If you’re weighing up a cheap older house you’ll do up against a newer build that costs more upfront, buy the newer build. I know the renovator looks like the better deal on paper. It usually isn’t, not for short-term rental.
Nobody tells you this when they’re selling you the “value-add” dream: maintenance chews into your profits. Every callout, every repair, every replaced fitting comes straight out of your margin.
And a short-term rental doesn’t wear like a family home. When you live in a house yourself, the taps get turned on a handful of times a day. In an Airbnb with guests arriving and leaving week after week, everything gets used harder like tapware, door handles, appliances, flooring in the high-traffic areas. It’s heavy use by people who don’t own it. That’s not a criticism of guests; it’s just what turnover does to a house.
Now add old stock into that picture. An older house with its original fittings and original wiring means you’re either paying for a full renovation before a single guest walks in rewiring, a new switchboard, new tapware, all of it or you’re paying for it piece by piece while the property is trading.
We manage an older property on the Sunshine Coast that’s been the piece-by-piece version. So far: a replaced dishwasher, blown lights, and now a switchboard upgrade because the old board can’t handle the air conditioners that were added to keep guests comfortable. In the meantime, the power trips and knocks out the hot water and nobody knows until a guest is standing under a cold shower.
The guest is annoyed, the local host is scrambling, and the owner is paying for it in reviews and repair bills. None of this is dramatic on its own. Together, it’s a steady leak in the returns.
A well-built modern home skips most of that. The wiring is current. The hot water system isn’t on borrowed time. The bathrooms don’t need gutting. You still have to look after it, preventative maintenance isn’t optional, and across the properties we manage we run an annual preventative maintenance program for exactly this reason. But there’s a big difference between maintaining a house and rescuing one.
My tip: you don’t even need brand new. A property that’s less than 10 years old is often the sweet spot. The new-build problems like the settling cracks, the door that never quite closed, the drainage issue the builder had to come back for have already been found and fixed on someone else’s watch.
So before you buy the cheaper older house because the purchase price looks good, do the maths on what it costs to bring it up to standard and keep it there under guest use. The newer home usually wins.
Thinking about buying a property for short-term rental in South East Queensland, Hervey Bay or Melbourne? Ask us for an appraisal before you buy, we’re happy to tell you what a property would actually earn.