Are Old Property Investing Strategy Books Relevant Today?

Cleaning out the other day and pretty much ditched many of my property investing books.
They are not necessarily relevant today, wont work too well.

I kept one - this is an oldie but its a goodie....
Will have to add credit squeeze to this one

https://www.amazon.com.au/Grow-Property-Cycle-Kieran-Trass/dp/0143019430

 

The stategies may not work but the thought process and due diligence is valuable to me

 

Hi @MTR - I love glancing through Old property books!
The data might be outdated, but the wisdom is timeless imho.
This was one on of my first books in early to mid 2000s

 

I loved my old 1980s-90s investing books!

Buy a house for $40K with a weekly rental of $120! We did, the rent WAS $120 a week but the house cost $42K. Mind you, the deposit needed and interest rates paid (16%) were the flip side of the coin.
Marg

 

Yeah, I occasionally drag out my old stone tablets for a “light” read .

 

Too much of a hoarder to part with them

 

I think technology has made those old PI books redundant.

I didn't really have any but I had a fair collection of girlie magazine which I sold in a garage sale a few years back.

Why take up half a bedroom of space when everything is on the net these days ?

I was surprised though, that that the young fella up the road bought the majority of the magazines. It was good timing cause not long after he got locked up.

 

I gave my 1980s and 1990s books to my Bestie from school. 20 years later she is now retired and I'm not. Do you think I should have kept them?

 

I have a signed copy of the above ,from the early 1990's and is based on The Economic Clock,and if purchases are appropriate to the economic cycle..It's good to read old investing books as nothing changed just the interest rates and the price ..imho..

 

Some of the old best sellers/strategies would not cut it today They just wont work.

In 1985? it was the abolishment of low doc/no doc loans, many lost their shirts.

Today we have APRA, I did not realise the impact this would have today, it basically has turned markets from boom to bust.

So what works today... not harvesting that's for sure (one strategy) - Investment Club promoted?

Jan Somers strategy today? you will hit the wall very quickly in lending criteria today, this strategy is very much dependent on leveraging and buying when you can afford to buy. Investors would not be accumulating as quickly as required and certainly not the number of properties required for this strategy to be effective. Problem with this strategy is changes to lending criteria

Michael Yardney - well he was advocating in part LOE and using equity to continue to buy. He also was of the opinion that Blue chip is bullet proof and it will continue to outperform. We know that's just a fallacy.

 

In which case it could be worth finding books from an earlier era.

For instance before Paul Keating deregulated banking and interest rates in the '80s there were significant controls on lending. People sometimes had to get two loans for their home - one possibly at a higher interest rate. We've had tight credit before, either tightened in the form of limited supply (credit squeezes of 1961, 1975) or through high interest rates (1989, 1994).

Of course the '70s and, to a lesser extent the '80s, were high inflation so property was a great hedge against that. Especially if you borrowed as the amount you were paying back was dropping greatly in real terms each year. In the early 1990s a lot of people thought that property was no good after the high inflation ceased after the 'recession we had to have'. Jan Somers mentions this in her book. But those who bought from the mid 90s on enjoyed a great boom through to the early 2000s.

Even older books could be beneficial. In the '50s and '60s credit was limited, inflation was low and we had high immigration. Sounds a bit like today! Anyway people back then still invested, succeeded and/or failed. If you can't find real estate investment books from then maybe biographies of successful people may be the next best thing.

The point is to not chuck out old books as they may become useful. And if you don't have any, scour the op shops and garage sales.

 

So history repeats, credit squeeze... perhaps we should look at how that particular cycle turned around.