Re population, yes, Auckland has the big bell curve thing going on – most of the immigration to NZ comes to Auckland first.

HOWEVER!! the immigration rate is something that the NZ government in their infinite wisdom sort of open and close the gates at will, so to speak.

Now this is all a great big dynamic economics study. NZ dollar up, property prices up, immigration up, unemployment very low, demand, boom, etc etc.

Sounds good, right?

however here’s the flip side. Interest rates up. inflation up. property becoming un affordable. Less export possibilities (which NZ relies on) because the dollar is so strong, therefore less competitive for O’seas markets to buy our products.

So, what’s a government to do? They have put the brakes on immigration for the moment as far as I understand. This has nothing to do with how many people WANT to come and live in NZ, but how many the gov’t will let in this month.

NZ is constantly swamped by requests to immigrate there permanently, and (if anyone has tried, that is for example english, swedish, german etc) it’s extremely hard to ‘get in’. Aussies are different because we have a bit of a reciprocal agreement so no probs for Aussies to move to NZ.

Anyway, so yeah long term Auckland is SOOO predicted to grow. Right now they are having a government induced ‘situation’. Which is affecting the economy, the dollar, the property market (perhaps a little slower to react, because of course it’s mostly owner occupier driven, no matter what investors in their infinite egotism might like to believe.)

Sydney is no different, at the moment you have a glut of rental properties, you can bargain them down, all of that. However perhaps it’s a great time to buy because prices are a bit down. ???

Just really, Auckland is a lot like Sydney. It’ll grow and grow, and rents will be high or they will be soft. And then it will change…

cheers-
mini

I reckon that ‘buying and holding’ something for some stupendous CF+ve yield like I was able to do in NZ a couple of years ago is ‘old school’ in the current market and people that are waiting for that deal even in NZ either have to look at 200 to find it (cause you do occasionally find them, if you are always looking) or else DO a bit more to MAKE the deal happen.

subdivide. develop. renovate. add a bedroom. all that sort of thing. DO something. This is how you can carry on building your equity AND your cashflow without waiting for time and capital gains to do it for you, you can create it.

my two cents. cheers-
Mini

Really! Is that for your units? how long a period was that for? Is that what we call ‘rates’ in NZ?
cheers-
Mini

hi Westan

i would say I’m more interested in the ‘next Gisborne’ than Gisborne itself right now…however if you can find anything CF+ve or close to but with an upside to improve, sure, grab it – deals are everywhere even Gisborne!

Your answer is totally dependent on the town and the price-range and what is expected by tenants.

In a way you want to keep it to what ‘most tenants like’ so you could ask your rental manager.

However I think there is something to be said for being ever so slightly more ‘trendy’ than what the market is doing, to futureproof your place. I see a lot of (outdated I think) beige and pink and light green and I like to do white/cream with navy blue feature walls. I also see a lot of floral curtains or that horrid what I call ’80’s motel print’ geometric pattern, whereas I like to do navy blue roman blinds. Clean and modern. It’s still neutral and inoffensive to be appealing to many and not ‘offputting’, my rental manager is crazed about my places.!

I did a brick red feature wall behind the fireplace on one of my properties which also looks great, the rest is polished wood floors and dark cream walls, and lighter cream curtains
I don’t much care for net curtains, I prefer say a cotton voile slightly seethrough sort with ties. I don’t like any sort of pattern really apart from black and white checks and neutral sort of ‘earth’ patterns.

bathrooms I have only ever done white gloss bathroom paint or else used seratone panels.
Didn’t go too trendy on the bathrooms because it would have cost too much for the house.
Seratone is I think much cheaper than tiling, but it depends on what your market expects – for me tiling would have been ‘overcapitalising’!

taps and fittings, I think for the sake of $50 bucks to get a slightly trendier i.e. mixer tap go for it, even on a cheaper property, it helps gives the impression of luxury, ditto doorhandles and cupboard handles and light fittings.

I used cheapo light fittings on my places $11 each) and I think next time I might go the whole hog and go the deluxe $22 ones (ironic grin) – well again it’s all relative, innit!

you might be in a market where you might want to run halogen spots on a wire track, who knows!

cheers-
Mini

Hey Kerwyn

it’s basically how you negotiate it. What are the vendor’s options? How do you set it up? What are the vendor’s needs? What other offers do they have? What are their choices? that sort of thing. Also every purchase is different with a different vendor or agent or both

Fabulous, and God Bless our property managers, running a professional business, acting as our eyes and ears in the market. I could not invest as I do (in various locations all over NZ) without them.

