Jobless man's guide to getting rich

By ANNE GIBSON

When Dr Dolf de Roos' Dutch parents migrated to New Zealand from Holland, via Indonesia, they were surprised to see banners on the waterfront saying "Down with Holland".

It took them some time to realise that people were not expressing anti-Netherlands sentiments, but anger at then Prime Minister Sir Sidney Holland.

They had arrived during the lead-up to the 1951 watersiders' dispute, a time which Holland famously labelled "industrial anarchy".

The Dutch couple knuckled down to hard work. They ran a hotel in Dunedin, shifted for better prospects to Wanganui, and then moved to Australia's Gold Coast to run a shop.

As a multi-millionaire, born in Holland but having grown up mainly in New Zealand, it saddens de Roos to remember how hard his parents worked.

At just 44, he claims to have property assets which span the globe.

They include a funeral parlour in Ashburton, an inner-city Christchurch apartment, a Gibbston Valley vineyard near Queenstown and many other houses and flats in New Zealand and the United States.

How much he owns, he refuses to say because, he says, some people will sneeze at it and others will envy him.

But he admits to being so wealthy that even after losing "around $1 million" in the 1987 sharemarket crash through a handful of disastrous New Zealand shares, he could emerge wealthy and boast that he has never had a job.

De Roos now lives in Phoenix, Arizona, but he remains an influence on property investors in New Zealand.

His series of mainly self-published books are still on sale and he regularly returns to do the speaking circuit, peddling his message about how to get rich.

De Roos' latest book is Real Estate Riches - How to become rich using your banker's money (Addenda, $32.95) and has a foreword by Robert Kiyosaki, who wrote the Rich Dad series of books.

It has been on the Wall Street Journal and New York Times best-seller lists in the past few months, and includes a chapter recommending buying residential property in New Zealand.

"Imagine I told you that there was a Western country where there was no capital gains tax, no estate or death taxes, no wealth tax, no transfer tax or stamp duty, unlimited deductibility of losses (paper or real) on one enterprise against profits in another, no limit on the amount of mortgage interest you can deduct against income and generous depreciation rates based on purchase price and not written-down book value as passed on from owner to owner," de Roos writes.

"Such a country exists! It is New Zealand."

Andrew King, editor of the Auckland-based Residential Property Investor magazine, sings the praises of de Roos and particularly his promotion of New Zealand through the book to an international audience.

De Roos writes a column for the Auckland magazine. The headline on his March article was "How not to pay off your mortgage".

He has two more books coming out soon. His fifth, due out in the United States at the end of July, is 101 ways to massively increase the value of your real estate without spending much money.

It will be followed by Dolf on property - 10 years of real estate wisdom.

As a taste of the fifth book, de Roos is keen to impart a few tips for investors who own property to let.

"Put brighter lights in the rooms. It will make them look bigger," is the first gem of advice. The second is to install a new mailbox: "People often judge a property poorly if they see a rusty old letter box out front."

De Roos married an American. The couple have a 14-month-old daughter, Isabella, and the family are considering moving to Christchurch or Queenstown because de Roos has got a taste of the nesting instinct and is wearying of his intensive travelling schedule.

When he returns to New Zealand soon for his speaking tour and to run his property schools, he will bring his wife and daughter, making the travel a little more endurable.

De Roos has a PhD in electrical engineering. He graduated from Canterbury University, and worked on a project there in the 1970s in which students helped to develop a new sonar system for deep-sea divers.

But he reckons the really clever thing he discovered while studying was how most people are not wealthy - particularly electrical engineers - but that those who are rich have a few factors in common.

"I noticed that engineers were not uniformly wealthy, and started to study the rich to find out what they had in common.

"I read biographies, autobiographies, encyclopaedias, and research articles and interviewed wealthy people.

"I found that they had very little in common - it wasn't age or gender or religious beliefs or whether they were born into a rich family or which country they were born in.

"I could find only two things that they had in common: they were all people of high integrity, and they all either made their money, or held their wealth, in real estate. I knew then that I should invest in real estate."

After eight years at university, de Roos was offered a job at $32,000 a year. But the week before, he had completed a real estate deal worth $35,000. "Consequently, he didn't accept the job and to this day has never had one," boasts the dustcover on one of his books.

As a tool for property investors, de Roos is marketing his real estate acquisition computer programme via an internet download or a CD Rom.

As for the electrical engineering doctorate, de Roos is grateful for all those years of study, even if it taught him less about electronics and more about people.

Dr Dolf de Roos

Empower Education

Addenda

Rich Dad