Hi everyone
I have bought four properties all interstate, none in melb where l live. My advice is to ring as many property managers as you can in the area you are looking at after you have done extensive research on your own. You will get a feel for the good ones.Choose a manager to look at properties for you. They are keen to get business and many are willing to do this. Especially good is to find one not affiliated with an agency, therefore only do property management, as one of the former posters explained.
Setup property alerts from the various Realestate sites. File all these alerts and after 6 weeks or so start ringing the agents and find out what they sold for, or why they haven't sold. You need to track house sales in your chosen area.
Also ring council, local police ( say your looking for a rental, any areas to avoid, if female even better , you want to know the safe areas), look at local papers online, google earth etc. , There are so many online tools at your disposal. By the time you have looked into an area which can take a couple of months or longer you will know it better than the locals from an investors point of view.This is different than a locals view of the area. A local doesn't think or know about growth drivers, population growth, unemployment stats, growth of wages, demographic trends etc. . You on the other hand should know all this before you buy.