Author
Steven Jin
Chief Acquisitions Officer
Steven Jin is the Chief Acquisitions Officer of PremiumRea. He leads on-the-ground property acquisition across Melbourne and regional Victoria — sourcing off-market deals, running due diligence, and negotiating purchases for the agency’s investment clients.
12 articles published
- 29 August 202614 min read·Investment Strategy
Best Suburbs for Rooming House Investment in Melbourne — 12 Suburbs Ranked by Our Own Deal Data (2026)
Which Melbourne suburbs actually work for rooming house investment? Not an opinion list — a ranking built from the 48 rooming house conversions in our own published client dataset (offer dates October 2023 to September 2025). Dandenong recorded a 7.36% mean gross yield on total cost across five conversions, Rowville 7.26% across seven, and the full 48-deal subset averaged $1,146 per week in rent after works. Tier by tier: the suburbs, the real numbers, why tenant demand holds up in each, and the suburbs we deliberately avoid.
- 29 August 202613 min read·Investment Strategy
Building a New Rooming House in Melbourne: Real Costs, the No-Planning-Permit Pathway, and the 10% Question (2026)
How much does it cost to build a rooming house in Melbourne, and do you need a planning permit to do it? The purpose-built new rooming house is the successor strategy to the conversion, and Victoria Planning Provisions Clause 52.23 carries two separate permit exemptions: Clause 52.23-2 for the use across ten zones, and Clause 52.23-3 for the buildings and works across six. A new rooming house designed within the limits — 300 square metres of total floor area excluding outbuildings, 9 bedrooms, 12 residents — needs no planning permit in either respect. This is our internal briefing: both exemptions and their conditions, the Class 1b cost logic, what builders quote versus what we contract, and two fully worked cost scenarios.
- 29 August 202611 min read·Investment Strategy
Rooming House Leasing Rules in Victoria: The Operator's Guide to Residents, Rents and Minimum Standards (2026)
Owning a compliant rooming house is only half the job — running the tenancies inside it is governed by a distinct part of Victorian law that most landlords have never read. Rooming house residents are not standard tenants: their rights arise from occupation, their rent and bond rules are different, and the 2023 minimum standards regulate the rooms themselves. This is the operator's guide to rooming house leasing rules in Victoria — what changes, what the standards require, and why specialist management is the difference between 95% occupancy and chaos.
- 28 August 202611 min read·Investment Strategy
Buying an Established Rooming House in Melbourne — Due Diligence Guide
Buying an established rooming house in Melbourne trades conversion risk for verification risk. An already-operating rooming house arrives with registration, fit-out and a rent ledger — every one of which must be independently verified before you pay for it. This guide covers where established rooming houses are actually listed and sold, the due diligence specific to the asset (operator licensing and council registration, compliance audit of the existing fit-out, ledger verification, tenancy agreements under the RTA rooming-house provisions, fire-safety currency), the price and yield trade-off against converting your own, and the red flags that end negotiations.
- 27 August 202612 min read·Investment Strategy
Rooming House Feasibility Study — The Checklist We Run Before a Client Buys
A rooming house feasibility study is the difference between a 7 per cent conversion and an expensive mistake. Before any PremiumRea client buys a rooming house candidate we run the same eight-step work-up: zoning and overlay check, floorplan test, Class 1b threshold test, conversion cost estimate, room-rent evidence, total-cost yield math, registration timeline and sensitivity analysis — ending in an explicit go/no-go call. This article publishes the full checklist with a worked example built on the numbers from the 48 rooming conversions in our client dataset.
- 26 August 202611 min read·Investment Strategy
Rooming House Finance in Melbourne — How Lenders Actually Treat the Asset
Rooming house finance is the constraint that decides whether a Melbourne rooming house strategy is executable at all. Lenders treat a configured rooming house as specialised use: valuation methods change, income is discounted or ignored, and loan-to-value ratios drop from the 80-90 per cent of standard residential to 60-70 per cent — or the asset is declined outright. This guide maps how the lending market actually treats rooming houses by lender category, how the buy-standard-convert-later sequencing works and where it can go wrong, and what to resolve with a broker before you buy.
