Managing and Monitoring your Portfolio

Managing your property portfolio

Your property manager should do most of the heavy lifting in terms of managing your property portfolio; however, it will be your responsibility to ensure you are responding promptly to their emails, paying any bills associated with the property (e.g. rates) and managing your cash-flow to ensure you have no issues with holding the property.

Basic Pro-tip: calculate how much your mortgage repayments are per month, and set up a direct debit to the relevant account that your mortgage is taken out of so it transfers automatically once you get paid. If you miss any mortgage repayments it is not going to look to the bank when you are trying to make future purchases.

Managing your portfolio really shouldn't take more than a couple of hours a month, but please note that from my experience, the first year of owning the property is usually the most time consuming - so don't get disheartened if you think it is taking more work than you expected.

As I have mentioned before, property is technically an active investment but it will get easier over time.

You can also use a property portfolio management spreadsheet to keep track of your expenses and adjust them accordingly - there are heaps of these online if you google it or even ask your broker or accountant they may have one (sorry I don’t have one for you…).

Monitoring your property portfolio

You shouldn't just hold your properties and pray for the best - you do need to monitor them to a certain extent. I don't mean looking at HtAG or DSR every day and tracking the data, but you should take a look every 6 - 12 months to make sure that property is doing what you expected it to do and looking at the story the data is telling you (i.e. is the market getting hotter, or is it slowing down?).

In particular, you should be looking to see how much growth your property has experienced every 6 months. You can do this by checking HtAG or onthehouse.com.au.

I also like to ask my mortgage broker to get a bank valuation every 6 months to see if there is any equity that I can extract in order to move on to the next purchase. These are generally free, just ask your broker.