Process and experience for buying investment property

Identify who is your target tenant. Whether they are university, college students, lecturer, admin/workers, factory workers, expatriate and etc. This will help you to identify where are the targeted areas that you should survey on later.

Focus on the targeted areas identified for example my targeted tenant is Penang USM local/foreign students, then my targeted areas will be where normally they choose to stay. After some survey and talking to housing agents, I'll focus on areas like Batu Uban (foreign students especially from Arab), Jalan Sungai Dua (mostly local) and Jalan Bukit Gambier.

Find out and list down the apartments/condominiums options available in the targeted areas that meet you budget and where your targeted tenant is looking for. Of course make sure the property provide good rental too so that you have positive cash flow and good yield (<2x of fix deposit). Start looking for ads in newspaper, I found that Kwong Wah newspaper on Friday/Saturday and Monday have the most Penang housing ads coverage. I started to keep these newspaper ads 3yrs ago in order to keep a record on how is the pricing go for the interested property and decide whether the recent advertised property is worth buying.

Call housing agents to check out the properties and viewing of the properties. The frequent questions I'll ask including pricing, which floor, is it furnished, if yes, what are the furniture avaiable, how many car park, owner occupied or tenanted. How much is the rental if tenanted. Survey the sorrounding and enviroment of the property before and after viewing at different time and day to ensure you don't miss out anything at that area which only happened at particular time and day for example pasar malam on Friday evening.

After you found the property for investment, negotiate the price, go into the legal procedure and hope you become the landlord 3months later.