Hi Ed and Jebb! Thanks for your interest and kind comments!
1. Vacancy rates - around 6 weeks' vacancy per unit per year. I factor this in to our 'expected costs' by assuming we will have 8 weeks' vacancy per unit per year, so will need to cover that lack of income ourselves.
2. We primarily market through the Gumtree website. We've tried other options like The West Australian and Sunday Times, but Gumtree has a much better response rate, plus it's free and allows photos - two big benefits!
3. Premium for furnishings etc - yeah, two bedroom unfurnished units probably normally go for between $250-$350 per week, depending on location, condition etc.
4. We are in the process of buying two more two-bedroom units, which we will also be adding to our PFR website - what we do works very well (so far) and demand generally exceeds supply, so we're going to stick with this approach
5. I don't know that we would change anything from the way we've done it, to be honest. We've always been very careful around things like good leases, good tenants, etc etc. We've had the occasional bad experience but I think that's inevitable if you have property. Plus we've had very good capital growth from our properties, as well as receiving good income (rent) from them.
It is time consuming, but as I've said elsewhere we don't have kids or hobbies (apart from property) so that's time that we would otherwise spend sleeping or in front of a computer or the TV. To try to minimise the time consuming side of it, we do limit ourselves to an absolute minimum lease of 6 weeks. If we were turning over the units every week I'd need to give up my fulltime job just to keep up with the cleaning and laundry! As it is, we've spent some late nights after work, doing cleaning etc because the tenants have just moved out, and new tenants are coming in the next day. There's nothing like inhaling oven cleaner fumes at 1am in the morning
