Today I wanted to cover identifying potential development suburbs and development sites.
In our latest development, we chose the Central Coast suburb of Long Jetty for a number of key reasons.
Firstly, my wife Amy has grown up in the area and spent her whole life living and understanding the area and the people in it. That was really crucial to us because that gave us a head start in in researching the area.
Secondly, we were only one suburb away from the beach, but not actually on the beach. So we weren’t paying massive land prices for that.
Thirdly, we believe there is a regentrification process happening in Long Jetty and that there has been for some time. Old shops are turning into new shops and that’s driving the economy in the local area.
Now the fourth piece to the puzzle is that we believe Long Jetty is definitely landlocked in the sense that to the north there is lake, to the east there is beach and to the west there’s also lake. So, that means that there’s limited land supply and also puts demand for owner-occupiers to come and live in the area which obviously brings up property prices.
Now for finding the site.
So the key drivers in finding potential sites in the suburb of Long Jetty were that we know through our dealings with council that we needed a minimum 700 square metre block and also needed to make sure that we could create two torrens title townhouses on there if we needed to. Going into strata title with smaller blocks meant that there was a massive oversupply of strata title. Whereas we believe torrens title town houses had the appeal to them and and not as many of those were going to be built in and around the Long Jetty suburb.
In identifying the right block, we’d already done a development in Long Jetty prior, so we had already had experience with the local council and the local builder. But if you’re doing it for the first time you would need to make sure you sat down with council, sat down with builders and got a really good understanding of that local area to ensure that before you execute a purchase that you’ve done your due diligence around that.
So, in finding the RIGHT potential site you need to get creative.
Now the conventional way of going about finding a site is to look at realestate.com.au, look in the local rag, and talk to Real Estate agents. Now that’s ok, and it might find you something that you need, but we believe it’s a much longer process because you’re competing with everyone else out there wanting the same thing as you.
The way we got creative was to speak to family, friends, associates and anyone in the area that knew we were on the lookout for buying a potential site. We also kept very close with real estate agents – I call it the “squeaky wheel syndrome”, where we’re always knocking on their door saying “keep us front of mind if something comes up that we may be able to secure off market”.
Now in this instance, we were actually lucky enough to find that one of our friends knew someone who was looking to sell but didn’t want to really use the whole Real Estate Agent process and dealing with open houses etc. So, we in short, due to our creative approach, were lucky enough to find exactly what we wanted.
If we didn’t tell our friends and family that we were looking for this type of block, our options would have been limited and this opportunity may not have presented itself.
So get out there and GET CREATIVE!
Thinking of developing? Shoot me an email at john@solverewealth.com.a