Not only can you read about all things property-related in the NZ Herald and on One Roof, you can listen to advice from experts and join in discussions on radio. Newstalk ZB’s OneRoof Radio Show (Saturdays, 4-5pm) is part of the Weekend Collective slot hosted by Tim Roxborogh and Tim Beveridge.
What are the hot topics of conversation with callers?
Tim R: You can guarantee people will ring through if we start talking about good and bad tenants, and good and bad landlords. That gets people going, and we seem to get someone saying, “I am not saying all tenants are bad…” or “I am saying all landlords are bad, but…” in just about every show.
Tim B: Things always get pretty hot if it is political. So anything politically nuanced to do with the housing market, or capital gains tax. Ghost houses – houses that people buy but don’t live in – gets people going about overseas investors.
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Are some of your experts more likely to spark heated discussion than others?
Tim R: [ OneRoof property commentator] Ashley Church has some quite vigorous disagreements with callers. We’ve had tennis matches going on, where the caller will go, “You’re wrong,” and he’ll go, “You’re fundamentally wrong,” and the caller goes, “No, you’re wrong.” We just step back.
Tim B: Ashley gets what talkback is about, he’s very entertaining.
Tim R: People can always find things to argue about with any of our experts. We have our regulars like Ashley and Sara Hartigan, who is a mortgage adviser, and Pete Wolfkamp, the building expert.
Tim B: It doesn’t get too inflammatory with Pete, there’s not too much to argue about with building. But people’s points of view depend very much on which side of the equation they are on. There are two sides – those who own a property and those who don’t. Their needs are completely opposite and so are their views.
The Tims say callers get particularly excited about housing politics and tenants and landlords. Photo / Fiona Goodall
Have you learned a lot about property from doing the OneRoof Radio Show?
Tim B: Given the wealth of expertise we have been exposed to you would think that by now we’d have become property magnates, but no. Actually, I did start to dip my toes in the water, looking into property investing and what that involved. I chatted to Ashley to get some pointers but of course now the property market has gone ape because of Covid so that’s not happening.
Tim R: I feel like I have learned things but nothing I have been able to put into practice. Yet.
Have you had a lot of experience yourselves when it comes to buying and selling property?
Tim R: No. I’ve never bought a house. I had the good sense to marry someone who already owned one.
Tim B: My wife Anne-Maree and I bought the house we were renting from our landlord. It was a private sale.
So neither of you has been through the process of endless open homes, sweating it out at an auction or haggling over the price?
Tim B: No. Although it was quite an adventure tracking down our landlord behind our [letting] agent’s back. I did a property search, found out who owned it and made him a cheeky offer. My lawyer said to get him to sign the contract straight away. But he took it away to have a think about it. I thought, Oh, that’s it. He won’t sell. But he called me that night during half time at a Leonard Cohen concert he’d gone to and said, “I’m listening to Leonard’s lyrics and thinking about life and you’ve said you want to raise a family there, so give me another $5000 and it’s yours.”
Did you sing Hallelujah?
Tim B: Ha! I was pretty pleased. We got it for a very good price.
Tim R: I had never really thought about buying. I moved out of home when I was 18 and for 10 years I lived in the Brooklyn Apartments, a beautiful historic building in Emily Place, [central Auckland]. I then went travelling for a year and a half and when I came back I had a place at the Heritage [the former Farmers department store, converted in luxury apartments and hotel rooms]. I was there for five years. It was affectionately known as Roxborogh Towers.
Tim B: Only by you. Not by anybody else.
Tim R: It was my dream bachelor pad, full of my music memorabilia. It had the tennis court, the swimming pool, the great location. I couldn’t really afford to live there, I was spending way too much on rent, but I loved it. And then I met my wife Aimee who owned a house and I moved in with her. The fact I now own a house is entirely down to her.
What are your homes like?
Tim R: One thing we have in common is that we both live in 1960s/70s style places. We like that mid-century modern style. If our place was done up it would have that very cool Palm Springs vibe.
Tim B: We have renovated part of our place. It’s a rear unit of four, and we converted the back part of the two carports downstairs into two bedrooms, so it has gone from two bedrooms to four. Upstairs the living area was four parts – a living room, dining room, tiny kitchen and inside veranda. We enclosed it all, ripped out walls and made it one big space. I’ve learned to do a bit of DIY so I did the plastering.
Tim R: That’s impressive. I got the room ready for our baby daughter, Riley. It had been my music room and I thought she could have all my memorabilia on the walls still but my wife said no. That was my first experience of trying to strip and sand and paint.
Tim B: We’ve left our bathroom quite retro, it’s got that 1970s pink stippled paintwork. But we need to do something about it. I sent Pete Wolfkamp a video of it and he’s going to give me some notes on what I could do. Actually, I’d just want him to turn up and give me mate’s rates to do it. In fact I could say, “Pete, mate, come round and do it and I’ll bake you some croissants”. I got into baking croissants in lockdown and they’re really good.
Have you got a dream home?
Tim R: There is this house in Park Avenue, Takapuna, just back from the beach that I absolutely love. It’s mid-century modern and an L-shape, two-stories, with a swimming pool in the gap of the L and palm trees. It’s so California, so Palm Springs, and I love it to the point that I want to put a letter in their mailbox and say Hi, can we start hanging out? Or even better…
Tim B: Can you adopt me?
Tim R: …when you guys go away, can we house sit? It’s not for sale, but I am putting it out to the universe that one day, we will own that house. It’s incredible. I really do love Californian architecture. Pre-Covid, every time I have been lucky enough to go to Los Angeles, I’ve walked the streets of Beverly Hills looking at the houses. The first time I did that somebody rang the police and said, “There’s some guy wandering around the neighbourhood”. Nobody walks the streets there, they jog or they drive. So I got asked by the police what I was up to. I just like looking, the houses are gorgeous.
Other Tim, do you have a dream home?
Tim B: Not an actual one as such, although I have always loved a house in Mulholland Drive, Los Angeles, that was owned by an American guy called Russ Garcia, who I got to work with. He was Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong’s musical arranger. It’s called the Rainbow House because of its curved roof and was designed by a student of Frank Lloyd Wright – it’s in one of the Lethal Weapon movies. It has a very cool 1970s vibe I really like.
If I won Lotto my taste might change but to be honest, I really love our house. I guess a mortgage-free house would be my dream home.
Do you regret not getting into the property market sooner?
Tim R: No. I spent every spare dollar I had on travel, which is a big passion for me, I do travel writing. I’ve never regretted that.
Tim B: When I was working in Australia 25 odd years ago, my bank manager said to me, “If I can give you any advice, it would be to buy a house as soon as you can.” I could have bought something in Prahran [inner city Melbourne] for about $200,000 that would be worth a few million now. But I was working in musical theatre, in a country I didn’t intend to stay in long-term, so I didn’t do it.
I have this philosophy that you can’t regret anything that precedes the birth of your kids. If I’d bought a house in Melbourne I might have settled there and I wouldn’t have met my wife or had my daughters Lily and Rose. So I don’t have any regrets about decisions I made before they were born.
