Hadley’s Top Tips for New Zealand Real Estate Investment by propertyinvestory

New Zealand Real Estate Hadleyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Top Tips for New Zealand Real Estate Investment

By: Tyrone Shum - Property Investory

Hadley’s Top Tips for New Zealand Real Estate Investment

Podcast: Play in new window | Download Subscribe: Android | RSS Hadley Nightingale is a buyers agent and property investor, where he actively invests in the Whangarei Markets and in Palmerston North. Before settling back in New Zealand, he had the opportunity to work in the agricultural industry in Wheatbelt, Australia as he had always dreamed of being a farmer. But once he returned to his home country after eight years, his passion for investing in New Zealand real estate quickly ourished which has led him to where he is today. Join us in this episode of Property Investory to learn how Hadley Nightingale started building his portfolio and how he gured out how to increase his wealth through investing in property! ‘When you’re going to purchase a property, your strategy is the key thing.’

Hadley Nightingale We nd out what Hadley Nightingale’s day to day role entails and how it ties in nicely with property investment. I’m a buyer’s agent in New Zealand and also a real estate investor myself. So, [I’ve] been in the buyer’s agency space for about three years now, or coming up to three years, and from a property investment perspective, about the same time. So, they sort of went hand-in-hand to a degree, as we got into things. He shares with us what a typical day for him is like where he usually nds himself devoting his time to his clients.

Hadley’s Top Tips for New Zealand Real Estate Investment

My day consists basically of being out there in the market for both myself and my clients to acquire property. So, working one-on-one with them to sit down and dive into strategy, work through what’s really going to get them to the next level and what they’re looking to achieve with their property goals. For some people it’s to buy one house, for others to build a portfolio and a legacy. So, I suppose that’s the exciting thing is—working with a range of people to create outcomes and get them what they are after. Nightingale goes on to explain how he became a buyer’s agent in New Zealand. I’m based in New Zealand. And it really came about through my own personal property journey earlier on. And the piece—so, back when I was 20 myself and my parents went out —we bought a piece of land. And the whole way through the process when we went and saw a real estate agent who said, ‘Hey, look, I’ve got this amazing deal for you’—which I’ve now learnt isn’t always the best thing to hear of a real estate agent’s mouth. Secondly, when we went to a lawyer who went, ‘The payload all looks good to me. ‘It’s 2007, happy days. Just go and buy it, and if it costs you a little bit of money, at the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter’. So, sort of fast forward that to where we are. Three years ago when I rst started this was when I got back into the property market and sort of realised that there was no one representing the buyer. You know, anyone that walks off the street goes and meets a real estate agent who works for the seller and then they defend for themselves to try and get themselves the best deal. And when you’re not in the market every day, it makes it really tough to, to know where the market’s at, what you should or shouldn’t be paying for a house, and, sort of, what you should be looking at. So, it was more around buyer representation that I wanted to go on this journey. And for me, I still strongly feel that the buyers are hugely underrepresented in the market.

More on Hadley Nightingale’s Story Prior to becoming a buyer’s agent, he shares with us his upbringing in New Zealand.

Hadley’s Top Tips for New Zealand Real Estate Investment

I grew up in New Zealand in a little town called Fungaday, which is about two hours north of Auckland. So, I grew up there and decided I was going to become a farmer. So, that sort of lasted for a couple of years. And then at the same time, towards the end of that, when I bought this piece of land because that was part of the grand plan, and then from there I worked out that I had to earn some more money to cover a mortgage than what New Zealand was going to pay for me, or paying me for. So, [I] ended up moving to Australia and worked out in Wheatbelt. So, driving tractors and heavy machinery out there which then turned into operating road trains. So, I was driving from Perth to the Northwest and then transitioned into mining. And then sort of to where I am now. It’s been a bit of a chop and a change right through. Growing up in a small town he delves into his schooling years. From where we are, the town that we were in is reasonably sized. There’s about 80,000 to 90,000 people that live here. We’re on the outskirts of town; so I mean, schooling was in Fungaday. And then I went down to a farming school towards the lower end of the North Island for 12 months after I left school at the end of the sixth form over here, and yeah got on with my working there after. What age did you actually start going out into the workforce to do these different things? I left school when I was 16, oh, 17. I had more or less made my mind up that school wasn’t for me at about 16. And so I struck a deal with my parents that if I got reasonable grades in the last year that I was there, I could leave. So, made sure that I did that so I could get out of there. Nightingale tells us about the rst job he had once he left school at a young age.

