One of New Zealand’s top podcasts has just met a remarkable milestone, shortly after its second birthday.
Coinciding with a runaway property market, an ever-increasing number of communication tools have become available to those in the trade and podcasts - in particular, have evolved to reach a wide and receptive audience, especially in the much-discussed area of property investment.
As the government works to put the brakes on house prices - partly in the hope of preserving an equitable supply for first home buyers -current landlords and would-be investors often struggle to make sense of an ever- changing array of rules - including LVRs: loan to value ratios, and bright-line tests that have been brought into play.
Ed McKnight and Andrew Nicol from Opes Partners had already identified a need for clear and concise information when they launched their regular free podcast in 2019. Each day The Property Academy Podcast delves into a new topic relating to property investment in New Zealand, with short, sharp, 10 to 15-minute shows.
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Nicol says that he wishes there had been something similar available when he first began investing himself, at the age of 19.
“It was terrifying, so I’d go to every seminar, and read every book I could on property investment. However, a lot of the information was very surface level.
“Here in New Zealand, people will sit around at the family BBQ and talk property. So, for the show, we make a point to doing the research and finding out the truth.”
“Sometimes it will take hours to properly research an episode,” he says.
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Over time, Nicol has built a sizeable portfolio of 38 rental properties and he founded Opes Partners – a property investment company in 2013.
Nicol confirms that the ever-evolving landscape, which characterises New Zealand’s current property investment scene fuels the pair’s imaginations and allows the show to cover a broad range of topics.
“We might be building on something I’ve seen in the news or an issue I’ve been helping an investor with, because there’s sure to be other people wanting to know the same thing.”
Nicol says investors can learn about the government’s new tax rules for property investors; find out how to adjust the rent on a property; discover which areas in the country or within a certain city or town have the most potential, and they can listen to reviews about individual developers.
“What we’re trying to do with the show is make well-researched financial information available for all Kiwis.”
Complementing Nicol’s hands-on experience, McKnight adds the data and research to the show. Growing up in a working-class family, in South Taranaki, he studied economics, and now crunches the numbers for the podcast.
“The podcast has grown from its small roots,” McKnight says. “When we started, we literally recorded it in my hotel room, and the first week we got 42 downloads. Now, it’s more than a thousand times that number, every week.”
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“We were very prim and proper back then,” adds co-host Nicol. “As time’s gone on, we’ve become more and more relaxed, and we’ve found that listeners enjoy that much more, especially if we make them laugh.”
He says one stand-out podcast was episode 656.
“Kiwis often think that if they buy a bigger section, they’ll get more capital growth. The thinking is that more land equals faster house price increases.
“But when we ran the numbers with REINZ data,” McKnight says, “we didn’t see any statistically significant difference for properties with 50m2 worth of land or over.”
The pair say their approach keeps listeners on the hook, providing helpful and sometimes unexpected information that would take investors hours to dig up for themselves.
Nicol says that the best part for him is hearing from people who have taken action after listening to The Property Academy Podcast.
“I’ll get stopped on the street, and the person will say they’ve heard the show and have subsequently bought an investment property. They’ve learnt the skills and now their families are better off for it.
“Some people have told us that they’re literally addicted to The Property Academy Podcast!”
This content has been produced in partnership with Opes Partners. To listen to their podcast click below.
