Dearly me, Mr Gurner:
A young property tycoon has claimed Generation Y needs to stop travelling and spending money on overpriced food to save for their first home.
Tim Gurner, 35, from Melbourne, has amassed nearly half a billion dollars since buying his first investment property when he was just 19 years old.
He said his generation can become home owners by changing their spending and lifestyle habits, despite Australia’s housing affordability crisis.
‘When I was trying to buy my first home, I wasn’t buying smashed avocado for $19 and four coffees at $4 each,’ he told Channel Nine’s 60 Minutes program.
Talking his own book, like every other property magnate, at the AFR:
“It’s an incredibly challenging time in the market, no question. We’ve got foreign buyer restrictions, lending restrictions and we’ve got a planning minister here [in Victoria] who is being difficult. And we’ve had 18 months of the press being negative about property.”
“But I am pretty confident about the market. I think there is still a massive undersupply of apartments in the inner-city and good quality apartments at that. We’ve launched a few projects in the past six months and every one of them has sold within a few days. What we are seeing is still a huge demand for quality product.”
But Gurner admits there is a big shift in the sales of his apartments from investors to owner-occupiers. “What is giving me most confidence is the strength of the rental market. So we are seeing more longer term leases and people competing with each other for those leases.”
Gurner tells The Australian Financial Review in a special Rich List lunch series he is therefore mitigating some risk by keeping some of the apartments he builds to rent out – as billionaire Harry Triguboff has made a stunning success of in the past decade. He has also started developing commercial properties to tide him over in case residential sales fall dramatically, and is looking for development sites in other cities.
That’s an interesting take on things. Limiting risk by holding onto apartments as we head into a balance sheet reckoning.
My advice, Mr Gurner, is dump stock and deleverage.
