The John Kenel Show

John Bolton is the founder of Squirrel, New Zealand’s largest mortgage broker doing around $3 billion in mortgages annually, and one of the country’s biggest non-bank construction lenders with $700–800 million deployed into development finance.

 

In this episode, John Bolton sits down with John Kenel for a straight-up conversation about what is really happening in the New Zealand property market right now.

 

They cover buyer confidence, yield, pre-sales, product mistakes, developer margins, down-sizers, and where the next opportunities may be setting up.

 

What you’ll learn:

- What Squirrel is seeing across $3 billion a year of mortgage activity

- What $700–800 million in development finance says about the state of the market

- Why buyer confidence is still uneven

- Why yield now matters more than easy capital gains

- The product mistakes developers keep making

- Why storage matters more than many people realise

- Why down-sizers are an overlooked opportunity

- What is happening to margins on real projects

- Why this painful part of the cycle may be clearing the way for the next one

 

If you’re building, investing, developing, or trying to make smarter decisions in property, this conversation is full of practical insight.

 

Sign up to my FREE monthly newsletter to improve your finances: https://johnkenel.com

 

Get finance for your property development with Squirrel: https://funding.johnkenel.com

 

Free guide to wills, trusts & passing down your wealth properly: https://wealth.thepropertydevelopmentclub.com/

 

Learn how to become a profitable developer in New Zealand at https://thepropertydevelopmentclub.com

An election policy announced on Sunday would change how commercial leases work in New Zealand. Two parts. Rent reviews on leases already signed could go down, not just up. And if a CBD shop's been empty for more than a year, the council could give the landlord 8 weeks to find a tenant, then auction off a lease on the building.

 

My area is residential, so I asked someone who works with commercial leases every day. My son Alex is a commercial broker at James Group Real Estate in Auckland. We go through what a ratchet clause actually is, why banks want one, how a commercial building gets valued, what happens to that value when the rent drops, what landlords would do on the next lease, and who actually turns up to a council lease auction. Then the honest bit: why shops really sit empty, and whether any of this fills them.

 

Alex Kenel is an industrial property broker with James Group Real Estate, specialising in Penrose, Onehunga and Mt Wellington - the core of Auckland's industrial market. He works with owner-occupiers, landlords and tenants on leasing, sales and purchases, with a background in industrial valuation.

 

If you're looking at industrial property in the area, or just want a straight read on rents, values and what's actually moving, get in touch:

📞 022 369 0406

✉️ alexkenel@jamesgroup.co.nz

🔗 https://linkedin.com/in/alexkenel 

 

Sign up to my FREE monthly newsletter to improve your finances: https://johnkenel.com

 

Get finance for your property development with Squirrel: https://funding.johnkenel.com

 

Free guide to wills, trusts & passing down your wealth properly: https://wealth.thepropertydevelopmentclub.com/

 

Learn how to become a profitable developer in New Zealand at https://thepropertydevelopmentclub.com

More young New Zealanders are looking at the housing market and deciding the system's rigged. In plenty of ways, they're right. I've been building houses for over 20 years and I've benefited from the way things are, so I'm not here to tell anyone they're wrong to be angry.

The question is whether the fix being offered actually fixes it, or makes the same system bigger. In this episode: why the anger is rational, what actually failed (and why "free market" is the wrong name for it), who a bigger state actually suits, the Vienna question, the developer question, the tax question, and one test you can run on any policy before you buy it.

 

Sign up to my FREE monthly newsletter to improve your finances: https://johnkenel.com

 

Get finance for your property development with Squirrel: https://funding.johnkenel.com

 

Free guide to wills, trusts & passing down your wealth properly: https://wealth.thepropertydevelopmentclub.com/

 

Learn how to become a profitable developer in New Zealand at https://thepropertydevelopmentclub.com

Governments around the world are talking about paying you to exist. It's called a universal basic income, and AI is the reason it's back on the table.

 

In this episode I look at what's actually being proposed here in New Zealand and overseas, what the real-world pilots in Finland and Ontario showed, what a land tax looks like from someone who actually holds land, and the part almost nobody talks about: what happens to the relationship between you and your government when your income and your money both come from the same place.

 

And then the practical bit. $370 a week is about $19,000 a year. You don't have to wait for a government to give you that. You can build it yourself.

 

Sign up to my FREE monthly newsletter to improve your finances: https://johnkenel.com

 

Get finance for your property development with Squirrel: https://funding.johnkenel.com

 

Free guide to wills, trusts & passing down your wealth properly: https://wealth.thepropertydevelopmentclub.com/

 

Learn how to become a profitable developer in New Zealand at https://thepropertydevelopmentclub.com

Someone commented that developers are deluded and my 695,000 home was a ripoff. Fair enough, I've heard worse. But it got me onto the argument I have nearly every day: get investors out and more Kiwis will own a home.

 

Partly right, but it answers the wrong question. So in this one I do something simple. I count the houses. When an investor sells a rental to a first home buyer, one household becomes an owner, and that's great, but New Zealand still has the same number of homes on the ground. The name on the title changed, the roof didn't.

 

I get into the 2021 interest deductibility changes, why the government quietly wanted a different kind of landlord, what build to rent really does to supply, how Australia rolls out the red carpet for big operators, and why no pre-sales means no finance, no build, and no new front door. Two questions cut through all the noise: does it help more Kiwis own a home, and does it actually create another home to live in.

 

Sign up to my FREE monthly newsletter to improve your finances: https://johnkenel.com

 

Get finance for your property development with Squirrel: https://funding.johnkenel.com 

 

Free guide to wills, trusts & passing down your wealth properly: https://wealth.thepropertydevelopmentclub.com/

 

Learn how to become a profitable developer in New Zealand at https://thepropertydevelopmentclub.com