Buying a home and an investment as one purchase. Why that's harder than it sounds.
I bought this property in 2014 to live in. I always knew it would become an investment eventually. That single decision cost me years.
There's nothing wrong with buying a home. There's nothing wrong with buying an investment. The problem shows up when one purchase is asked to do both jobs at once. As a buyers agent, I see this exact pattern with clients constantly, they try to make one address solve two different problems.
When I bought this property, I was choosing it as a home, somewhere to live, based on what suited my life at the time. Investment performance wasn't the filter. It couldn't be, because the criteria for a good home and the criteria for a good investment location aren't always the same thing.
I lived there for two and a half years. Looking back, there was no meaningful price growth in that area until 2018, four years after I bought it. Rental pressure in the background was already telling a different story, vacancy sitting around 6% in 2018 and tightening to 1% by 2021, but price hadn't been the reason I chose the location, so it wasn't the thing I was watching.
A home purchase is filtered on lifestyle and what suits your life right now. An investment purchase is filtered on location fundamentals, price pressure and rental pressure, being a small number of things that matter most. These filters don't always point to the same address.
When you buy with both objectives layered onto one decision, one of them ends up compromised, usually without you noticing at the time. You tell yourself the location works for both. Often what's actually happened is the lifestyle criteria won, and the investment case was accepted rather than tested.