Inflated Property Returns

I was talking to someone recently about our property in Florida, and was saying how the expenses were higher than we first imagined, and in turn our return is a bit less than what we were hoping for. Initially I was hoping for a net yield of around 8.00%, I thought this might be a bit optimistic but going through the numbers before purchasing a property, it seemed like a realistic value.

But after obtaining our property in Florida and seeing first hand the expenses, it seems that despite being fairly conservative in our initial assumptions, the return is still less than what we initially hoped for. However, if you rearrange the numbers a little, the investment looks better and perhaps even a bit more realistic as well. See below for the initial and subsequent calculations which show net yield returns.

Initial Calculations

The Net Yield of 0.56% is less than desirable, and if we were told we would be getting this return then I don't know if we would have taken the leap to invest in the US as the hassle would just not be worth it. Although I did not include any capital gains on the property (as our plan is for cash flow) this can be  disregarded as the cash flow target simply has not been met.

But by making some adjustments to the calculations, like shifting some of the expenses to the capital (moving the cost of the A/C unit and the whitegoods under capital expenditure), the numbers start to look much better. This is realistic as these expenses are not a yearly expense and you would hope that a new A/C unit would last a few years at least, the same with the white goods. Further, you can remove the cost of PI  insurance (as this expense is not dedicated to this single property and will cover all properties under the LLC) and include it as part of the LLC's general overheads.

Adjusted Calculations

As you can see by adjusting the calculations to perhaps more realistic figures, we have now obtained our 8.00% Net Yield that we were hoping. It is important to note that both situations are essentially identical with all expenses included in both examples (with the exception of PI Insurance), yet it is simply a different way of
calculating that gives you a very different result.

I think this is a good sign to be careful when seeing advertisements purporting unbelievable returns. You should always look through the numbers yourself and satisfy yourself that what is being advertised is achievable. You should also always check whether the returns are 'gross' or 'net' yield and what expenses have been considered.

The End Of Our First Tenant

We got the news the other day that our tenant at our first US property has left. They had signed a 12 month lease, and yet they have vacated the property after little over 3 months.

According to our property manager, the husband's grandmother had fallen sick, and the family moved to a different state to be by her side and help her out. It is unfortunate for us because not only have we lost our tenant that had so far been quite good to us, they also left in such a hurry, that the property was left with a lot of rubbish and a lot of cleaning required. I was hoping to be able to get some photos of the state the property was left in, because one person's definition of trashed could be another person's definition of perfectly acceptable.

Regardless of the condition of the property, we have had cleaners go in and fix up the property, and it is back on the market and hopefully we will be able to find a new tenant in the coming weeks. The tenant did pay a bond of one month's rent, so this should more than cover the cleaning bill required, but there are still other costs that leave us out of pocket.

Firstly, the tenant had not paid rent for the month of September, and they had left halfway through, so we are out of pocket a couple weeks' rent there. Also, the property management we have, charge a fee of one month's rent for finding a new tenant.

Sometimes there is a benefit of a tenant leaving in that you can justify in raising the rent for the next tenant, which can sometimes be a little difficult with an existing tenant. But unfortunately, in this situation, the market has not really moved significantly enough and it looks like we will have to stick with aiming to get a tenant in there paying $700 per month.

So at the end of the day, this is the the end of our first tenant, I am sure it could have gone a lot worse but also it could have gone a lot better. Hopefully our next one will be able to stay on to at least fulfil the end of the lease they sign on for.

Placing an Offer

When we first started looking at properties in the US, our first reaction was of amazement, simply due to the amount of properties that were for sale. Not only just by the sheer bulk of properties, but the amount of properties available under $50,000. Even though we had narrowed our search down to Lee County area in Florida, which includes Fort Myers, Lehigh Acres and Cape Coral, there were still hundreds of properties listed for sale.

Looking at information on Lee County, the population is approximately 620,000. Yet there is more houses for sale in this area than there is in the whole of Sydney, which has a population closer to 4,000,000. I guess when we saw data like this, it just shows the crisis the area was in.

So our initial thoughts would be that finding a property would not be a problem at all, there almost seems like there is an unlimited supply of houses, so when we are ready we can simply go in, put an offer in, get accepted and be done with the search and start investing. I think I was also falsely optimistic when I purchased my first house in Sydney. I only really looked for a couple weekends, went to approximately 6 open inspections of houses, submitted one offer and it was accepted. So I started to think that there was nothing stressful at all about trying to find a house.