Hadley’s Top Tips for New Zealand Real Estate Investment

First job, I was milking cows on a dairy farm with about a thousand cows on it. So, probably one of the key lessons from that was learning how to get up early and work a long day. We’d start by getting up at 3:00 in the morning to go and get the cows to milk them, we were out for breakfast—out for lunch, if you’re lucky—and then, back out milking the cows again in the afternoon to sort of knock off at 5:00 or 6:00 at night. So, they were pretty long days. But I think it put me in good stead to learn what hard work was about and not be afraid of the hours. That is very long. Especially because it’s quite labour-intensive as well, did you have machinery to help milk the cows or did you have to all do it by hand? We had a 50-bar rotary so that the cows would walk on, then [we’d] milk them. And then as they got round to the other side, they’d walk themselves off. So, it was like a three-hour operation in the morning and three hours at night. Wow, it’s still quite a lot of work though. To be sitting there for hours on end —it’s not easy is it? It was sort of the driving force to try and nd something else that was less labour-intensive. He explains how long he stayed in this kind of job and the direction he took after. I was in the dairy industry in New Zealand for about two years. And then from that, I had a bit of a dream, I suppose, when I was young about the Wheatbelt in Western Australia was somewhere that I’d like to go and work for a bit. So, when I was 20, I decided that that’s where I was going to head. I applied for a job over there, and I happened to land it. And then basically for the next two years after that, I was working on the farm over there in the winter. Then I’d come back here to New Zealand for the summer season. So, six months here, six months in Australia—and then, after about two years, made the move back to Australia permanently to work on farms over there.

Hadley’s Top Tips for New Zealand Real Estate Investment

After making the decision to move, he shares how long he lived in Australia during this period of his life.

It was about 10 years—so about a third of my life in WA. What’s that like in the WA? It’s a good place. I really like it. I think I’d still be living there if it wasn’t so far away from everywhere. That’s true. Good people, pretty laid-back, and yeah, I had some really good times there. After living in Western Australia for 10 years, he discusses the stage in which he decided to move back to New Zealand. I moved back to New Zealand when I was 30. So, back in 2015, or end of 2015, and [the] start of 2016 is when I moved back—when the mining industry was starting to slow down and the company I was working for started to lay people off. So, I thought, ‘Right, well I’ll jump before I get laid off and get back to family and people I hadn’t seen for a long time’.

Hadley’s Top Tips for New Zealand Real Estate Investment

Nightingale explains how he changed industries once he arrived back in New Zealand. What I did when I came back: I entered into a company over here and then moved to Auckland for about 12 months with a safety and training company, which is sort of where I ended up in the mines, in terms of safety and training. So, it was a bit of a ow on from another ow. What attracted you to continue to work in that space? I suppose when you get yourself into a position where that’s all you’ve done for 10 years, you haven’t got any tertiary quali cations and you’ve been chasing the dollar—which is all good and well—when you come out the other side, your options are fairly limited. And I suppose for me, I didn’t really have any inclination to go back and sit in a truck or to go and operate machinery. So, it was sort of a thing of ‘Right, what’s my skill set? What can I do?’. And I suppose it also got the mind ticking as well to go, ‘Well, you haven’t been to university. You know, what other options have you got for income?’ I think you have to become a little bit entrepreneurial to, to sort of get yourself over the hump there of, of moving forward as opposed to staying stuck where you are, if that’s not where you want to be. Following the arrival back to his home country, Nightingale shares how he was in uenced to get into property. Not so much from my parents. I think I got my work ethic, most de nitely, from them—both extremely hard workers. The only property they own is the place that they live on. Plus, another section of land that they’ve also got. But I suppose I always remember my mum saying to me, ‘Why would you want to become a landlord when you have to x people’s toilets?’. So, that was her reasoning and her justi cation as to why you wouldn’t want to get into property. So, they weren’t into it. But I sort of sat there and looked and went, ‘Surely there’s got to be a way of this happening, a way to do this. Because there’s so many people that do use it as a wealth creation tool’.

