Couple From Australia Looking To Invest In New Zealand Market

[Brent Sunlay]

Hi,

My name is Brent, and my partner Jenni and I are brand new to the Bigger Pockets community, and new to real estate investing in general. We live and work in Melbourne, Australia, and have finally decided that we are ready to take the big leap and begin looking for our first rental property(s) and to start building our property portfolio. We love the BP forums and podcasts so far, and are really looking forward to becoming more involved in the community in the months to come!

We recently attended a 3 day property investment seminar over the weekend, which focused on investing in positively geared properties to gain cashflow. The seminar was great, and we feel like we learned a lot - it really opened our eyes to the many property investment options and strategies out there. We even managed to avoid falling for the sales pitch at the end to sign up for the massively over-priced "Mentorship" program, realising that with a little (or a lot!) of research and some hard work, we could learn how to find our own deals and how to use one of the tried and tested strategies to begin to build a our own portfolio. I have already listened to the Bigger Pockets audiobook titled "The Book On Rental Property Investing", as well as been reading loads of websites and blogs focusing on real estate investing. 

One thing that did stand out to us from the seminar though, was the teachers' advice to buy in the New Zealand market rather than here in Australia. This was because apparently New Zealand has lower taxes for property buyers, and even no Stamp Duty tax at all, not to mention the fact that NZ property prices are lower in general than in Australia. This would all apparently add up to make the cashflow potential much higher in many more deals.

As we are so new to the property investing game and have so much to learn, we are really keen to meet and connect with like minded people and anyone who may be able to give us some tips or advice, especially anyone with any insight into the Australian and New Zealand markets, who may have even invested there themselves.

Please don't hesitate to say hi, and we look forward to chatting to you all soon!

[Dean Letfus]

@Brent Sunlay I am a New Zealander who has invested in New Zealand, Australia and the USA. In fact I had the largest real estate investment education business in NZ prior to the GFC so I was one of those "gurus".

New Zealand is attractive to invest primarily for our very predictable capital growth but like any nation it is easy to get things wrong by not buying well. The only places you will get positive cashflow right now are in small towns which have recently been through a spectacular boom so you would be buying at the very top of a bull cycle.  Or you could look for properties that can be further developed to create cashflow.  Our average yields are higher than OZ but still very low.

 I invest heavily in the USA now because cashflow is literally lying around everywhere. I have been in the USA for 7 years now and cannot believe how easy it is to make money there. The US market is very crude and unsophisticated compared to NZ and Oz.

So my advice would be to consider the USA. If you are fully committed to NZ then I'm happy to give you what advice I can. There are a few kiwis on BP who can help in certain areas also. But if you're really chasing passive cashflow forget down under, look at the USA.

PS: The above comments about lending are incorrect. It is easy to get money for non resident aliens now the lending landscape has improved significantly int eh last 12 months. The only real downside is the remote nature of long distance investing.  The upside is you can buy a great investment property for under 90K AUD which is a lot less risky than the 400 to 1 mil you would need in NZ.