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First Home Buyers & How To Buy Well | Soho Carpool

January 30, 2020

CEO of Bridge to Bricks John Comino shares his advice for first home buyers and some tips on how to buy the best properties.

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Here’s the transcript of the video:

I wanted to touch on first home buyers. I guess, you know, it's a bit of a daunting task.
I’m a first home buyer, what do I do? Where do I start?
There's all this information that it's like information overload.
Do I do it myself? Do I engage with an industry expert?
You deal with so many first home buyer. What advice do you, I guess, have for them?
Yeah. Well, I guess the first bit of advice to give is all-around mindset.
So the first thing you've got to do is take action.
I know it's a bit of a real estate cliche to say,
you know, you've got to do something
but it's kind of true. And the difference between the people who really succeed in real estate
and those that maybe get left behind is the people who pull the trigger.
Yep.
And there's what we call the procrastination tax as well.
Like there's a cost in waiting it out.
Because you’re never going to find,
well, waiting it out to find the perfect deal is really not always to your advantage.
So don't wait for the perfect deal and start.
The other thing I'd say is unless you're using a buyers agent, it's okay to make a mistake.
So don't let making a mistake, you know,
turn you off because real estate’s a very forgiving asset.
So go for it.
I guess if you're investing in Sydney, I'll give you, sort of, three tips as a general rule for how to buy well.
The first thing is try to stick to 20 kilometres from the CBD.
It's a nice round number but generally they’re the most stable suburbs
that the perform the best.
Two, I'd say buy walking distance to a train station
because if we're going to be a city with a population of 10 million people in 20 years time,
you're not going to be able to drive anywhere, so train stations are valuable.
Yeah.
The third thing I would say is avoid high rise and stick to low rise and boutique.
Yeah, you won't go wrong if you do that sort of thing.
And I guess what's the philosophy around high-rise and sticking to low rise?
Is it just strata fees are higher and I guess maintenance?
I don't know.
No, it's more that the economics of buying property is all
about trying to get as much land as you can.
So the lower rise, you know, when you buy a unit, you are getting land.
You’re just getting an allocation of land.
So if you buy something low-rise you're getting more land and
that's the name of the game when it comes to real estate.
Gotcha. So it's kind of like instead of buying an apartment
that's got 600 other apartments in it,
it’s better to go for something that's got 4 to 10, 20,
Whatever that number may be.
Keep it boutique, keep it low-rise.
There are several practical reasons why that's valuable too
because you have unworkable strata meetings when you've got 600 people in the block,
but that's not the main reason.
The main reason is just to make sure that you're getting land
that it’s a desirable place to live that it doesn't turn into a ghetto
once it starts to age and look a bit tired.
Yeah, a little bit more about first home buyers
and I guess events and seminars that you actually run.
So you run quite a number of seminars and events.
Are they free, actually?
They are, yeah. I've got a meetup group called The Property Fanatics.
So we meet up about once a quarter.
We did something about two months ago.
That was a seminar targeting first home buyers,
and we sort of talked about, we talked a lot about like
when is the right time to buy
and I was sort of showing charts around how to know if real estate's expensive
because real estate is always expensive but
how do you know when it's relatively expensive?
So that we did that and the next event we've got coming up is in November
and that's going to be drinks.
Gotcha. So I just sign up to The Property Fanatics, it's going to be on meetup, turnup?
It will be.
Have a couple of drinks, you do a bit of a presentation.
Spot on.
And then we'll kind of go from there.
Oh, yeah, the next one will just be social.
Can you invite me?
Absolutely. You’re in.

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