The real world of a property investor

Before you read this post, checkout this link:

What is your Cash Flow Position of your IPs?

Somehow I missed this thread on Somersoft until today, but I'm glad it was resurrected, because it's an important poll. If you do the quick math, you'll find that only approximately 23% of investors on the forum have a positively geared portfolio, with the balance made up of those on neutral terms and at the other pointy end of the data, 7% who are way into the negative territory. This comes as somewhat of a surprise to me, I would have thought there'd be a much higher percentage who have 'successfully' achieved the CF+ stage, but alas no, a lot are still paying out more than they are getting back. Of course looking at this data in its singularity is flawed and, as I have here, it's easy to jump to conclusions without seeing the whole picture. For example, those on negative geared portfolios may have properties performing extremely high in terms of capital gain. Those with CF+ portfolios could have one small unit returning $10/week profit. Perhaps there could be a better way to calculate a number to indicate with greater depth the true worth of their portfolios.
Something for me to think about and perhaps come back to in the future.

Your Opinion - the 2010 Property Market

From the survey questions that you see on the right hand side of this wonderfully awesome blog, your opinions regarding the movement of property in 2010 has shown some interesting results. 23 people voted and overall, it seems we are continuing to be optimistic. 74% of you voted that at least, the property market will stay flat, while 35% overall thought property prices will continue on their merry way and that it will be business as usual.

I suppose the only information that is missing is whether the respondents were in fact home owners or investors or non-investors, or whether the responses were made by mindless bots trolling through the kazillion websites, voting at will, rendering any information derived from such polls as useless. We will never know, but let's for argument's sake maintain that it was indeed humans who responded.

A lot of what happens to property prices is down to sentiment. If we are happy and feel that property is a great investment vehicle, than our good sentiment will flow down through property, through shares, through business, down to the pockets of all Australians as we continue to relentlessly increase the prices of homes in this great, and often dry, land.

I think for quite some time we will see this positive sentiment continue, especially if the upcoming election, inflation rates and RBA decisions go in investors' favour.