Hadley’s Top Tips for New Zealand Real Estate Investment

He delves into the rst property he purchased which ultimately kick-started his property investing journey. In terms of the rst property aside from the farm, that was an absolute disaster as a rst start. Anyway, the rst property that we bought, we got into that by seeking out some mentors. So, myself and my partner at the time went to a Rich Dad, Poor Dad seminar and then went through with their mentoring program as well. And then I suppose that was the thing for me at the time with property investment. Like I said before, it has to work because so many people do so well out of it. But there was the fear and the trepidation there if I get this wrong again, I know what the consequences are. So, that’s sort of how we got into it back in late 2016—started investing in a place called Palmerston North in New Zealand. And that sort of propelled us in the positive direction there after. He goes on to explain the exact timeframe he started investing property. We started in 2016. So, [we] moved back to New Zealand at the end of 2015. In November 2016, we bought our rst property. How many properties have you accumulated since then? At the moment we’re sitting at three, sorry, we’ve got four at the moment that we have ourselves with. And we’ve got six income streams from that. After experiencing ups and downs throughout his property investing journey, Nightingale shares with us one of his worst investing moments. Lowest of the low with that was a joint venture that we did and we sold. It started out as a pretty straightforward ipping project. Builder was lined up, where he gave us a quote for what the work was going to be. He was all good to go. We got some other contractors to give them a hand, and we were sort of looking at about a $70,000 renovation. So, everything started out good and well for that.

Hadley’s Top Tips for New Zealand Real Estate Investment

It was a remote project where we didn’t have anyone on the ground at the time. And then we were getting updates every week from the builders to say, ‘Hey, look, I’ve done this and I’ve done that’ and to say that everything was good and on track. But, I suppose, from a bit of naivety and overtrust, we didn’t sort of ask for photos every weekend and actual video walkthroughs of where we were. We got about a month and a half to two months into this when he told us he was nearly nished and decided we’d go down and have a look at the property to pretty quickly nd out what he’d seen and what he’d done were two very different things.

What kind of things did you see? It was things that he said like ‘Oh, the wardrobes are all nished and everything’s good’, and you walked into a room and there were no wardrobes, and yet they were still just ripped back to studs and nobs. Also, things like we walked down the side of the house and there’s like a hundred metres of boards that have been put on the property that we would have never asked for in the rst place.

Hadley’s Top Tips for New Zealand Real Estate Investment

You walked down, and it was just jaw-dropping, the stuff that had been done and the stuff that hadn’t been done—and then just watch the bills escalate substantially from there. Wow. What did you do to get out of that problem? Well, we were very lucky that we had a very understanding JV partner with that. So, we ended up having to sack the guy that was on the project at the time, get some other builders in there, and then just basically strictly manage the build from there to get it over the line. The other thing that we did, because our margins became so tight from a ipping perspective, that we ended up turning it into a boarding house for about 18 months. A rent-by-room situation in the university town, so that we could get some more cash ow back. And we were also lucky that the market was rising substantially as well at the same time. So, we ended up cashing out of it in 2018. Just sort of two years or 18 months of holding onto it. I guess I was in a position where we were going to lose money. And I think that was probably one of the blessings. And the key learnings from that was that it’s all very good and well to go out with the best of intentions to go and ip something, but at the same time, do you have a strategy in place to go right, ‘If the ip doesn’t work, can I do it?’. The thing is that it was a blessing and a lesson at the same time that with the way the property panned out and how things happen that really emphasise the point that when you’re going to purchase a property, your strategy is the key thing. You can look or see out to go and ip a house, but if your renovation costs blow out or the market turns, what other options have you got to hold onto that property to make sure that you’re not losing money on the back end of that? So, that was really our saving grace, so to speak—was that we had the option of rent-by-room there to cover our costs and our expenses and everything else until a time where we could cash out of the property and make the required money that we wanted without it costing us anything along the way.

