... but not for long if you price accordingly and get a new tenant fairly quickly. We've had this before, but handed them to an agent to find us tenants. It was the week of my mother's funeral and we had other things to deal with.
There is a lot of movement by tenants everywhere right now but from what I am seeing in Sydney and Melbourne that I can speak of, as quick as properties get vacated, just as quickly they get rented out again. You will have a gap but if your property is reasonably priced, you wouldn't have a big issue. January is the best month to fill a vacancy.
Just on a side note, in the few years of working in this industry as well as being an investor myself with 4 properties (so I know what it's like to have debt and bad tenants), I'm surprised at the amount of owners who are (or give the impression they are) on such a knife edge with no provisions in place and in the event the property is vacant never really planned for that type of thing and it's the end of the world, and also willing to squabble with tenants over the smallest things(amounts) instead of getting on with it....pretty crazy
For many years, we lived on the knife edge, holding onto our properties by the fingernails. So I totally understand that a broken HWS would have caused us great anxiety. But we always had the ability (and did take advantage of this) of being able to borrow a thousand from my parents and pay it back (and paid interest). That allowed us some "sleep at night" factor. Now we don't have that backing, and we are providing it for our kids. It feels good.
