by Paul McBeth
Better and more timely information on rent levels and vacancy rates is the aim of an online database being set up by the Residential Property Investor.
Editor Andrew King says the database will be free to anyone renting out houses and should provide much more helpful information than is currently available. He says that Tenancy Services currently supplies median rental price information, but it's generally six weeks out of date and can also be skewed depending on the particular bunch of properties that have been rented the previous month.
That's because the existing data compares the median prices of those properties rented out in one time period with the prices of properties rented out in another period. King says the problem with this is that the two groups of properties may be vastly different and lead property investors to the wrong conclusions, whereas his database will group the actual price changes for individual properties.
King says another area his database will cover is vacancy rates, something that's not well documented at the moment but is vital information for any property investor. Other data provided will include the number of times a property is being advertised.
King says that obviously the more people that join the database system the better, to improve the spread of data. The system will send an email to participating property investors to check whether they've rented any properties in the past month, they then answer seven quick questions (King says this should take no more than a minute) and send the information back. Results will be sent out to contributors on a regular basis.
Anyone interested can find out more at the magazine's website, at www.propertyinvestor.co.nz (click on 'free e-rental stats').