When you’re trying to secure finance for an investment property, it’s important to keep a few simple rules in mind to make sure you get the best deal possible and will be able to afford the repayments, come what may.

If you’re thinking about purchasing an investment property, it’s important to manage the risks adequately. For example, you shouldn’t rely on rental returns as a guaranteed income to meet loan repayments, as there are times when a property may be vacant or hard to fill immediately and some months the rental return on a property may be diminished by maintenance costs.

Starlight Home Loans will help a borrower find the right product, so that he or she can afford the repayment. All Loan Budgets will have had a two per cent rate hike factored into the rate. This is to make sure you can still make repayments if, or when, mortgage rates go up.”

Most investors will already have put some thought into where they would like to invest and will have an approximate price-range in mind. While a loan calculator is a great resource to start out with, use Money Buckets Budgets and Starlight Home Loans expert knowledge to sense-check and flesh out your plans.

With access to property data and trend analyses like RP Data’s, a finance broker can pull property reports for you, detailing how the area has performed in the past as an investment, the average median house price or rate of return and how much the property values have increased over the past five or six years. These are details that investors generally can’t access.

Even better, if you meet a local finance broker  in the area where you want to invest, he or she will know that particular market and be able to provide a lot of detailed information from working there every day.