Once we started to dig a little deeper in the Lee County houses, we soon found why there were so many houses listed for sale, basically 90% of them were just not worth the money, even for $50,000 they were just dead investments, either they had Chinese dry wall issues all throughout, or they were trashed inside by the previous owners leaving the property needing tens of thousands of remedial works. Quite often houses had termite damage, or simply the properties were just too far away for anyone to want to live there. A lot of the properties were also in undesirable areas, such as areas with a strong gang presence, typically Mexican gangs in this area.

So here we are now, looking at hundreds and hundreds of houses, where only 10% are of any good, still sound like there is not much of a problem. With discussion between the property manager and ourselves, we can find out if a house is worth it or not. Unfortunately, as I have discussed in a different post, there is a difficulty with communicating with our property manager in Florida, with the time zones making it very hard to have an effective and efficient talk. These delays meant that the properties we saw that met our desired criteria had just about always been sold before we had the chance of putting an offer in. The good properties seem to get snapped up very quickly, normally within hours of being put up for listing, seems professional investors keep a very close eye on new listings, and are ready to act fast. It made it very hard to compete with people like this, I imagine it would have been a lot easier if we had been in Florida in person and been able to work physically together with our property manager when trying to find a property.

As you can see, with things going very fast, it is important that you have everything ready when you start placing offers on houses, this turned out to be quite annoying for us, as we had $40,000 sitting in our Interactive Brokers account, in US Dollars, waiting to be used to buy a house. This would have been fine, except we initially put the money into the account in December 2011, we did not end up purchasing a property late April 2012, so there was effectively 5 months of money doing nothing for us. This money was taken out of my home loan offset account, which meant I was forced to pay extra interest. At a 7% interest rate, this equated to an extra $1,200 or so, a significant amount.

So although we did not end up getting a property until April 2012, we did start putting offers in on properties from December 2011, at first we were very hesitant and thorough, making sure we read through all the offer documents and making sure we understood everything, over time we were able to trust our property manager more and in the end we almost signed the offer papers without even reading them. There is a cooling out period in the offers, typically 10 days, so we were able to withdraw the offers if they were accepted, and we had a better chance to be able to look through the property.

At the start, we also only made sure we had one offer in at any one time, if we submitted offers on more than one property, if they were both accepted, we would be responsible to purchase the properties, well actually I guess we could cancel one of them during the cooling off period, but it was still dangerous to offer on more than one property just in case. But soon we found that the waiting time between submitting an offer and being notified if you were successful or not, was weeks, so it was just wasting our time. So we ended up quite often having offers on up to 5 properties concurrently. We also found that short sales tended to be even slower, and would quite often sit with the banks for months before they accepted or rejected the offer.

In the end the property we purchased ended up being a short sale. I cannot remember the exact timeline of how everything went, but from memory it was something like this -

January 5th 2012 - Initial offer submitted at $42,900
January 10th 2012 - Offer accepted by owner of the house
January 20th 2012 - Bank counteroffers with $44,000
January 31st 2012 - We re-offer the asking price of $44,000
March 10th 2012 - Bank reject our offer for the property
March 25th 2012 - Bank changes decision and says offer is back on the table
April 3rd 2012 - Bank accepts offer for $44,000
April 28th 2012 - Money transferred into title account, house is officially ours!

As you can see from the above, there were a couple of months between initial submission of the offer, and the final purchase of the property. Being a short sale, the bank seems to slow down the process to a snail's pace. Which to be honest I do not understand, you would think a bank is trying to get as much money as they can, and although they are accepting a loss on the property as the sale price would not match the existing loan, it is still better than holding on to the property.

Anyway, in summary, I believe we submitted offers on about 20 properties, and approximately 16 of those were rejected by the owner or the bank, 3 or so would have been withdrawn by us due to issues found during a more stringent inspection, and lucky last was accepted and is now officially ours. 

If you have any questions, please feel free to email us at streamlineinvesting@gmail.com

Why we chose Fort Myers

When we first started looking at investing in the US, there seemed to be almost unlimited amounts of opportunities. The opportunities were not limited to a specific area; they were literally all over the country. We would read stories about one investor who made money flipping properties in Las Vegas, another who purchased unit blocks in Detroit, others who invested in Atlanta, etc. Basically it seemed like we could find good properties in a number of places, all of which had advantages and disadvantages. At the end of the day, when we finally picked a place, we made it based on a hunch, I believe that you could invest in a number of areas and be successful, but by selecting Florida as a state, it at least meant one decision was finished and we could focus on the next steps.

