Discussing the Investor Property Market - Guest Interview: Steve Goodey, Property Coach

co on facebook they they they look at those developers driving around in their jets and their private planes and stuff and and and they they just go crazy oh but somebody’s making a living out of this i’m saying well yeah but this guy just helped the market by a hundred houses this year and what did you do you’re still living in your house you haven’t rented it out you haven’t donated it to somebody they’re actually fixing the problem and so i i’ve got a few ideas what’s going to fix this market my first idea is that a nothing will fix it it’s a free open market economy and it will fix itself and it will probably take about 50 odd years it won’t be in my lifetime because it’s taken that long to get us to this point additionally i think if the government was really serious about fixing it they should take GST off the price of new builds and take GST off the price of new build materials and promote and allow people to rebuild new houses faster and a lot of people look at me as a developer and say oh that’s that’s self-effacing you know that helps you out i also think they should double rates i i’m in this my house here and i pay about two and a half thousand dollars a year in rates i’d be happy to pay five thousand dollars a year in rates  on all of my houses if they used it to free up all that i was just gonna say if it’s used in a productive way absolutely i don’t need a new swimming pool complex i don’t need more parks i need them to do higher density and in the areas where it’s where it serves the purpose and that’s that’s the only thing that’s going to do it is more houses yeah and i think higher density is a thing that people of New Zealand are going to have to get used to right Australians are kind of used to it they build these brick houses one up against each other cookie cutter bam bam bam down the road and and kiwis really stick on to this kind of i’m not living in less than 700 square meter kind of section and and well right yeah yeah other people can but i’m just not going to and that’s if everyone says that then uh then that’s an issue but i and and you’re starting to see it and there’s the likes of kind of Albany in Auckland and things where there’s these rows of houses and look then they’re not the most beautiful but people get houses whether it’s investors or first home buyers um people are getting roofs over their head developers can build them reasonably cheap and they sell them reasonably cheap because they they only want to make you know they want to sell their house um but i think we’re going to have to really change a mindset which again won’t happen in by 2022 but maybe where we’re heading you know the new generation coming up um may just find acceptable to live in an 80 square meter 70 square meter townhouse um yeah it’s probably double glazed it’s probably warm it’s dry it’s clean it’s tidy there’s no massive backyard to take care of and nobody in the next generation wants to live in the house that makes the Dunedin student flat look good but they want these clean dry new places that are commutable from where they are and you touched on it with Australia too like when i was um holidaying in Brisbane as a kid you drive for 45 minutes to get to the Gold Coast and now it’s all urban centre urban centre because what what happened is they went oh we’ve got this projection that says we’re going to have this population that’s going to be living in in Queensland and so we’ll put a train system and a sewer system out there and let the developers go crazy and that’s what they did they were ahead of the curve and we’ve been behind that curve for 20 or 30 years um 1919 the first housing court New Zealand property was built in New Zealand it was in miramar still there it’s a museum now and they’ve been building those housing corp houses for a hundred years and has it fixed the problem not according to the data so you’re an investor right obviously and so am i what’s going to stop us from buying more rental properties yeah yeah and there’s so many houses that the rents stay the same or drop down a little bit and it’s not affordable for us to do so we’re not making money out of it that’s the only thing that’s going to stop people from doing that and you’re talking about this sort of free economic decision then right like it’s it’s it’s your economic decision to no longer be in the market and that’s where and and Wellington’s done it Wellington did it and when was the last time it stagnated probably of 2008 to 2016 um it just got to a point where everyone said i’m no longer happy to pay those prices seven years later it became the norm and everyone got excited again it had become the new norm um people’s incomes had gone up a little bit and kind of interest rates have come down and that was the market right nothing stopped it it just stopped and Auckland did the same thing in the last 12 months it’s boomed off its nut but i mean let’s be fair for the four years before that it was kind of stagnant and so 50% of the boom that auckland’s just seen as a catch-up um the rest of it is ridiculous um but ridiculous is the new normal absolutely used for every price having a decimal place in it yeah Christchurch could be next what did you we were talking you were talking a bit a little bit earlier about some of the double glazing that new builds brings in what did you think of the um new requirements for um healthier homes uh put on landlords did you think that was overly onerous or um happy tenants right happy tenants healthy tenants funnily enough you’re gonna love this it was self-serving for me as well because a lot of my actual properties are boarding houses and i paid the power cost there so i’d already installation i’m paying for them to be heated inside the property so it was cost effective for me to do so i’ve just bought three new heat pumps today for some some rentals and to sort a few things out before winter comes along i mean i don’t particularly consider that i have any tenants at all i have clients and i like to keep my clients happy and they