Choosing an Apartment

My first encounter of being a landlord started in 2006 when I bought a medium cost apartment in Ampang. The reason I bought the apartment was to move our from the apartment that I was staying with my brother back then since he had a few plans laid out for himself. Instead of renting, I thought it might be better off to buy a cheap apartment for my own stay. My budget at that time was a below RM 100k apartment.

Before I went searching for an apartment, I first laid out the criteria that I wanted in an apartment. The criteria I developed not through reading books but instead from my own experience staying in an apartment for the first 2 years of my working years. Here are the criteria:

1. Find a property with freehold title. Well this reason is pretty obvious and you can find it in any property investment books. Among the advantages of freehold property easier to sell, faster transfer of land ownership and higher price compared to leasehold property.
2. Find apartment near amenities. Well this is also an obvious reason since I don't plan to stay in that apartment forever. Renting it out in the future is a possibility. So this criteria will make the apartment more appealing to tenants.
   
3. Try avoiding units at the highest level. Certain books do mention about this criteria. When I stayed at the apartment with my brother, occasionally my room will be flooded due to very heavy downpour. Anything got to do with the roofs, certainly the top unit will have to bare the costs of repair or will suffer due to leaking roof.
4. Try also avoiding the ground floor unit. There are 2 reasons for this. First, the ground floor unit will likely be the main pathway where residents go up and down the apartment. It's likely that this area will be noisy and dirty. Secondly, imagine car alarms going off in the middle of the night and it don't stop until the next morning. Scary? Yup, that's the reality. If it's your car, then fine, you can always switch it off. But what if you don't even know the car owner? Can you stand the alarm until next morning? Even staying at higher floors does not guarantee that you will not hear the car alarm. But the effect is quite minimal compared to the ground floor.
5. Try finding apartments with no or minimal maintenance fee. Well this is not a common thing but there are certainly these type of apartments out there. To spot these apartments, here are few criteria; normally low rise with 4-5 storeys and no lifts, no perimeter fences and no security guards, they are unlikely to have swimming pools or shops within the compound. Reason for choosing this type of apartment is the fee is beyond your control. The property manager can always increase the fee without justifying the reasons. There might be certain laws to address this issue that I don't know. If the maintenance is not up to the standard, what can you do as property owner?
6. Find an apartment with water connection direct to the Water Board i.e Syabas, Puas etc. What is normally done by property managers nowadays is that they buy water from the Water Board and sell them to the apartment residents, of course at a slightly higher price. Residents pay their water bills to the property manager, not to the Water Board. The property manager even goes one step further to cut the water supply in case the resident do not pay the maintenance fee. How dissatisfied you are with the property management, you basically can't do anything rather than complaint which they might or might not listen too. Having your water bills paid directly to the Water Board will eliminate this risk. Just in case you are not satisfied with the property management standard, just don't pay the maintenance fee until actions are taken. At least you have something to hold on to.

I did manage to get some of the criteria mentioned in my first property purchase, not all of course. Having these criteria in place certainly helped narrowed down my choice of apartment.