Four things every Perth landlord should know about their own property.
Most owners can tell you what their property rents for. Far fewer can tell you what it costs them each week after tax, what a fortnight of vacancy really costs, or the earliest date they can lawfully put the rent up. Pick the question you have and the calculator opens below.
Positively geared means the rent covers everything. Negatively geared means you are paying to hold it and claiming the shortfall against your income. Most Perth investors with a loan in the last five years are somewhere in the second camp and have never worked out by how much. The four figures below decide most of it and the rest carry sensible Perth defaults, so you get a real answer without opening anything.
Enter your figures and this will fill in.
This is a cash flow calculation, not tax advice. Depreciation, the deductibility of any particular cost and your actual marginal rate are questions for your accountant. Local Property Partners is a licensed real estate agency, not a tax agent or a financial adviser.
Why principal repayments are not in this
If you are paying principal and interest, the principal part is not a cost. It is you converting cash into equity in something you already own. Including it makes every property look worse than it is and makes two properties with different loan structures impossible to compare. Your bank statement will show a bigger number leaving your account than this calculator does, and both are correct, they are just measuring different things.
What it does mean is that a positively geared result here can still be a negative month in your bank account. If that is the number you need, add your principal repayment to the weekly figure yourself.
Why the vacancy allowance matters more than the fee
Owners spend a lot of attention on the management percentage and almost none on the vacancy line, which is usually the larger number. On a $650 a week property, the difference between an 8% fee and a 9.9% fee is about $12 a week. One extra week of vacancy is $650. So a manager who leases the property a fortnight faster has paid for the fee difference for the entire year, twice over.
That is not an argument for a higher fee. It is an argument for putting the two numbers on the same screen, which is what the next tool does.
What this does not tell you
It says nothing about capital growth, which over a long enough hold is usually the larger part of the return and is the reason most people accept a negative weekly position in the first place. It also assumes your costs stay flat, which they will not: rates, insurance and interest all move, and insurance in particular has moved sharply in recent years.
Treat the weekly figure as a snapshot of today under today's rate, and re-run it when something material changes.
The most expensive decision a landlord makes is usually not the fee they pay, it is the extra twenty dollars a week they hold out for. Rent is an annual number. Vacancy is a weekly one. This works out how many weeks of empty property it takes before the increase you were chasing has cost you more than it earned.
Enter two rents and this will fill in.
A rent increase on a sitting tenant carries no letting fee and no vacancy, so the only real risk is that the tenant leaves. That is exactly what this is measuring.
Why this is the argument against self managing, not for a cheap manager
On the figures above, the break-even is usually somewhere between two and four weeks. Perth's median time to lease moves around but has been well inside a month in recent years, so a property priced correctly and marketed properly is rarely empty that long. A property priced twenty dollars above the market, listed with three phone photos and shown on one Saturday, very easily is.
The gap between those two outcomes is worth several times the difference between any two management fees you will be quoted. That is the whole argument, and it is arithmetic rather than opinion.
When holding out is the right call
Sometimes it is. If the property is genuinely under-rented because the last increase was skipped, if comparable stock is thin, or if you are heading into the part of the year when demand in your suburb is strongest, the market may simply come to you and the break-even never gets tested.
The point is not that you should always take the lower number. It is that you should know what you are betting and over how many weeks, rather than discovering it in March.
In Western Australia rent can be increased no more than once in any twelve months, and the increase cannot take effect until at least sixty days after written notice is served on the prescribed form. Those two clocks run at the same time and owners routinely serve notice too late to use the date they wanted. Put the dates in and this gives you both: the earliest the new rent can start, and the last day you can still post the notice to make it.
Put in the dates and this will fill in.
General information about Western Australian tenancy law, current at September 2026, not legal advice about your tenancy. Notice periods are minimums and the notice has to be correctly served to count. Confirm anything you will rely on with Consumer Protection WA.
The form, and why the wrong one wastes sixty days
The notice is a Form 10, and it has to state the increased amount and the day it takes effect. An email saying "your rent is going up $30 from next month" is not a valid notice, and neither is a letter that gets the effective date wrong. If the notice is defective the sixty days does not start, and you find out when the tenant declines to pay the new amount and is entirely within their rights.
Residential parks use a Form RP10 instead. The rest of this applies the same way.
Fixed term agreements, and the 29 July 2024 change
During a fixed term you can only increase the rent if the agreement itself already says by how much, or how it will be worked out. If it is silent, the rent is fixed for the term and no notice can change that. The practical answer is usually to time the increase to the end of the term.
Agreements signed before 29 July 2024 that contain a rent increase provision continue to operate under the older rules until that agreement ends. Once it is renewed, the once in twelve months rule applies again from that point.
A tenant can challenge the amount
Serving a valid notice is not the end of it. A tenant can apply to the Magistrates Court to have an increase reviewed as excessive, and the court will look at rents for comparable properties nearby, the condition of the property, what has been spent on maintaining it, and whether the increase looks retaliatory.
In practice that is rare and it is rarer still where the increase is supported by evidence. It is a reason to be able to show the comparable properties you priced from, not a reason to avoid increasing the rent.
This compares what you would walk away with if you sold today against what the property is returning you on the equity you have tied up in it. Then it tells you what the tenancy actually allows, which is the part most owners discover late and which can decide the question on its own.
Enter your figures and this will fill in.
Before capital gains tax, which on an investment property is usually the largest single number in a sale decision and depends entirely on your cost base, how long you have held it and your other income. Speak to your accountant before acting on this. Nothing here is a promise about price or about how long a property takes to sell.
Why return on equity, and not yield
Gross yield tells you what the property earns against what it is worth, which is useful when you are buying and close to useless when you already own it. What matters once you hold it is what your own money is earning, and your own money is the equity, not the value. A property worth $750,000 with $500,000 owing has $250,000 of your money in it, and that is the figure the return should be measured against.
It is also the figure you would be freeing up by selling, which is what makes the comparison honest: sell, and that equity goes somewhere else and earns something else.
The lease is not a detail, it is often the decision
Whether a property sells tenanted or with vacant possession is the single biggest lever on the price, because vacant possession opens it to owner occupiers, who buy on how it feels to live in and generally pay more than an investor buying on yield. A tenanted property is priced by investors doing arithmetic.
And you cannot simply end a fixed term early because you have decided to sell. A sale is not a ground for termination in Western Australia. That leaves you with three options: agree it in writing with every tenant, wait for the term to end, or sell it tenanted. Which is why the lease dates belong in this calculation and not in a conversation you have two months later. How selling a tenanted property works.
The trades I actually use
These are the people working on the properties I manage, not a paid directory. Call them directly and say Local Property Partners sent you, which is usually worth the agency rate rather than the retail one. I do not take a commission on any of this, and if one of them lets you down I want to know, because they are on my properties too.
People I will introduce you to
These are introductions rather than services. I hold a real estate licence, which is not a credit licence and not a financial services licence, so I can tell you who I trust and why, and then it is a conversation between you and them. Ask me and I will make the introduction.
Ask me something
One form, because the last version of this page had forty six and that turned out to be forty five too many. Tell me what you need in your own words. If it is urgent, call me on 0422 238 434.
Local Property Partners, licensed real estate agency RA85442, ABN 48 582 232 398. The calculators on this page are general information and produce estimates from the figures you enter. They are not tax, legal or financial advice, and they take no account of your personal circumstances. Tenancy information reflects the Residential Tenancies Act 1987 (WA) as at September 2026; confirm anything you will rely on with Consumer Protection WA. Nothing here is a promise about rent, price, yield or how long a property will take to lease or sell.