come back and they you know they stick around um and i feel some social responsibility obviously to them as well i love when my clients leave my business and go and buy their own property i think that’s a great move um i’ve got clients that have been in my properties for 10-12 plus years as well i kind of like with my hold properties to set them up so that they’re sustainable for a very long period of time um renovate them once do it really properly um not have to go back for a long period of time make them bulletproof but um i think the healthy phones thing was a minimum standard and if you had stuff that was well below that then you should probably have a bit of a closer look at yourself anyway well as someone who uh rented student flats in the student years in Wellington i was very for them because uh some of those houses are horrendous right and and really required a makeover so it’s um yeah but it’s an aging population an aging population of property stock in the marketplace too which is why we need the higher density we need high rises and stuff i mean i’ve i’ve worked very hard and very long for many years on building high-rise developments and i can tell you how hard it is and how expensive it is it is absolutely insanely expensive um i know a lot of developers now who won’t go over four floors um they won’t they don’t want to do anything with structural steel or anything with a lift shaft in it um just because of the cost of it and it’s just the insanity of it um and next are you talking around earthquake strengthening or just load bearing over four four-story kind of stuff so you go to your qs and you say look i’m building 167 apartments i’m going to go nine stories high over 2 000 square meters of land 100%  site coverage you do a drill test into the ground to see if there’s going to be liquefaction see how deep your piles need to be that drill test cost you eighty thousand dollars and the results of that drill tears tell you how deep your piles have to be and how much steel has to be in them so you figure out exactly how much steel there has to be and then it goes on the quote it goes plus or minus two hundred and i said well two hundred what two hundred dollars 200 000 no plus or minus 200% that’s as accurate as they got right and that’s because of the fluctuation in steel cost because it does fluctuate it you know if if you want to really really worry about something worry about steel costs if you want a relaxing time by cryptocurrency it’s just about um and then they give you the world’s worst quote and it says it might cost this much or it might not um and then you’ve got to fund it so you’ve got to then go out into the marketplace and find 19 million dollars um additionally if you’re doing high-rise one of the things that most people don’t kind of realize is if you’re building 160 apartments you have to finish all 160.

before you get paid for the first one if you build 160 townhouses on lower density you can finish five and sell them and then start the next five and then have the next five with the foundation down you can stage it yeah it’s just so much cheaper so there’s no real great incentive and cost and return to actually go high anymore which is creating this density issue that we’re having so every single time somebody like myself goes and buys a big piece of great central dirt and then doesn’t use it at its highest density that you’ve created a problem around that for the next hundred years or until the uh the end of the life of the property have any companies solved that i mean i can’t i can’t think i’ve stopped my head what the solution because you’ve also got to pre-sell 70% of them uh normally right no normally 100% so the percentage they use on pre-sales isn’t the percentage of the size of the building it’s the percentage of the dollar value of the lend so if you’re building a 19 million building you usually have to pre-sell 19 million dollars worth of property you can’t sell any two of those to one investor um there’s a whole pile of rules around it as a developer you would have to dig into i’ve sold this property to bob and bob can afford it because he owns these other properties and he’s got a job and it’s COVID proof you basically have to do the broking work for each individual person before you sell it to them or it might not be considered a pre-sale and they’ve obviously got to be arms length transactions so i can’t i can’t sell six of them to my cat yeah but it’s it’s just very very hard and it makes townhouses look easier so if you go one or two floors high and just stuff the density of the entire area it’s cheaper and easier and more cost effective yeah yeah it’s a shame isn’t it because uh if stock is to be solved then it needs to go vertical but um well it kind of does i mean 22 town houses were came on the market just down the road from here here last week and they sold in four hours 30 or 40 000 above the asking price um which most people who bought them considered quite reasonable yeah yeah um brilliant okay yeah hey so interest rates what are you telling people um you know i heard a great quote this morning i was having principles i can’t remember who who has um who wrote it but i’m reading it at the moment and uh and his quote was those who live by the crystal ball are doomed to chew broken glass i thought that was great because uh the number of bits of broken glass that i’ve chewed from my erroneous crystal ball gazing has been great so based on that what have you got yo um i love a good crystal ball but i’m i also think that after 25 years in the property market holding more you know millions of dollars with the mortgages i’m quite realistic and i first started borrowing money at seven percent and it went up to nine percent and i was freaking out ah cash flow terrible and so um when interest rates come down to two point two percent where they sort of are now i’m looking at it going they’ve gone from nine to two point two in ten years are they liable to go to minus six which is the you know nine two two minus um they’re just not going to i think that we have largely bottomed out um we’re at a um 0.

