Nerang Real Estate

Ordinary People. Extraordinary Real Estate Abilities!

Changing your brand is never an easy thing.

Just ask Woolworths and the ANZ bank who have recently changed their brands.  The new signage is ordered, the painters are standing by ready, new stationery is on its way and everything seems to be slotting right into place.

Keep an eye out as Nerang First National’s e new look will be busting out very very soon!

First National is changing its corporate branding  and Nerang First National will be one of the first in the new colours. The First National group is Australia’s largest independent real estate network and the third largest real estate brand in the country.  First National has changed a great deal in its 26 year history, having grown from having 30 members in 1983 to 450+  plus member offices employing in excess of 5000 people today.

Nerang First National is in the middle of changing over to the new First National brand and be one of the first agencies in the country to have made the switch and the painters and signwriters should be starting very soon. We thought we would give you a sneak peek of what the office will look like through this mockup.

(click on the photo to enlarge)

Residential real estate investment has been the investment vehicle of choice for many Australians that just don’t trust the share market’s rollercoaster effect when they can have the security of land, bricks and mortar.

The Gold Coast is Australia’s most popular holiday destination and attracts over 3.4 million Australian visitors every years to its combination of theme parks, beaches, glitzy shopping and natural hinterland wonders.

The attractions of the city have been attractive to many and the city has sustained some amazing growth over the past decades and behind the tourist strip  is a thriving modern city that is now Australia’s 6th largest behind Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth and Adelaide.

Gold Coast real estate investment has provided exceptional returns for many from right around Australia but everything that glitters is not gold.  Some marketeers have leveraged the Gold Coast’s high visibility, popularity, population growth statistics and increasing property values to market their own properties direct to the public through investment seminars around the country.

These seminars targeted inexperienced investors using hand picked statistics, far fetched forecasts and high pressure sales. They were combined with free flights and accommodation to the Gold Coast and  rental guarantees to convince  investors to seal the deal. In hindsight many of the investors sold on the their properties through these investment seminars have regretted the purchase with hindsight as the properties were often oversold and way over priced in comparison to local property values.

Like many Gold Coast real estate agents we have seen the after effects of  this sort of investment and how it turns into a family’s financial nightmare.  The marketeers excuse is that they asked a price and they were able to find people gullible enough to pay for it and since something is worth what another  is prepared to pay for it, then they really sold it at market value.

One of the latest examples seen a developer sell townhouses in a new townhouse complex to out of town investors for around $1 million and more.  These were certainly very nice townhouses  but just 10 min research on the internet would have revealed dozens of luxury free standing houses in the Outlook Estate in Highland Park double the size and with better quality fittings and panoramic views of the Gold Coast for the same price or even less within 200m of the complex.

Within months of these properties settling many of them had been repossessed by the bank and re-sold for between $400,000 and $500,000 which was were many claimed their true value always laid.

These sales make up only a tiny fraction of all sales on the Gold Coast but because of the substantial losses some out of these out of town investors have sustained the stories gain publicity. A few have even made it to front page of major newspapers and feature articles on Today Tonight, A Current Affair and many other television programs.

Despite this the Gold Coast remains an exceptional opportunity to invest in residential real estate and the vast majority of investors never purchase property at inflated prices through these marketeers.  Like all investments you need to do your own homework and you need to ensure you are paying fair market value and remember the golden rule, if it sounds to good to be true, it probably isnt.

One of the easiest ways to do this as an out of town investor is to research property through local real estate agency websites like Nerang First National‘s site www.nfn.com.au.

Nerang First National’s primary trade area includes Nerang, Highland Park, Carrara and Worongary which features some of the Gold Coast’s most popular suburbs for investment. These suburbs are centrally located, affordable and most importantly when considering an investment, they are popular amongst locals.

If your thinking of investing in residential real estate give one of the team at Nerang First National a call. The sales team can find you a perfect investment property to start or add to your portfolio and the Property Management team can help make that investment  trouble free. Contact the team today on 07 55960055

Are you thinking of Selling this Spring?