Hadley’s Top Tips for New Zealand Real Estate Investment

Despite the disappointing outcome, he shares his initial intentions with buying his rst property. The initial plan for that was just to think of it as a refurb and then trade it. So, carpets, there was a bit of a repair that needed to be done. Paint bathrooms, kitchens…so it was supposed to be about a $70,000 job all up. But, obviously, with the way things that panned out, that didn’t quite end like that. If you didn’t actually sell it, do you think you would’ve held onto that property and still continue to get cash ow from it? Most de nitely. That was sort of where we were looking to go towards the end of it, was just to buy our joint venture partner out of it and then keep it for ourselves. So, just some really rough numbers on it was that we bought it for $210,000. We ended up spending all up, including furniture about $130,000, so the budget went over by 50. But in the end, we were renting the property for about $850 a week with rent-by-room. So, it was cash ow positive from the day we got it. I guess the question is, do you now look back and go, ‘Should we have kept this and bought it out from our partner instead of selling it?’.

It’s one of those things that we do sit there and go ‘Should we have done that?’. It was the next project that we did afterwards…if we’d bought that house, we wouldn’t have been able to do the next renovation that we did which sort of set us up properly—and it was probably one of the best deals we’ve done. Despite the obstacles he faced along his journey, he looks back on the moment where everything just clicked.

Hadley’s Top Tips for New Zealand Real Estate Investment

My amazing moment was probably the rst house we bought. We walked into the house; there was mould on the ceilings, down the walls. There were people walking out going, ‘Oh, this house is disgusting’. And that one day is probably the moment I probably went, ‘Right, this is what we’ve heard about. This is what we’ve been taught to go and look for. Let’s go and buy a house’. And so, we sat down; we did our research. We did the renovations that we needed to do on it. And then when we rented the property out, it actually cash owed and gave us rental returns that we’d gured we were going to get. I suppose that rst house was the aha moment of ‘Wow, this property thing really does work from previous experience of having to fork out each and every week to feed the farm’. As the rst house he bought was an ordeal to begin with, Nightingale explains how much he made on this particular deal at the end. That rst property, well, everything that we do is buy and hold, other than the one that we had with our joint venture partner. So, that one there we purchased for $250,000. We put in new carpets and painted the kitchen, a new bathroom. Painted the outside and just gave it a general tidy-up. The place looked a lot worse than what it actually was. So, [we] spent about $35,000. So, the revaluation came back at $360,000. And then also, from a rental perspective, we rented that property at $550 a week to a group of students. So, from an equity uplift, it was about $80,000 worth of equity and a cash ow of around $500 a month after expenses as well. So, it was a good little deal to kick us off with. He goes into more detail about the deal he sold that was later reinvested into another and how it set his future up nancially. That one was a house that we bought and we cut into two. So, that’s sort of my strategy now moving forward—is to nd properties where there’s potential to either cut them down the middle and so turn one house into two, or to buy something that’s got two units, refurbish them, and rent them out.

Hadley’s Top Tips for New Zealand Real Estate Investment

That one, there was a house we bought that had two kitchens in the property, and we put a rewall down the middle of it so that we had a big unit: a three-bedroom unit and a two-bedroom unit in that particular house. So, that one there, our costs all in for that were around $550,000 for round gures. And then our reevaluation on that one was $700,000. So, there was about $150,000 of equity for that property, and then, from a cash ow perspective, about $1,300 a month. It really did set you guys up quite substantially there. Exactly. There’s a good upside from an equity perspective—and also some solid cash there on the other side of that.

How to Know the Property Market with Hadley Nightingale

Finding Great Deals and Moving with Property Investing In terms of strategy, Hadley Nightingale delves into how he plans to move forward with property investing.

