We talk to Cherie Barber about why some renovators become hugely successful with some skills they employ without even picking up a hammer. She also tells you why the internet is not a great tool to rely on when you are researching a property or market.

Recently there’s been a lot of talk about banks changing the goal posts making it harder for property investors to get loans so Michael Yardney details the 7 ways to bleed the banks dry.

Conveyancer Garth Brown answers my questions about deposits on contracts. Amongst them …. what happens if there is no deposit, what are the circumstances that would see a buyer loose the deposit to the seller and how to avoid that?

Suburb gentrification is the new term for a hot spot. So what determines that an area should be, or is about to be, gentrified? Property lecturer and author Peter Koilizos says many investors have jumped in thinking an area is about to be transformed when it was never going to happen because the fundamentals were never there. Peter tells us what to look out for.

Shannon Davis explains what flipping is and how it stacks up against other strategies like buy and hold.

If you are building a new home either as a principal place of residence or as an investment, one of the ‘knife edge’ moments, apart from deciding on the location, design or builder, is when it comes time to do the handover. It needs an expert eye. Don’t rely on a contractor supplied by the builder. That just set up a conflict of interest. We will have the solution for you today.

 
Transcripts:
Cherie Barber
Kevin:  One of the reasons why many people become very successful in property and through renovation is because they thoroughly research and understand the market before they purchase, not after they purchase. I know this is a topic that is near and dear to the heart of our next guest, Cherie Barber from RenovatingForProfit.com.au and also a regular guest on The Living Room on Channel 10.

Cherie, some of the techniques that you use that you’d like to highlight for us to make sure that we actually buy the right property at the right price?

Cherie:  Wow, that’s a big one. It takes about two days to explain that in my workshop. Let me try and give you a couple of key tips first of all. One of the first things that I say to people before they actually rush out and buy a property… That is very tempting. A lot of the renovation shows on TV spur people into going out on the weekends and wanting to do a renovation, and they jump into it before doing the proper research.

I think the first thing is become an expert at the suburbs. You only have to spend about a week in a suburb, driving the streets, looking up suburb demographics online. There is so much suburb data on the Internet these days. It’s incredible. First of all, do your suburb due diligence. That will take a week or two to get a really good feel of the suburb.

Once you’ve done that, you need to then move to pricing due diligence. One of the big things is a lot of people do a lot of their pricing research via the computer these days. As you know, Kevin, you call that desktop valuation. It’s simply not enough, because all of those Internet reports are great tools but if that’s your sole mechanism for determining the value of a property, you’re in serious trouble, because none of those Internet online reports will tell you where the negative and positive price pockets are at a suburb level.

What I mean by that is that you can go into a suburb and some streets pull higher prices –  and for no logical reason, you have other streets that historically have lower property value. What can also skew that is the location of infrastructure, like if you’re closer to the water, naturally, property prices are going to be higher. If you’re closer to the shops, property prices could be lower. You need to be going through properties, you need to be going through other people’s homes,