What Are The Pros & Cons Of Buying New
Host: Those pitfalls are.
Paul: Yeah. I mean long and short of it is the unforeseen. I’m building some properties myself at the moment and going through a whole list of what they deem to be PC items and fixed price contracts not of this fixed price contract so even if you are buying off the plan on a particular fixed contract price, there are so many additional aspects to that that as a first time buyer and/or owner builder you potentially won’t know what the pitfalls are and the additional costs that come into the play. If you look at it on the flipside though from any kind of benefits from buying off the plan or buying new there are certain states and certain development companies who potentially might look at offering things such as stamp duty exemptions or certain discounts on certain aspects of the build cost, so depending on which market you’re buying in there are certain times or certain opportunities where you can actually manufacture a bit of leverage and actually use that to a strength rather than a weakness, but it’s full of certain pitfalls if you’re not aware of what you’re looking for.
Host: Just looks like a pretty stressful way to buy given it you know the figures we’re looking at the beginning of this show it’s like units in Baulkham Hills, have gone down 19 percent. I mean if you bought one of those off the plan and then only had it for a couple of years and then it’s gone down by that much you’ve lost a lot of time when you were never even in the unit it was just sort of a line on a piece of paper.
Paul: Absolutely and that’s probably the really the biggest risk aspect of that off the plan component is typically off the plant doesn’t mean that two months later you own the property typically it’s somewhere between 12 and 36 months and in that time you’re looking consistently at data trying to think it is my property going up in value? Is it going sideways? Am I going to need to tip in a bigger deposit by settlement time comes around and quite frankly right now probably be bought off the plan in Sydney or Melbourne probably one or two years ago and looking at all three of those things happening at the same time. So definitely buying existing mitigates a lot of those risks because you buy existing products with existing rents existing markets and you can predict those outcomes a lot more specifically.