So why did we choose Florida?
As I said before, we really only chose Florida as a necessity to make a decision, where the result of the decision was not that important, but it was essential that a decision was made. One of the reasons we chose Florida is that the properties there seemed to experience the biggest gain in value during the real estate boom, and subsequently experienced just about the biggest loss since the bust. For example, the property we purchased for $44,000 in 2012 was sold for $133,000 in 2007 and $110,000 in 2004. So although the value of the house in 2007 was undoubtedly too high for what it is worth, we believe the house is still worth significantly more what we paid for it. And this was a similar situation all across the state, where property values had dropped by upwards of 75% of its value from just a couple of years ago. So expectation of capital gains was a big factor for us, if the value of our property reaches half of what it was in 2007, then that is a 50% capital gain of what we paid for it.

Another factor for us was the properties in Florida seemed to be relatively newer compared to other places we were looking. One option for us was Rochester in New York State, where many properties had very high rental yields, but it was very common for the properties to be nearly 100 years old, and although maintained all those years, still showing significant signs of wear and tear. Whereas in Florida, and typically in the Fort Myers area, there were thousands of houses that were built during the boom, which are now for sale, so there was a good opportunity to get a house that is less than 10 years old and still in as new condition. Actually there were several properties that had never been lived in before. However it should be noted that there are many instances of defective drywall in newer properties called "Chinese Drywall" which should be avoided at all costs. So age of property was a big factor for us, although in the end, we ended up purchasing a house that was built in 1966, so one of the factors that drew us to Florida, we did not really adhere to in the end.

We also knew that tourism is a big industry for Florida, and since there will almost always be tourists of some nature, there would always be associated business that would aid in the economy of the local area. So while several areas seemed to have dying industry (Detroit being a big one), we believed Florida to at least be able to maintain the tourism industry. Part of the tourism aspect is the fact that Florida is a popular retirement area of the US, with a lot of senior citizens looking to escape the cold northern states and into the tropical Florida climate, with an ageing population, we believed that in the future, Florida's population would only increase and there will always be some demand to live in this area.

There are many other positive aspects, and it should be noted there are also a lot of other negative aspects with Florida compared to other areas in the US. I have not been able to go into them, but above I have outlined our main reasons for investing in Florida, at the end of the day, choosing an area to invest in, when there is so much choice, is just a personal preference and you need to make a decision that you are comfortable with.

Why do we choose Fort Myers?
Again narrowing down a state to a certain area was no easy task, there seemed to almost be unlimited areas where we could obtain the results we wanted. One of the biggest factors was that we knew a fellow successful property investor, Steve McKnight, was investing in the area. Being a very successful and astute investor, we believed that he would have put careful consideration in selecting an area to invest in, so in a way we took that as a reason that it would be a good area to invest in. In a similar way, if you see McDonalds is building a new restaurant somewhere, then it is typically a good place to invest in property too, as the people at McDonalds would have put significant effort in choosing a location, and it is not common that they get these things wrong.

Another factor in choosing a specific area was we found a property manager we really trusted and wanted to work with. Our agent is originally from Australia but now works out of Florida, so she understands our position and knows the issues that we will run into before we experience them ourselves. So as I have said before, rather than finding an agent in a place, sometimes it can be effective to just find an agent and invest in where they operate, as a good agent is worth their weight in gold at the end of the day.

So these are the reasons why we selected the area we ended up investing in, like I said at the start, there seems to be an opportunity everywhere. So it is not always important what decision you make, just as long as you make the decision. If you want any more information on how we came to select our location, or anything else you wish to ask us, feel free to email us at streamlineinevesting@gmail.com

Is it worth spending the money?

With our first property in the US. We had to carry out some small renovations to get it up to scratch in order to find a good tenants. Most of the renovations were only small, such as painting walls, repair some minor damage and clean up the property as it had been left vacant for a few months.

On the quote from the contractor was replacing the carpet with tiles. There is obviously a benefit with tiles compared to carpet with regards for an investment property, as tiles are typically more lasting and can be cleaned a lot easier. The existing carpet was slightly worn and had a few stains, but overall it was not in too bad a condition. The quote to replace with tiles was $2,900, we opted not to spend the extra money and just hired a good carpet cleaner for $200 to give all the carpet a thorough clean.

