The Hidden Costs of Tropical Property Investments: Paradise Comes with a Price
In the tropical north, weather patterns can trip up the unsuspecting investor, with extra costs on everything from pools and aircon to insurance and garden design
3 min
There’s a lot to think about when purchasing an investment property, and location is often at the top of the list. This will crucially affect rentability, income and ultimately, sale price. Investors also need to factor in its knock-on effect on maintenance costs. And nowhere is that more apparent than in the Tropics.
The Wet Tropics World Heritage Area accounts for the land between Townsville and Cooktown on the north-east coast of Queensland, covering an area of more than 8000km. Within this, FNQ holiday hotspots such as Mission Beach, Cairns, Palm Cove and Port Douglas have become sought-after investment addresses in the post-pandemic era. Ah, the Aussie Tropics! Year- round sunshine, a holiday lifestyle and (compared to our more southerly cities) affordability. So far, so idyllic.
But what else do you need to know before you put down that deposit? Here are some of the ongoing costs involved in investing in a tropical dream.
Growing pains
Most landlords in the Tropics include regular garden (and irrigation) maintenance as part of the monthly rent. Mitch Sullivan, horticulturalist with Papillon Landscapes and Construction, works on properties in Cairns, the Daintree and everywhere in between.
“Anyone who’s been around long enough, knows how hard it can be,” he says. “People from down south often aren’t aware of the rate at which everything grows. If you don’t have the knowledge, or the time, it can get away from you really quickly.”
And if you have paying guests, you need to keep your corner of paradise in tip-top shape.
“Occasionally you may get a tenant who says they want to look after the gardens but that usually doesn’t go too well,” he says.
Landscaping companies charge from around $120 for a fortnightly service, depending on the size and scope of your block. It’s always good to get a quote upfront.
Keep it covered
Extreme weather patterns all over Australia in the past few years have made it clear that adequate insurance is a no-brainer. And when you’re buying property in a region that’s at risk of cyclones for six months of the year, it’s especially pertinent. According to financial comparison site Canstar’s calculation of average annual home and contents insurance premiums across Australia in 2021, North Queensland’s premium more than doubles the Queensland average and approximately triples the other states and territories (except NT). While the risks are minimised by the fact that the properties are built to code — ie to withstand a cyclone — it isn’t a foolproof system, and the wise investors will have their properties checked prior to cyclone season for signs of deterioration.
How’s the humidity?
With winter lows at around 25 degrees and hot, humid conditions in the wet season, aircon is a must. Jason and Anne Moore (pictured below) are resident managers at Freestyle Resort in Port Douglas, where air conditioning is a responsibility of the individual apartment owner/investor.
“Aircon units have a relatively short shelf life here because they’re almost constantly in use,” says Jason. “They often don’t outlast the warranty period so it’s something else for buyers to factor in.”
Humidity is also responsible for mould, which can be a major issue in the tropics, especially if a property is left vacant for periods of time during the wet season.
“If you leave a place locked up for eight weeks you may well come back to find it’s turned green,” says Jason. “Once it’s in, mould is not easy to get rid of. Removal is an expensive exercise.”
In the swim
Not every property has a pool but it’s one of the most popular add-ons for a rental in the Tropics, so let’s assume your investment has one. As with gardening, pool maintenance is generally built into the rent. Holiday makers expect a pristine pool, and you probably don’t want to trust long-term tenants to maintain the chlorine levels and keep the filter running.
Daryl Taylor owns and runs Happy Pools, servicing pools from the Northern Beaches of Cairns northwards up the coast.
“Most landlords have a pool maintenance service,” he says. “It makes sense up here because people swim pretty much all year round, so you need it to be operating perfectly. In the wet season, we get an enormous amount of rain, and this dilutes the chemicals and washes the garden into the pool.”
Happy Pools offers different tiers of service for rentals from monthly and fortnightly regulars up to several times a week.
“Holiday properties need more attention because guests are in the pool a lot — people are leaving beer bottles around and kids are weeing in there — so we need to service it between each booking.”
Expect to pay around $45 (plus chemicals) for a fortnightly service, depending on your pool.
For Central Element, the start of work at Pearl represents another step in the company’s growing eastern suburbs pipeline.
All three vehicles will form part of a broader charitable initiative benefiting Big Brothers Big Sisters of America, the American Red Cross and Starlight Children’s Foundation
Randy Boyagoda’s new novel, “Lords of Serendipity,” delivers a biting satire of cheating, politics and dysfunction across modern universities.
5 min
Administrative cowardice. Rampant cheating. The soaking and scamming of undergrads and grad students. Performative wokeism. Intensifying competition for international tuition dollars from an expansive China.
These are either the latest dire headlines about American higher ed or the myriad subplots of “Lords of Serendipity,” an ambitious new novel by Randy Boyagoda. Unlike most campus fiction, its scope extends well beyond the cloister of the liberal arts classroom to whammy the entire university system, from its financial model to its function within a globalized economy. Along the way, it skewers its lightning-rod targets with a precision too sharp to be considered entirely fictional.
That its author is not only well-versed in satire, having written four other novels in the genre, but is also a professor of English at the University of Toronto and an experienced college administrator, further blurs the lines between comic fiction and brutal fact. It’s the kind of no-holds-barred book only a consummate insider would know to write—but only one who is also conveniently outside the American university system could get away with writing.
“This is someone who’s got the inside dope on what can go on at universities, especially with international students, and what kind of con games are going on,” said Margaret Atwood, a friend and fellow Torontonian.
