Contract Conditions Complete
May 31, 2005
I have had a building inspection for house 4 today and my finace is all in place. The purchase price isn’t that much, but if the house is going to be a maintenance nightmare after you buy the property, it could cost you a lot more in the long run.
I also got a second opinion on the rental value from another agent. I am not sure if it is true but the builder remarked to the agent that the property would make a good rental.
I was thinking of writing a step-by-step guide to buying a house in New Zealand and the things I have learnt so far. I don’t have much experience as some investors, but I think I might have something to offer - and at least the guide will be free!
Making money on-line
May 30, 2005
Marshall Brain has a great article on making money on the internet: http://webkew.blogspot.com/2005/04/welcome-to-webkew.html. He is author of the extremely popular site: How Stuff Works.
Since you are probably going to have more success at becoming financially free by having your own business and multiple sources of passive income, than working in a regular 9-5 job, the internet abounds with opportunities.
Also, you can continue working in your regular job while you wait to build up the business. The process is slow and time consuming, but the great thing is that you can go and vacation for two weeks and the cheques still roll in.
If your site is moderately successful and you keep working on it, growth tends to be exponential as you get more and more readers, links, advertisers and so on.
Google Page Rank Gone from Toolbar
May 30, 2005
For aspiring Webmasters in the Internet world this has come as quite a shock. Since I started developing websites last year, I have paid quite a bit of attention to a site’s Page Rank.
Suddenly, since from around Friday the PageRank is greyed-out on all websites. Page Rank was used as some kind of ranking for webmasters to value a website.
Supposedly, the higher the rank, the higher the popularity of the site. This site got to a Page Rank of 5 in only a few months.
Anyway it was getting too easy to exploit by spamsters, so I suppose Google has decided to drop it. I think the biggest surprise for people is that the decision has come completely unannounced. They had recently released a new toolbar, without the PageRank feature, but I don’t think anyone noticed.
I think it gets people worried if anything changes to the Google Adsense program.
Motivational Story
May 27, 2005
I found this post on the New Zealand Property Talk website pretty inspiring:
http://www.propertytalk.co.nz/postt3200.html
Finance Approved
May 24, 2005
My housing loan for house number 4 has been approved. The loan is only fairly small and the bank is lending 80 per cent of the purchase price. Setting up a loan will enable me to finally get a bank account established in New Zealand, and also hopefully a line of credit which will enable to make further purchases, without having to fill out all the paperwork again.
Since house 2 and 3 have no mortgage, I have potential to refinance them to finance at least another 2 houses.
I used a mortgage broker to help get finance, and since they are working to get their commission they have been very helpful and responsive.
Property Tour
May 21, 2005
I received an email yesterday from a realestate company here in Japan, which helps investors here in Japan buy property. They are interested in expanding their operations to Australia and New Zealand.
They are looking for someone to help organize a trip to Australia to buy property. This is something I would love to do. Of course, I don’t know how this is going to work out, but it has least made see that there are Japanese interested in buying property in Australia, and as for a business there is real potential for my ozfudosan project.
Update: After a meeting and a couple of emails, nothing eventuated with this company (May 15th, 2006).
Successful Offer
May 19, 2005
My offer was successul! I got a signed fax today from the seller accepting my offer. The tennant also has agreed to stay on in the house. I have been busy tonight filling out loan application forms.
The purchase price is fairly low, but at least it gives me an opportunity to open up a line of credit in New Zealand with banks that will hopefully be willing to loan me more money in the future.
Submitted My Offer
May 18, 2005
I have submitted my offer which the realestate agent will be presenting to the vendor tomorrow. She told me it wasn’t too late to increase my offer as there are some other potential buyers.
It is difficult to know if they are bluffing, but I thought that if the agent was going to the trouble to write up and fax me the contract, my offer must be at least close to what the sellers are considering.
Hopefully I will have some good news tomorrow.
New CSS Version of My Site
May 17, 2005
I have been working hard on my Tokyo Essentials site. I have decided to stick with a static HTML version for the site, at least for now. A CMS would make it much easier to update, but after I have added all the content I can I don’t expect I would change to much on a week by week basis. The look is very basic, but the content is all in proper tags, so changing the whole look of the site should mean just updating the CSS style file.
The top page hasn’t changed yet, but you can see the CSS version here. I was worried about changing the site as I thought it might loose its Google rankings, but so far nothing has changed.
Traffic to the site hasn’t changed much. I have been SEO optimizing to the best of my knowledge, like using
tags and descriptive alt and title tags in pictures. More internal and outbound links. Adsense has increased a little from when I first added it to the site.
Once I have updated the whole site I am thinking of going back and breaking up all the long pages into single, short pages. More pages should equal more revenue. A forum, guestbook and user comments to articles are all planned additional features to the site.
I have also applied to new travel affiliate programs, which I am still waiting for acceptance. Any suggestions?
I am planning a post on travel sites, as I read somewhere, the online travel industry is becoming a multi-billion dollar business.
Update: I have done most of the things in this post and the site is going along making a nice passive income for me. (May 15th 2006).
Looking for House 4
May 17, 2005
I have been looking for house 4. I am still looking in New Zealand. Despite recent increases in prices, houses there are still much cheaper than in Australia, with fairly decent returns.
I am looking for something in the NZ$60-80K range, which won’t get me into much trouble if anything were to happen. I missed out on a deal last Friday. I have complained about realestate agents enough already, so won’t do it again, but they have a very interesting way of doing business. They really use the distance factor to their advantage.
Anyway, I put in an offer this afternoon which hopefully the agent will present to the sellers. The thing I hate is that you can never be sure that the agent will actually present the offer to the seller even though I believe they are legally required to do. If anyone has any advice on this I would really appreciate it!
I am fairly certain I will be able to get a successful offer in by the end of the month.
