Hi all, any thoughts on what is a fair price for agents to charge in Brisbane? My mum wants to rent out her apartment in Milton and I’m doing a bit of digging for her.
On a separate note, she has gotten unsolicited advice from agents telling her to furnish the apartment prior to letting it. Being in Sydney, this seems like a silly thing to me because the market for furnished apartments is tiny in comparison to the market for unfurnished apartments. But, I do see a fair few Brisbane listings for furnished apartments - is this a big thing over there?
I live in Brisbane and have rented out a furnished apartment in the past, and an unfurnished house now. The furnished apartment was more trouble and more expensive to keep up with repairs and replacements, and also attracted people to rent who had no furniture - which is sometimes the kind of person who took off in the middle of the middle of the night WITH the furniture. I was forever claiming on insurance. It was worth the change for me to an unfurnished house with less troubles.
Thanks for sharing @sharlenepjm - in the end, I persuaded my mum to leave it unfurnished. Just seemed like less hassle all up! As for the agent’s rates - I think she managed to negotiate them down to 7.5%, but that seems like a lot compared to what people are paying in Sydney…mostly under 5%.
We have used both real estate agent and a specialist property manager (Louise Griffin @Stones Corner). We found the real estate agent poor in managing the property (more interested in taking the management fee) They didn’t do regular inspections etc and we tended to have ro request info from them. The specialist property manager was the reverse and did regular inspection etc. However, they tended ro pick up everything wrong with the property even if the issue was not urgent (e.g. slight peeling of ceiling paint in one room). As the teneant got a copy of the inspection, we felt obliged to do repairs in a timely manner rather than waiting for a few non-urgents to build up to tackle at one time (to reduce disturbance to the tenant).
In the end they possibly had the interests of the teneant and landlord in hand.
We also found that fees were similar no matter who managed the property.
I would also never rent a furnished property as others don’t tend to look after furnishing like you would yourself.
Something to watch is water charges as these are usually not included on a standard tenancy agreement and often the lanlord has to pay for wasteful water useage by the tenenat.
