This week a timely warning from Anna Porter at suburbanite.com.au to be very cautious of filling your portfolio with regional properties, or buying in tourism hubs if you are looking to buy a growth property. These markets are volatile she says.

This is week 2 of the 30 day flipping exercise with Nhan Nguyen. He is attempting to buy and sell a property in 30 days and make a big profit along the way.  We will continue to follow his journey to see what we can learn.  He gets some good news today.

A lot can happen in 10 years as you will hear today as Michael Yardney reflects back on the last decade.  Michael outlines the 10 big factors that have impacted our property markets. A walk down memory lane.

We take a look at the abundance of free and often useful online tools designed to help homebuyers and investors make decisions about property purchases. But how good are they and how much can you rely on them? We get the good oil from president of the Real Estate Buyer’s Agents Association of Australia, Rich Harvey.

Sam Saggers from Positive Real Estate is our feature guest this week telling his investment story. His first investment, how he got hooked on positive cash flow property, how he works with agents and the drivers that he looks for before buying. Lots more too in this extended chat with Sam.

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Transcripts:
Be careful what you include in your portfolio - Anna Porter
Kevin:  You may recall recently I talked about some of the benefits of investing or looking as an investor at some of the regional markets around Australia. We’ve also sounded a note of caution about some of the tourism hubs, too. I’m going to pick up on that conversation and talk to Anna Porter. Anna is from Suburbanite.com.au.

Good day, Anna. Nice to have you on the show again.

Anna:  It’s my pleasure to be here.

Kevin:  You’re a little bit concerned about some of the regional areas and particularly tourism hubs. Tell me why.

Anna:  Yes, certainly. We regularly research the 5-, 10-year, and beyond performance of markets. We often have people come to us after a regional growth property, and we say, look, regional investing is definitely one way to do it if you’re chasing yields or income properties, but having a growth property in a regional area is a little counterintuitive.

When we look at the stats, typically we see regional hubs over a 10-year cycle perform at about more like 4% per annum growth whereas your more metropolitan or satellite city areas tend to perform more at 6% to 8% per annum growth. To put that into real numbers, the difference between 2% per annum over 10 years if you buy a $450,000 property is $165,000 in capital growth. That’s a lot of money.

Kevin:  Doesn’t it depend on some of these regional areas and what the drivers are, like if there’s good long-term industry, then it’s going to be okay?

Anna:  There are some regional areas that have performed well, but there’s always risk. If you’re going into a regional area and you do get good performance, it’s often from being quite speculative, so you have to be a risk taker.

Take, for example, some areas like recently we had a new client come to us and they had just bought some properties in Lismore, which is a university town. They came to us and they had some problems with one long-term vacancy in the property, and also they had had problems with growth. The property hadn’t gone up much at all in about five years.

One of the factors that we identified early on is they were buying because they felt there was stability with the university being