Nelson PIA August newsletter and meeting announcement

[Glenn]

NELSON PROPERTY INVESTORS ASSOCIATION
AUGUST 2014 NEWSLETTER
PO Box 198 Nelson
[email protected]

Our fifth meeting of the year is being held at the Nelson Suburban Club, Tahunanui Drive on Tuesday 19 August. The meeting proper commences at 7.30 pm with the ever popular meal at 6pm when you will have the opportunity to chat to other investors. This meeting we have a representative from IRD speaking. They have approached all associations re speaking. Despite the request coming from them they still declined to make a contribution towards neither advertising nor any of the costs of running the meeting which amount to around $1000 each time. As we know the policy of the current and any future government is to discourage and penalise rental housing investment via the tax system. The IRD spoke at one of meeting a few years ago and their presentation was well received. They are out to get you, not be fair, and if you have a reasonable issue to dispute some payment then they will frustrate the process in the courts that will cost you more than the amount of the claim. Members and interested parties are encouraged to attend. Find out what stones they are lifting this week and become informed about how to avoid the onerous penalties that await you if you make the slightest mistake. If you are coming to the meal please email Glenn by return email. The Suburban Club reserves seats on the basis of my bookings.

THE MARKET

At the time of writing this hurriedly put together newsletter it is but seven days since I got back from another exotic overseas hiking holiday. So sorry folks my mind is still off in the hills and I am likely to make a few typing slip ups. At the beginning of the week my company had fourteen properties to let. I hit the office running. After a fast and furious week of showing properties and signing up tenancies we are now down to just four properties on our books. This is an all-time low for us. We have seen new tenants coming from refugee camps, Auckland, West Coast, Dunedin, and the old favourite for me the mental health unit of the hospital. Apparently the hospital is full. Let’s hope those sticky vacancies of mine go out the door this week. Looking at the figures on Trademe I can see our company is not alone in this dramatic turn around. The number of vacancies advertised on TM to let in Nelson has fallen 50% since June. The vacancies did drop briefly to those figures in January this year but generally there have been too many properties to let for over twelve months. Is this the long predicted and keenly sought after turn in the market for Nelson caused by good times and booming immigration? Only time will tell. I can remember the last time we had a shortage during the winter the following summer roared. We are not there yet but things are looking good. As the media and figures on TM indicate the selling market is still asleep. The selling market will follow the rental market.

FUNNY STORIES FROM GLENN

Help help goes the text message we have a sewage spill. Our plumber reports they have given up after two hours of fighting their way through tangled baby wipes. Call in Punts they say. The tenants ask do we have to pay for this. Perhaps I answer you should not be putting baby wipes down the toilet. I was not wipes she answers LOL it was some other stuff. But ok looks like I will be paying you off for ever.

This happened the day after I served a tenant with a 90 day termination and 14 day to remedy notice. Help she rings I have had a break in. Have you rung the police I ask? No is the answer. My new boyfriend had a break in once and the police told him to find the culprit first. That sounds strange I say. Yes she says the burglar used a stick. What? Yes they poked a stick in the lock and now we cannot get in. That sounds like kids not burglars to me I say. Oh no she says my kids are off with their father this weekend. Over the next few days her father rang several times trying to make me change my mind re the notice. I knew him professionally so it helped keep the communications cordial. In the end I think he came to the same conclusion as me.

Hi it is A and K. As of 12/6/14 we are giving you three weeks’ notice. When can we sing over our bond? What I reply, today is the 19 th June not 12^th. The reply came in “We gave U notice last week as well” Well as you can imagine I did not buy that nor did anyone sing for the bond. We got the full refund to us. Too bad their spelling is as bad as their lies.

HOW DOES NELSON RATE

As mentioned above I have just got back from a holiday in Juneau Alaska. I was lucky to be hosted by a distant relative. We share a common ancestor from the 1700’s who lived in Scotland. My cousin is also a baby boomer now retired from the Coast Guard. He too has a rental investment. I got to comparing our cities and its housing. I see that the average house price there is not that much different from Nelson even though Juneau is above the USA average rate. Per head income is ahead of ours but their household income is very similar. Rent is way lower at an average of US$250 per week, so I deduce that the gross rate of return is about 50% lower than ours. However the bank interest is 4% so for investors the external rate of return is not that dissimilar. 33% of all dwellings are rentals which is the same as Nelson. Gasoline and mains power is way cheaper than here. Their free newspaper had an interesting article about their homeless which sounded very similar to home. So what does this tell us?
Is our housing hopelessly overpriced like the international experts tell us? Are our poor being unfairly burdened compared with other places?
Which is the better place to live? Would Cousin Tom’s ancestors been better to have come to New Zealand or Glenn’s gone to find gold in the Klondike? Their crime rate appears lower than ours. Their taxes and government systems are as disliked as much as ours. I never did get to wander around a supermarket to look at food costs. In Haines the cost of salmon is $2 per pound and many people eat it every day. Well at 61 degrees north compared with our 41.5 degrees South we can at least claim our weather is way better and easier to live in. Apart from these rough comparisons all I can say is home is where the heart is. Enjoy your city and its environments. We have lots to be thankful for. One of our members wrote this comment in an email to me yesterday. “ I do get annoyed at the media, politicians, socialists, etc always viewing us as the bad guys.” Yes we get hounded, abused and penalised by the Government in order to ???? Next time you are talking to a politician ask them if we should aspire to be like Juneau. That might just get them thinking and who knows one day they might wake up and figure no matter what they do, the world will just go on revolving once every 24 hours regardless. Despite all the differences across the world there are no free lunches for those who hold their hands out. Hard work, thrift and honest living is the universal tonic to be taken every day for 50 years after leaving school.

Keep laughing. It is better for your health than crying.

Glenn