Re: Richmastery,

“few of them have the negotiation power we do (currently we act for 46,000 active NZ property investors). “

Hah! Good try!

Well, I am one of the 46,000 on their list (and how special that makes me feel, NOT) and though I am *definitely* an active NZ property investor,
richmastery don’t ‘act’ for me. We don’t ‘act’ for our clients either, (unless they are ‘deals to order’ clients which is a personalised service – and even then we find and pitch deals to the client who decides the action to take, we don’t ‘act for’ most of our clients.) Like richmastery we sign up and pitch deals to the client list on spec, and being on the list for a while and seeing what we have to offer is part of gaining trust if not also learning about the current market. Also I would bet that with the richmastery multitudes (just like with our list) you’d have a percentage that are ‘active’ because they purchase through us/them, a percentage that are ‘active’ that don’t purchase through us but might – or purchase elsewhere or by themselves – and a percentage who are ‘on the list looking’ but not necessarily active (yet) and may never be.

Also you only need one ‘active’ investor per deal and so it doesn’t really matter how many thousand spare you have. It’s not like even richmastery would say ‘hello Mrs agent, here is an offer on a property which we are then going to assign to 46,000 clients’ – they are just going to pitch it to their clients for one to take the deal. I would say that it would be a statistical certainty that richmastery with 46000 clients would have more tyrekickers on their list than we would! We don’t have a website or advertise (unless you could call this post advertising) – it’s all word of mouth. Also we have too few deals to go around as it is, so I don’t actually want so many more clients because it’s not respectful to the clients we already have, a lot of whom are pre-approved and waiting for a deal!

As far as ‘having the negotiation power of 46,000 investors’ well, that’s obviously something your spotters can try and bamboozle agents with, as of course we do by waving our ‘client purchasing power’ at agents. It’s obvious that anyone doing repeat business is going to get into a fantastic position with agents to get deals first, and of course that is part of how come we can sign up deals 1-2 percent better yields than the average person can find. It’s being given those special deals that never make the net in many cases, all of that. For sure the buying power of a group benefits the individuals in that group, as does the market knowledge gained by doing so many deals all the time instead of just our own. In the end it comes down to our spotter’s relationship with agents, and agents choosing our offer over another buyer’s offer at the same price, often, because they know us, and of our good reputation for having clients that will complete the deal and having very few ‘fall over’ – less than 1 or 2 percent over the last year!

This is to my business partner’s credit who makes sure that all information flows between us, agent, client, lawyers, financier, and inspectors and that the client is sort of baby-sat through the purchasing process, right down to helping them get tradies to fix up any problems and appointing the best rental manager that we know of in the area! I am not sure how much of this richmastery do but we very much offer that as well as the deal, which I know from experience is as much part of the deal as the bricks and sticks itself.

