cleaning, coming in to see someone has dropped a meat pie on the floor that everyone else has walked through, a stubby that has been dropped and broken with beer everywhere
*unconcious junkies

That leaves the property
Go for it, with your job it should be easier to pick up a great little buy.  Go for something that has large land value, which might by sub dividable in the future, close to shops and schools.  With your 2 properties combined your cash flow is almost netural so funding any futre properties shouldn't be to bad, especially if you find something that is CF+

looks like your doing well with the property so keep it up i think.

I would suggest you use IO loans with a 100% offset attached. This way you can save the same interest without paying the loan down. So if you ever decide you need the cash it won't be tax complicated – eg you may want to buy a PPOR.

Also look at setting up a discretionary trust for the next one.