25 percent OCR and all of the reserve banks comments around the OCR are that we’ve bounced back from the COVID experience better than expected um at the moment property is propping that up most definitely and so is fiscal policy from the government and monetary policy from the reserve bank i. e printing money and flushing the economy with additional cash which is obviously um it’s cocaine for assets let’s be fair and so property values have gone up what hasn’t really shot up as fast as property values is rents and so what smart investors have done is they’ve gone oh my four and a half percent interest rates going down to two and a half um i’ll but i’ll keep repaying at a four and a half percent level and we’ll get rid of some debt um a lot of smart investors have done that instead of just having 100 bucks a week extra in the bank account um i think interest rates will start to come up again i don’t think it’ll happen until the very end of this year and when they do i think it’ll be very very gentle because unless some other industries in New Zealand start pumping along the way property has property is the golden child and they don’t want to kill the goose i can’t see them wanting to adjust or tweak or change that too quickly there’s a number of things right there’s business confidence with global COVID still going on they want to keep that ability to borrow for your business going on which is why they’re looking at debt to income ratios and LVRs to sort of slow down the finance but not raise interest rates i think i think you’re absolutely right i think people should be aiming and you don’t have to do it today but aiming for the ability to pay their mortgage at seven or eight percent uh yes all right i think i think you’ve got to stress test your portfolio you’ve got to look at it and go have i got some stuff that’s only just cash flow positive and stuff that’s really cash flow positive and how comfortable am i with that i i think you’ve got to expect that in the next couple of years your interest rates will go up two and a half maybe three percent max um i don’t think you’ve got to go as hard as six or seven percent i think that’s um a little bit of a false economy but we’re also looking at the difference between how much you’re borrowing the money out and how much you’re renting the property at so you’ve got to look at your yields you’ve got to look at taking care of your tenants/clients and your properties and getting the best rent you can out of them because that buffer between what interest you’re paying and what yield you’re returning that’s your profit margin and that’s your buffer thats your comfort with being able to sleep at night yeah i mean i use seven percent as kind of a stretch goal anyone who’s paying it off as though it was five percent is doing really well and in the next few years by the time it reaches five percent will have paid down a significant amount of their mortgage and will therefore be in a better position but i think what people are missing is that they say that interest rates go up you know interest rates could go up by two percent um which doesn’t sound like a lot but it’s double right like 2.

