A Random Person’s Random Investments

Well it is time to recommence house hunting.. interest rates are up several times since the last attempt went FUBAR, but we have more deposit saved. The good part is driving around with wonderful wife looking at houses. The bad part will be having to interact with those that work in real estate. Hopefully things havent changed so much that we can’t re-use some of the mortgage prep work we have already done.

Well at last it looks like Hunter Hall have provided some online access for clients to check out their investments.. a big step up as Australian Ethical has had this feature for some time.

On other Hunter Hall related news they have also launched a new Global Deep Green Trust - quoting from their web site:
“The Hunter Hall Global Deep Green Trust will focus investment in enterprises which are deemed to make a positive impact on the well being of humans, animals and the environment.
The Hunter Hall Global Deep Green Trust should be regarded as a speculative investment.”

After reading an interesting thread on index funds etc on invested.com.au I just found out that that one gap in the ETF market in Australia has been filled - international index funds. In fact a whole pile of them launched at the same time - they are essentially ASX listed, aussie dollar denominated versions of funds already available in the USA and Canada

• The ishares australia web site
• ASX announcement

Now if only there was an SRI/Ethical index fund available to non-institutional investors.

update
The iShares funds now listed on the St George margin lending acceptable securities list with a gearing ratio of 60%.

Well within the space of a few days it all went to crap - well to be specific it was all crap from the start but we were unaware of it until close to the settlement date. Incredibly unimpressed with those responsible.

• The “Contract of Sale” was never valid, it did not have all required signatures from both vendors on the night of the Auction. Well I guess we’ll know to look for this next time.
• The real estate agent apparently thought this minor detail not worth mentioning to us.
• This was brought to our attention by our Conveyancer, at least they were on the case doing their job professionally, though it was only mentioned to us fairly late in the piece, which caused me a bit of angst. At the time I was misguidedly directing part of my frustration at them as well, when really the problem lay elswhere.
• We are not heavily out of pocket from all of this (though we have lost money on this whole fiasco), it’s more the massive letdown and waste of our time and effort, after spending most of the 65 day settlement period thinking all was fine and we had all of our house in order.
• Looks like we were collateral damage in somebodys messy divorce, or something.
• I could go on but it might devolve into a bitter rant.

Well after all going apparently smoothly for the 2 months of the settlement period, all at the last moment, within the space of about 10 days, it has all turned into a complete shambles. More news - and further details - when I feel up to describing them - after it breaks, we’ll know at crunch time this time next week how it all ends up playing out. Suffice to say aspects of the paperwork were incomplete, and we have only been recently notified of this by the conveyancer.

The Basis Capital web site says:
A globally focused fund investing in a diversified portfolio of relative value and arbitrage opportunities in international markets, across liquid Eurobonds and less liquid structured credit securities.

while the article on The Age web site says:

The Basis Yield Alpha Fund had invested mainly in collateralised debt obligations (CDOs), bundles of bonds, loans and asset-backed debt securities that are divided into sections, or tranches, including the high-risk subprime mortgages.

While the aim of the CDOs is to spread the risk, commentators have described the process as being like putting horse dung and rubbish into a grinder to make sausage.

All the non-geared managed funds sold for use as house deposit, so these all held within the margin loan account. This lot will most likely stay fairly static for a while.
Listed in order of largest holding to smallest:

• STW: SPDR S&P/ASX 200 Fund
• AUG0004AU: Australian Ethical Large Company Share Trust
• SLF: SPDR S&P/ASX 200 Listed Property Fund
• HHV: Hunter Hall Global Value Ltd
• CTN: Contango Microcap Ltd
• ANZ: Australia & New Zealand Banking Group Ltd
• BEN: Bendigo Bank Ltd
• AOD: Aurora Sandringham Dividend Income Trust
• SGB: St George Bank Ltd
• TGG: Templeton Global Growth Fund
• VIR: Viridis Clean Energy Group
• AEZ: APN/UKA European Retail Trust

Well last Wednesday night we took a punt at an auction, and got a place. So now quiet living out in the ‘burbs beckons.

Wierd about the auction was that after discussing all sorts of auction and bidding strategies, we ended up being the only bidder, bidded up to the reserve and got the property straight off. After observing a few auctions we have noticed they can be real hit and miss in terms of bidder interest.

Interest rates up and the share market rocky at the moment makes it a wierd time to buy but we have have the resources to push it through, and we havent overextended, going for a cosy unit rather than a palace.

Now its over to the conveyancer and mortgage provider..

Excellent source of information from a series of related web sites by the Real Estate Lawyer Peter Mericka. Some good advice on the stumbling blocks on dealing with the Real Estate industry from the legal side.
Also a good example of well done web promotion.. starting with excellent, relevant content, and a series of topically named mutually reinforcing web sites feeding traffic to each other.

http://www.lawyersconveyancing.com.au/
http://australianrealestateblog.com.au/
etc..

Some good:

• http://www.realestate.com.au - appears to be the most popular. Agents incredibly slack to keep their listings up to date though, about 1/3 of the listings seem actually sold if you try and follow them up.
• http://www.domain.com.au - second most popular? cleaner layout, but harder to use than realestate.com.au, a lot of overlap. And they keep emailing me listings of “new” properties that are also listed as “just sold” on the same page. What?
• http://www.property.com.au/ - realestate.com.au with a “web 2.0″ skin.. much nicer to use. Unifinished but shows potential
• http://www.myhome.com.au/ - slick, not as many listings
• http://www.homehound.com.au/ - also nice, bit a bit more overlap. good use of google maps. Not enough ranges for limiting search selections. 150K-200K, then 200K to 400K? Why can’t I put in both upper and lower limit? Its my search.

Some needing work:

• http://www.zeroagents.com.au/ - very nice site, but few listings, a pity as it is direct (no agents)
• http://www.owner.com.au/ - more listings than zeroagents it seems, but not massive, web design firmly located in 1997. One property I in there I googled showed up as being sold by and agent after it was apparently (no dates?) listed..
• http://www.diysell.com.au/ - another very nice site, but not many listings, only 16 for all of Melbourne when I checked.
• http://www.noagentproperty.com.au - ugly, linear and hard to navigate site, but has more listings than the others.

I am a fan of the concept of agentless sales, but with all the listings spread over a range of mostly terrible quality websites the current state isn’t good. If they were all listed in zeroagents.com or diysell it would be great.