Borrowed money is not your money. Borrowed money has a additional cost to it. Compounding interests @ 4.5% over 20 years is frightening unless the Capital appreciation works out right. Rentals are just to subsidise mortgage repayments. It will not generate into positive cash flow.
Many people were lead into falsehood that they own properties but actually they own nothing but debts.
As an individual, I do not like to borrow money to buy properties unless it is way beyond my reach.
Spoken like a true property investor and which is something I kept repeating over and over. Johor interest rates very high compared to Singapore, that is why I say, in most cases, especially in the case of Singapore property buyers, they are subsidizing the tenants, but many stubbornly still say that they own an asset in the end, now your last paragraph sums it up perfectly, what I was saying all along....in the end they own freehold liability, not asset, especially since by the time they fully paid up the property it would have deteriorated and depreciated so much that one may hardly recover back the principle sum.
You see, all the dummy Sinkies look up to you whenever you say anything positive about Iskandar properties, but there are just about 10% difference between you and them which makes all the difference between success and failure in Johor.
1. You are a Malaysian, this is your homeland, it is given that you own property there, but it is an option for Sinkies.
2. You are astute, like it or not, a lot of your points in property investing and financing align with mine.
3. You are cash rich and can take the losses, unlike many of the Sinkies here who are just plain ordinary folks and the $200 to $300k are their life savings mean for their retirement, once wiped out they are finished and yet they want to compare their risk taking with being the same as multi- millionaires or even multi-billion dollar corporations, how dumb can they get?
I wonder if their dumbness is exclusive only to Singaporean Johor property investors or is their dumbness really widespread, or maybe only really limited to 5 whole people who only post here.....LOL LOL!
Malaysia Boleh! Majulah Singapura!