2 to 4. 4 is double and if you’re if you’re stretched at 2. 5 ish and your interest doubles then there’s there’s going to be some problems so you kind of work towards doesn’t have to be today it’s enough to be in the next six months work towards getting the ability to pay something down for starters your personal mortgage any non-tax deductible mortgage uh at that sort of higher rate then the next five years doesn’t matter and you can concentrate on investing not on being worried about what interest rates are going to do right does that sound yes but and the big part there i suppose is that that interest rate as part of the great scheme of property investment if you like doesn’t actually happen in a vacuum and so if interest rates go up two percent it’ll probably be a heavily weighted inflationary pressure on rents as well and you will find that actually that actually rents start to lift at the same time that interest rates do um you know you’ve got the property values you’ve got your mortgage you’ve got your interest rates you’ve got the rent you’re receiving the yield you’ve got nothing in there spikes on its own it goes in waves and this carries that along and this makes that change and we saw this in 07/08 as well we’re getting interest rates um the reserve bank was using interest rates to try and cool the market down we got up to sort of nine percent um fixed breaks and things and uh that was the last peak i suppose and um me as a new-ish investor on at that in in the early 2000s i’m freaking out a bit and my my parents are saying to me you know we bought a section for seven thousand dollars was our first investment and we were paying 22 interest rates you know it’s like they all pat on the head sonny  yeah but you have no idea and we didn’t and um but i think that the only people that really need to not worry but be wary of of the opposition is people that are asleep at the wheel and people that don’t maybe contact their mortgage broker for an assessment of where their where their interest rates are sitting and where their lending is and people who aren’t basically concentrating and keeping an eye on it and people who have stretched themselves very recently and if you’ve stretched yourself very recently to get a big loan on a new house and it’s your first home or you’re an entry-level investor there is one global great big fantastic fix for that and i can give it to you right now and it’s super super easy for five years it’s under three percent the interest the the average interest rate in New Zealand over the last 30 years has been 7.

25 if you can fix it under three percent for five years you’ll be wrong for two years and you’ll be right for three years after that for that that’s that five year gap and and you’ll look amazing later on to your mates just right now you’ll be looking like a a little bit of a nana and we can live with that because here for a long time you know that’s that’s the trick more and more are choosing that five-year rate i mean we went through a stage of really excited um five-year lock-ins and when it hit 4.

99 um just kind of anecdotally that seemed to be the amount that everyone was really stoked to get the five-year rate i think about that one bank that offered the 10 year rate i think it was for fixed and there may be some regrets in there but we’re talking 2. 99% and as you say mortgage rates never going to be negative so you’ve got a bottom line of what it can be so we know we’re pretty close to it so uh yeah i i think i mean i’m i’m a big fan of um sort of breaking your mortgage into a couple of chunks um something like some like half on one one year and some and half on five years and some prefer three kind of chunks but but yeah having a bit of that means no interest rate shock it never comes off 2.

29 next year to 4. 5 you’ve always got a little bit coming off and i think that’s just a part of dealing with your um risk mitigation when you’re an investor absolutely and it depends on how big your portfolio is and one thing or another and realistically the smaller the portfolio the more rescue you show the bigger the lending you’ve got if you’ve got quite a few million dollars across quite a few banks you’ve actually got quite a lot less risk as well um yeah a lot a lot of investors do get stuck in that one bank risk model where they’ve got absolutely all of their equity and all of their lending and all of their banking with one bank and they can’t sort of pull that away and when um the reserve bank and the government’s mucking around with fiscal policy the way they are um it’s it’s dangerous and you know you really need to be spread across a few a few different areas yeah i i’m not sure you’re going to agree with my strategy on this but this is what the discussions for my my general rule is that i give a bank a million dollars of lending and after that so it’s not a house but generally a million dollars because after a million dollars you don’t tend to get any better service or better rates or anything quite um but below that you know you kind of still small fry like everyone’s kind of got it i don’t want to you know minimize anyone’s position but kind of most people have a 600 000 debt these days if they’ve got a house so i tend to do a million and then look on the next house at another at another bank um because you’re maximizing the benefit of that bank um and it’s debt and and the banks are wise to it these days they’re given sort of an additional 0.

1 percent or just been a little bit prickly or if you’re only giving them the investment property but yeah that’s that’s generally where we sit which is probably similar in terms of you would give a couple of securities and then move to the next bank right would that be your yeah if at all possible you know sometimes you just don’t get that choice um and as you say you know banks give out um you know freebies a little bit of interest off here and there but you know let’s be realistic you’re talking about you know a sliver of a percentage point which means very very little over the length of a loan the one thing that most people think is important in lending is getting the best price possible and i don’t necessarily agree with that i think what’s more important is being able to borrow more money continuously and always having a redraw facility and having a good relationship with your bank and being in good standing with them and basically um deal of the century pops up you can rip down to your bank and you can have the money with them in a day or two um i think that’s way more important than you know a sliver of a percent here and there that means very little over the long period of time yeah isn’t that funny so the difference you know this banks you’ve got to pay 0.

