Are you ready to buy? Four questions.
Answer four questions and you will know whether buying now makes sense, or what to fix first. Nothing is sent anywhere unless you ask for it.
Most people who enquire are not ready, and most of them do not know it. There is no shame in that — being nine months away is normal. What is expensive is spending those nine months doing nothing because nobody told you what the nine months were for.
Where is your finance up to?
What's the purchase budget?
When do you want to have bought?
How set are you on where?
No sign-up to answer. The result is yours either way.
One email a quarter. Your result is not attached to it, and nothing is shared.
Only one buyer’s agency in the country publishes a readiness tool. It is also the only one whose enquiries arrive pre-sorted.
Ninety days is usually enough.
Three of the four questions above are fixable inside a quarter. This is the order to fix them in — it is the same order I would use myself, and none of it requires hiring me.
-
Get a borrowing figure in writing
Not a number off a website — a broker running your file against a named lender. Until that exists, every conversation about property is guesswork. Ask me and I will introduce you to a broker; I take no fee for it, and the structure of your first loan decides whether there is ever a second property.
-
Clear the credit card limits you do not use
A lender assesses a card on its limit, not its balance. A $20,000 limit you never touch can cost you roughly $80,000 to $100,000 of borrowing power. Closing it is a phone call.
-
Read three quarterly screens before you commit to anything
Most people who end up engaging me read three of them first. It is the cheapest way to work out whether you actually believe the method, and whether a market you like keeps passing or was a one-quarter accident.
-
Decide whether you can give up the suburb you had in mind
This is the one that is not a task. Buying near where you live is the single most common and most expensive mistake in Australian property investing, and it is the bias the whole method exists to remove. If you cannot let it go, I am not the right person and you will save money finding that out now.
Why there is a $300,000 floor
The fee is fixed. Below $300,000 it takes too large a bite out of the return for me to be doing you a favour. It is arithmetic, not a judgement.
Why finance comes first
Your borrowing capacity decides which suburbs exist for you at all. The three briefs on the intelligence page returned seven, thirty-three and thirty-six suburbs — with not one suburb in common.
Why I ask about location
Every filter in the method is designed to ignore where you already feel comfortable. If the brief starts with a postcode, the data cannot do its job.