Now I have a network of few spotters and all of them are investors, and I am very much hands on.
I started off with one client, finding one deal at a time for one client. Pretty soon I had a waiting list of 3 clients, and then suddenly I had 30 clients, then 50 – all about a year and a half ago and all pretty quickly. (there are more than that now, but I don’t like to disclose it because if you say ‘x’ clients some think ‘too many, I am not special’ and some think ‘too small, you are obviously not richmastery’, that’s the only reason why – nowadays we are only as big or small as ‘here’s a deal, and here’s a client who wants the deal’ basically! ) It all started when I posted here on this forum 10 deals of 15 percent + yields from an agent I knew in Levin, I had just bought and there were so many deals out there at the time! I was just trying to help (for free!) and said ‘there are too many deals for me, you guys are always complaining about the lack of CF+ve properties, here you go, email me and I’ll tell you the agent’. Only to ensure that the agent would continue to present me all the great deals in the future, that was all i was hoping to get out of it. The forum practically crashed as did my email (1700 reads of the thread before it was closed down by Steve saying OK no more emails to Mini!) which led to me being asked to find someone deals for a fee. During this process I realised it was not just the deal, but who’s the best building inspector? rental agent? What is a LIM? do I need one? etc 120 questions, that was as much part of the ‘mystery’ of buying in NZ as the deal itself, so my business was sort of created and grown by demand, rather than the other way around. The charging was agreed with the original clients, and I had to keep putting it up as I figured out how much TIME it actually took, to answer all the questions and just generally ‘liase’ and help someone get it all over the line. Hold their hand and help them from a to z. The fees have crept up to what they are now, which is $2200 for the cheapies and then more for blocks of units etc. A lot of the information has since been written out by me, so there are less new questions, because I have heard questions from 100 clients or more now and tend to know what people need to know and when and how they need to know it! It’s evolved into a quite streamlined system, yet still has a personal touch and personal service. When I began working with spotters it was fantastic because I could cover more ground, but my network is the tightest and best qualified group of spotters you’d find anywhere, and I would bet my entire portfolio on that being true! Okay!
I never wanted to be as big as richmastery, but this is basically because I enjoy giving a personal service. Also I will say this much, we are in the market and we KNOW what agents are saying about ‘other spotters/flippers/flickers’ which may or may not be richmastery, and I also know that many times we are having to say ‘but we are different’ because we ARE! – as damage control in areas where other spotters/flippers/flickers have ‘pooped’ and left droppings, so to speak.

OK so what I do notice on richmastery is that they will buy (say) 10 x city apartments and then sell them individually. “six sold, only 4 left!” I mean, yeah, fantastic, buy in bulk and sell individually in any shape or form is an extremely good strategy.
Also richmastery offer a valuation included in the fee which is an important factor in ‘proving’ that a deal is a good deal, so that’s valid, and if I were buying one of ten identical properties they are flicking let’s say an apartment, I would def. want a valuation to back the deal up.

We don’t offer valuations with ours, simply because on a 65k property (say) some lenders don’t need one, and if we paid for one upfront, it would be more risk upfront for us so our fees would have to be higher. A lot of clients do get a val anyway and are 99 percent of the time happy to find that we have secured a deal under valuation for them. Any probs with the val or builder’s we go and negotiate, and have an excellent win/win/win/win/win (yes, a win for five parties!) procedure in place for this.

So my conclusion – yes, def, richmastery is a trusted ‘brand name’ and yes they do provide properties under valuation, with proof, and 20-40k under val is quite good for a 5k fee, and they do tend to specialise in higher priced and city properties. whereas we specialise in lower priced entry level properties CF+ve with an upside’. Although when it comes down to it a deal is a deal and we are all just a service to help investors who don’t know a market get a deal.
I would recommend all our clients to also go on the richmastery list, why not.
I have nothing bad to say about them and I don’t see them as competition even though others would, we are different, and we co-exist. I hardly ever came up against us and richmastery trying to go for the same deal, so, it’s all good as far as I am concerned. And Vive La Difference!

Hi there

SOOO interesting to hear the real life stories. Yes Hans says as much in his book, (the nightmares re: bonds, cracks, and the ENORMOUS carnage even if the house was brilliant at the old site but it looks like a wreck at the new site.) Also a lot of cool things have to actually be dismantled and re-built at the new site, so if part of your colonial that you like is tiled fireplace, brick features, leadlight windows, that it has decent carpets, whatever – all of that actually has to be removed or else it won’t survive the trip. and like redhaven in the Hans book, he started with a colonial home which was like you to get a better home than they could afford to buy.

So anyway I was looking into relocations as a possibility of creating a CF+ve rental property where you couldn’t BUY one any more. However the grief and time factor just seemed not worth it, especially compared with the cost and ease of building new.

however if I did do it, I would look at the ‘new’ relocatables, or anything that had the dimensions that would suit a ‘one piece move’ without having to take the roof off.

This is all outlined in hans’ book. Basically it means that the smaller and more box-like the house (i,e, unappealing!) the better it’s going to suit relocating. The fancier and more pretty the house, the more work it’s going to need at the other end re: sorting

and don’t forget you have to deal with the old site too and cap drains etc –

If you are thinking of doing it in Aus I would suggest try to get in touch with Shaune and Rachel the mappers, who have done several of these and have a few on the go now too.

They might be available on a consultant basis, worth a shot