Expat widens his NZ portfolio

By ANNE GIBSON

A new student lodge in Christchurch, a Queenstown university and a new Queen St office block in Auckland are some of the latest projects which property investor and author Dolf de Roos says he is involved in.

Announcing he wants his company, Property Ventures, to be listed on the New Zealand Stock Exchange within the next year, the Arizona-based de Roos is in New Zealand this month to give a series of real estate seminars. He said he would be seeing many of his investments while touring here.

Via Property Ventures, de Roos said he had bought 96 Lichfield St in Christchurch, an old building which had been converted into 140 apartments to cater for backpackers between November and January and tertiary students during the university year.

Property Ventures' subsidiary Lichfield Ventures - whose directors include Christchurch property investor and anti-Inland Revenue crusader Dave Henderson - owns the building which Quotable Value says is worth $1.1 million but de Roos said the venture was worth closer to $7 million.

The building had been renovated and the new accommodation venture is being advertised at www.livingspace.net.

Students would pay about $155 a week for rooms with a kitchenette, free national toll calls and high-speed internet connections, he said. A neighbouring massage parlour had burnt down, which de Roos said was to his advantage as he bought the land "so I can control what goes on next door".

Further south, de Roos said he was negotiating with a tertiary associate to bring a university to land he owned at Gibbston Valley through Gibbston Ventures near Queenstown. Henderson is also a director of Gibbston Ventures, according to the Companies Office. Because the negotiations were yet to be completed, de Roos said he could not say what type of university could be established or what degrees or courses might be offered.

In Auckland, de Roos said he had bought 280 Queen St, "a 17-level building" which he said was owned by Gardez Investments. Companies Office records show Gardez directors include Henderson.

Henderson rose to prominence about three years ago with a campaign - mounted with Act New Zealand MP Rodney Hide - against Inland Revenue, which was outlined in Henderson's book, Be Very Afraid.

De Roos hoped to list Property Ventures - his main vehicle in New Zealand - on the sharemarket in 12 to 15 months. Property Ventures' headquarters is in Colombo St, Christchurch. Its Auckland office is at 276-280 Queen St, formerly the Countrywide Centre, which has 11 levels of office space and three of retail and has been re-named The 280 Centre.

De Roos said he owned 30 per cent of Property Ventures which started four years ago and his aim with the listing was not to raise new capital.

He admitted that some people criticised him. "Usually it's the tall poppy syndrome," he said.

Critics include John T. Reed, a former real estate agent and now an author specialising in real estate and sports books in the United States who last year took a crack at de Roos' book Real Estate Riches - how to become rich using your banker's money (Addenda, $32.95), which was on US bestseller lists.

Reed said the book's theories were "not just silly and inaccurate, but downright dangerous because it misleads readers in an area involving serious amounts of money, debt and time".

The book made it seem too easy to make money and was really just an advertising brochure, Reed said.

In the US, the New Zealander of Dutch descent has promised to show people how easy it is to invest in residential property by vowing to buy one house a week in Las Vegas, which he says is "the hottest real estate market on the planet".

Since January 1, de Roos said he had bought 52 Las Vegas houses through searching records which show homeowners in default on mortgage repayments. He offered distressed vendors a one-off cash grant to enable them to leave Las Vegas for somewhere else in the US, another cash grant to bring the mortgage payments up to date, asked they transfer the property to him but retain the mortgage.

This way, he said, he saved on bank fees and other transaction costs but was able to rent the property out to cover mortgage repayments and wait for the house to increase in value.

Although 5000 people a month moved out of Las Vegas, another 7000 moved into the city, creating the need for an extra 17 houses a day so demand for property was strong, he said.

"It was too easy to do this so we did more than one a week," said de Roos, who recalled that as an eight-year-old being raised by his parents running a motel in Wanganui, he and his friend would build a mini-property empire by stacking up cardboard boxes to create houses and driving their Matchbox toy cars through their estates.

"We created our own massive Monopoly sets," he recalled "and these games would go on for days."

Now, de Roos' parents live in Malta: "They don't have a car," he said to illustrate their frugal personality.

De Roos boasted of many deals he had just done in New Zealand, including buying a $22,500 fully-furnished cabin in Queenstown's motor camp "which the local council is desperate to buy off me" and owning a strata title share of a Queenstown hotel.

Although he ran property seminars here, he was highly critical of others working in this field, accusing them of being "hucksters who were promoting ostrich farming eight years ago and kiwifruit farming five years ago" and with little knowledge of the real estate business.

He was particularly critical of seminar organisers who sold residential property at their events, saying they had conflicting interests.