I wish the Financial Market Advisors bill would also cover people that write articles like this:
It was the cover story.
For the record now is a bloody awful time to buy a house. The economic fundamentals in the world are very fragile, the rent versus buy equation is horribly skewed towards buying and home prices versus incomes are far too high.
Lance Wiggs 
Are you an accredited financial advisor to make these comments :-)
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No. But then again neither is my mother, and it doesn’t stop her telling me to buy.
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Surely you meant “skewed towards renting” above? The ROI excluding dubious capital gains is very negative at the moment. Sydney is worse though… 1.5m properties for $1000 a week rent.
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Towards renting yes. And capital gains are much more likely to be medium term capital losses.
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Forget Sydney, we are renting a $1.2 M property in Eastbourne for 600 bucks a week, we have already been here for 12 months and we will be here for another couple of years. It just makes no sense to buy.
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No sense at all, it is a bit silly that I can afford to rent properties that I couldn’t afford to buy (e.g. pay mortgage on).
I would hope that this is corrected slowly by inflation for everyone’s sake. So far I’ve seen few signs of that though — low inflation keeps the interest rates low, which seems to encourage speculating.
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There’s a problem with a bottom-feeding magazines and web-sites in New Zealand where the publishing business model is about serving advertisers and not readers. It’s bad everywhere in the world, but far worse here.
Presumably Property Investor runs advertising from either large scale property investors with a lot of stock to unload, or money lenders who want to push their risk onto the great unwashed.
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