- 25 August 202611 min read·Investment Strategy
Class 1b Rooming House Investment — The Complete Compliance Guide
Class 1b rooming house classification is the single most important building-code decision in a Melbourne rooming house conversion. Stay inside the 12-resident and 300 square metre thresholds and your fire-safety and permit obligations remain residential-scale; tip into Class 3 and you are building to commercial accommodation standards at two to three times the cost. This guide covers what Class 1b actually means under the NCC, the fire-safety stack, when a building surveyor must sign off, how the classification interacts with Rooming House Operators Act registration, and the conversion mistakes that trigger enforcement.
- 7 May 20269 min read·Guides
REBAA-Accredited Buyer's Agent in Melbourne — What It Means and Why It Matters in 2026
REBAA — the Real Estate Buyers Agents Association of Australia — is the only national body that accredits buyer's agents specifically. Most consumers searching for a Melbourne buyer's agent in 2026 confuse REBAA with REIV (the sales-agent body) or assume that any licensed agent is automatically a member. They are not. Membership is voluntary, the bar is genuine, and the difference in consumer protection between a REBAA member and a non-member is substantial.
- 4 May 202612 min read·Investment Strategy
SMSF Property Investment Melbourne — Buyer's Agent Step-by-Step Guide 2026
An SMSF (Self-Managed Super Fund) can buy investment property in Melbourne — but the rules are unforgiving and most generalist buyer's agents are not equipped to navigate them. This 2026 guide walks through the LRBA borrowing structure, the sole purpose test, suburb selection criteria specific to SMSFs, the five-person professional team you need, and a real case study showing how a $780K Hampton Park SMSF purchase moved from $0 to $312,000 in equity over four years.
- 30 April 202612 min read·Finance & Tax
Melbourne Buyer's Agent for Foreign Investors — FIRB, Tax & 2026 Rule Changes
Foreign investors buying Melbourne residential property face a stack of restrictions that have changed materially since 2025: a Foreign Investment Review Board (FIRB) application fee that starts at $15,600 for a new dwelling under the schedule in force from 1 July 2026, an outright ban on purchasing established homes that runs from 1 April 2025 to 30 June 2029 after the 2026-27 federal Budget extended it, Victoria's 8 per cent foreign purchaser stamp duty surcharge, and a 4 per cent foreign owner land tax surcharge. A Melbourne buyer's agent who specialises in foreign investor transactions is now arguably more important than the conveyancer.
- 25 April 202610 min read·Investment Strategy
Melbourne Buyer's Agent for Investors vs Owner-Occupiers — How They Differ in 2026
An investor buyer's agent in Melbourne and an owner-occupier buyer's agent are doing two genuinely different jobs that share an industry name and very little else. Investors care about yield, depreciation schedules, tax structure, and long-term growth math. Owner-occupiers care about the school zone, the commute, the kitchen layout, and how the place feels at 5pm on a Tuesday. The shortlists do not overlap, the inspection checklists do not overlap, and the negotiation playbooks are nearly opposite. This article explains why and how to choose the right kind of buyer's agent for your situation.
- 24 April 202612 min read·Investment Strategy
Rooming House Investment Melbourne — Buyer's Agent's 2026 Guide
A Victorian rooming house is a building where four or more people may occupy rooms for rent — Residential Tenancies Act 1997 s 3(1) counts people, not leases. Operating one requires a licence from the Business Licensing Authority (up to 240 penalty units or 2 years imprisonment without one), council registration as prescribed accommodation, a 7.5 m² minimum bedroom, and one toilet, bath or shower and wash basin per 10 people. Clause 52.23 often removes the planning permit. Across the 48 conversions in our published 345-transaction dataset (October 2023 to September 2025) the median gross yield after works was 6.94%. Every legal figure is linked to the authorised legislation and was verified on 31 August 2026.