This is the most opinionated episode of Confessions of a Property Investor so far. Catherine Andrews and Michelle White from Chase Wealth Australia go straight at government policy, national debt and what both are doing to property investors, and they say up front that they are not softening it.
Underneath the politics is a history lesson worth having. Negative gearing was abolished once before, in 1985, and had to be reversed when fewer investment properties meant less rental supply and rents climbed. That mechanism has not changed. The conversation traces the same pattern through the recession of the early nineties, the GST years, the GFC that barely touched Australian residential property, and into the debt position the country carries now, which Catherine argues is why property investors keep being treated as the ones who can pay for it.
The second half is practical. Why Chase Wealth Australia pushes new dwellings rather than established ones, how depreciation, warranties and running costs actually stack up, and why a strategy has to pivot when the rules pivot. It closes on the clients who went ahead through COVID while everyone else waited: around 80 per cent of them are now paying their mortgages off, while the ones who waited two years came back to a market that had moved without them.