Hadley’s Top Tips for New Zealand Real Estate Investment

More of what we’ve just done, that is the strategy moving forward. So, if we can turn one house into two or buy a house with a couple of units on it that have some subdivision potential, I suppose that the key thing for moving forward is to make sure that we are getting some solid cash ow with whatever we’re buying. But also that it needs to generate some equity and some forced depreciation in there as well, so that we can keep moving forward. And obviously the cash ow in there, from a serviceability standpoint, is really key as well. The property investor explains how he goes about in nding deals. I suppose the big thing with these is around zoning. And then also there’s a whole lot of intricate bits when the house is built, council requirements, also just the layout of the house in general. So, is it going to be easy to turn into two units? How do we need to go about re-rating them? And from nding them, it’s quite interesting. Some of them stare you right in the face in terms of realestate.com.nz and and Trade Me, which is our other property site, where there’s actually stuff on there that may have been on there for like a while that people just haven’t seen the potential. And also too, we work closely with agents that ring up and tell us about deals that are off the market. And the other thing that we have, and it just happened last week for one of our clients that lives in Brisbane, was to purchase him an off-market property that the vendor came directly to us and said, ‘Hey, look, we’ve got this property; it yields about 9.4%. We’ve got some other stuff going on. Have you got someone that can buy it?’. And so, it’s really a range of situations that the deals come through to us and that we look at rather than, you know, just sort of [a] one-set piece or one-set website. When coming across a deal, Nightingale also has a particular process where he looks for certain criteria.

Hadley’s Top Tips for New Zealand Real Estate Investment

I suppose the rst thing that we look at is rent and rental potential to then do a reverse calculation on the yield. So, that’s sort of the rst thing. If the yield is not there, then we sort of stay clear and move on. Unless there’s something extremely creative we can do to make sure that we can achieve that. So, there’s been properties that we’ve bought that if you looked on paper and clients would buy them, but once we do some stuff to them, then it changes that yield position. Because if we turn one into two, then obviously our rent doubles; our yield increases. But then also, at the same time, location’s really important. Building conditions are really important as well. Because at the same time, we don’t want to be buying places that need $200,000 worth of work when you’re only going to make $100,000 out of them.

It’s really important, but overcapitalisation is probably one of the biggest mistakes I see people make where they go, ‘Oh, cool, awesome. We’ll buy the house. We’ve probably paid a little bit too much for it. But I think we really need to do the kitchen up’. Doing the kitchen up is only going to give you $10 a week more than what painting the kitchen is going to do, to have exactly the same outcome more or less. So really, you’ve just got to take everything into context. But it really comes back to yield and rental demand in the area as well.

Hadley’s Top Tips for New Zealand Real Estate Investment

As the property expert has built up his contacts over the years, he discusses how he has found trustworthy people that he knows he can depend on. We’ve been through a few of them to nd some really good people. So, I suppose that’s one of the things that we do ourselves. And we also provide for our clients, as well, is that when we go into an area, we’ve got contacts there or we know people that invest in the area as well that have got builders, electricians, and plumbers and things like that. So, it’s really important that you’re getting people that are going to do the job. And especially if you are investing from abroad, it becomes even more important for them to have trusted people on the ground. So, we recommend accountants, mortgage brokers, lawyers also, too, from a trades’ perspective—all the trades that people might need as well—to all of our clients and our Australian clients, especially to get them set up and to get them sorted. I suppose the other great thing is that because we don’t provide any of these services ourselves, we are independent to them. So, if people aren’t performing, then we’ve got options to go and nd other people there as well. As Nightingale is very knowledgeable of the New Zealand market, he gives us insight on what it’s like in comparison to the Australian market. One of the biggest things for New Zealand, or the attractions to New Zealand, is that it’s really from a tax perspective. So, I’m not an accountant. This is just an overview or outlining of the differences. So, basically, we haven’t got stamp duty, so there’s a massive save there for anyone. We don’t have wealth tax. We don’t have inheritance tax. We don’t have capital gains tax. What we do have is a bright line test, or if you’re trading in property and you sell it within ve years of purchasing it, then there’s a tax to pay. But if you’re a long term investor and you sell your house in 20 years time, but you’ve had the intention to keep it, then there is no tax on that. So, there’s a huge difference between New Zealand and Australia, and those aspects. The other thing is too, is that we’ve still got yield over here, which after nally talking to Australians that, you know, guys are chasing yield but are having to go into more remote sort of places to get that—where we’ve still got it in our big the centres which is also really attractive too.

