Buying your first investment property
Almost every first purchase goes wrong in the same place: the advertised yield is a gross yield, and the costs that turn it into a net one are not in the listing. Work through these in order and you will price a property the way its eventual buyer will, rather than the way its seller does.
Read these in this order
10 frameworks. Each one ends in a number rather than an opinion.
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01Net rental yield
Net rental yield is annual rent minus every running cost, divided by the purchase price plus every acquisition cost, and it is typically two to three percentage points lower than the gross yield a listing advertises.
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02The one percent rule, and why it does not travel
The one percent rule says a rental property should let for at least one percent of its purchase price every month, which is a screening shortcut built on one country's cost structure and gives badly wrong answers in any market where those costs differ.
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03Mortgage capacity, and what the bank is actually testing
Mortgage capacity is set by two tests applied at once, a loan to value cap that limits the loan against the property and a debt burden ratio that limits it against your income, and the smaller of the two answers is the only one that matters.
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04Transaction cost drag and the minimum hold
The round trip cost of buying and selling property is roughly eight to ten percent of value in Dubai, and because that cost is fixed regardless of how long you hold, it sets a minimum hold period below which a purchase cannot pay for itself.
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05The service charge and the reserve fund
A service charge pays for this year's running of a building while the reserve fund pays for the replacement of things that fail once a decade, and a building with a low charge and no reserve is not cheap to own, it is deferring a bill that will arrive as a special levy.
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06Due diligence before an offer
Due diligence on a property purchase means verifying the four things that determine what you will actually earn, namely the title, the service charge and reserve position, the tenancy status, and the achievable rent, and every one of them is checkable before an offer rather than after it.
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07Margin of safety, and what it costs
Buying only at a discount to your own estimate of value protects against the estimate being wrong, and the discount is not free, because every point of it also turns away things that were worth buying.
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08Off-plan versus ready
A ready property starts paying rent immediately while an off-plan unit pays nothing until handover, so an off-plan purchase has to make up several years of foregone net yield out of its price advantage and its appreciation before it is even level, which is why the two can only be compared as cash flows and never as headline prices.
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09Mortgage versus cash
Borrowing to buy a property raises the return on your own money whenever the net yield exceeds the mortgage rate and lowers it whenever it does not, so the decision is not about affordability, it is about whether the spread between those two numbers is wide enough to pay you for the risk.
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10Break-even occupancy
Break-even occupancy is the share of the year a property must be let for its income to cover every running cost and every mortgage payment, and it converts a yield into the single question that actually keeps owners awake: how empty can this get before I am funding it.
Run your own numbers
Nothing is stored and nothing is sent anywhere. The arithmetic runs in your browser.
Gross yield is what the brochure shows you. This is what reaches your account.
The unrecoverable cost of owning against the unrecoverable cost of renting.
Terms you will meet
Each is one sentence, then the trap it hides.
The first property checklist
The five stages in the order the decisions arrive, with the questions to ask at each one, including the costs that are never in the listing. It downloads the moment you subscribe, on this page, rather than arriving by email later.
Free. Unsubscribe in one click. The frameworks it points at are ungated and always will be.
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Investments Playbook publishes educational research and general information. Nothing on this site is personal investment advice, a solicitation, or a recommendation to buy or sell any asset. Property and securities can fall in value. Past performance does not predict future returns. Figures shown are indicative and may be delayed. Always take regulated professional advice before acting.