We all know 2020 has been a wild ride. We're all looking forward to a well deserved break with family and friends over the Christmas period to take stock of what has truly been an extraordinary year. 

If you're thinking of listing your property for rent some time in the near future, now is the right time to start a conversation with a property manager to make sure you list sooner rather than later. 

Here are our top 5 reasons to list your rental property before Christmas. 

We've written before about the findings of the 2018 Voice of Australian Property Management Report, which found that most property managers are inexperienced, many are not happy in their role and want to leave their job, and that staff retention is often a low priority for real estate agency owners. Yikes!

We know from experience that investors can feel it's a case of "better the devil you know", staying with a less than satisfactory real estate agency simply because that has become the expected level of service. 

Not happy with that, we've taken a look at our own data to determine how we "stack up" in terms of client satisfaction. We're pleased with the results!

The latest data from month ending 30 September 2020 has shown that Lake Macquarie East currently has the lowest rental vacancy rates in the entire country. 

As the impacts of COVID-19 began ramping up around March / April 2020, the NSW Government announced temporary measures to restrict when landlords can evict tenants due to rental arrears as a result of COVID-19. In addition, the Government increase the notice period for certain other cases for termination to 90 days.

​These restrictions were originally due to end on 15 October 2020. They have now been extended until 26 March 2021.

In NSW we are endlessly presented mainstream media reports about the property market, heavily skewed by data from Sydney and Melbourne. The reality is that so much of what we are presented simply does not apply in our local area or regional areas generally. 

In this post we present the latest data specific to vacancy rates across Newcastle and Lake Macquarie, and discuss research showing that people are relocating to regional areas away from capital cities, which is in turn helping to drive house price growth and these lower vacancy rates in regional areas.

A common topic of conversation with our investors is whether they should offer their property furnished or unfurnished. There are several factors which contribute to determining what is best in each particular instance, as we will cover below. 

As of 1 July 2020, the rules have changed regarding how landlords must deal with items left behind in a rental property by a tenant. There are some quite significant changes from July to the rights of landlords and tenants when goods have been left behind, which we will detail below.