Category: Blog Posts

Creative Estates Israel manages many rental properties in Israel and sends in teams of professional cleaners between rentals and before owner visits. We asked our cleaning crew for the 7 best cleaning products for cleaning house in Israel, so here are their recommendations for keeping your home in Israel clean and shining!

• Economica – household bleach is the universal cleaning product in Israel. It is used generously to clean floors and surfaces, often with pleasant scents added to the bleach to mask its unpleasant smell. It is easy to forget how caustic it is – always wear gloves and beware splashes on clothing.
• Magic Sponge is the secret product that we use to keep our white walls white! Almost any mark comes off with a damp magic sponge, and it is not impregnated with chemicals so it is easy and safe to use.
• Calgon often provides the remedy for those annoying limescale deposits that appear wherever water sits. Because water in Israel is ‘hard’, it leaves behind white calcium deposits. Accumulated deposits can block pipes and inhibit the functioning of kettles, hot water heaters, shower heads and washing machines, so look for appropriate Calgon descaling products for your appliances too.
• Sponga Stick – it’s not a product, but it is the “weapon” of choice for most Israeli cleaners in the war on dirty floors. Simple but effective – simply wrap a damp cloth (shmatter in Hebrew!) around the rubber floor stick and wipe your floors quickly and easily. Sponga is the Israeli way to clean!
• Window Cleaning Spray – this is a no-brainer for keeping windows clean so that you can see the sunshine and enjoy those bright blue skies. However, pick your season – there is no point cleaning your windows in the winter or the spring until the last rains are over, because rain in Israel often carries dust or sand, and you’ll just have to clean them all over again!
• St. Moritz Oven Cleaner – if you need to clean your oven after a spill or to prepare for Pesach, this is the strongest cleaning product we know! It attacks baked-on greasy spills, but it is also highly toxic – open the windows to ventilate the kitchen, wear gloves and old clothes to use this product, and always keep it far away from children.
• Vinegar – some people swear by natural cleaning products like vinegar and baking soda because they don’t like using dangerous chemicals. Vinegar can often help to remove light limescale marks and to clean windows, so you can save your chemical weapons for the heavier cleaning tasks.

If cleaning house in Israel sounds like hard work that you don’t have time for, the Creative Estates Israel cleaning and maintenance team would be happy to take care of your Israel rental property. Talk to Shaun Isaacson about our property management services today.

If you are renting out a house or apartment in Israel, one of the most important features to potential tenants will be the kitchen. Shaun Isaacson of Creative Estates Israel explains how to add value to your Israeli property by renovating the kitchen.

As in many other cultures, the kitchen is often the center of a Jewish home. Family life and social life in Israel tends to focus around eating, so your tenants may expect a fully-equipped modern kitchen in their rental apartment. So here are some helpful points to consider before you start to renovate:

Kosher Kitchens

Not everybody in Israel is religious, but a 2016 poll revealed that even one-third of secular Israelis said they keep a kosher home. This usually involves keeping dairy and meat dishes in separate cupboards, washing them in separate sinks, and sometimes – at the more religious end of the spectrum – even having two separate ovens. You may have to consider the size of the kitchen and practicality of installing multiple sinks and appliances, but there is no doubt that advertising a kosher kitchen will add to the rental value of your property in most areas of Israel.

Israeli Plumbing

Depending on the age of the building in which your kitchen is located, you may encounter practical challenges when trying to upgrade the plumbing. Installing a second sink, for example, may involve adding additional water and waste pipes. It is not recommended to throw food waste down the sinks in Israel because the pipes are often narrow and can become blocked easily. Unblocking pipes will usually be the landlord’s responsibility, so you may want to install filters in the kitchen sinks that can be easily cleared. For the same reason, sinks with food disposal systems are not common in Israeli kitchens. You will save yourself money in the long term if you help your tenants to avoid kitchen sink disasters and pipe blockages.

