Wowee, 3 months without a post. Its been quite a busy 3 months and here is a bit of spew: cousin had his bucks night, cousin got married, movies, Count Basie Orchestra at the Opera House, Flemington Flower Markets, house inspections, dancing, another niece appears, Melbourne Ska Orchestra with Mojo Juju at the Opera House, Chick Corea and Herbie Hancock at the Opera House, movies, dancing, Blue Mountains, Glenn Miller Orchestra at the State Theatre, and some Balboa thrown in there (I’m separating that from dancing since its the next thing I’m trying to learn).
It seems like a lot of Orchestra’s and a lot of Opera House visits, which there was! The annoying thing is that the walk from Circular Quay isn’t 5 minutes but more like 15 minutes to actually get there and inside. It seems that there is always a last minute dash to get there on time.
Count Basie Orchestra:
Melbourne Ska Orchestra:
Chick Corea and Herbie Hancock (MIA):
Blue Mountains (well a part of it – oh and there were numerous bird spottings, the Lyre Bird being the highlight):
Glenn Millers Orchestra:
Naidoc week – Emma Donovan and the Putbacks:
The house hunting has taken a lot of my time and efforts. There are rentals to look at as well as ones to purchase. It does seem like the ones I miss out on purchasing do appear 6 weeks later as rentals, which is a shame. There are clearly a lot of investors out there. I know everyone mentions that its a bad time to buy, but I’ve got my point of view on the situation, which logically might make sense.
Basically, there is a pool of people I’m competing with. Lets just say that there are 20 of these people. This pool are people looking to buy something where I want to live. Now the pool gets split up, into investors who can afford, investors who cannot (influenced by the low interest rates – I refer to these people as idiots), owner occupiers who can afford, and owner occupiers who cannot (again, idiots).
Then there are the two scenarios which people say will “lower” prices. One is interest rate rises. This flushes the idiots out and thus they will sell / rent out the property. The other genuine way that prices will go down/plateau, is an oversupply, which will happen in a few years.
So, the people who can buy now and can genuinely afford it, good for them. The other people who are buying and can’t, may be forced to sell at some point. So then back to the point that the prices will drop. Now, lets say in 12 months time, interest rates rise 2-3% (unlikely), and people are selling. Lets say the property was bought a few months ago for $1,000,000. Now I might’ve thought people were overcommitting and it should’ve really been worth $900,000 which would’ve been a conservative amount. So now that property is on the market again.
The 20 people that are in my pool are STILL looking, with the SAME amount of money, for the SAME properties, in the SAME area. Some may have been impatient and settled in other areas, but lets say that 10 are still there. So now my pool of 10 are still around, with exactly the same conditions as myself.
So here is this property, which we’ll all revalue at $900,000, thinking the existing owner has overspent. The issue is that we all still want it, and will STILL drive up the price. The 10 of us, will drive that price CLOSE to what it was or even more.
This means that the worst case of buying now is that the market will plateau or drop 5%. This might stay the case for a number of years coming. Its until there is an oversupply will that greatly affect the price, but even then, it won’t crash and burn as people might think. I just think that buying now or buying later won’t make a huge difference if your goal is to buy something you can afford to either live in. Buying an investment might require more thought as then there is the current oversupply of rental properties and thus the ROI isn’t the best. Of course, buying in the right area will alleviate this.
So thats my rant on property prices. Logically it works, but we’ll see in time, so it’ll good to come back to this later on to see if I’m right!