KPI magazine…I loved it a year ago, just devoured it. These days every time I get an issue I ‘eat it’ but still feel hungry, if you get what I mean. Basically, I reckon I could write a better magazine myself. Ditto NZ property investor magazine.

i.e.
from The NZ property Magazine:

this takes up the entire page 9 of the magazine (apart from a large ad)

TIPS for managing your rental:
Tip 1: (there is only one tip)
Let fresh air in (then it expands on it for a paragraph. “this tip of the month wins $25”

Oh puh-Leeeeze

They also have an ongoing interview series with some renovators, which has some enlightening information such as

q: ” Did you and Talei share evenly the responsibilities, or split them up?”
a: We just split the jobs up depending on the amount of free time available. I did less of the organisation work than Talei…

yawn

KPI is actually a lot better. At least it has small (normal size) type so although you get a LOT of ads, there’s also a bit more to read than the NZ property investor magazine, which is kind of done in that 5 -year old reader size type, or triple-spaced, probably to make the content look like more. Either that or maybe their target market is the bifocal club, who knows.

Neither of them compare to the slick and professional API magazine, but then, that’s NZ versus Australia all over – and I say that lovingly, as a Kiwi resident here now – !!

And I still subscribe to both in the hope of some pearlers now and then…

cheers-
Mini

joy to the world

Hmmmm, I don’t much like renovating properties – that is, slapping paint around on a roller is fun for 2 hours, but i did it once for 4 days and the novelty has worn off. Besides I don’t have time these days, there are fish to be fried and television programmes to be made!! but I digress….

Nevertheless, it’s the disgusting dumps that (if structurally sound) that for a simple 3-5k cosmetic make-over can be transformed – that make the investor more money than the dolled up ones. But there is ‘the hassle’ involved. But you DON”T have to do it yourself. You can either call tradespeople, book them, brief them, do it all with photos, or else use someone on the ground to project manage for a fee (i.e. the rental manager can often do stuff for you for a ten percent surcharge.)

I just bought my fifth property and I will possibly be able to create up to an 18 percent return on “purchase price + 4k spent per unit on cosmetics”, or even 20 percent if I furnish the properties – which has an element of risk involved (tenants scarper with the furniture, as the bond won’t cover it-) so still figuring this out.

But believe me I won’t be there with my paintbrush. Don’t disregard the ugly properties, because you are missing out on $$$$$$ if you only buy the pretty ones.

cheers-
Mini

joy to the world

http://www.backpack.co.nz/

the BBH network is ‘it’. The rating system makes it easy to pick a hostel. The info is online, but also, when you get there, pick up the hard copy booklet.

freedom air is fine. never flown it myself as I haven’t needed to get to those places from international, but know loads of people that have. Virgin also flies to Christchurch so check out virgin, Air Nz and qantas as well. sometimes there is a big difference in prices and sometimes there isn’t. Earlier in the year flights to NZ were $99 one way on Virgin Blue.

rental cars – i think any firm you haven’t heard of i.e. ‘AAAAba car rentals’ or similar could be false economy. Use Avis, hertz, budget, Maui, or thrifty, europecar etc. i.e. a reputable firm with a large fleet and many offices. We always do now, since we hired a cheap car from AAAAba rentals (or similar) in wellington, which had bad brakes – we found out doing hills in the south island with no way to swap the car for another one. it was a nightmare. we had to get it repaired ourselves on our credit card, delayed our trip, got reimbursed etc – hopeless, would never do that again.

my tips.

cheers-
Mini

joy to the world

Hi there,

several months ago while in NZ I saw their neon signs up. I think it was at a roundabout in Wanganui! i called the guy up, being semi-anonymously asking questions without giving too much away, ‘what are you doing? how are you doing it? Who are you? I might have a property for you, but you’ll have to tell me a bit more about yourself and what you’re up to’ – anyway quickly was convinced it was just an investor ‘doing his thing’ and screening through 50 calls to get one deal which was OK (as you do!-) and in the end I disclosed what i was doing and how I did it, and had a great (quite long) chat with the guy. Seemed fair dinkum, all he was doing really was (with his signs) ‘putting it out there’ to try and ‘buy what’s not for sale’ – very john burley or Dolf de roos (or whoever it was) of him. My impression – seemed legit.
No idea if it’s the same one I talked to. was he based in Palmerston North or something?
it could well be!

