Nelson PIA March meeting and newsletter

[Glenn]

NELSON PROPERTY INVESTORS ASSOCIATION

MARCH 2015 NEWSLETTER

PO Box 198 Nelson

Our second meeting of the year is being held at the Nelson SuburbanClub, Tahunanui Drive on Tuesday 24 March. Seddon Marshall our long servingVice President will speak on “Money – The big picture – Hidden reasons why property prices and rents will continue to rise.”Seddon has done it all. Builder, Iron monger, city councillor, developer, parent, Nelson investor, confidant to many. A few wise words from him beats hands down expensive advice from those who hold themselves out for reward as skilled advisors.The meeting proper commences at 7.30 pm with the ever popular meal at 6pm when you will have the opportunity tochat to other investors. If you are coming to the meal please email Glenn by return email. The Suburban Club reserves seats on the basis of my bookings.

THINGS HAVE CHANGED FOR GLENN

BUSINESS AS USUALFor those of you who have not caught up Elizabeth, Andrea and I have sold our property management business.We keep commenting to each other how nice and quiet the phones are these days. I have the occasional self-doubt as to how well I will be able to fulfil the position of secretary and newsletter writer. Of course we still have our family portfolio of flats, houses, factories, shops, offices, workshops, and whatever to keep busy with. However I will now need, more so than in the past,information from you members who are still working at the coal face. Please pass on your stories of daily trials and tribulations. Things are always changing in our market and in the court processes. Minor changes can have a big impact on the outcome of some tenancy disputes.

THEMARKETI have just arrived home from another mountain summit. This time it was Kilimanjaro in Tanzania. 5895m ASL is a long way up. The air was thin, the temperature -12C, and my body was not happy. So arriving back home the world seems somehow different than it was two weeks ago when I left. The advertisements on TradeMe for Nelson city have gone from 87 at the beginning of the year to 137 today. Canterbury has gone from 1593 on 4 February to 1663 today and Auckland from 3701 to 3353. So what does this indicate? Well I think the summer is over. Holiday rentals are converting back to standard rentals and students are heading back to big city universities.

THEMEDIA AND UTTEREANCES FROM POLITICIANS AND SELF APPOINTED HOUSING SPOKESMEN

I am getting a little annoyed at the ongoing anti landlord media stories and official reports about our industry. For instance the Central bankers have been rattling their chains for a long time now. First they introduced the 20% deposit rule in order to pull back house prices. Too bad their aim was hopeless and they shot young first home buyers in the butt. Now they are talking about borrowers with more than five properties having to pay a higher interest rate. I am not sure if they mean five dwellings (like a block of flats) or five titles. I wonder how they will count various legal descriptions of properties. Again there seems to be very little technical description of what they are aiming for in the media reports. I wonder how they will deal with rate swops on the loans. I wonder if they understand the difference between houses versus blocks of shops and factories. In years gone by governments taxed and controlled their citizens on the number of things they owned. Things as diverse as vehicles, slaves, children, and windows have been tried and failed. The market has a way of adapting to imposed taxes, often producing unexpected outcomes. Prime Minister John Key set the scene with his state of the nation address. I was asked to respond to his address. A copy of this enclosed. Nick Smith also gave a similar address. He was wisely careful to not mention his plans for a new house. I notice at long last after perhaps three years things seem to be moving on his bare section. Various governments over anumber of years have created so many planning and financial rules it has made doing the business of creating and managing housing harder and more expensive. A number of intellectual and well respected social commentators have produced interesting reports lamenting New Zealand’s poor housing standards. We are not alone in the world and the rules are going to get tighter as we move to the same higher percentage of rentals versus owner occupiers that apply in other English speaking democracies around the world. An article from the USA on this subject is attached.

A major private landlord’s response to JohnKey’s state of the Nation report.

In John’s report he provided some of the figures of the money that is being spent on social housing in New Zealand.The statement is made that Housing NZ is the biggest provider of social housing in New Zealand. Actually private landlords are by a country mile the largest providers of rental housing to those in need. The last census recorded that there are 428,284 rental dwellings owned by private landlords. Of those the briefing paper to the 2014 Minister of Housingindicated that 300,000 people shared the $1.2 Billion Accommodation Supplement quoted by John. That averages out at $76 per week for those people who are renting in the private sector and are poor. Compare that with the 62000 in HNZ rentals who get Income related rent subsidies. They share between them $700Million which averages out at $217 per week each. Housing New Zealand also collects $457Million rent on their properties which averages at $136 per week average for all of their rentals. When those rents are added to the IRRS$217 + $136 = $353. This figure is for large and small rentals from Bluff to the Cape. So clearly the cost of providing state owned housing is not a cheap option.The average rent across NZ for all sizes of private rentals are actually less than this. The plan as outlined by the Prime Minister is to let some non-government organisations participate in the Income rent subsidy scheme. So this means that a few lucky people will receive something like 286% more than my tenants are entitled to. Fair enough if the chosen few are worthy. However as a landlord of several hundred dwellings in my city I know that there is no difference between my tenants and HNZ / social housing group tenants. I have in fact lost some good well behaved tenants to them and gained some lower grade hard to manage tenants from the public sector. It is not right to create inequalities in our society. This often leads to people becoming angry,dangerous, and desperate.

