Our Avondale Blockhouse Bay Road property was on a 12-month fixed term rental agreement ending December 2007. Into the 13th month of the tenancy, Latu - our first long-term tenant - gave notice to move out. They have BOUGHT A HOUSE and him and his family are moving into their own home! We congratulate him sincerely as this is a huge event in anyone’s life - and not an easy step with the high house prices in Auckland.

This left us looking for a tenant. Quite difficult really when you’re on the other side of the world. Fortunately several things were on our side:

1. We have *AWESOME* property managers - Greg and Helen who have been looking after Blockhouse Bay Rd for us. Thanks guys!

2. It’s summer in New Zealand - the BEST time to be putting a property up for rent (or be selling a house). Especially at the beginning of the year. People have time, days are long and everybody is generally in a good mood because of the sun!

3. The unit is actually a very nice unit. Even though it’s quite small it’s newly renovated and is tidy and very cosy.

4. The unit is great value. Everybody that looks at it always tells us that it’s a fantastic unit in comparison to similar ones in the area. This is always great to hear as we have put quite a bit of blood and sweat into it!

In line with my thoughts on the state of the rental market in Auckland a few months back we raised the rent by just over 6%. I also did some research on Trademe to make sure that the new rent was similar but also competitive for similar properties in the area.

So, as usual, up went the ad on Trademe:

The response was unbelievable:

In a single day there were over 1000!! hits and Greg had over 30 people come through to have a look during the open-home. It seems like there is some serious shortage of good-value rental properties in the Auckland area and we were wondering whether we have put the rent to low.. I wonder how one could deal with this next time. Considering we have listed the asking rent on the ad I don’t see how we can raise it once people start responding to it..

The property was rented out the following day (TTR = 1 day) for another 12-month term breaking our previous TTR (Time To Rent) record of 4 days. This one’s going to be hard to beat!

Being an investment property owner I like to compare the current worth of properties similar to ours in the same area. This is easy to do with Trademe Property. They have over 50,000 properties listed so whether buying, selling or renting out the site can be a good indicator of current market values, rents etc. as there are bound to be comparable properties in almost any area in New Zealand. (And their search functionality is great - especially the “search surrounding suburbs option”). I haven’t found anything like this yet here in Vancouver.

Looking through Trademe today I stumbled on the following “For Sale” ad. In case it sells and gets pulled off the site here is the most important detail:

This unit is in the SAME block of units on Blockhouse Bay Rd (Avondale, Auckland) as our one so it’s perfect for comparison.

It’s about the same size and it’s also a downstairs unit like ours - this one has a bit more deck space and is probably a bit more sunny as ours is a corner unit. On the other hand it is in original condition inside (1960’s cupboards, old kitchen & bathroom, old wiring, bare concrete block walls etc.) whereas our unit is completely renovated and modernised.

Given all of the above it is nice to see the asking price being upwards of $175,000. Although this doesn’t mean that it will sell for that much it is encouraging to see the price keeps moving in a positive direction considering what’s going on in the market at the moment. At the end of last year these units were being listed for $159K - $165K and so this is over a $10K jump - almost a 10% increase over the year - in line with long-term averages. And this is during a time where we are constantly reminded that property investment is on the downturn and growth is flattening off - well, certainly not in Avondale.

Based on the above asking price the capital value of our property investment has risen well over 20% since we acquired it 2 years ago.

Avondale as an area has always shown positive growth with the proximity to the city and with much expansion and upgrades happening around Avondale central the area seems to still be going strong. I wish we could’ve bought more of those units back then