1 more but they will allow you to buy a six hundred thousand dollar property which will grow at seven percent on average per year you’d pay point one percent of that uh additional all day long right yeah well it’s seven percent average on year year on year obviously yes but um the trick to it is is twofold the trick is right now people are getting five thousand dollars capital gain per average property and so if you were pretty smart a few years ago and bought five more properties than somebody with an identical position who wasn’t quite as uh up to it if you like you’re now earning 25 000 a week extra in capital gain this isn’t just me pulling numbers out of the old back pocket either this is a bank account and why am i referring to bank economist anyway a legitimate source economist article came out during the week saying that the average gain in capital per property at the moment uh a few years ago was eighteen hundred dollars a week and now it’s five thousand dollars a week so five extra properties twenty five thousand dollars a week better off if you’re at the end of your investing career and you’ve got reverse mortgages you’re living on that equity that’s a lot of money that’s a huge amount of money um and the difference is just being set up properly and actually you know dealing with experts and getting the right advice um hey let’s talk about um buying to renovate are you seeing much i know i know you do it you do it very well you’ve got a good team what about the average kind of punter who’s first or second investor is it a game that that non-professionals can get into do you think or is that what it always has been I very famously many many years ago was buying renovating and then on selling up to 200 properties a year which means that i had to finish one about every nine days so i was doing four or five at once with a big team of people um if i’d kept half of those then um you’d be my backdrop would be my private island now um the real money is in buy and hold absolutely problem with buy and hold is you run out of money you run out of ability to borrow and it’s a bit slow and if you can buy renovate and hold or buy renovate and sell you know there’s obviously much better cash flow in that than just trying to buy one house every year or two um don’t get me wrong i love all strategies and all strategies tend to over the long period get you to the desired result but i just think that having more than one or two or five strategies is uh far superior i still like buy renovate but it’s starting to get killed by the heat of the market at the moment i i queried a couple of weeks ago in one of my videos on my page that um is the act of buying a second-hand house is dead for current investors and is buying new builds buying off the plans buying you know personal ownership even uh is that the new investing that we’re going to see coming forward and it might be for the next year or so i mean if you can uh make five thousand dollars a week by doing nothing then you you’ve got to make a lot of money by renovating right to make that yeah um there’s so much heat in the market at the moment though that you can do nothing without renovating you could literally and i’ve done this this week you can literally buy a house and then sell it again the next day for seventy thousand dollars more and just walk away but you know that’s six to eight months every 10 years you’ve got to time the heck out of that it’s always a good time to buy and hold long term um it’s nearly always a good time to buy and renovate i think it is now but if i can go down the street here and buy a three bedroom villa that needs um you know three months worth of work to make it profitable uh and that’s going to cost me 850 grand and i actually have to settle it and i have to have a hundred thousand dollars renovation capital in there to make my 50 or 100 000 profit why wouldn’t i just go and buy an 850 000 three bedroom new build in a popular area um that’s not going to be built for 12 months and it’s worth 950 every time i settle it yeah yeah and i think that that act of sort of buying to flick on immediately um it’s okay if you’ve got a large portfolio and you’re offset by other long-term assets but it’s a game of musical chairs because at some point the music’s gonna stop and you’re gonna be left holding something that you didn’t plan to hold and as someone who that happened to in 2008 but we’ve all got those stories right so uh yeah someone who that who was buying and selling madly and then 2008 hit and really hard to get rid of it for three or four months um in a world where a week was was enough to sell a property so um yeah but you just got to have that kind of uh offset um the way i trade i don’t take any risk on the properties i don’t go unconditional on them until i found an on sale that type of thing and i’ve got a lot of protectionisms in place there but i do i do agree with you that every layman thinks that he can do that um and it’s not necessarily the truth and in reality most people think they can buy a house and renovate it in three weekends for 20 grand and that’s also not true it’s nearly always financially better off to get a project manager and a crew of guys in rather than do it yourself um as somebody who’s coached maybe a thousand people in property trading what i find is even the people