Empower Blog Residential Property

RBA Rate Decision – September 2017

Today, Governor Lowe and the Reserve Board met and, as widely anticipated — and it's going to be a bit of a broken record — the cash rate remains on hold at 1.5%. So with a cash rate on hold, and basically all the levers doing their thing, I wanted to focus in on jobs —the unemployment story of the Nation — because this is going to be th...

Watch Video

Top Seven Negotiation Tactics for Spring

With spring “Selling Season” just around the corner, I thought it'd be a good time to revisit some negotiating tactics we need to employ when we're looking to buy a property in this upcoming season.   The first one is: it's not all about price. We need to find out what the vendor really wants. It takes a bit of digging, and it takes a...

Watch Video

RBA Rate Decision – August 2017

Today Governor Lowe and the Reserve Board met and—no surprises here — cash rate remains on hold at 1.5%. We did see some interesting commentary come out of the RBA over the July period, and some of that commentary was around what they thought was an ideal cash rate — around 3.25%. Now, with the current cash rate sitting at 1.5%, the market...

Watch Video

What Is The Biggest Expense A Property Investor Will Face?

As a property investor building a portfolio, the question often asked is, what is the biggest expense I will face when I build out the costs for the portfolio? For me, it's really clear that the biggest expense, bar none, is a vacancy. If you think about it, you're renting a property for $500 a week and it's vacant for four weeks; there's $2,000...

Watch Video

RBA Rate Decision – July 2017

FACT SHEET: Changes on Government Fees and First Home Initiatives (Effective since 1 July 2017) [gravityform id="23" title="false" description="false"]   Today the Reserved Governor and the Board met and they've kept the cash rate on hold at 1.5% for the start of the new financial year. Let's have a look at some of the economic data tha...

Watch Video

How to Protect your Portfolio from the Inevitable Storms?

Today what I want to talk about is How do you protect your portfolio from the inevitable storms that you will face if you want to play this game for the long term? We've just had a world record here in Australia—we've had over 25 years without a “technical” recession, which means that no other developed economy in the world has actually do...

Watch Video

RBA Rate Decision – June 2017

The Reserve Board met today, and they kept the cash rate on hold for another month at 1.5%. Now we saw May 2017 being a very interesting month in regards to the Federal Budget. It came out, and we did see some surprises inside that Federal Budget. Firstly let's talk about the Bank Levy. This is all to do with what they call budget repair and it'...

Watch Video

What Causes Property Price To Fall?

In this How To Session, we're going to get a little bit more serious, and we're going to talk about what causes property prices to fall. Now property prices are again, similar to any type of economic value setting mechanism where demand and supply plays a role. So when you get low supply and high demand, you usually see values increase. It's not di...

Watch Video

Why I Love Property

I was recently asked by a journalist when they were interviewing me, “Why is it that out of all the asset classes out there, why do you actually love property as a form of investment?” And it's pretty simple. It’s actually leverage. The fact that I can use the cash that I've got and leveraged it to buy a much larger asset, and then I can g...

Watch Video

Seven Tactics of a Property Spruiker

As a property investment Advisor I'm often asked by people: “How do you actually avoid property Spruikers?” “What is it that you're actually looking out for?” And I think it's important to revisit what the definition of a property spruiker is. There are three groups of people in my mind that you can take your advice from when you'r...

Watch Video

Today Show – Investing In A Granny Flat

When it comes to property investing, sometimes you will need to think outside the box. If you can't afford to get another investment property, would you consider getting a granny flat instead? This time on Today Show, Bryce Holdaway discuss why investing in the granny flat would be an attractive choice for some property investors and what are th...

Watch Video

Smoke and Mirrors

Like any other sector, there are tricks of the real estate trade that a property investor needs to be aware of. In order to ensure that you aren’t paying any unnecessary costs when investing into a new property, this article provides tips and analogies of what to avoid and look out for when dealing with real estate agents. In order to help you st...

Read More

Should You Invest In Property Overseas?

As a Qualified Property Investment Advisor, I often get approached by clients asking me about investing in property overseas. They've been on a recent vacation, and they bring back a brochure telling me about this amazing opportunity they've got in Bali, Spain, the UK or in America. Ultimately, I try to dig into the main motivation for them to inve...

Watch Video