After the carpet cleaner did their work, the carpet was a lot cleaner, but there was still an issue of smell, aparently the old owner had animals, and the smell of dog was almost ingrown into the carpet. Having not being able to visit the property we only heard the issue from our agent, and we were told that although it was not great, it should not stop us getting a tenant.

When we started looking for a tenant, we received a positive response on the property generally, apart from the smell of the carpet. That was the deal breaker with the first few groups who were looking at the property. Due to this, we had to reduce our advertised rent from $800 per month to $700 per month. There was also the delay of approximately 1 month due to the vacant property which we had to deal with. I cannot say for certain that the property would have rented right away for $800 per month if we did replace the carpet with tiles, but I am confident that this would have been the case.

So if we did initially spend the money to replace the carpet, then we would have made back our money in a couple years. Not to mention, replacing the tiles would have also added value to the property, so any money spent on renovations for the property would have been instantly rewarded in a capital gain.

So although we still receive a decent return, it seems it may have been worthwhile replacing the carpet with tiles while we were renovating the property. I guess it is just important to know if improvements you plan on doing to the property, will really be worth it in the long term. Down the line we may plan on approaching our tenant about replacing the carpet with tiles, and perhaps negotiating a higher rent from them, so all may not be lost.

If you want more information from our experience, or any other comments. Feel free to email us at streamlineinvesting@gmail.com

Disclosure: The article is not to be taken as investment advice and the views expressed are opinions only.  Readers should seek advice from someone who claims to be qualified before considering allocating capital in any investment.

Huntdale Street - Lehigh Acres PHOTOS

Our property on Huntdale Street in Lehigh Acres, Florida was our first property. 

Click here for a map to the location - LINK

See below for some photos of the property so you can get an idea of what $44,000 can buy you in this area. 

We had to spend approximately $4,000 on renovations to get it up to rentable condition. Not much was required however, just some general cleaning, a new door was required for one room and painting of most of the rooms was needed. Please see below for some photos after the renovations were complete.

First US House Expectations

There is no point investing without a plan. If you simply choose to invest and do not have a goal, then most likely you will not succeed. Of course you may get lucky, but investing and just hoping to get lucky, is not really a strategy. Definitely not a successful one. 

That being said, with our US property investing, we were not 100% sure how well it would work, our plan was to purchase one property, if it worked out well, then we could continue this and keep purchasing more and build our portfolio in the US. If we found that the US did not work well for us, then we could cut our losses and get onto a different investment strategy.

Because we were only hoping to invest $50,000 for our first US property, it would not break the bank if we failed, whereas if we invested in Australia, we would still have a significant mortgage lying over our heads. This is why we felt that investing in the US, although it may seem a lot riskier, we actually think due to the lesser investment amount, it is almost a safer bet than investing in Australian property.

Below I have outlined what we initially predicted our investment to be like in the US, we were hoping to be conservative so that there was more chance of us surpassing our expectations, rather than not meeting them.

Initial Information

House Price + Renovations = $50,000

Monthly Rent = $750

Gross Yield = 16.8% (not the highest that we have seen in the US, but we were comfortable with this amount)

Deductions

Property Tax = $1,000

Maintenance = $800

Insurance = $850 per annum

Vacanct Rate = 5% (750 x 12 x 0.95 = $8,550)

Property Management Fees = 10% of gross rent  ($8,550 x 0.1 = $855)

Tax = 30% ($8,550 x 0.3 = $2,565)

Net Return

This gives our net return of $8,550 - $855 - $1,000 - $800 - $850 - $2,565 = $2,480

Net Yield = 4.96% 

The return does not look that impressive and it seems like you could invest in a high interest term deposit and receive a similar return, however it is important to look at the capital gains aspect of it. If the property value increases by 5%, then the net return will go up to almost $5,000 or near a 10% yield return.

Now that we have our first property, I will be keeping track of all expenses for the property and can see if our initial assumptions were accurate. Hopefully by learning more information we can refine our assumptions for future investments and be able to make more accurate information.

If you would like more information about our US Investments or anything, please send us an email at streamlineinvesting@gmail.com

Disclosure: The article is not to be taken as investment advice and the views expressed are opinions only.  Readers should seek advice from someone who claims to be qualified before considering allocating capital in any investment.