Hadley’s Top Tips for New Zealand Real Estate Investment

What kind of yields are we talking about in New Zealand? They range hugely. So, as I was saying, the last unit that we bought from one of our clients was about 9.4%. And obviously the bigger the city gets, the smaller the yield gets. But generally clients are after stuff from sort of six and a half to eight, where we regularly see stuff with that, with good equity on the other side of that as well. He also talks about the main differences between Australia and New Zealand in terms of living.

The climate in Australia is fantastic; it’s the same with Perth. If I was in the east coast of Australia, I’d probably still be there. But I think the great thing about New Zealand is that not everything is out there to try and bite you or kill you. It’s quite nice going for a walk through the bush and not waiting for a snake to jump out at you, or go and swim and get attacked by a crocodile or a shark, which is quite attractive. And then, from a property perspective, the biggest thing that I’ve found is just differences in contracts and things like that. The New Zealand sales and purchase agreements is a fantastic contract because it gives the purchaser, you know, quite a bit of power in terms of what they do from a due diligence investigative standpoint. We don’t have gazumping over here; so once you’ve got a contract on a place, you’ve got a contract. No one can just come in and pull the rug out from under your feet, so to speak, at the 11th hour. So, things like termites, we haven’t got them. Personally, I just nd it quite easy to transact and there’s a few less things to worry about.

Preparing Financially for Today and Tomorrow

Hadley’s Top Tips for New Zealand Real Estate Investment

In terms of mindset, Nightingale delves into the reason why he jumped into property investment. I think the biggest thing for me is it’s really been around passive income. It’s quite the cliché saying about making money while you sleep. And I think now with the Coronavirus and everything else that’s happening with the world, it just goes to show—and it’s de nitely stood out to me—that having passive income is quite important. That if something happens to you, or for some reason you can’t go to work, to have your income cut off today would be a shock to the system. And there’s not a whole lot you can do about it because it’s out of your control. So, that’s really the thing, is just to have something that generates income for me so I can survive and live and get by. Nightingale takes a look back on the resources and mentors that have helped him along his property investing journey. In terms of the property side of things, when we rst got started, the Rich Dad, Poor Dad training was the rst one where we went. And then through a company called Wealth Mentor in New Zealand, which was a really good stead to get going and to start learning about how property works, what we need to do, what we need to look for, and just be there, to give us a guided process. And I suppose, like anything, as you become more involved in the industry, you get to know some more people. And your mentors change a little bit as you go. And your circle of friends changes as you go as well. I suppose that a number of my friends now, we all bounce ideas off each other, and it’s just that sort of mentoring component from a property buying perspective at the moment. From the buyers agency, Ben Handler’s been absolutely phenomenal in terms of a shift in mindset, shift in business— and just opening eyes up to the possibilities of where we can go and what we can do. The mentor side of things I think is vital to anyone that’s looking to either purchase property or in business. Or no matter what you’re looking to do, it’s always easier to stand on the shoulder of someone else than to want to try and go on and do it yourself and learn the hard way. He shares with us how the Rich Dad, Poor Dad training impacted him and his mindset.

Hadley’s Top Tips for New Zealand Real Estate Investment

They were the ones that got us through the process of the mentoring program. And so we sat down, and we ended up working with Wealth Mentor, a company in New Zealand, to go through our mentoring program to make sure that what we were looking to do was going to t our needs and our wants and formulate a plan of how to acquire the properties that we needed to get us from where we were to where we wanted to be. They kind of helped you map out a plan that you could just follow and work together on what you want to achieve in terms of your goals and your targets? ‘It’s really important to get up, get your mind in the right place and just be really clear and really focused on what you’re looking to do, what you’re looking to achieve, and just keep that at the forefront of your mind.’

