Day 12 of the lockdown. I hope everybody is keeping safe and well?
On occasions like this they say that no news is good news. There haven’t been any significant new issues that have arisen for the rental property market in the last week so we can consider that as good.
I am pleasantly surprised at the low number of tenants that have not paid their rent so far. I am sure that this will change the further we get into lockdown, and more so if the lockdown is extended. I will get in touch with you directly if your tenants have any issues.
Housing and accommodation are still not deemed to be an essential service, which in my opinion is crazy. This means that no-one can move house – unless they can do it within their own bubble and use their existing transport e.g. no moving trucks are allowed.
Unfortunately, we have a few owners that had just joined the Hamilton Property Management family, some with houses that they had just bought (and settled) as the lockdown began. We have not been able to hold viewings for some of these properties, and some others we have tenants ready to go but they cannot move in. As soon as the lockdown finishes we will be working hard to get them sorted.
Some good news for property investors is that interest rates are coming down, some are now available around 3%. Banks are offering Mortgage holidays to owners that are struggling with mortgage repayments, there is quite a bit of information available about this on the internet. If you are thinking about doing this please do your homework, you WILL incur extra interest on the payments that you don’t make, which will increase the mortgage amount. In my opinion it definitely helps solve short term issues but can have longer term implications.
What is new in Hamilton Property Management?
It is a good time for us to look at how we do things and identify what we can do better to continue providing you with a great service. One area we are working on now is using a 360 camera to do walkthroughs of available rental properties. We will also trial using 360 photographs for ingoing inspections, one photo in a room is all you need and you can see everything really clearly in that room.
Examples:
Walkthrough of a house https://ashcrofthomes.co.nz/virtual-tours/ walk around the house by clicking on the direction you want to go. The small circles are where the next pictures have been taken from to get different perspectives, click on the circles to move.
360 photos https://kuula.co/post/7vLfl and https://kuula.co/post/7qxVd. You will see how clear everything is and you can spin it around and zoom in and out to see details.
That is all for now. If you need to discuss anything please don’t hesitate to contact me any time.
Yours sincerely
Jeremy Barker
Hamilton Property Management
022 0122530