Chilling in Israel

Refrigerators and freezers are an essential feature of any Israeli kitchen. Because of the hot weather during most of the year, some Israeli cooks will keep almost all their ingredients in the refrigerator. It is considered good practice to keep flour, rice, sugar, and many dried herbs and spices refrigerated to avoid possible infestation and to conserve their flavor. When planning your kitchen renovation in Israel, we recommend leaving large gaps for your tenants’ to install their refrigerator and freezer.  Some tenants may also want to install a cold water dispensing machine, which requires a thin pipe from the main cold water feed.

What is Shayesh?

When potential tenants walk into your new kitchen, they may ask about the ‘shayesh’. This is a catch-all Hebrew term that describes the kitchen surfaces that are usually made from stone. When renovating your Israeli kitchen you may want to choose natural granite or marble, but we recommend installing counter-tops made from caesarstone or other engineered stone materials. The advantage of these part-synthetic stone surfaces is that they are heat-treated and less likely to crack or show scratches. They are cheaper to install and maintain and will keep your kitchen looking good!

Creative Kitchens in Israel

Creative Estates Israel has renovated numerous kitchens in our clients’ rental properties. We have a team of contractors who have extensive experience in the various tasks involved in removing the old kitchen and installing a new one. We recommend that our clients talk to us before bringing in an expensive kitchen company, because we can always beat their prices and install a great-looking kitchen for less. Talk to us today about your rental property and any renovations that you require.

A typical Israeli kitchen renovation – taking it back to  the basics!

How does Israel’s buy to rent market compare with other real estate markets around the world? What profit can investors expect to make from buying and renting out apartments? 

As with many things in Israel, the real estate market is complex and hard to predict. Israeli property prices rose by 5.9% during 2016, while rental prices rose by just 1.4% over the same period – the lowest annual increase since 2008. The shortage of housing stock and the rise in mortgage interest rates is boosting demand for rental housing but not driving up rental prices, so yield rates for investors are not increasing in parallel with housing prices.

Potential property investors look for a number of different factors when assessing their likely return on investment – purchase price, anticipated increase in property value, rental returns and renting costs. They also look for economic stability and predictable regulations, both of which are difficult to find in this region of the world. For example, fluctuations in the value of the shekel, which has risen 12% against the dollar over the past 5 years, make it difficult for overseas investors to calculate their ROI.

Legislative uncertainty has made Israeli real estate investments more unpredictable in recent years. The purchase tax on housing for investment was increased in 2015, and there is legislation on the books to tax the owners of three or more properties (currently held up by Israel’s Supreme Court). There have been multiple attempts to regulate the rental market in Israel but none have resulted in legislation.

Various bills have been introduced in order to try to stabilize rental prices, by either prohibiting landlords from raising prices or incentivizing them not to do so. They have tried to specify what conditions a rental property must meet, what repairs landlords are liable to make, and the maximum value of the collateral that they can demand from tenants. However, these bills have not passed into law because the government does not see it as an urgent priority, leaving the market largely unregulated.

One of the consequences of this regulatory vacuum is that Israel offers the lowest landlord costs in the world. According to the Global Property Guide (www.globalpropertyguide.com), Israel has one of the lowest “round trip costs” for property investors of any country, ranking 102 out of the 123 countries that they have surveyed. They look at the total cost of buying and then re-selling a residential property of comparable value, including all the rental costs (except the sale price itself), and this figure is expressed as percentage of the property value. In Israel, this total transaction cost is 6.74% of the property value, compared with 8.03% in the UK, 10.65% in Hungary and 18.45% in France. This means that the price of buying and selling investment properties, in terms of registration costs, real estate agent and lawyers’ fees and sales and transfer taxes, is relatively low in Israel compared with most other countries.

The same Global Property Guide shows Israel as levying 7.75% tax on rental income, which ranks us 89^th out of 130 countries measured. In Switzerland the tax is 48% but in the Bahamas and many other countries there is no such tax, so Israel sits somewhere in the middle of the table. (Their calculations assume that the property owner is a non-resident foreigner with no other local income.)

Indices like this are not totally reliable, because situations change and certain assumptions have been made in the collation of comparable figures. For example, the agents’ and lawyers’ costs paid by buyers and sellers vary widely, with buyers of more expensive properties often paying proportionately lower agents fees.

