I had a almost mortgage free home in Auckland and I got sick of the Ph calls from seminar operators wanting me to go to seminars to learn how to mortgage my home so I could buy a second/third home.

Why should I contribute to the rising prices of homes by helping to drive the cost up for first home buyers, Oh yes I know most the price rise is by immigrates but a lot is still by 2nd/3rd+ investors. Why should I do the dirty on others for my greed. I value my sleep at night. We moved away from Auckland almost 2years ago and invested the excess from my home with the bank. it might not be a greatest interest rate but hopefully safer that in investment homes.

If one has money for investment why invest in commercial which is crying out for investors.

I don't see any advertising for seminars lately I wonder why?

I afraid I'm not crying over the greedy who have got their fingers burnt.

A lot of those greedy people have been caught and others who were unlucky enough to buy a home at the wrong time, the second group I feel sorry for.

Yes totally agree it's hard on those trying to get a first home.
But those who have helped to push the price of existing (and new homes) beyond the reach of them are the ones I 'don't have any sympathy for.

Narroc,
Rather a "belated post" in response to your first comment here, as I haven't looked at this section of the "grown-ups" website in so long.

I really liked what you said there about property investers being the ones pushing house prices up.

It wouldn't be so bad if they at least rented them out to people at levels that were actually AFFORDABLE to thier tenants - that is without thier tenants needing the accommodation supplement in order to be able to pay the rent that's charged (especially on places that are actually already freehold). In other words that makes the Landlord/Landlady in effect a beneficiary themselves (even if indirectly) as far as I am concerned.

I'm also quite sure that many of them actually set thier rents accordingly BECAUSE of the availability of that supplement in mind (even if to the tenant). That in turn becomes "the going rate" which other owners then go & base thier rents on as well.

In fact, when I attended one of those seminars after being invited to one, that was one of the things they suggested you ADD ON when you decided on what rent to charge. At the time, I was a section-owner at the time, so therefore "owned property" only I wasn't in a position to take-up any of what they had to "sell" - if anything I felt more like a "victim" of much of what they had to say, as I was still renting then & as an owner of a section, I wasn't eligible to get accommodation assistance for my ever-increasing rent which was taking up a larger & larger proportion of my income from the high-stress, low-paid job I was working in at the time. The same would apply for anyone who has managed to get together something that would even resemble a house deposit, thus the rent they have to continue to pay in the meantime would only be getting eaten into all the time.

Fortunately for me, since then, I have been able to cash up my section & put it towards a home unit & it has taken a huge stress off my life, both financially & in other ways. I managed to pick it up for a really good price, only in the process of acquiring it (like waiting for the proceeds from the sale of my section to come through), I was continually hoping that some property investor wasn't going to come along & snap it up from under my eyes. For me, it was such a rare opportunity to finally get out of that financially debilitating rent trap.

In fact, I feel that high rents are the biggest "guzzler" of incomes for those on low incomes in this country. I see many of them as "making money out of the less well-off in society" rather than helping them & I feel that they are more about "looking after number one" rather than "providing a home for someone". If more people were able to own thier own home, then there would be less demand for rentals as well (which would also help to keep rents down). I do even wonder if things are purposely designed that way, to actually keep people in rentals forever rather than becoming homeowners (that way it keeps a large "supply" of potential tenants for property owners to pick & choose from in order to keep thier properties continuously tenanted - thus making money for them). I find the whole thing to be geared at nothing other than selfishness quite frankly. On top of all that, there were also the huge tax breaks etc that they were also able to get through having thier rental properties.