One of the most common questions we get from potential sellers is when is the best time of the year to sell their property and it is also one of the most complex questions to answer. There are actually “pluses and minuses” to consider when selling at any time of the year.

Often making this decision will usually come down to your own personal plans and circumstances.

When you look at it closely, there and “pro’s and con’s” to selling at any time of the year, but there is no absolutely right or wrong time.

Spring is the Prime Selling Season

For many people, Spring is viewed as the “Prime Selling Season” for real estate.

And why not?

Our landscaping and gardens tend to be looking at their best, pools and outdoor entertaining area look at their best, the weather is normally neither too hot nor too cold, and many families like to buy at a time that will allow them to move and settle during a comfortable time of year.

Whether it has something to do with the birds chirping while the flowers are blooming or extra cash from tax time, spring is the number one time to sell a house. The only drawback to selling in Spring can occur if large numbers of people decide to do the very same thing!

Quite often the law of supply and demand can become very evident during spring if a large number of homes come onto the market all at the same time.

If the set number of buyers suddenly have a vast number of more options to choose from, this can lead to a drop in the number of buyers per property, and therefore diminished competition.

Because a property’s highest period of activity during the sales process is in the first few weeks it is absolutely essential to get the asking price right from the very start. With so many new properties coming on to the market and over priced property quickly becomes stale and is replaced by fresh listings. Re-assessing the list price can be too late and the missed opportunities can be expensive.

The simple fact is that the best time to sell your property is when it suits YOU best. For many that perfect time of the year is Spring. The secret to ensure you obtain the best selling opportunity in Spring is to get in early before the typical Spring stampede gains momentum and because of the increased competition ensure your price is right from day one.

If you are ready to sell at a particular time, then that is the time you should sell. With a little helpful advice from Nerang First National Real Estate, you can achieve an outstanding result at any time of year.

According to the recently released First National 2009 Property Outlook Mid Year Update, the Queensland property market should be well positioned for the earlier than predicted Australian property market recovery.

Queensland property prices are expected to enjoy moderate growth in the short term, fuelled by a burgeoning population.

Prices were predicted to bottom out by the end of the year, and the state’s economy is expected to contract slightly over the next 12 months, making prices vulnerable.

But the expectations are that prices won’t collapse, due mainly to ongoing strong population growth, the highest in Australia last year.

Housing approvals are at a rate of around 21,000 per year, compared to an underlying requirement of 42,000 – so pent up demand will build rapidly this year.

This current sustained population growth, coupled with a very solid economy, ensures the state’s residential property market is likely to continue to perform well.

The Australian property market is already well and truly on the road to recovery, with a new property cycle expected to commence by the end of the year.

Record levels of housing affordability, coupled with a continuing shortage of supply across every state will continue to support the market in the coming years.

Housing prices are set to rise, rental yields are forecast for continued improvement and the government is investing heavily in major infrastructure and property projects.

All this augers well for the market, ensuring it will thrive as we start to recover from the global financial crisis.

But the bargains that are there at the moment won’t be there forever with the market already showing strong signs it is ready for the beginning of a new cycle, which may see housing affordability reduced.

As the nation recovers and the property market strengthens, there are a number of factors to watch.

At some stage in the near future, higher interest rates will be a factor, as the nation begins to pay back some of the money it has borrowed in its efforts to sustain itself through the global financial crisis, and subsequent recovery.

This is the beginning of a new cycle in the Australian property market, and while supply and demand will put a floor under the property market in the short term, particularly during its recovery, relative affordability may well rear its head again and become the fundamental issue it has been in the not too distant past.

With many First National agents reporting strong auction clearance rates since the beginning of the year, I am confident the middle tier market is beginning to move, and that investors are beginning to venture back into the market.

For the first time in 17 years, property punters can enjoy high growth and strong yields, something that is not easy to come by in this day and age.

Conditions are such that you can get properties that are going to provide good growth over the long term and give you cash flow in the short term that in the recent past, you would never have expected.

The astute investor and buyer will then seek to lock in interest rates to manage outgoings as the economy picks up and the property cycle begins its next phase.

