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NELSON PROPERTY INVESTORS ASSOCIATION
AUGUST 2018 NEWSLETTER
PO Box 198 Nelson
Our sixth meeting of the year is being held at Honest Lawyer Monaco on Tuesday 14th August 7:30 pm. I am really excited to have Leonie Freeman speaking. Leonie has spent her whole career in the property industry. She holds a Masters of Commerce from Lincoln University and holds registration as a property consultant and property manager.
The following paragraphs have been supplied by her for this newsletter.
She is an entrepreneur, business futurist and professional speaker.
She has spent over 25 years disrupting and transforming businesses. This has included launching start-ups and buying, and transforming existing businesses.
In the past 8 years she has focused on a contribution in the public sector which included being brought into Housing New Zealand as the General Manager of Development with responsibility to turn it around. This broadened her social housing experience and at the request of then Minister of Finance, she led a strategic review of the Social Housing Programme 2 years ago.
She has been a director of the listed company – Goodman Property Trust since 2011.
Last year she launched a philanthropic and independent initiative with the sole purpose of solving Auckland’s housing crisis called thehomepage.nz and was the Chair of the recent Auckland Housing Summit. She has been a regular and sought after print, radio and TV commentator.
Leonie has recently been awarded the Property Institutes Life membership and the Supreme Property Award for 2017 and was a finalist in the recent Westpac Women of Influence Awards.
No one can be happy about where we are. Changing policies, high level cluelessness, a demand-supply failure, and a radical disconnect between the public and private sectors have all contributed to what is now widely acknowledged as a Crisis for Auckland housing.
If we can’t find a path to solving our crisis, the future looks bleak. It’s a picture of rampant house prices, people living in cars and garages, more congestion, housing supply at a trickle and many of our people – our young in particular – giving up on any hope of owning a home in Auckland. It’s a familiar nightmare, because it’s what we are experiencing now amplified to the power of 10!
We’ve reached a point where it has become increasingly obvious that no single idea, organisation or person is going to be able to fix this problem. Solving it will require proper leadership with a long-term focus – and, above all, a commitment to getting things done and being resolute about producing measurable results.
I shared with Leonie a few key points about our housing market and this was her response. I enjoyed your stats on Nelson – there are obviously challenges there too!!!
At last a breath of fresh air and a clear thinker! This will be another great NPIA night to hear from one of New Zealand’s foremost property experts.
METH CONTAMINATION STINKS
In my last newsletter I wrote about the earth shattering change of meth levels as per Sir Peter Gluckman report. My reaction was to state that I have stopped doing between tenants testing. As a consequence of writing my newsletter Myles Stratford from Meth Solutions made contact and we talked though the issues over a cup of coffee. Some minor qualification to my sweeping generalisation needs to be made. Firstly between tenant checks were started as a result of demands made by Tenancy Adjudicator Jenny Leith. They were done primarily to avoid being fined by the court for letting an inadequately clean property. A number of landlords had been fined because some tenants claimed they got sick from meth contamination. The secondary issue was to permit a claim to be made against an outgoing tenant. Clearly great doubt has been placed on the issue of getting sick because the good doctor clearly stated there was no evidence of even one person getting sick from meth contamination. However just because I do not carry out lab based testing between every tenant does not mean that I have no intention of ever doing another test. Firstly almost all of the properties I manage are owned by my family and most of the tenants have been there for many years. If there are other issues observed at the time of vacating such as particular smells, comments from neighbours, or police presence then the plan is to carry out a test. Myles’s observation is that HNZ and their owner the government are now treating drug issues as a medical rather than criminal activity and so are not now evicting know drug users. I have certainly read comments to that effect made by Housing Minister Phil Twyford. It is public knowledge that the minister is a graduate of a journalism degree. He must surely be widely read and must have studied the novel Erewhon written by NZ author Samuel Butler which was published in 1872. This novel described what appeared to be a utopian society in it’s disregard for money. The mythical state declared disease a crime for which the sick are imprisoned and crime is considered a disease for which criminals are sent to hospital. So there we have it. Perhaps they want New Zealand to be more like Erewhon. By the way Erewhon is “almost” nowhere spelt backwards. It never existed and never will be!
Hope to see you at the next meeting.
