South and north of the Sydney market where the opportunities are down from Wollongong, further down the south coast, central coast and Newcastle and beyond. They’re probably about 6 to 12, sometimes 18 months beyond where we are as cycle wise. You know Wollongong grew about five and a half percent. Newcastle grew about seven or eight percent last year or this past 12 months, but they’re on a downward trajectory, so I expect them to probably be with Sydney’s and about six to 12 months and they’ll probably be in that position longer than what Sydney will be because the jobs are still going to be focused around the Sydney CBD.
One Bedroom Apartments in Sydney. Are They Worth It?
One bedroom apartments as an example where a one bedroom apartment sitting as part of this grand scheme will probably that later. Part of that answer is there’s a lot of construction going on. The apartment space, there is still certain pockets in probably more the established areas with minimal amounts of available stock in the newest space that one bedroom apartments will do. Okay, and I’d probably more refer to those walkups red bricks in really the quite strategic areas that are walking distance to all amenities and probably more preferential to baby boomers downsizing and that’s probably the other components are really oversized luxury one bedders in certain areas where again, there’s limited available stock, but the problem with both of those is right now and in the Sydney market is that yields a pretty, pretty terrible. So to hold them cash flow wise is going to be a big stretch for me to justify that over two dozen different markets across Australia right now. I would never ever be able to justify that in this point in time.
Renting Vs. Buying. The Debate
It’s a fascinating question for me because I look at the say I’m a longterm renter and I think a lot of people in this day and age are okay with longterm renting. The fascination with wanting to own is something that’s always going to be completely individual and I think that’s the part of the question there to say if you have to own physically to feel like you have succeeded or if that you feel like you’re secure. Yeah, that and you can raise a family and that’s what you need. Then I would say if that’s always going to be the fear, I’ll I will would deem that there’s probably always going to be a bit of confirmation bias that you always think it’s going to be better to buy than to rent and it comes down to what is your mindset? Are you comfortable never owning where you live, but still creating wealth elsewhere?
So fundamentally you can do so many predictable algorithms to say; I’ve got x amount of growth. If interest rates stayed here, if I went on a principle interest repayment of this year, then it’s going to lend. Then therefore say that my spreadsheet will tell me that this is the best time to start thinking about buying or selling or continue renting or vice versa, but I think that you could do that to the cows come home and you could stress yourself out and you could run through a million scenarios and you can basically get to different outcomes every time. For me it more comes down to what is the really, what is your passion and where does the fundamental need lie here and if you can get past the deemed yeah, I guess social pressures of owning your own home and knowing that your creating wealth and setting up your future, your family’s future and other markets.
Then those discussions kind of become redundant, so if you can’t, then for me it comes down to saying, I’d say jump in as soon as you potentially can afford to jump in because what will end up happening is you become disappointed in the fact that you didn’t buy when you should’ve bought and you’ll always find a reason and you’ll always second guess your decisions and 100 percent and you say it so often. You see so very, very often and typically what Lisa to people doing nothing. And that is usually the worst scenario. I’ve got actually quite a number of clients who I’ve been speaking with for almost, you know, some of them I can think of two or three years and we’re in. We’re at ground zero still and they’ve had capacity to start investing a long, long time ago and it’s not even one market. Now. We’ve talked about buying one market. Now we’ve stopped buying in that market because the growth has come. Now we’re in a different market and they’ve not chosen to buy in that market because they thought, well, well I’m just gonna. Hold out for this market and the pattern is obvious and I think ultimately comes down action and letting perfection get in the way of profit is always going to be the drama for most in that position.
Sydney’s Future. Will It Perform As Well As It Did In 2013-2015?
Where we’re at right now in Sydney and and look, we’re probably into our 11th, 12th, 13th month depending on what suburb you’re looking at, have a probably categorized sideways if not some declines in certain markets in Sydney and to what, to be honest, Melbourne’s only probably six months behind the same trend and we expect them to run more or less pretty similar correlations over the of the forthcoming cycle. We’ve got a big issue with a income to debt ratio and we’re sitting anywhere between eight and 10 times annual income to debt ratio. Historically we see that needs to be sitting well below probably six, six and a half times to see opportunity to grow. That’s part of that equation is wages growth. We don’t have an issue with with jobs at the moment and I don’t think over the next five years in Sydney specifically, especially in some of these really big infrastructure project corridors from the southwest to the west and even part of the up, the guts through in a west, et cetera.
There’s jobs, jobs galore and well paid jobs, white collar, blue collar, right across the board, skilled and unskilled. So I think the jobs are going to be there. The issue is affordability in conjunction with people being able to borrow money. So I think we need two things to start seeing this wave come back is one of which is wage growth, to see that debt debt to income ratio reduce. And the second, I think the second one is probably going to be that there’s going to have to be a restricted amount of supply consistently given to the market because we’re also going through this apartment building boom in Sydney is not a probably, i would say, they’re not going to be spared in certain areas. It’s not right across the board. We’ve got a lot of population growth, but we’re also got alot of construction. So I think we’re probably three to four years for those apartments really going through the market and then getting back to probably what I would deem to be an elite and an equilibrium position where you’ve got a deficit which we had for the previous 10 years in addition to a ramp up of wage growth and then cheaper money.
Changes In The Funding Environment And The Investor Approach
I think there’s a lot of property investors as well as potentially other property investment strategists who have had certain modus operandi over the last 10 years which worked in certain cases. But when you start to get a changing environment in funding and in growth and in yields, you can’t just keep running the same race because unfortunately the different competitor and you’ve got to change.
