Victoria

What Victoria’s New Tenancy Laws Mean For Landlords

Victoria’s new tenancy laws mean that landlords need to pay extra attention to basic standards, especially relating to health and safety. These include (but are not limited to) providing functioning heaters, stoves and even deadlocks. Furthermore, ...
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Passing Your Next Rental Inspection With Mould-Busting Professionals

What’s one thing landlords despise? If you guessed mould, you’re right. “The obvious things we look for are mould in the bathrooms/cupboards/bedrooms,” says one expert in the field. “This is usually an indication that the tenant isn’t ...
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The Politics Of Smoke Alarms

From 1993 to 2015, CSIRO conducted tests on smoke alarms but the public is yet to read the findings. This comes at a time when activists want ionised smoke alarms banned due to alleged issues with response times to common fires. In America, the alarm...
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Common defects found in homes

Are you buying a home or investment property? Here are some of the common defects that our building inspectors in homes. Termite damage The advantages of getting a vendor report before putting your house on the market. Termite damage was found ...
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Re-stumping red flags

A guide to Re-Stumping Re-stumping - or re-blocking as it's known in Victoria - is big business in Australia and can be a very costly exercise, particularly if you don't know what you're looking at and you don't understand what you've bought into....
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Building? Here Are Mark Campbell's Lessons Learned

“My rationale for building new was threefold,” writes Mark Campbell, a working-class Aussie. “Firstly, it enabled me to have control over the end product and it made sense from an investment perspective because I could maximise depreciation and...
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What's Depreciation?

New to the property investment game and struggling with the lingo? You’re not alone. Below is one definition posted by news.com.au to build your real-estate knowledge. What’s depreciation? > Depreciation Often investors can claim a po...
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Am I An Owner Builder?

Whether you are or aren’t an owner builder can sometimes be a tricky concept to get your head around. Even if you didn’t personally lift a hammer, but rather project managed different trades to do the work, – you are still, legally, the owne...
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Asbestos Concerns? Call The Experts

Here’s an all too familiar story from the Newcastle Herald: A Glendale property is demolished after its owners found deadly loose-fill asbestos insulation. This type of asbestos was relatively popular in the1960s and 1970s. Science now tells ...
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Buying Off-The-Plan Housing Needn't Be Scary

Buying an off-the-plan house needn’t be scary if you make smart choices. One important choice: Seeking out experts in New Construction – and Jim’s Building Inspections is a good place to start. Buying off-the-plan with professional guidan...
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