Here with another interview, this time with a solicitor. Good friend of mine. I was going to call you an old friend of mine,but yeah that’s yeah I’d rather say good friend of mine, that Martin Collins from Collins legal and Martin could you just tell us a bit about yourself your business and and and how you work with property buyers, property investors and specifically.
Sure. So I’ve been in the legal game for over 30 years. My current practice I’ve been operating for the past 12 years on my own with a small staff. We do a lot of conveyancing. Most of it is referral work from brokers and I think our point of difference in that is that we’re always quick to report back to our referrers and to keep the good line of communication open and to be good with our service.
Great. And yes we we’ve been working together for a number of years. Tell us a bit about what you’re seeing in the market in the last 12 months or at the moment with people buying investment properties especially with all the issues we’ve had with the Royal Commission and so on from your perspective.
Well it’s been a big change over the last 12 months. The beginning of that time a lot of move a lot of movement in the market. A lot of interest things were going very well with the Royal Commission. It’s been harder and harder to for investors to get loan. And we are finding that especially for people buying off the plan. They were having problems with the banks constantly lowballing the valuations on on the on the land or the house and land and packages they were buying and finding that they perhaps had to shop around a lot more in order to get that loan across the line. So that’s been a big problem for them and and especially investors in Brisbane found that they were getting a lot of pressure from the valuation side.
All right because your your based here in Sydney and in in Baulkham Hills in Norwest Business Park. And you you mentioned Brisbane you do conveyancing not just here in New South Wales but for Queensland as well.
Yes I had a referrer who was linked with a developer on Hope Island and we did a batch of purchases into a off the plan development up there which is six towers in total. Right. And that gave me the grounding to then ride the wave off of Queensland property investment which seemed to come and has been over the past couple of years. OK. Especially in Sydney seeing it’s a lower buy in. Good rental return. And it’s been ticking along quite nicely until recently with the problems with investment.
Have you noticed any improvements in the market in the last few months.
There’s been a bit of interest but most referrers that I’m talking to are saying that, that moved out of the investor market and more concentrating on first time buyers. And the future for the rest of this year. Where do you see the market going or any insights you might have.
Well I’m still seeing some interest in clients that I have coming back and selling and having interest in selling and buying land. There’s still value in the market and especially I’m talking Sydney now. So I think I think with the election people tend to close down a bit. So I’d like to get the two elections out of the way I know then people can get a bit more confidence and move on always. It’s a bit of a disruption and people that don’t like uncertainty, No. And once all those things are sorted out I think we’ll start to see a pick up towards the end of the year and any general advice for people looking to buy or sell from a you know anything from a conveyancing point of view, to people looking at buying investment properties specifically.
But in general so I think the biggest thing that I’d be concerned about at the moment is with apartments a lot of Sydney apartments are getting caught up with this whole cladding business and even this building that we’re sitting in there has been talk about the cladding on the building. So a lot of owners are getting stuck with that potentially could get stuck with that. You saw the fire in the apartment block about a month ago. Also a certain number of the new apartments are not quite up to what they should be in terms of quality and a number of body corporates are finding that they have to put their hand in their pocket to do some either chasing the developer or they’re putting their in the property or having to pay out to fund structural repairs. And we’ve seen that most dramatically in that apartment block in the Surry Hills and somewhere in the inner city anyway right. Everyone had to leave, the in Homebush. Yeah yeah. He still left anyway. So I think care should be taken in by apartments in fact I have a call from a homeowner who was selling an apartment and got badmouthed by the. The estate. The the body corporate manager who said that they had ignored a request by them to do work on the unit and it was affecting a sale. Wow. I don’t know whether he didn’t know where that came from where the comment came from. So just be a little careful. Any other insights or if we’re getting any questions from anyone for for about buying a property please let us know. Any other general questions or anyone else that you’d like to hear from. Please reach out to us whether if you’re listening to us on the podcast on any of the other platforms.
