All tagged Rental Property
Over the years, I’ve noticed a steady stream of residential rental property investors finding their way to The Happy Saver. They generally arrive after years, often decades, of believing that property was the way to build wealth. Not a way. THE WAY. But something has changed, and often, it’s them. Eventually, they reach the point where they think: There has to be another way to invest my money. The Googling begins, and they discover there is another way that doesn't involve investment properties. But selling the property turns out to be the easy bit. What do you do with the money? Working that out requires a complete re-education. This blog is for all the people I meet who are done with property, but very unsure about what to do next.
Rental real estate investment brings out some pretty passionate opinions and although I always enjoy a conversation, I don’t like arguing, therefore I rarely write about property. That and the fact it just does not interest me as a way to grow wealth. I regularly speak with such a wide range of people about money and I’m lucky that I get to see the allure or otherwise of property from many different angles and I conclude from talking to a lot of people who are ‘real estate investors’ that most of them appear not to be making any money.
Have you noticed that I never really talk much about real estate? Except to say that I own the house I live in and I have never really gone too far down the path of writing about property as an investment. With the equity that we have in our house, the ‘obvious’ thing to many Kiwis would be to borrow against it and buy more property that I then rent out to other people. For many this has been a way to successfully grow their wealth. To many, it has not.
More people than I can count ask me whether I would buy a rental property, by which they mean a single house which I would rent out. Buying a slice of the commercial building rental market is a much more interesting proposition.
When we moved away from Wellington fifteen years or so ago our landlord at the time said “BUY property, BUY anything you can get your hands on, houses have never been so cheap and they are about to go UP in price”.
