Leading property buyerโs agent and Cohen Handler Chief Executive Officer Simon Cohen, has joined forces with Joshua Meli to form CH Secure.
CH Secure is also a buyerโs agency, but will focus on helping everyday Australians build long-term wealth by investing in affordable properties across the nation.
โCohen Handler has always been about helping people buy their houses and investment properties and we really wanted to give all Australians, everyday Australians, the opportunity to build wealth through property,โ Mr Cohen said.
โWe wanted to build this business and this platform to enable that.
โObviously, with such a long history in buyerโs agency and long standing experience in real estate, we thought we were the perfect people to do it.โ
Mr Cohen said it was every Australianโs dream to own property and CH Secure would enable that to happen.
โOne thing weโve seen people create the most wealth through, in any vehicle, is property,โ he said.
โAnd with Cohen Handler Secure, all you really need is $70,000 (for a 10 per cent deposit).โ
Mr Meli comes to the partnership with extensive experience in residential and commercial property buying and property management.
He said affordability was key for CH Secure, and it would operate in the $200,000 to $700,000 price bracket across the nation.
The agency works with a 100-point checklist, which every property must meet before it will be suggested to a client, including not investing in areas where one industry makes up more than 10 per cent of the job market.
โThereโs really a lot of research and analytics that go behind it,โ Mr Cohen said.
Mr Meli said at the moment, many buyers were seeking properties with beach lifestyles after being priced out of Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane.
โWeโre currently purchasing in SA, Queensland and WA and weโre looking for areas with lifestyle drivers,โ he said.
โRight now, a lot of the areas weโre purchasing in have a beach lifestyle because weโre noticing that, with the affordability factors in Sydney, Melbourne and Queensland, people are looking at moving interstate.
โTheyโre looking for a similar lifestyle to what Sydney offers, so right now we do have a large beach lifestyle focus, along with (areas where there’s) heavy infrastructure spend, so upgrading public transport, schools coming in, hospital upgrades and road upgrades.โ
Mr Meli said as well as thinking about long-term capital growth, higher yields were also a key consideration.
โInstead of purchasing an investment property in Sydney where it could be a 2-3 per cent gross yield, which means youโll have to fork out quite a lot to hold onto that asset, weโre looking in areas with 6-6.5 per cent gross yield,โ he said.
โThis means our clients donโt have to spend as much holding onto those assets.โ
Mr Meli said one recent example was a property CH Secure purchased in Mackay and Whitsundays region for $440,000.
The three-bedroom, one-bathroom, two-car garage home is tenanted at $580 per week, which is a rental yield of 6.65 per cent.
The area is tipped to see property capital growth of 19 per cent cumulatively over the next three years according to Select Residential Property, a research firm specialising in property growth trends, which means the property could make the owner more than $83,600 in equity in that time.
โSomeone with a 10 per cent deposit could have secured this property for just $44,000 plus associated costs,โ Mr Meli said.