To grab a copy of the report you can download it from our website at www.nfn.com.au or read the report online here

Up to now Real Estate on the internet in Australia has been controlled by RealEstate.com.au which is a property portal that most agents upload their properties to.

In New South Wales the Domain.com.au portal also holds significant marketshare but here in Queensland it is very much a one horse race with Domain.com.au and other portals like Homehound.com.au and Myhome.com.au barely registering a challenge.

Realestate.com.au has built this up through sheer listing numbers.  With around 95% of all agents uploading to realestate.com.au you can be pretty sure that most properties available through real estate agents are available on the portal.

But Is It The Best?

On a strictly numbers level Realestate.com.au is the best without questions. But on a usability level you need to be your own judge. Realestate.com.au is a corporation and accordingly the portal is often focussed too hard on money and very little else. Unfortunatley the pursuit of higher and higher profits generated from agents has impacted the portal to the detriment of  property seekers.

Let me Explain!

There are a few issues of concern but one of the key ones for a buyer is that no matter what search you conduct on realestate.com.au you will only ever be able to view the FIRST 200 properties returned for that search. In our primary trade area this is over 980 property for sale right now on RealEstate.com.au.

Realestate.com.au sell  feature property upgrades to propert owners for $90 per month so they can jump to the beginning of the queue  and this exacerbates the 200 property search limit problem. In popular suburbs there can easily be 100 or more  feature properties.   This means that quite often there is under 100 spots that properties are rotated through and as property is listed in date order brand new properties push older ones out of those 100 spots very quickly. In some suburbs a property where the owner has not paid for feature status may only last as long as 10 to 14 days in top 200 for a suburb wide search.

These issues have resulted in agents trying to cheat the system. Even though it is up against the portals terms and conditions and can result in agents being suspended from the site many agents try to cheat by removing and reloading properties so they appear at the top of the queue again which in turn pushs everybody else down the list faster and faster self perpetuating the problem over and over.

It is not unusual for property seekers to overlook a suitable property because it just never shows up in any of their searches.  This problem is at its worst in high turnover and more popular suburbs, just like Nerang and when you select the “surrounding suburbs” option as then you are trying to cram 10 suburbs into just 200 results.

Because realestate.com.au and a few other portals charge for these services they have to justify their cost and one way they do that is to quantify their results. This means they try to get you to view more and more properties on there site rather than visit the agents own website directly and all enquiries are funnelled through their portal.

One side effect of them controlling all enquiries from the site happened last year when millions of enquiry emails to real estate agents were lost by realestate.com.au for over 10 weeks.   Many people never got an answer from agents right around Australia but that was because RealEstate.com.au never sent it on.

Another casulty in the hunt for more money is the advertising on the site.  The level of advertising is just mind boggling.  If you stop and count there is nearly 80 paid advertising links on just the front page alone.  The individual property pages are not much better.  It’s a bit like reading your sunday papers and watching as the traditional news content is slowly being reduced and replaced by pages and pages of ads.

Google Real Estate Launched

In the past few weeks Google has launched Real Estate on Google Maps.  The way Google handles real estate is completley different than how traditional property portals handle real estate.  It approaches it very much like a traditional search engine method.

Instead of real estate agencies paying to list properties, Google treats real estate agents as simply a data source, a place to get information to serve up to you, the consumer.  Google displays that information primarily using a mapping interface so you can see all property for a given area all at the same time.

Using the same methodology they use for web searches Google simply indexes the property for sale and property for rent. This means they only keep a snippet of information on each listing. Enough to show you an overview of the property.  This works exactly like their normal web search. If you want to know more informaiton you can click on the property and visit the agents site directly to get more information.

Google also allows other websites to use their informaiton in what is called a mashup. So sites like www.baseestate.com are able to display all the properties that are on Google. This is probably the primary reason why RealEstate.com.au and Domain.com.au dont want to provide their information to Google. They dont want to be providing the data for a heap of spin offs that in the end they are competing with for eyeballs.

