Posts by Alfie
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Polity: House-buying patterns in Auckland, in reply to Katharine Moody,
Maybe already posted here .. but Fran O'Sullivan has taken Joyce to task on that 'wooliness' big time;
Thanks Katherine. It's good that Fran included the loophole of de facto buyers fronting purchases that I suggested in an earlier post.
The reason why it won't be perfect is that many acquisitions are transacted through 'buyers of convenience', like the 20-year-old foreign students in Auckland apartment blocks who front sales for non-resident family members.
Those students already have local bank accounts and an IRD number... so that's a ready-made get-out-of-jail-free card for wealthy investors.
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The Standard has an interesting story today -- Ben Guerin: a dirty politics fuckwit. This pathetic individual who works for a Nat MP put up a site with the Labour logo and numerous slurs against the Chinese.
The site has since been removed and redirects to the Young Nats.
Included in this thread as yet another example of the Nats' ongoing Dirty Politics.
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Up Front: Stand for... Something, in reply to Lucy Telfar Barnard,
Or it shows that these days people don't engage with an issue by attending physical meetings.
While that's the official line, I suspect Kim Dotcom's Dirty Politics meeting which overflowed the Auckland town hall kinda puts the kibosh on that theory, Lucy. In my experience, public meetings attract an audience when people are interested.
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Our country has certainly engaged in the flag debate, or maybe not.
The 25 nationwide roadshow meetings ended last week and figures released by the flag panel showed a total of 739 people attended - an average of 29 per meeting.
By my calculation, that's 4,599,595 of us who aren't vaguely interested in Key's $27m flag distraction policy. My worry is that the handful of people who are playing Key's game will actually get to decide what happens to our national symbol.
I was hoping that some form of protest vote would come to the fore -- a flag featuring a ponytail perhaps? If enough of us voted for that option, the Nats would have a real problem on their hands. However their hand-picked panel will never allow cynical designs to make the final cut, so that's not really an option.
Short of refusing to vote, is there any other way to send a message to the government that this issue is nothing but a huge waste of taxpayers' money? Or do we have to wait for the second referendum to produce a resounding "no"?
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Polity: House-buying patterns in Auckland, in reply to Russell Brown,
There's something else in that legislation which I find odd -- the so-called brightline test. That says income tax has to be paid if a residential property other than the seller’s main home is bought or sold within TWO years.
Brief backstory
Back in the early 2000s the IRD had a crackdown on property investors in the Wakatipu. They declared that anyone who had bought a property and resold within TEN years was a speculator or developer and they chased everyone in that category for back taxes. They pulled in tens of millions as a result.We were accidentally caught up in that trawl. I was injured on a skifield when a large Japanese snowboarder straight-lined me at speed, breaking my ribs and giving me a frozen shoulder which put me off work for more than two years. ACC wheeled out two tame surgeons who declared my injury "hereditary" and declined cover. Bastards!
So we sold our retirement plan -- a section we'd owned for three years -- to keep paying the bills. The IRD decided we were speculators and chased us for around $90k in back tax. It took me five years and a lot of stress to finally overturn that decision.
My point is, as ten years was the cutoff point a decade ago, why has the new legislation been set at a mere two years? Surely most offshore investors will have no problem waiting two years to take their tax-free capital gains? It seems to me that the Nats aren't serious about taxing foreign speculators, even though it could bring in hundreds of millions of dollars for the country.
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Steven Joyce responds by saying the government will finally start to collect data on foreign buyers from October 1st. Those who suggested that Labour's release of limited data would force National's hand have been proved right, although Joyce was a bit woolly on detail and couldn't say when that data would be released or in what form.
There's still no sign of any government restrictions on new builds, stamp duty on overseas investors, etc. So expect more of those of Chinese ethnicity in Auckland with lower than average household incomes AND local IRD numbers to be involved in expensive property purchases on behalf of uncles, cousins...
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Envirologue: Swamp Monsters – the…, in reply to Sacha,
Hand-wringing from Nathan Guy.
Hmmm. Methinks there will be some new jobs created in the Far North... for Maori carvers who work fast and don't chisel more than 20mm into the outside of logs.
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After this subject received a good public airing, the Government has decided to tighten export rules for swamp kauri.
Primary Industries Minister Nathan Guy said milling operators will now have to notify the Ministry of all finished products for export and have them inspected.
Operators will also have to notify the Northland Regional Council of any and all extraction activities.
Mr Guy said the Ministry would increase its oversight of swamp kauri exports and put more resources in Whangarei to increase sawmill and export inspections.
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Polity: House-buying patterns in Auckland, in reply to BenWilson,
Basically every young family that has a property in NZ is suddenly worth negative hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Keep in mind Ben that the housing bubble is pretty much confined to Auckland. When (not if) that bubble bursts, the damage will most likely be confined to Akl. The housing market in the South Island -- except in ChCh, cos earthquakes -- is relatively stable and tends not to suffer the up/down cycles of more volatile markets.
We're a staunch lot down here.
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I wish that the people crying racism would step back and look at the wider picture. This is nothing to do with overseas buyers interested in living in our fair country. It's the wealthy looking after their assets and this mass movement of capital is happening worldwide at the moment.
A new 230 apartment complex in London's Canary Wharf sold off the plan in five hours this week. Half went to local buyers, the rest to investors from Greece, Italy and China. Those flats won't even be completed until 2019.
The same thing is taking place in Australia and Canada where the rich are parking their capital in safe havens.
Around 20% has been knocked off the value of Chinese shares since mid-June, although attempts by authorities to stem the bleeding are having some effect.
Many wealthy Chinese investors had already cashed out. Major shareholders sold 360bn yuan (US$58bn) in the first five months of 2015 alone, compared with 190bn yuan in all of 2014 and an average of 100bn yuan in prior years, according to Bank of America Merrill Lynch.
It's no wonder our naive little market is being targeted. We've been told today that Auckland's median house price leapt 26% in the last year. Add to that NZ's lack of regulation of foreign property sales and the easy to circumvent must have an IRD number requirement coupled with zero tax as long as you hold a property for 24 months, and you're looking at some of the best tax-free returns on capital money can buy.
In Singapore, offshore investors pay a 15% stamp duty on the purchase price of property to the government. Whether that's the solution or the 'new builds only' law in Australia, NZ desperately needs to stem the inflow of wealth that's distorting the Auckland market. Because it's not going to slow down anytime soon.