Re the other questions, ask for some testimonials, perhaps there is another client you could call as a reference.
cheers-
Barb

joy to the world

Yah….i.e. evidence that what I am saying is true -t hey don’t get news about the rest of the world in the US. (and if it ain’t on the news, it didn’t happen.)

so if I sum up by saying ‘it’s not their fault, it’s the media’, would you agree or disagree? …oh news media guru?

joy to the world

OH BTW Richmond did I ever say i LOOOVED hanging out with you in Melbourne that time, I thought you were real brainy and awesome and good company etc

God loves you Monopoly, but I, flawed human that I am, find it damn hard.

joy to the world

richmond,

ok fair comment, and YAY!!! about the agree part!

I was only calling them all ‘poor little’ because the americans get only the “news that will attract viewers” i.e ‘about US!!’ , so they don’t get the whole global picture. They get a bias. And so, “biased” becomes their “truth”=

They believe, “because it was on TV – it must be true. they have laws that they can’t show it on TV unless it is true!”….but as we know that is bogus, and furthermore, the reverse does not apply, which is that if it wasn’t on TV it didn’t happen…

and with ‘couch potatoes’ I meant the national US trend over there that people want more and more home entertainment (couch-based) and so are getting more obese. (not that US couch potatoes are any differnt than Aussie ones – i think maybe it’s a global trend??)

I stayed with these people in Montecito (millionairesville, CA) a few years ago, just after September 11- it was probably around October 11. (hey the airfares were real cheap…) I was gutted cause I was a guest and couldnt’ be disagreeing with them in their own home, would have been rude – but at the same time I just couldn’t believe these people’s attitudes and indignation – they said “why wouldn’t any countries like America? All we do is help other countries!” – they were also (scarily) supposedly educated. I’m sure they knew lots about the Mayflower and bugger all about i.e. Kuwait)

It wasn’t a matter of disagreeing with someone’s politics, cause I know that’s par for the course sometimes. Not that I know much about US politics anyway.

It was the fact that they really didn’t know what was going on in the world, because it have never made the news.

when I asked them but “what about when the US did this and that and the other”, they said ‘that’s not true! it can’t be! We would have heard about it if it had happened like you said.”

I REST MY CASE!! That’s the spooky bit!

Michael Moore – and I have never seen a movie of his yet, though I intend to – at least is showing something other than the ‘US news-bias’ (even if it’s just another bias in itself, i.e. Michael Moore Biased,) and even if all MM is doing is showing people there is a bias, that’s valid.

Back to my hosts…worse was when a senator came and stayed for the weekend, complete with miami golf tan, a winning superwhite smile, and HE was just as bad. I mean lovely, charming, but just as clueless about the REST OF THE WORLD!!!!

So in amongst that previous post of me thinking ‘these people are about as smart as it gets in the US – if these ‘educated’ Boston people don’t know jack about what their country gets up to in the world on their behalf, who does?’

hence the ‘it’s not their fault poor little’….remark.

You got to get the truth to people’s homes via television, at the moment it’s the best way, as people are too busy for anything else with their lives….

joy to the world

super ted, “you already know what made the news for the next week after and what gets 5 minutes airtime.” yes indeed, which is what is wrong with the media in the US. More than 5 percent foreign content and people change channels, because they are not interested….

that kind of explains why America is the way it is. the poor little couch potatoes can’t help it, because it’s all they’re given

joy to the world

Here is the truth, and unfortunately I know that there are some here that will find this the hardest to deal with. It is: that the back of bourke properties (i.e. mine, steve’s in ‘west wendouree’, westan’s, del’s etc) that have way way way outperformed the blue chip or the up and coming inner city areas for capital growth. The highest performing suburb in Sydney one year during the boom was manly, let’s say it had 27 percent CG in a year. close enough. 3 percent rental yield. WELLLLLLLLLL

are you sitting down????

What about if I told you that I had 100 percent capital growth in 18 months on my properties.
This is not unusual, many investing compadres are telling the same story. I hope you won’t be too jealous when I tell you these properties were also making 24 percent cashflow returns.

So basically it was already good on CF but I also made 5 years of CF in one year with CG. Crazy eh.

But here’s the thing that TOTALLY shiznits me about this forum, ok, ready?