Many agents and the smaller portals are uploading property to Google. Google will actually take real estate listings from anybody but as yet Realestate.com.au and Domain.com.au  has refused  to release their information  to Google. Because both  of these two top portals are either fully or majority owned by traditional media companies, News Ltd and the Fairfax Group both have undertaken a media campaign to discredit Google’s play into the Real Estate field.

When large public companies feel pressured they do what they always do and apply marketing spin in bucketloads.  The media machines have trumpeted an industry expert as playing down the Google threat but failed to mention that he is the ex CEO of RealEstate.com.au and still significant shareholder in the company.  The top two portals have claimed that Google only holds 20% of the listing numbers that they do but if they are not providing that information it is impossible to verify.

We decided to put that claim to the test at least locally and we quickly found that the majority of property are on both RealEstate.com.au and Google.Whilst there are not many there are certainly property that are just one of the two portals and not the other. Neither of them features all of the property available.

We have created a very large map where we have overlaid both portals properties on the one map. Google’s results are the red dots and realestate.com.au’s are the blue houses.

The image is far too large to display on this page in full but if you click on this small cropped section of it you will be able to view the full map.

No matter what area you go to in Australia 20% of the agents are doing 80% of the business and that is the same in our area. The top 2 agents are responsible for the vast majority of all sales in the district and we are both uploading to Google Real Estate. This means that at least for the local area, that the vast majority of all listings that will sell next are available right now  on Google Real Estate.

So What Does All This Mean?

Forget what you read in the paper, use whatever portal you find works best for you, in fact we would recommend that you use at least 2 or three portals to make sure you get the best coverage you can.

If you are looking to purchase property you probably need to be using both Realestate.com.au and Google Real Estate.  Technically you dont have to use Google own mapping interface, you could use one of the current mashups like Base Estate or one of the many that are currently being developed.

If anything Google Real Estate makes it much easier to locate properties that you may have overlooked due to RealEstate.com.au’s 200 property limit.

As part of a staged rollout Google will soon integrate their real estate listings into their normal search pages like they do for other markets around the world. This will massively increase the exposure of all listings on Google to millions and millions of Australians using the standard Google web search.

If you are looking to sell property then you need to make sure that  your agent uploads your property to both Google and RealEstate.com.au. In fact with Google it does not cost the agent anything to upload your property and is a great indicator of at least their basic technical understanding.

Nerang First National proudly uses both RealEstate.com.au and Google Real Estate and as always we are simply the best selection for buying or selling property in the district.

With around two-thirds of Australian households owning a pet, there are plenty of tenants out there looking for pet-friendly accommodation – a tough ask, but one that can be overcome by being responsible.

Landlords aren’t out to rid the world of pets, they just want to know that you are a responsible pet owner that will respect their concerns, and their property.

Responsible pet owners make excellent long-term tenants and tend to abide by the housing rules, because they know it can be difficult to find animal-friendly accommodation elsewhere and want to avoid the difficulty of having to look for it.

So, they will go to greater lengths to look after the property and keep their landlords happy.

There are a few tips pet owning tenants can keep in mind to show a prospective landlord their properties will be in safe hands.

• Be a good neighbour. Provide your pet with plenty of attention and exercise, so that its physical and social needs are being met. By doing so, you will cut down on nuisance barking, one of the most common complaints of neighbours. Clean up after your pet, preventing not just a messy smelly yard, but also a serious health issue. Consider enrolling in obedience training and grooming. Nothing says ‘responsible’ to a landlord and neighbour better than a well-behaved well-groomed pet.
• Honesty. Do not try to sneak your pet into a ‘no pets allowed’ property and do not misrepresent your pet’s breed. Some pet friendly properties restrict certain breeds or have weight limits or restrict the number of pets allowed. If you are not completely honest with your landlord and get caught, this just makes landlords more hesitant to rent to pet owners. Remember, this may not just be your landlord’s rules, some municipalities have Breed Specific Legislation or Pet Limit Laws. Check with the local Council.
• Show goodwill. Write up a Sample Contract to present to your potential landlord stating that you agree to abide by all of the property rules including cleaning up after your pet, keeping your pet secure and supervised at all times, ensuring your pet is friendly and approachable to neighbours and to keep your pet vaccinated and free of fleas, ticks and parasites. If it is not in your rental agreement, offer your landlord a pet deposit to make it perfectly clear that you are responsible for any damage to the property caused buy your pet. This will not only make a lasting impression, but show your landlord that you are serious about renting and that you will care for the property.