Insurances for our US Property

With our property in Florida recently being purchased, and the renovations just about complete. The next step was to ensure we were insured properly. One of our biggest fears was that a tenant would slip over in the shower and then sue us for everything we had, probably a bit dramatic but was still a real concern for us. Even though we have the property owned in our LLC, we thought that this meant the total liability we could be facing was everything the LLC owned, i.e the property. I mean this is what Limited Liability Companys are used for right? To limit the liability, at least that is what I initially believed. Although it is true in most cases, in the situation where the owner of the house has been extremely neglient and there is a serious injury or death due to this neglience, then the law system may have the power to go after the personal assets of my business partner and I. 

To be honest, I have not looked into the potential to be sued as an individual too much, I have only been told that is is a possibility, especially in America where anything seems possible. Due to this, we have to make sure we protect ourselves as best as possible with all the necessary insurances. Our property agent set us up with a contact who is able to sort out insurances for us, she recommended that we procure three different insurances for our property

Flood Protection - although in a 'low risk' flood zone, it is still recommended

Personal Liability - otherwise known as Umbrella insurance to protect the landlord for being sued as above

Property Insurance - self explanatory, building insurance should the property sustain significant damage

We initially received quotes for the insurances and below were the premiums (received on 24/5/2012):

Flood Protection - $343 per annum

Personal Liability - $410 per annum for $300,000 cover

Property Insurance - $1,826 per annum

The property insurance quote definitely raised my eyebrows, it was a fair bit higher than I initially was hoping for. Also along with this, due to the age of the property (it was built in 1966) we were required to have a roof stability report carried out, as well as a wind mitigation report conducted. To be honest I don't even know what a wind mitigation report is, I assume it just analyses the capacity of the property to withstand strong gusts of winds? Anyway, each report is only about $100 each so I have no problem getting them both carried out to satisfy the insurance company.

Back to the $1,826 quote for property insurance, looking through the quote, I noticed the property is being insured for $192,000. This seems a bit ridiculous seeing as only paid $44,000 for the property and spent $5,000 on renovations. So I would expect we only require it to be insured for around $75,000 to fully cover our investment on the property. Flood protection was similar, the property was being covered for $200,000, well over its actual value. Also there was contents insurance associated with the flood protection to the sum of $80,000, which again is not realistic as we not be renting out this property furnished, so we would only provide the bare minimum to the tenant, assume only $10,000 cover would be required for contents.

To be honest I am curious how this works, seeing as my home insurance for my house in Sydney is only $640 per year, and I paid $350,000 for this property a couple years ago. And yet, a property over there worth $44,000 requires $1,800 in insurance a year? Three times the cost of insurance for a property worth an eighth of what mine is in Sydney, it really does not make sense. I do understand that they are looking at replacement cost of the property, rather than the actual property value. So it very well may be that it would cost $192,000 to rebuild the property. But still, when I put the same property details into a quote generator with AAMI Home Insurance, the home insurance premiums were still only $750 a year, so I really do not understand where the extra $1,000 or so comes from.

After emailing the insurance broker, we found out that $1,200 of the cover for the home insurance was for wind cover. This seemed very excessive seeing as the property is relatively inland (approximately 20 miles) so most of the damage from a hurricane would subside, and also the property has been around since 1966 and never had wind damage previously. Due to this we opted to remove and wind cover for the property, bringing the property insurance level to $586. We were also able to reduce the flood protection cover from $200,000 to $100,000, which reduced our premium by half down to $174.

The final amounts we ended up paying for our property insurance were -

Flood Protection - $174 per annum
Personal Liability - $410 per annum
Property Insurance - $586 per annum
TOTAL - $1,170.00


To be honest it was still a bit higher than we initially were hoping for, but I guess it seems like a standard rate for the area so not much we can do about that. Removing the wind cover makes the total cost a lot more accessible for our budgets. It should also be noted that the personal liability insurance should be able to cover us under all of our properties, not just the individual property.

I was also talking to another investor who opted to not provide any property insurance, their argument was that they would most likely not bother claiming on the insurance for anything minor, and anything major is such an unlikely event that it was not worth worrying about. Their typical property value was around $40,000 and by saving the $17,000 a month in insurance fees (they had hundreds of properties), as long as a large fire or similar didn't occur more frequently than every 3 months, they would come out on top. I believe they are happy with their situation and have come out on top without using insurance at all. This is definitely one approach that can be taken, however for our first investment, we have chosen to have some security for us, if our port folio substantially increases and insurance starts eating significantly into our profits, our line of thought may change.