Regards
Glenn
AUGUST 2018 NEWSLETTER
PO Box 198 Nelson
Our sixth meeting of the year is being held at Honest Lawyer Monaco on Tuesday 14th August 7:30 pm. I am really excited to have Leonie Freeman speaking. Leonie has spent her whole career in the property industry. She holds a Masters of Commerce from Lincoln University and holds registration as a property consultant and property manager.
The following paragraphs have been supplied by her for this newsletter.
She is an entrepreneur, business futurist and professional speaker.
She has spent over 25 years disrupting and transforming businesses. This has included launching start-ups and buying, and transforming existing businesses.
In the past 8 years she has focused on a contribution in the public sector which included being brought into Housing New Zealand as the General Manager of Development with responsibility to turn it around. This broadened her social housing experience and at the request of then Minister of Finance, she led a strategic review of the Social Housing Programme 2 years ago.
She has been a director of the listed company – Goodman Property Trust since 2011.
Last year she launched a philanthropic and independent initiative with the sole purpose of solving Auckland’s housing crisis called thehomepage.nz and was the Chair of the recent Auckland Housing Summit. She has been a regular and sought after print, radio and TV commentator.
Leonie has recently been awarded the Property Institutes Life membership and the Supreme Property Award for 2017 and was a finalist in the recent Westpac Women of Influence Awards.
No one can be happy about where we are. Changing policies, high level cluelessness, a demand-supply failure, and a radical disconnect between the public and private sectors have all contributed to what is now widely acknowledged as a Crisis for Auckland housing.
If we can’t find a path to solving our crisis, the future looks bleak. It’s a picture of rampant house prices, people living in cars and garages, more congestion, housing supply at a trickle and many of our people – our young in particular – giving up on any hope of owning a home in Auckland. It’s a familiar nightmare, because it’s what we are experiencing now amplified to the power of 10!
We’ve reached a point where it has become increasingly obvious that no single idea, organisation or person is going to be able to fix this problem. Solving it will require proper leadership with a long-term focus – and, above all, a commitment to getting things done and being resolute about producing measurable results.
I shared with Leonie a few key points about our housing market and this was her response. I enjoyed your stats on Nelson – there are obviously challenges there too!!!
At last a breath of fresh air and a clear thinker! This will be another great NPIA night to hear from one of New Zealand’s foremost property experts.
METH CONTAMINATION STINKS
In my last newsletter I wrote about the earth shattering change of meth levels as per Sir Peter Gluckman report. My reaction was to state that I have stopped doing between tenants testing. As a consequence of writing my newsletter Myles Stratford from Meth Solutions made contact and we talked though the issues over a cup of coffee. Some minor qualification to my sweeping generalisation needs to be made. Firstly between tenant checks were started as a result of demands made by Tenancy Adjudicator Jenny Leith. They were done primarily to avoid being fined by the court for letting an inadequately clean property. A number of landlords had been fined because some tenants claimed they got sick from meth contamination. The secondary issue was to permit a claim to be made against an outgoing tenant. Clearly great doubt has been placed on the issue of getting sick because the good doctor clearly stated there was no evidence of even one person getting sick from meth contamination. However just because I do not carry out lab based testing between every tenant does not mean that I have no intention of ever doing another test. Firstly almost all of the properties I manage are owned by my family and most of the tenants have been there for many years. If there are other issues observed at the time of vacating such as particular smells, comments from neighbours, or police presence then the plan is to carry out a test. Myles’s observation is that HNZ and their owner the government are now treating drug issues as a medical rather than criminal activity and so are not now evicting know drug users. I have certainly read comments to that effect made by Housing Minister Phil Twyford. It is public knowledge that the minister is a graduate of a journalism degree. He must surely be widely read and must have studied the novel Erewhon written by NZ author Samuel Butler which was published in 1872. This novel described what appeared to be a utopian society in it’s disregard for money. The mythical state declared disease a crime for which the sick are imprisoned and crime is considered a disease for which criminals are sent to hospital. So there we have it. Perhaps they want New Zealand to be more like Erewhon. By the way Erewhon is “almost” nowhere spelt backwards. It never existed and never will be!
Hope to see you at the next meeting.
Regards
Glenn