Landlords should also keeping in mind that a well-managed, pet-friendly rental offer can help improve their returns, broaden the pool of prospective tenants and also promote a sense of tenant safety and security.

Responsible pet owners make excellent tenants because caring for pets takes as much, or more, effort and responsibility as caring for where we live. What’s important for the landlord is to have a clear set of guidelines on keeping pets on the property.

Last week we released market activity statistics in the form of a motion graph on three Gold Coast Suburbs which were Nerang, Carrara and Highland Park.

We have now updated the graph to include another 8 suburbs including Worongary, Advancetown,  Clagiraba, Gilston,  Guanaba, Lower Beechmont, Maudsland and Mount Nathan. To view the graph with all suburbs click here

Analysing the real estate market is never easy. Actual sales data takes months to process through solicitors and government databases before its available for real estate agents, jounalists or market commentators to analyse. This is why when you property statistics in the newspaper they are always for earlier in the year.

Nerang First National has for a while now tracked the total number of properties for sale and properties marked “under contract” on the major real estate portals.  Agents are required by law and by the terms and agreements with the portals themselves to have this informaiton accurate. Advertising a property for sale that they do not have an authority on can bring heavy fines and failing to remove properties under contract can see you getting banned from the portals for repeated breaches.

This information is the best indicator of just what is happening in the live in the marketplace. One of the best ways to communicate changing data over time is using a motion graph. The motion graph turns what was once a static graph into an animation as it plays through time so you can see the changes as they happened.

One of the best introductions to Motion Graphs is through Hans Rosling’s statistics presentation to the TED conference.  Hans created the Trendalyzer program which allows pages and pages of data to be easily understood by everybody.  To get a good understanding of how the graphs work check this video out. It will truly blow your mind and show you how the motion graph helps anybody understand complex data.

So using the same type of Motion Graphs we are able to have a look at the local real estate market  for Nerang, Carrara and Highland Park over the past 12 months and some amazing trends stand out. The graph tracks the available property for sale and property under contract in the suburbs of Nerang, Carrara and Highland Park from the beginning of the financial year to now.

Nerang Property Market - Financial Year 2008/2009 Click to Access the Motion Graph

As you watch the graph you will notice the suburb indicators change colour.  This colour is based on the Under Contract rate which is the percentage of properties Under Contract in relation to all properties. In the first 6 months you will notice a lot of properties on the market but very few under contract which results in low conversion rates  that is indicated by a blue or green colouring.

The second half of the year is a different story as the number of properties for sale drops rapidly around February and the number of properties under contract skyrocket.  This improves the conversion factor and turns the icons orange and red.

There is certainly different activity levels through different price ranges and property types, but if you are thinking about selling or are on the market at the moment and somebody is telling you how tough the market, maybe they are living in the past.

Contact the sales team at Nerang First National on 07 55960055

When you looking to sell how would you like to have a peek into the real estate agents database just to see how many buyers they have that match your property.  Agents will often talk about their buyer database but will they actually let you see for yourself?

Thats just what the new feature on Nerang First National’s website allows any prospective seller to do. 

Nerang First National maintains one of Australia’s most popular and successful real estate agency websites and the team at Nerang First National manages an email database of over 4000 buyers, sellers, investors and property owners. 

Prospective purchasers and investors can register their property requirements using our Priority Buyer or Priority Renter feature.   

Remember this is a genuine database of active buyers and investors – registered and looking for homes right now extracted live from our buyer database. If you search a couple of days later the numbers will change as new buyers are identifitied, current buyers change their criteria and we find some buyers their dream home so they are now off the market.