{"id":267867,"date":"2026-02-04T21:48:08","date_gmt":"2026-02-04T21:48:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/267867\/"},"modified":"2026-02-04T21:48:08","modified_gmt":"2026-02-04T21:48:08","slug":"the-return-of-the-property-flipper","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/267867\/","title":{"rendered":"The return of the property flipper"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/4K4485Z_118454481_xl_jpg.jpeg\" width=\"1050\" height=\"700\" alt=\"do it yourself and home renovation concept: little house made of cardboard and DIY tools in the background shot at shallow depth of field\"\/><\/p>\n<p class=\"photo-captioned__information\">\nLast year was the busiest year for property flipping since 2007.<br \/>\nPhoto: 123rf \/  Federica Fortunat\n<\/p>\n<p>Property flippers are back, at a rate not seen since before the global financial crisis.<\/p>\n<p>A recent case in which an Auckland re-seller was ordered to pay $1 million to a couple he left out of pocket highlighted the perils of the practice.<\/p>\n<p>Robert and Margaret Smallridge took their case against Paljeet Singh to the High Court in Auckland, where Justice Tracey Walker ruled in their favour.<\/p>\n<p>The couple <a href=\"https:\/\/www.rnz.co.nz\/news\/business\/584697\/almost-1m-bill-for-failed-property-flip\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">sold their Avondale home to Singh<\/a> at the peak of the property market, in November 2021, for $1.925 million.<\/p>\n<p>He intended to sell it on before the settlement date, but the market dropped. The couple eventually resold the property to another buyer for significantly less.<\/p>\n<p>Singh was told to pay more than $750,000 in damages as well as contractual interest at 14 percent from 23 November, 2022 to the resale on 14 April, 2023, to a total of $99,604.48. He also had to pay a contractual interest on the net loss on resale at $268.01 per day from 15 April 2023 until it was paid.<\/p>\n<p>Nick Goodall, head of research at property data firm Cotality, said the number of contemporaneous sales &#8211; where a property is sold to one person and then on to another at the same time &#8211; had lifted significantly last year after a sharp fall in 2023.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;There was a lift in these types of transactions last year, almost double 2024, and even more than what we saw through the Covid boom times.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Perhaps this reflects the position of some vendors being more inclined to shift a property &#8211; given the decline of the market and weakness of the broader economy &#8211; rather than being able to hold on for a better price. Though this activity is still less prevalent than in the lead up to the Global Financial Crisis.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>The peak of this activity, according to Cotality&#8217;s data, was in 2007, but last year was the busiest year for it since then.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;It probably also speaks to the fact we&#8217;ve seen more activity at that lower end, which I suspect is going to be where more of the flipping activity happens as well,&#8221; Goodall said.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;When you look at the growth or lack of in prices that we&#8217;ve seen at the lower to middle end, where first-home buyers have been active, that hasn&#8217;t actually been as bad as perhaps the overall market has, which has been affected by the middle section of the market where the movers aren&#8217;t moving at the moment.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>He said people who made it work were selective in what they bought.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;You might find a property that&#8217;s been on the market for a while. It&#8217;s going to be experienced people and maybe they understand where a vendor might want a quicker sale in terms of moving on, but they can open up a different market to sell that on once they get to a certain state.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>He said it would happen less frequently when the market was soft, but there would still be buyers making it work on some properties.<\/p>\n<p>But the Auckland case showed it did not always succeed.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;If the market&#8217;s not going so well, the economy&#8217;s not going so well, the buyers just aren&#8217;t there, they&#8217;re not seeing value on the property you&#8217;ve got, whatever it might be&#8230; It&#8217;s certainly not foolproof or faultless, but there&#8217;s probably always opportunities for this type of activity to continue,&#8221; Goodall said.<\/p>\n<p>&#8216;Lazy investors&#8217;<\/p>\n<p>Property investment coach Steve Goodey said there were a number of &#8220;buyers&#8217; advocates&#8221; in the market who would find properties that appeared to be a good deal and sell them on to investors with a small margin.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;I&#8217;ve done quite a few contemporaneous settlements in the last few months &#8211; four in December and two in January.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;There&#8217;s an investor market out there that doesn&#8217;t really know how cheap you can actually buy stuff at the moment, so if you&#8217;re a professional buyer and negotiator and can find equity, a discount or a high-yielding property, it&#8217;s not terribly hard to pass it on for a moderate fee.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;There are lots of lazy investors out there who don&#8217;t mind taking something off someone if the numbers make sense.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/rnz.us6.list-manage.com\/subscribe?u=211a938dcf3e634ba2427dde9&amp;id=b4c9a30ed6\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Sign up for Money with Susan Edmunds<\/a>, a weekly newsletter covering all the things that affect how we make, spend and invest money.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Last year was the busiest year for property flipping since 2007. Photo: 123rf \/ Federica Fortunat Property flippers&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":267868,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[48,138,47,111,43,139,69,49,46,44,45],"class_list":{"0":"post-267867","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-business","8":"tag-audio","9":"tag-business","10":"tag-current-affairs","11":"tag-new-zealand","12":"tag-news","13":"tag-newzealand","14":"tag-nz","15":"tag-podcasts","16":"tag-public-radio","17":"tag-radio-new-zealand","18":"tag-rnz"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/267867","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=267867"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/267867\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/267868"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=267867"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=267867"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=267867"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}