So…back 18 months…. I was in the minority here, as someone buying in NZ, and a new investor. only enough capital for the equivalent of a unit in Bathhurst, circa early 2003. I know this because that’s the kind of place I was looking at first. wasn’t even CF+ve there then even at the bottom of the market. For the same price you could get three freehold CF+ve houses in NZ. but back to where I was at at the time. Yeah, I’d done a seminar or two and read a book, but I wasn’t *really* sure. I was way ahead of the pack in NZ – I was there before Steve and Dave, before AD, before westan. Many of them even picked my brain before they went in there. I was in a tiny tiny minority and being shouted down by a wave of ‘knowing’ investors, blowing my hair back with a gale force of negativity -you won’t get capital gains there, it’s going to be more trouble than it’s worth, the risk, you’re crazy, you’re nuts buying there, that strategy won’t work, it will be impossible to sell, you’ll be fixing toilets in the middle of the night, that town is a dump, etc etc etc. It just wasn’t what the lemmings were doing. (insight: today’s dump suburb on the edge of town or undeveloped and undervalued town is tomorrow’s up and coming. go buy there NOW while it’s cheap. oh and buy bottom of the market cause that’s where the huge bell-curve of interest is, and always will be. Oh, and while you’re at it buy something you can add value to, either in capital or rent, which will then translate to capital value anyway, and then! Ah! then we’ll truly be on the same page!) So anyway, I listened to all these negative nay-sayers with a ‘zillion years of property cycles and experience’ and ‘millions’ behind them, and let myself get kind of psyched out a little bit. So what I did was buy three properties in cash, thinking, if they went bad like everyone predicted, at least I wasn’t geared. A year later, I now realise that listening to people who don’t know JACK even if they say they do (I was the one who DID know, I’d done loads and loads of research!!!!) -cost me dearly. If I had had the confidence to back myself, I could have bought 9 properties on 30 percent LVR, and had 100 percent CG on 9 properties and 20 percent CF as well. Hmmmmmph!!

So I learned my lesson. Don’t listen to people who don’t know JACK. Don’t let negative people who aren’t even investing, just sitting on the sidelines giving reasons why they’re not, slow my progress. It’s the 2 percent of the population that can think independently that will make the money, not the 98 percent that wait for all their mates to agree. they will be the ones who are way way way too slow. Another lesson being to take my advice from people who are in the market right now and making money.

I.e. Steve McKnight. del. westan. castle dreamer. those are the investors who I consider mentors and who I consult, who I consider to be people who KNOW.

In fact I could feel Steve kind of ….going AAARGH!!! She gets it, FINALLY!! cause he’s been the one that’s been telling me the whole time that I was going way too slow. He was right. But it was the forum – the lemmings – that psyched me out. These days I have a heap more confidence (oh, how sweet of you to notice!) and i couldn’t give a rat’s about being in the minority, because I’ve realised that it’s the minority that makes the moolah, not the majority, who are too slow and fearful. a little like I was when I didn’t want to gear at all ‘just in case’. Yah, well at least I’m over that now. OK Steve, Dave, I GEDDIT!!

I totally totally agree with the new book that says that buying problems and solving them is the way to make money- whatever that means to you – whether in property terms or in business or life in general.

A lot of people here are sitting on a load of equity they got from buying an emotional purchase zonk years ago (whatever) AKA their own house, sitting on their arses in their homes for a few years working jobs in the day and watching television at night, during one, two or five property cycles (depending on their current level of crustiness) and realising they are now worth a lot more $$$ – and sitting here gloating about it pretending they are successful ‘investors’. Well, that’s very nice and hey, it worked for my parents too, but much as I love them, I wouldn’t call them investors either.

I see how now you can start with the ‘janitor’ card and a whole heap of things stacked against you and STILL overtake those kind of smug pseudo-investors, that it’s still accessible for everyone to do the same, at any time in the cycle, on any budget. And that, people, is the real truth that Steve and the like-minded people he has attracted and ‘trained’ for want of a better word, those people are the ones to learn from. the ones in the market right now. always. the ones taking action.

I have now got to the point with my investing that I am able to look at deals one or two price-rungs higher than I was able to 1.5 years ago. And that’s even more exciting, because the competition is….hardly even there! it’s literally a buyer’s market for deals out there.

The hardest ones to find are the ones with no work involved, such as 10 percent + return on purchase, in a growth area, nothing to do. Of course it is those kind of deals that everyone
wants. But if people were prepared to roll up their sleeves they could make soooo much more if they looked for problems and solved them.

enough ranting…hey, it’s been fun…

joy to the world

I agree. Anywhere can be CF+ve. even Sydney, in the blue chip suburbs, I’ve seen ‘potential’ CF+ve…just like it says in the steve book #2. believe it or not. it’s all about how you put together the deal. For example, a 12 bedroom mansion within 4k of the city near popular tourist and local amenities might not be CF+ve as a family home or whatever, as is, but to spend some money putting a shared bathroom in and turning it into a boarding house, fully occupied, perhaps even furnished, would be very much so CF+ve.

joy to the world