A Singaporean In Australia

Since WA is struggling and is the worst performing state in Australia, prices of property has gone down for the past 8 quarters. Unavoidably, this affects the rental market. Unlike the days where I had to fight 20 applicants to rent a place, I heard some landlords are now offering a period of free rental to whoever taking up their untenanted properties. It is a 360 degrees change from 5 years ago when I first set foot in Perth.

The reason why residential properties are over supplied now is mainly due to a negative migration rate and the bulk of folks leaving WA are economic migrants from the eastern states who came over to capitalise on the mining boom. After the bubble burst, they fucked off back to where they came from, reversing the supply status of properties in WA completely. Not surprisingly, property prices in the eastern states are still increasing consistently.

So why did the eastern state people leave? Well there are no more jobs for them. Many companies seem to vanish completely in the air, as if they have never existed. The others have downsized. So where does that leave us? Industry areas looking sorry and desolated all over the place. Less cars on the road. Perth has returned to its old boring state, which is great - except that survival remains a doubt and a challenge. 

Some factories in prime industry areas have been left untenanted for more than a year. Free rental in those properties is a given if you care to rent of one of those. It is a question of how many months you get. Thus my company was interested in moving to a bigger place, in a better location because the management think it is now or never. At the peak of the boom several years back, we can only dream. With the rental rates going down, the boss reckoned that if we were to negotiate and lock in a 5 years contract with the much lower rental rates, we should be able to handle the risks of higher overheads for the next 5 years.

I have mixed feelings about this. While I was one of those crying out for a bigger factory, anyone knows that if we are unable to capitalise on the advantages of having a bigger inventory, we will go down in the long run. To make things simple, sales has to go up significantly. Period. At this climate, it is easier said than done. For an employee, it means more work with the same pay. So we can never win. However, I still feel great pride in this expansion attempt. It is the first time in my work life that I have grown with a start-up company and played a role in building it up. The new factory is basically my canvass. I am free to design the set up in the best way I feel it should be. Though I am not paid fantastically here nor do I have good bonuses and have not seen a pay increment from Day 1, what I cherish is the trust I have from the management to run the show. When there is no problem, they practically left me alone. With that freedom, after I get things up operationally running smoothly, I concentrate on thinking of better ways to do things. That is why I stay in this job until today.

The new factory is about double the current factory space. It isn't huge like some of the businesses out there but the increase is still significant. With the space, I will be able to allocate some space to aid some of our annoying work inconveniences in the factory. I should be able to implement some of the low/no cost ideas, albeit crude and unsophisticated, to make things easier for us in terms of operation or stock taking. The location of the new place will mean my commute time reducing to 50% of the current. It should take no longer than 20 minutes to get to work in future, which is good. That is one of the reason why I moved to the valley. We should be able to move this Winter.