Anyway that was our experience with insurance for the properties, I guess at the end of the day it is important to question the costs of everything, it is easy to just assume it is the going rate over there, seeing as we do not know much about it. But by simply asking questions and realising what cover we need and what we can do without, we were able to reduce our premiums by half. And my business partner and I are more than comfortable with the amount of insurance we have. If we feel it is not enough, there is nothing stopping us increasing the cover next time when we renew our insurance.

Disclosure: The article is not to be taken as investment advice and the views expressed are opinions only.  Readers should seek advice from someone who claims to be qualified before considering allocating capital in any investment.

1st Purchase!

28th April 2012

So today was the day we have been waiting for the best part of 2 years ago. We finally landed our first property in the US. Like I said we started this adventure about 2 years ago, it has been filled with a lot of ups and downs, not to mention a lot of frustrations. But in the end, we have learnt so much on or journey. We do not plan on this being our only property in the US, so we hope that this information will allow us to streamline the process for future deals. Also we have a lot of things set up (LLC, Property Agent, Property Management) for this first sale, so we hope to be able to start looking for a new property very soon.

This property we were able to purchase in cash, the total price was $44,000, so we were fortunate enough to between us have that much saved up. As we have exhausted a significant amount of our savings, we will hope to obtain finance for the next purchase, however we will need to establish some sort of credit rating prior to being able to do this.

Over the next few weeks we will outline all of the steps we went through to purchase this property, hopefully it will allow people who follow in our footsteps to be able to streamline their efforts and make it easier for themselves. I believe our next one will be very difficult too however, with the added requirement of needing to obtain finance for the property.

Once everything is settled, we will also provide all the expenses we have incurred in order to obtain the property initially, and also to maintain the property successfully, once we have some history with this property, hopefully we will provide an accurate record for everyone.

But for now, it is definitely time to celebrate, along the way I had doubts that this would simply never happen, that it was all too difficult, that there were simply too many obstacles in our way that were there to stop us, but eventually we were able to prevail and now we are looking forward to our next step in our investing journey.

How to Finalise the Paperwork When Purchasing a US Property

When signing any official document in America, you need it to be witness by a Notary Public. A Notary Public in the US is similar to a Justice of Peace in Australia and is just as common over there. In Australia, a Notary Public is much less common (they are generally a practising solicitor with around 10 years experience) and MUCH more expensive.

When we had the offer on our first property approved, we needed to get the closing documents witnessed by a Notary Public with both of us present. As both of us work full-time as Civil Engineers and on the opposite sides of Sydney, this posed a problem. Finding a Notary Public that worked outside regular business hours and didn't cost an arm and a leg proved very difficult. A Notary usually charges on a per hour or per document fee and you will be hard pressed to find anyone to witness a set of documents for under $200.

To find a Notary Public, use this link in Australia - http://www.notarylocator.com.au/

The Notary Public we chose works at Chatswood and was very easy to work with. He was very interested in our US Investing and was actually working on investing over there himself. He did not have much experience with the whole purchase of a US property and the forms involved, so it was a bit of a learning process for all of us. One thing that we were very impressed with was his professionalism and thoroughness. This is crutial when selecting a good Notary Public.

When we contacted our Notary for a quote, he asked us to send him the documents via email so that he knew exactly what he had to do. Others simply gave us a figure (sometimes much less and sometimes much more than our Notary) without really giving this too much thought. Our Notary ended up quoting us for $380 for his services.

You need to be well prepared when visiting a Notary and have the following documents ready:

• Two types of photo identification (preferably with your signatures on them like a Passport and Driver's License)
• Proof of ownership of the company or entity that you are purchasing under
• Evidence that your company is in good standing and is active at the time of the purchase

The whole process took around an hour (we had around 12 forms in total that we had to sign and about 6 or so that the Notary had to witness). In the end he decided to charge us only $350 for his work, a bit less than the initial quote, but still a fairly expensive exercise. When we deposited the money into his bank account, we decided to split the difference and sent over $365.

It seemed that both parties were happy with how all this turned out, he asked us interesting questions about our US investing so it was good to get some more critical information from a different perspective. It was a win-win situation that we created, which we believe is important because we intend to purchase several more properties over the next year or so.

If you are from Sydney or are visiting and would like to have an appointment with our Notary, then feel free to email us and we can pass on his information. He is very helpful and we are more than happy to use hime again.