found a lovely two bedroom unit at Grange right on the beach front and had both buses and a train service to the city.
This two bedroom unit was on the ground floor with its own carport right next to the unit. All she needed to do was furnish it and I knew I could get a very good rental return. On settlement day we met at the unit and she had bought some second hand furniture for the unit. I remember talking to a tenant in the block of units, he asked me if the unit would be renting for $130 per week as this is what he was paying and he had a friend who wanted a unit in this block.
I told him we would be asking no less than $300 per week as we were furnishing the unit. We did get $300, later we increased the long term rental leases to $350 per week. At Christmas time we earned as much as $150 per night.
Within the first year Susan purchased another unit in the same block on the ground floor, this one had been totally renovated with a new kitchen and floating timber floors, plus it was the front unit so it enjoyed sea views from the bedroom windows. Within three years she told me a lovely three bedroom home she had sold to support her family had come back onto the market. This waterfront two storey home at Christies Beach was fabulous so I told her to put a contract on the home subject to the sale of her two units.
I was so lucky to sell the two units for a huge profit, we paid $170,000 and$197,100 and sold the units for $280,000 and $285,000, Susan was able to buy back the home she had loved and thought she had lost forever.
Why Real Estate?
It’s a wonderful medium to exercise your own creativity. Writing advertisements, editorials, brochures, information on the Internet, window displays and presenting marketing plans to vendors is a lot of fun.
Chapter Four
Your AWARE Mentor
Success in business comes sooner than you think when you have a mentor working with you.
If you choose to work with AWARE Properties we are happy to help you from day one. You can start as an AWARE Associate and we’ll teach you many facets of our business that can earn you a top income without having to gain your real estate license. Our training programs will get you started and once you are successful as an AWARE Associate you can enroll in a recognized real estate course at TAFE, the Real Estate Institute or the Real Estate College in your state and gain your Sales Certificate and full Property Manager’s license.
We will act as your mentor all the way until you are ready to start your own property business either on your own, or perhaps your own branch of AWARE Properties.
Through our web site www.awareproperties.com.au we will give you advice and encouragement and answer your questions directly via email. One of the things I found the hardest when I was attending my courses was the need for a mentor and I didn’t have one.
My employers were far too busy to help me and although the staff answered my questions they didn’t seem keen to share their knowledge and experience. There was always an overt competitive problem. They were worried all the time about losing listings and they certainly didn’t want to share commissions with other sales people in the office. I was never given an appointment for an appraisal. I had to find all my own properties to appraise and list for sale.
Contact Us
If you need help in any way please contact us, we want to ensure your life in the real estate industry is rewarding and fun. Whether you choose to be a property investor, a real estate salesperson, or a real estate agent with your own business, it doesn’t matter to us, we want to be your mentor and help you to achieve your goals as quickly as possible.
You are probably still wondering why I chose real estate as the business to encourage you to enter. I have worked in so many different industries and businesses of my own and in all of them the rewards were never as good as in real estate.
In all other businesses I’ve owned I had to buy stock - in real estate I have hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of stock (houses) on my office window and on www.awareproperties.com.au and I haven’t had to pay one cent to purchase any of them. How many businesses do you know where you can go into business today and have millions of dollars worth of stock to sell within a couple of months? Of course you will have Professional Indemnity Insurance to pay which is expensive these days, and there are the normal office expenses if you choose to open your own office one day, but I’m going to encourage you to work from your own home office, with no staff if you prefer, to ensure your overheads are very low. To make money in any business you need cash-flow and very low overheads, so this is where AWARE Properties can help you.
Property Listings
One of the first things you need to learn if you are going to sell or manage real estate is how to secure property listings. This means securing properties that are FOR SALE or RENT. I had a graduate in my office for about a month giving him work experience following a six week concentrated Real Estate Sales Certificate course he had completed at the Real Estate Institute of South Australia. In all that time he was unable to list a property, even though I gave him information on appraisals I’d completed. I told him to follow them up and list them himself.
The one thing he found very difficult to do was to pick up the telephone. He wasn’t prepared to knock on doors either, but he did call a few people who’d listed their own properties for private sale in the newspaper. This is a hard way to gain a listing but he tried. He soon gave up and got himself a job with a steady salary that didn’t depend on commission.
One major lesson you will need to learn is, it’s hard to get started. I was very lucky because my first property listing came from a friend from my church. A member of the congregation told me he was about to put his house up FOR SALE and was talking to real estate agents. I asked him if I could appraise his home. I must admit at the time, high house prices in Sydney probably influenced me to put a high price on his home.
I did all the right things, everything I was taught at the REI sales course. I printed out the comparable sales in the beachside suburb of Hove for the previous six months. I had details from the computer on the home I was selling and I drove around and compared my vendor’s home with those that had sold in the same suburb. But his home was the first two-storey home of its type to be built in this location, looking at the sea. It was lovely, had wonderful sea views and there was no other property to compare it with so I invited my boss along to the appraisal to gain his opinion of its value. My boss agreed with my appraised price, so I was happy.
The vendor accepted my marketing plan and I got the job to sell his home. The only problem was that he wanted to pay me 1% commission including GST of the gross sale price of the home. I couldn’t believe it, why so low? Evidently other agents in his local area were prepared to sell his home for only 1%. I managed to talk him into giving me 1.1% including GST and 10% commission including GST of any additional money I managed to get above the expected sales price I had quoted. My share of the commission was only 30% of the 1.1%. I had spent the first month full time at REI studying the law subjects and I wouldn’t receive any of the commission as I was already in debt with my boss and had to repay my retainers and car allowances that I received while at REI.
My boss suggested I take the opportunity to gain the experience, as it was more important than to earn a good income in the early days. While he was right about getting started, he was certainly not right about the low income. At his real estate agency they charged such small commissions on sales that in the nine months I was employed with the company my commissions were so low I ended up still in debt to
