John Lindeman, Author at Lindeman Reports

The truth about good yield and bad yield

Given the current lack of growth in our property markets, many experts, educators and advisers are pushing cash flow as a good investment option. The trouble is that most of the suburbs and towns they put forward are selected purely because of their high rental yields – but there’s good yield, and then there’s bad yield.

Bad yield is not going to deliver you positive cash flow, because rental yield is a function of both prices and rents. Rental yields can rise if prices have fallen, even if rents haven’t risen, or if rents have not fallen as much as prices. This is bad yield, and some of the highest rental yielding suburbs put forward in various glossy promotions are in locations where housing prices have crashed in the last five or so years.

These “high yield” lists feature towns such as Broken Hill in New South Wales, Blackwater, Collinsville and Dysart in Queensland, Newman and South Hedland in Western Australia and Rosebery, Zeehan and Queenstown in Tasmania. Investors seeking positive cash flow might be tempted to buy in these towns because they have high rental yields and extremely low house prices. If you are amongst them, remember that the high yield in these markets has nothing to do with rental demand and everything to do with falling prices.

Good yield is driven by rent demand not by price falls, so if you seek positive cash flow from your properties, look for high rental yielding areas with high rental demand, such as tourist destinations, infrastructure construction zones and locations favoured by overseas arrivals.

All of these households create genuine rent demand. Some of the highest good yields can be found in coastal suburbs where prices have risen in recent years, but these are seasonal holiday locations, and the high yield is only obtained during the peak summer season. Watch out for such seasonal variation traps.

Permanent and semi-permanent rental areas such as ex-Housing Commission estates or the older affordable outer suburbs of our major cities provide consistently high yields with solid rental demand. These areas might seem unattractive to some, but they have strong rental appeal to others.

Remember, that although some of these locations may not appeal to you, what matters is that they do appeal to someone else. For example, Risdon Vale is an outer suburb of Hobart with a constantly high good rental yield and it’s also where Tasmania’s maximum security male prison is located.

The secret to Risdon Vale’s high rental yield is the demand for rental accommodation there, coming from the girlfriends, partners and wives of the prison inmates. They want to live in Risdon Vale so that they can more easily make conjugal and family visits to the prison. You might not wish to live near a maximum security male prison, but the secret to Risdon Vale’s high rental yield is that many others do.

What makes a potential investment area attractive?

Some investors will avoid areas because there’s a high proportion of rental properties or it’s a dirty looking industrial town. They might favour suburbs where they would like to live themselves, but this is not relevant. What matters is whether other people want to live there, because this is what makes an investment area attractive.

Risdon Vale is an outer suburb of Hobart and it’s also where Tasmania’s maximum-security male prison is located. It’s not what most would call an attractive place. The area is dominated by massive walls skirting the jail’s perimeter, topped with coils of razor wire and the night sky is penetrated by floodlit guard towers and the howling of ferocious guard dogs.

Coupled with the constant threat of rampaging escapees running amok through the town, surely here is a place that could be called “unattractive” and deter any potential residents.

Yet, here’s the thing, Risdon Vale has the highest housing rental yield in Hobart and it’s driven by genuine rental demand. The source of housing demand comes from the wives and partners of the inmates, who rent properties in Risdon Vale to be near their incarcerated loved ones for conjugal and family visits.

The irony is that the higher the incidence of burglaries, murders and other serious crime in Tasmania, the greater will be the demand for rental properties in Risdon Vale.

The importance for investors is not that you might find such places unattractive or even dangerous, and that you wouldn’t want to live there – what matters is whether other people want to live there, creating housing demand in the process.