The novel, like Boyagoda himself, is often very funny—even as the dilemmas its characters face read as tragedy. Its cast includes the bickering members of a Sri Lankan hotel cleaner’s family, insecure American freshmen, dead-end third-tier college professors and their highflying Ivy League counterparts and dispirited university functionaries. An old-fashioned Dickensian tale, it sweeps across continents and campuses, from a classic liberal-arts college to a stand-in for Harvard University to an urban technical school to the dilapidated buildings of a state-run university in Sri Lanka.
“I’m a joyful person,” Boyagoda said in an interview, though he prefers to see his outlook on academia as “hopeful” rather than optimistic. He smiles and laughs frequently. He bikes everywhere. He derives energy from his students and from his four daughters, ages 14 to 20. They help him and his American wife, Anna, also an educator, care for Boyagoda’s father, an immigrant from Sri Lanka who has dementia and lives with the family.
The germ of the novel came to Boyagoda during the pandemic, when he was serving as a vice-dean. An urban legend was circulating about a statistics grad student selling passing grades to international students. The cheating scheme itself may well have been apocryphal, but it felt tantalizingly plausible.
“As a novelist, it stayed with me,” Boyagoda said. “Who would sell grades for a stats course? Why would someone buy grades? What’s motivating them? Why wouldn’t the university be doing something about it?” What he didn’t want to do, he explained, was write “another novel about a creative writing professor and his drama with students.”
In addition to writing novels—the first of which was a finalist for Canada’s prestigious Giller Prize; he’s written eight books in total—Boyagoda teaches literature full-time. For his students next semester, kids raised in a purportedly “post-literature era,” he’s assigning three 700-page novels, he noted mischievously, books by George Eliot, Ralph Ellison and Kiran Desai.
On RateMyProfessors, students remark on Boyagoda’s heavy assignments, tough grading and distaste for cellphones, but also hail his “comedy.” When alerted to these reviews, Boyagoda laughed. “Guilty as charged,” he said.
“Randy’s one of those people in academia who is very well educated but doesn’t have an ounce of superiority about him,” said John Irving, who frequently guest lectures in Boyagoda’s classroom. “It’s amazing to see how willing students are to talk in his classrooms, how little afraid they feel of being mocked or put down—he gets complete candor out of them.”
Negotiating competing interests seems to come naturally to him. Like many college campuses, after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, the University of Toronto was embroiled in protests, encampments and discord; part of the school’s response was to convene a working group on civil discourse. Boyagoda was put in charge, serving for two years. It’s the kind of thankless task many professors would flee from, but Boyagoda relished the prospect and thinks the group, which is ongoing, made progress.
He has since pivoted to another formidable academic concern: the waning prestige of the humanities. In July, Boyagoda became the director of the Jackman Humanities Institute and special advisor on the humanities to the dean of arts and science. This fall, he is starting a series of gatherings he calls the Dead Book Club. (Dead writers feature heavily among his favorites: St. Augustine, Dante, William Faulkner, Evelyn Waugh, Saul Bellow.)
“The goal is to encourage students to read for its own sake and have conversation for its own sake,” Boyagoda said. “The importance of the humanities will be revealed to those who participate.”
“Lords of Serendipity,” which publishes next week, reflects Boyagoda’s commitment to the pursuit of knowledge: “I’m supposed to say I learn more from my students than they do from me, but no,” Boyagoda said. “I enjoy sharing my excitement and joy about literature and ideas. There are these moments when you are teaching and you can see someone’s face change because they didn’t know something and then they did. That moment when you’re actually watch someone enlarge themselves is deeply satisfying.”
In literary circles, Boyagoda is often referred to as a Catholic novelist, a description he embraces. “A novelist willing to give shape and voice to contemporary religious experience is needed,” Boyagoda said. “I understand myself as a Catholic novelist, provided that I’m not only a Catholic novelist, I’m also a South Asian novelist and I’m a Canadian novelist. I don’t want to be captive to one label.”
His characters, he said, are subjected to what he calls “Graham Greene character situations.”
“They are trying to do good in a fallen world and realize the most they can do is less harm than someone else would do in that same role,” he explained. “They have to accept they are complicit in something that provides some good thing to others. It’s a very Graham Greene way of thinking about sacrifice.”
The campus green they inhabit is a febrile zone in which lofty ideals and cynicism regularly collide. It’s a place where a traditional holiday college celebration is now an occasion for political protest. Kids freely police one another inside and out of the classroom with social media their constant, ready weapon of choice. International students, knowing their family’s financial futures hinge on their degrees, operate in terror of failure and deportation.
Early readers of the book include Gary Shteyngart and Junot Diaz, both of whom have taught at universities and written comic novels. They each contacted Boyagoda midway through to say, in essence, “You nailed it.”
As biting as “Lords of Serendipity” can be, Boyagoda’s faith in higher education remains undaunted.
“It’s absurd that we live in societies that make the decision to take people between the ages of 18 and 22, when they are most physically capable of contributing to our nations and communities, and tell them, ‘Go away for four years, and read and learn and have conversations,’” he said. “I want students to be aware of what an incredible privilege that is.”
Corrections & Amplifications
Randy Boyagoda is a special advisor on the humanities to the dean of arts and science at the University of Toronto. An earlier version of this article incorrectly said he is a special adviser to the dean of humanities. (Corrected on Sept. 2)
Mirzaian is a senior director within CBRE’s Development NSW business, operating across the company’s Western Sydney and North Sydney offices
From Tokyo backstreets to quiet coastal towns and off-grid cabins, top executives reveal where they holiday and why stepping away makes the grind worthwhile.
