In Part 2 of our Buyers Agent Case Study with Peta we spend some time analysing Brisbane suburbs against our buying criteria to identify the key locations we think will give the best ‘bang for buck’.
If you haven’t read part 1 of this case study you can check it out here:
Brisbane Buyer’s Agent Case Study – Part 1 – Introducing Peta
After determining, documenting and agreeing upon the buying criteria with Peta, we set to work to analyse all suburbs within a 10km radius of the Brisbane CBD to assess which areas would suit as our potential target locations. We knew that Peta was a person who really needed to understand the Brisbane market and be a across the numbers side of the analysis to be able to confidently make decisions about her investment as well as feel comfortable with the recommendations that we would make to her.
Our first major location report to Peta identified six subsets of areas or ‘pockets’ that would provide opportunities within our budget and buying parameters. The report provided maps of Brisbane and the location of major facilities such as shops, universities, train stations and hospitals. Peta wanted to be near services and facilities that would make her property appealing to tenants and to offer good potential for capital growth over the long term. The report offered information about each of the pockets and all of the ‘numbers’ associated with each location including the projected growth, historical growth for 3 months, 12 months, 3 years, 5 years and 10 years, vacancy rates, rental yield, numbers sold, time on the market and so forth.
The aim of this first stage was to further clarify our buying criteria and to also narrow down our target locations to a more manageable set of suburbs. After some review and discussion Peta decided to focus on houses rather than units and we narrowed down to a handful of suburbs in the North and the South, with our initial focus to be on the Northside.
Location report 2 provided more in depth information on each of these suburbs including location, demographics, style of housing, heatmaps showing growth and median pricing and detailed suburb analysis where we do what we term ‘suburb mapping’. This involves literally driving the entire suburb and mapping out where everything is, what style of housing exists where, the good bits, the bad bits and so forth. The outcome of the suburb mapping exercise is a blueprint that identifies the housing and pricing pockets within a suburb.
At this point we decided that our initial focus would be on the Northside and we began to look for properties in our target suburbs, Gordon Park, Kedron and Chermside. We were deliberately trying to ‘punch above our weight’ looking for houses in these areas within our budget, so we decided to expand our focus a little to include neighbouring suburbs with good fundamentals and projected growth. Our additional suburbs added to the mix included Wavell Heights, Geebung and Stafford.
In the next part of our case study we start to look at properties for Peta, stay tuned!