that are really good at it they get to 9 or 10 or 12 houses a year and they just burnt out they couldn’t stand going back down to Resene or Mitre 10 again and and and they’ve lost their enthusiasm you know they push for it and you’re much better off just to hire somebody who can um quote you the entire renovation go and do it walk out you know come back throw me the keys in two weeks and i’ll put it on the market or or place a tenant in the property um it’s just yeah you otherwise you end up with our hairstyle don’t you yeah that’s right yeah that’s how i got to be like this i’d rather relax i really would you know and um you know it’s claimable you get better quality work it’s it’s just too easy um what i do see and you know you commented on the property trading and renovating is what i see is newbie investors make some really good money in the first strategy they find and they go wow that worked and they rush out there to try and find more of those and so you’re basically out there looking at and you’re out there in a forest looking for a tree but you only want one particular tree and i like the idea of having 10 or 12 different strategies that i’ve known and used and can bring out of the tool kit and then i go into the forest just looking for the nearest tree and if it’s if you find a decent property you can then allocate the strategy to it yeah absolutely yeah but that’s where you need a coach right so like that’s where you need someone to sort of walk through at least an experienced person to talk you through some experience and what’s gone wrong yes or no um i am a property coach and that’s how i make my living and i literally think that barely anybody needs a property coach i know worst upsell ever you know most people will do quite nicely and they’ll buy five or ten properties and they’ll live in one and they’ll live off the rent of the other five and they won’t need the super and they’ll be able to go on some holidays and that’s great that’s fantastic and it’s a slow way to get rich because the fast ways to get richer always also a fast way to go the other way and i can’t stand that but i like the idea that most professional athletes have a coach most mortgage brokers get more education and go back into the marketplace and and learn more skills and i just think that it’s it’s safer and it’s faster it’s just just as simple as that nobody needs it but if you want to do this thing sort of like a slightly higher game then find somebody that you connect with and understand who works the strategy that you want to be working i mean i’m i’m not better at this than anybody watching this this recording i’m literally no better or worse than anybody else i’ve just decided to replicate people that work at it at a higher level than i do it’s the same with any self-employed business right you can do it in an average kind of way just by doing it but to be really efficient and good at it you you need continuous lessons from from someone that you gel with i think yeah yeah and you know so you just don’t know the things that you don’t know as well yeah i’ve quite famously put three or four minute videos on my facebook page every day since lockdown and uh they’re now getting sort of 45 50 000 hits a week and just the little two cent things that you encounter in the property market when you’re making multiple offers every day that you know are are a fact and this works and that this is a real world solution that other people just go wow never knew that would have never come across that in my entire life um it just makes a big difference yeah hey cool anything you want to say to budding investors out there we’ll just kind of we’ll wrap it up after that but just sort of what what’s your sort of message to people if they approach you and say hey what are you what do you think at the moment um i just tell them what i think at the moment to be fair um it’s it’s a it’s a changing market but it always is um the the screaming hot market place that we are encountering now and that we we have to handle at this moment will not be like this forever um the only constant is change um if a bank says no to you for funding go and talk to a broker if the broker says no go talk to a another bank or a second tier lender or don’t just don’t take no for an answer people can do joint ventures people could do long settlement terms people can bird dog other deals for other investors for a finder’s fee until we’ve got capital together i mean you know another reason i don’t think that every everybody needs a property coach is because you just need a burning desire and if you have a burning desire you’ll find the thing that fixes it for you um so so stay hungry keep at it it’s out there there’s plenty of money to be made there’s no shortage of property there’s no shortage of people who want to own it and rent it brilliant hey if someone wants to get holy and just talk about property coaching again my facebook page Steve Goodey property coach and just send me a message through messenger from there that’d be great yeah yeah and watch those videos because uh i i i’ve been in the game a long time myself and and i still learn a heap of stuff from from your videos so really worthwhile so brilliant hey thanks steve i really enjoyed that and uh and thanks for dialing in thanks very much i really enjoyed being here cheers.