Friday 11th of September 2009

Property investors could well feel battered and bruised after many of the comments made in the media, following yesterday’s official cash rate announcement.

I’ll put it on the record now. Much of this property investor bashing is totally unwarranted. There is a perception, which is wrong in my view, that all these investors are hell-bent traders and speculators, buying and selling residential properties non-stop.

Wrong. The large majority of the investors we deal with through the NZ Property Investor Magazine and www.landlords.co.nz are conservative, buy-and-hold investors.

Some people chose to invest in shares, others prefer managed funds, while others go for cash and fixed interest. Many people have decided that property is their preferred means of saving and providing for their retirement. There are lots of reasons for this, and all of them quite valid. They range from the desire to hold something tangible they can see, touch and feel, through to having poor experiences in the sharemarket.

So I often come across investors who feel they have been unfairly castigated and discriminated against because of their choice of investment. Their view is at least they are doing something to plan for their retirement and aren’t relying in taxpayer-funded pension from the state.

Investing in property is not like some of the other asset classes. Yes, there are different tax rules and there are benefits like depreciation and gearing.

What seems to get lost in this debate is that these people are not only investors. They are running a business providing a service to fellow New Zealanders. Therefore, they quite rightly can use some of the same structures as business owners, such as loss attributing qualifying companies (LAQCs).

The other thing which surprises me is some of the comments about putting a capital gains tax on property investors. For the record, there already is one. The Inland Revenue Department is on a $15 million, three-year education and enforcement campaign to enforce this part of the law.

Already it has pulled in hundreds of millions of dollars in unpaid tax.

One comment I do agree with from Dr Bollard is this: He says New Zealanders should not consider housing investment to be a one-way bet. Investment expectations need to be realistic. We won’t go back to the boom times of the past eight years. However, in the long run, property prices, like those of other asset classes, tend to appreciate.