THE AMERICAN DREAM

American cities—and not just the priciest ones—are more and more the domain of renters. Renters made up the majority of the population in cities at the core of nine of the nation’s 11 largest metro areas in 2013, a sharp change from 2006, when renters were the majority in just five of those cities, according to a new report. Cities have always had a larger number of renters when compared with suburban areas, in part because the cost of owning a home within a city’s limits is out of reach for many residents, especially in high-cost places such as New York, San Francisco and Washington, D.C. But the report, scheduled to be released Monday by New York University’s Furman Center and Capital One Financial Corp.,found a significant shift in the proportion of renters in all major cities—even in lower-density, relatively inexpensive places such as Houston and Dallas. A resulting demand for apartments is rising so fast that it is starting to overwhelm supply in many cities, which is pushing up housing costs nationwide. “As the number of renters grow, if the supply ofrental housing does not keep up—as it has not in most of these cities—then vacancy rates will fall, rents will rise, and more renters will struggle withthe costs of housing,” said Ingrid Gould Ellen, the Furman Center’s faculty director.In some cases, the rise in the number of renters reflects a reversion to levels before the housing boom, when easy credit and no-down-payment mortgages allowed many renters to become homeowners.Once the boom turned to bust, people went back to renting, either because theylost their homes to foreclosure or they became skittish about owning. In Chicago, renters made up 53% of the population in 1990, then dropped to 46% at the height of the housing boom in 2006 and returned to 52% in 2013.In other cases, long-term demographic trendsand changing attitudes have diminished the appeal of the traditional American dream of homeownership. In Houston, just 41% of the population were renters in1970. The rate rose to 51% by 2000 then declined slightly during the housing boom before starting to rise again, hitting 54% in 2013. Texas cities have seen explosive job growth,drawing many transplanted younger workers with entry-level or middle-income jobs. Dallas-based apartment developer Brad Miller said the young people he sees prefer to rent and want to be able to pick up and move to places such as Denver at a moment’s notice without having to worry about whether they can sell a condominium. “They’ll go where the jobs are and where the money is,” said Mr.Miller, president of Encore Multi-Family. Mark Tobia, a single 27-year-old, moved to Houston from Boston last September to take a job as a project manager in construction for Group 1 Automotive Inc. He chose to rent an apartment in a complex owned by Camden Property Trust not far from the city’s downtown. “I didn’t want to buy a place not knowing if I’d like Houston or if I’d like the job,” Mr. Tobia said, adding that he has since become comfortable with both .But for many, slow income growth and a lack of savings are the main reasons for renting instead of buying, even as mortgage rates remain historically low. Accumulating savings has become even more difficult as rents rise in many cities. Rents outpaced inflation in all of the11 cities except for Dallas and Houston, where they remained largely flat,according to the NYU-Capital One report. Rents rose the most in Washington,D.C., over the seven-year period, with a 21% increase in the median rent whenadjusted for inflation.“For many people, the biggest obstacle tobuying is saving enough for a down payment, which is more difficult if you’repaying a lot of rent,” said Jed Kolko, chief economist at Trulia Inc.The Furman Center found New York City no longer has the largest share of renters of any of the big cities, having been outstripped by Miami, where 65% of the population rents, a percentage point higher than New York. The nation’s largest city is also one of several where the percentage of renters has been on a long-term decline, falling from 71% in1970 to 64% in 2013.Among the 11 cities, Philadelphia had the smallest percentage of renters in 2013, just 44%, up from 37% in 2006 and 33%in 1970. Nationwide, 64% of households were own-occupied and 36% wererenter-occupied at the end of 2014.In the short term, economists and developerssaid they expect to see the percentage of renters continue to rise in most cities. “I don’t think the American dream is dead,” said Mr. Miller, the Dallasdeveloper. “It’s different, and it’s taking longer for people to obtain theAmerican dream.”

[flyernzl]

Enjoy your retirement Glenn.

May it last for a good long time.