However, it is clear from the Global Property Guide and other international indices that Israeli properties do not give the best return on investment compared with other countries around the world. The Guide website shows the return on investment in Israel as 2.57%, less than the average yield for the United States at 2.75%, and close to the bottom of their international table as the 76^th of the 80 countries for which gross rental yields are measured. Investors could probably make much higher profits by investing in Eastern Europe or Asia, and yet the property investment market in Israel remains strong.

At Creative Estates, we understand that return on investment is not the only driving force in the Israeli buy-to-let market. In our experience, people who buy properties to rent in Israel are usually looking not only for a good long-term return on their investment, but also to own properties that they and their family may live in one day. They recognise that Israel’s strong economy, rising birth rate and steady flow of immigrants are keeping property prices high. Politicians and economists may talk optimistically about increasing the supply of properties and taking the heat out of the market, but most investors recognize that real estate is holding its value.

At Creative Estates, we don’t believe that the Israeli property bubble is going to burst – it may deflate slightly as the supply of new housing increases, but we are seeing solid property prices and steady rental income. Jews from around the world continue to buy real estate in Israel as their security against increasing anti-Semitism and to fulfil their dream of retiring to the Holy Land. As long as the rental income remains high enough to offset the costs of their investment, they will be happy to buy to let the real estate that they hope will one day become their home.

If you call up an Israeli contractor for a price, hearing your accented Hebrew will probably add 20% to his regular fee!  As an experienced Israeli property manager and qualified lawyer, Shaun Isaacson has a clear advantage in hiring and supervising Israeli contractors.

When organizing and overseeing renovations and repairs in the properties that he manages, Shaun knows that he gets a better deal than his clients would have gotten for themselves. “I have seen how the price of a project can vary depending on the nationality of the client and the neighbourhood in which they live. Contractors will often take advantage of your accent and your address, thinking that you are a wealthy foreigner who can afford to pay more. Also, because I manage multiple properties, I can negotiate better prices than a homeowner, because companies want repeat business. This also motivates them to work faster and do a better job, because they know I will not hire them again if I am dissatisfied.”

In addition to Hebrew fluency and native negotiation skills, Shaun has the advantage of extensive experience in working with Israeli buildings, which are often built differently from his overseas clients’ home properties.

“Most Israeli buildings are made from poured concrete and they are often susceptible to cracks and water damage. The problem with leaks in concrete is that the water can enter at one location and seep through a crack somewhere else. Finding the source of the problem can be a game of trial and error, causing extensive damage to walls or ceilings in the search for the source of the leak. We have often brought in a company that uses an x-ray machine to find the crack in the pipe or the concrete and diagnose the problem. This service is costly but it cuts out the expensive guessing games and helps to minimize the repair costs.”

In one property managed by Creative Estates, it became clear that they had an electrical problem throughout the house. An old water leak had caused corrosion in the wires, and the fuses kept short-circuiting, which suggested that the wattage was too low for their electricity usage. Shaun’s team of electricians surveyed the property and recommended changing the spot lights (over 50 of them) in the ceilings throughout the house to LED lights, in order to reduce electricity consumption. They identified several problems and fixed them, without the unnecessary expense and disruption of rewiring the entire house.

In another example of how creative thinking can save Shaun’s clients money, the owners of a different home called in a swimming pool company who advised them to dig up the garden and install a cement pool, which would require building permits. Instead, Shaun and his team recommended installing a deck with an integral plastic pool which did not require permits. “The pool company had a standard way of working but, by looking at the problem from a different angle and thinking outside of the box, we saved our client 40% of the installation cost.”

Shaun understands that his job as a property manager includes managing construction and renovation projects, so he does not charge an additional management fee for this work. He supervises the contractors himself, which saves his client the cost of bringing in a site manager. “I have built up a team of highly skilled plumbers and electricians, builders and painters, who work on the properties that I manage. Not only can I rely on their honesty and professionalism, but if anything goes wrong, they know what to fix and they don’t quibble about putting it right. Our clients know that we will manage the entire project from start to finish, saving them money and stress.”

For more information about Creative Estates property management service in Israel, contact Shaun Isaacson at shaun@ceisrael.com or on +972 52-652-1096. We will give you a price quote in complete confidence and without obligation.