We live in a world of instant gratification. Almost everything you want can be purchased at the press of a button and turn up at your door within days if not hours.
Problem is, achieving goals generally involves putting in some hard yakka, a big dollop of persistence and a lot of patience.
So if you ask me if there are any shortcuts to becoming an Area Expert, my answer is always no. If you want the result, you have to put in the work. Getting educated is an important part of becoming a property developer.
Having said that, there are ways to speed up the process.
The best starting place is to actually think about what you're trying to achieve when you decide to become an Area Expert. I think of it as a spiral.
You start at a macro level, which is the beginning of the spiral, and gradually you circle inwards, getting more and more detailed, or micro, as you go, until you're basically ready to start looking at individual development properties.
As you circle around the spiral, each level feeds into the next one, guiding you as to which area you need to focus on more closely.
On the outer, macro level, you're looking for the big picture factors that play into being an area expert:
Discovering this information will then lead you to more specific Council areas that have been targeted for growth. Then you can take the next step in researching the Council as part of your due diligence:
Once you've done this loop on your spiral, you should be getting an idea of what suburbs show the most potential for property development. At a suburb level, you then start looking at:
Examining these factors should mean you can start getting a feel for the different areas within the suburb. This is when it's a good idea to start looking at sales history, and plotting out price points on a map, so you can evaluate whether there are specific areas in the suburb which consistently sell at a higher price point and may support stronger development feasibilities.
Look for clues to identify these. Perhaps there's a cluster of higher sales prices around a specific school. Or it's clear that the further you are from the train station, the lower the prices.
Once you've mapped out the price clusters, likely reasons and then overlay zonings, you should be developing a clear picture of which parts of the suburb are going to be the best places for you to buy a development property.
Now, put your hand up if you can guess what you do next? Well, first up you reward yourself for your excellent work in becoming an Area Expert, and then you start looking for properties with development potential in the target areas you've identified.
See? Not hard at all! Okay, okay, I can still hear you grumbling that it's a lot of work. And I'm not going to disagree with you. It is. But you know what? Once you've done that work, it's DONE.
I mean, maybe you might want to revisit your research every now and then to see if anything's changed, but once you're an Area Expert, you STAY an Area Expert. It doesn't just vanish overnight.
And realistically, that's your shortcut. Because you don't have to redo the work every time you're assessing development sites for sale.
I also want to add, doing this detailed research is much easier now than it was when I started. The amount of information and data available online is mind blowing. Everything from infrastructure planning documents, data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics and everything in between can generally be found if you do the right search online.
If you spend some time searching through Property Pulse and also my YouTube channel, you'll find various pieces where I talk about some of the elements of area research.
Do You Need a Crystal Ball to be a Property Developer?
State of the Market - DIY Crystal Ball
Help! How Do I Choose A Council To Farm?
I'm also going to give my Property Development Formula course a shameless plug at this point, as learning how to do Area Expert research is an important part of our Property Development Course. We go through the process in detail, which includes recommending plenty of websites you can go to in order to find the type of information you need.
I get that this can all sound overwhelming, but it doesn't need to be. The idea is to keep chunking down from macro to micro as the spiral spins towards the centre.
And the good news is that the information you discover at each level will make it very clear what your decision needs to be at every step along the way. That suburb is losing people, but this one is growing at a steady pace? Then you want to be looking for development sites in the suburb that's growing. That's just one example, but there are plenty at every level of the spiral.
All you have to do is trust the process and do the work, and you'll be an Area Expert much quicker than you might think! And once you are, you always will be (with the occasional update!). Happy researching.
Problem is, achieving goals generally involves putting in some hard yakka, a big dollop of persistence and a lot of patience.
So if you ask me if there are any shortcuts to becoming an Area Expert, my answer is always no. If you want the result, you have to put in the work. Getting educated is an important part of becoming a property developer.
Having said that, there are ways to speed up the process.
The best starting place is to actually think about what you're trying to achieve when you decide to become an Area Expert. I think of it as a spiral.
You start at a macro level, which is the beginning of the spiral, and gradually you circle inwards, getting more and more detailed, or micro, as you go, until you're basically ready to start looking at individual development properties.
As you circle around the spiral, each level feeds into the next one, guiding you as to which area you need to focus on more closely.
On the outer, macro level, you're looking for the big picture factors that play into being an area expert:
- growth corridors
- government infrastructure plans
- transport corridors
Discovering this information will then lead you to more specific Council areas that have been targeted for growth. Then you can take the next step in researching the Council as part of your due diligence:
- local amenities
- local infrastructure plans
- zoning regulations
- demographics
Once you've done this loop on your spiral, you should be getting an idea of what suburbs show the most potential for property development. At a suburb level, you then start looking at:
- location of shops
- proximity of schools
- transport
- local zoning precincts
- population growth
Examining these factors should mean you can start getting a feel for the different areas within the suburb. This is when it's a good idea to start looking at sales history, and plotting out price points on a map, so you can evaluate whether there are specific areas in the suburb which consistently sell at a higher price point and may support stronger development feasibilities.
Look for clues to identify these. Perhaps there's a cluster of higher sales prices around a specific school. Or it's clear that the further you are from the train station, the lower the prices.
Once you've mapped out the price clusters, likely reasons and then overlay zonings, you should be developing a clear picture of which parts of the suburb are going to be the best places for you to buy a development property.
Now, put your hand up if you can guess what you do next? Well, first up you reward yourself for your excellent work in becoming an Area Expert, and then you start looking for properties with development potential in the target areas you've identified.
See? Not hard at all! Okay, okay, I can still hear you grumbling that it's a lot of work. And I'm not going to disagree with you. It is. But you know what? Once you've done that work, it's DONE.
I mean, maybe you might want to revisit your research every now and then to see if anything's changed, but once you're an Area Expert, you STAY an Area Expert. It doesn't just vanish overnight.
And realistically, that's your shortcut. Because you don't have to redo the work every time you're assessing development sites for sale.
I also want to add, doing this detailed research is much easier now than it was when I started. The amount of information and data available online is mind blowing. Everything from infrastructure planning documents, data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics and everything in between can generally be found if you do the right search online.
If you spend some time searching through Property Pulse and also my YouTube channel, you'll find various pieces where I talk about some of the elements of area research.
Do You Need a Crystal Ball to be a Property Developer?
State of the Market - DIY Crystal Ball
Help! How Do I Choose A Council To Farm?
I'm also going to give my Property Development Formula course a shameless plug at this point, as learning how to do Area Expert research is an important part of our Property Development Course. We go through the process in detail, which includes recommending plenty of websites you can go to in order to find the type of information you need.
I get that this can all sound overwhelming, but it doesn't need to be. The idea is to keep chunking down from macro to micro as the spiral spins towards the centre.
And the good news is that the information you discover at each level will make it very clear what your decision needs to be at every step along the way. That suburb is losing people, but this one is growing at a steady pace? Then you want to be looking for development sites in the suburb that's growing. That's just one example, but there are plenty at every level of the spiral.
All you have to do is trust the process and do the work, and you'll be an Area Expert much quicker than you might think! And once you are, you always will be (with the occasional update!). Happy researching.
