Empower Blog Property Value

Are One Bedroom Apartments still the Poor Cousins?

Ask a baby Boomer what they think the great Australian dream looks like and chances are they will say a detached house on a quarter acre block surrounded by a garden with a BBQ and a hills hoist. Ask the same question to a Gen Y and they are likely to say an apartment in the suburb where their café culture lifestyle is… usually the inner city su...

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Is Land Size still King?

Look in my view, I think land size isn't King anymore and I think in the 20th century it was and its largely driven by baby boomers who had the Great Australian Dream as an aspiration and their idea of the Great Australian Dream was a detached house on a quarter acre block, surrounded by garden with a barbecue in heels hoist and that was represente...

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What Will Be The ‘Highly Prized’ Property in 20 to 40 Years From Now?

The data is in for the last 40 years and it seems clear who the winners in Australia’s biggest cities of Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane are; if you invested your money in the inner city fringe suburbs compared to buying in new estates you would have more than likely doubled and in a lot of cases tripled your money compared to returns from buying ...

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What are the Risks of investing in Residential Property

We can all get really excited about the prospects of creating a great passive income out of property. But one of the big things when we look at 2014 and we see all the hype around property investment is there’s still actual risk involved in investing in property. So today I wanted to share a moment with you in this time and talk about the risks t...

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What Causes Auction Property Sales Results to Fly Past the Quoted Range? It is the Agents’ Fault?

Buyers get very frustrated by auction results exceeding quote ranges; and justifiably so. Interested buyers invest emotional energy, precious time, and in many cases, valuable dollars when they shortlist and pursue a suitable property. Building inspections, solicitor’s review fees and travel costs can make a property pre-purchase adventure quite ...

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Will Property Prices Keep Increasing – a 38 Year Analysis – part 2

In last month article I highlighted the returns of 3 different Melbourne suburbs over a 38 year period and in this article I promised to explain how this happened.  In doing so, I have included three new graphs of each Suburb to help illustrate my findings. To help you interpret them I will just explain what is consistently measured in each gra...

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Will Property Prices keep Rising? – A 38 years analysis

One of the biggest questions I get asked by the ‘non-believers’ and ‘sceptics’ regarding property values is, will property prices keep rising? As a property analyst and qualified property investment advisor it’s my full time job to analyse and evaluate the market in terms of historical performance and even more importantly to determine w...

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What is Happening in the Melbourne Property Market this Winter?

I recall my reporting mid to late last year - around September/October, our difficult Melbourne market felt as though it had started to turn a corner for the better. I was too cautious to call it until November, when the race to finishing line for the year's auctions became quite apparent that it wasn't the only driver nudging buyer demand up in th...

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John Maynard Keynes – does that name ring a bell for you?

Well if you are someone who has studied economics, it will definitely ring a bell.  Those who haven’t well, this English Economist was influential in helping the world get through the Great Depression, by convincing governments to use fiscal and monetary stimulus to kick-start the global economy with his macro-economic theory around business cyc...

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Five creative ways to increase rental returns

Quite often investors ask us about clever ways to enhance property value. Most investors pay a lot of attention to the value of the property but why don’t they pay as much attention to the returns? Well, we do, and some clever investors out there do so as well. While we like to see our equity position growing, the bottom line for any ‘buy and h...

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Questions you should ask yourself when adding value to a property

Many investors start out with ideas about creating value - or better still; manufacturing equity....The questions we have for them though are diverse. What level of renovation or improvement does the investor have in mind? How hands-on does the investor plan to be? How long will the works take? Will the works cost the investor vacancy periods?...

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Is the Australian Property market about to crash?

The continuing commentary around the Australian property market is a bit like a movie review that you’d read in any weekend magazine – it’s simply reporting someone’s opinion about the subject and quite often results in very conflicting views. It’s not uncommon to read that one reviewer loved a particular movie and rated it very highly wh...

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Myth Buster on What drives Property Values

The "Great Aussie Dream" of owning property is part of our DNA and it's fair to say that most people have an opinion about what makes property values grow. For the Average Joe, these opinions are mostly educated guesses; for many people in the property industry they are often completely off the mark. In this article from Money Magazine (in conjunc...

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