Hadley Nightingale Exactly—and also for someone to use as a sounding board to go, ‘Hey look, we’re looking at doing this. What do you think?’. Some of the ideas the guys who were working with said, ‘Fantastic’. Some of the ideas they said ‘I wouldn’t touch it. I wouldn’t do it. This is where you’re going to lose your money’—which is, you know, an absolutely wonderful thing to have, especially when you’re new in the game. Having someone that’s got the experience. Not your uncle at the barbecue that’s never bought something before, but someone that’s in the game and knows what’s going on to see the pitfalls that you can’t.

Reading Books and Listening to Sound Advice Nightingale shares his book recommendations that have helped develop his mindset.

Hadley’s Top Tips for New Zealand Real Estate Investment

This is probably going to be another cliché answer, but Rich Dad, Poor Dad was the book that started me off. And the other week, I picked it up for about the sixth time and read it again. But what I found was, is that there was a whole lot of stuff that I missed the rst time. So, you read it the rst time you go through it, you get some of the ideas about, you know, around what money looks like and things like that. But then what happens thereafter is once you read it and you absorb that information and you grow as a person, your mindset grows, you start to pick up other bits of the book. And what I sort of found on the sixth time was, is that the book is quite heavily spiritual, not so much from a religious perspective, but from how you position yourself and on an energy perspective on how you view the world or how you view the situations that you’re in. It’s not simply just a book about money. The property expert re ects on the best advice he has ever received. The best advice I’ve ever received is what we’ve been talking about. If you’re not sure how to do something, nd someone that’s done it and nd someone that’s done it well. There’s an old saying that ‘Price is what you pay and value is what you get’. So, for me personally, I’m quite happy to pay people a lot of money to teach me to do stuff—because I know that I’m going to get the value on the other side of it. And the price tag for me is the price tag. But the value that these people can provide should be exponential to what they’re charging you, if you apply the lessons that are there. Adopting a certain mindset throughout his property investing journey, he also shares his personal habits that have helped him along the way. I think persistence and determination are the two key things. Especially in the game, you get a hang of a lot of no’s for every guess that you get. And if you weren’t persistent and you weren’t determined, the amount of no’s and opportunities that lead to nowhere would get you down at the end of the day. I suppose that it’s really important to get up, get your mind in the right place, and just be really clear and really focused on what you’re looking to do, what you’re looking to achieve, and just keep that at the forefront of your mind.

Hadley’s Top Tips for New Zealand Real Estate Investment

If he had some time to re ect on his past self 10 years ago, we nd out what he would have said to himself. Probably No. —dump the farm. That de nitely would have been…although there’s been a lot of really good lessons learnt from that, and I probably wouldn’t be where I am today if I hadn’t have been through that experience. But I suppose it comes back to the same old thing of: If I could’ve gotten to it ve years earlier, then that would have been a fantastic thing. But it’s more so just around, you know, that persistence, that determination and to follow through on what it is that you want to do and go and get that help that you need. The earlier you can realise that in your journey, rather than just going, ‘Hey, look, I’ll dabble on this and see what happens’, the far better off you are on the other side. So at the end of the day, you don’t know what you don’t know. He discusses the future, painting a picture of what is happening for him in the upcoming ve years. For me, the thing I’m most excited about is just to continue on the journey that I’m on at the moment. I’m really loving helping people achieve their goals and sort of coaching them through that, too, to a degree as well. And then personally, for myself, is just to also keep expanding my portfolio and doing projects that I enjoy doing is the key fun to the whole thing. If it’s not enjoyable, it’s not worth it. And lastly, Hadley, how much of your success is due to skill intelligence and hard work and how much of it is because of luck? To be honest with you, I’ve put most of my success down to my team rather than me. That is it in a nutshell at the end of the day. I mean, back in 2016, at the end of 2016 when we bought the rst two properties, we were very fortunate that we bought them just before the market and Palmerston North went ridiculous. But, at the same time, without the advice and the guidance from our team, and that’s everything from accounting to mortgage broking, legal advice, mentoring about what we should and shouldn’t do, and how things needed to be structured, is more how the success came from.

Hadley’s Top Tips for New Zealand Real Estate Investment