The Alternative Property Management Show

David Faulkner is in Wellington with Harrison Vaughan at Tommy’s, and joined from Melbourne by Jason Colbey, head of community at Tapi, for an announcement. After six conferences on the bounce, David is handing over the microphone. Jason will co-MC the PMC with Samantha Arnold on 29 and 30 October at the Pullman.
Jason has MCed BDM summits, PMP awards and industry conferences across Australia, plus charity work with the Starlight Foundation. He also lasted two years and nine months in property management himself, after telling a manager that only a pathetic person would quit inside three years, and he has never forgotten it. That experience is behind the message he wants to bring to Auckland: property managers are the most important people in this industry, and he will die on that hill.
The conversation gets pointed on value. Why management fees in Victoria sit at five to seven percent while Tasmania runs at eleven to seventeen, what that does to a rent roll multiplier, and why cutting fees to chase doors leaves everybody poorer. Why property management is still treated as a stepping stone to sales rather than a career. And what Jason thinks New Zealand does better than Australia, which comes down to competing brands actually talking to each other.
Also: the Wellington market lifting after a dead winter, what the election is doing to owner decisions, Labour’s flip on interest deductibility, and the PMC Awards judges revealed, eventually.

David Faulkner is joined by Rico Gomez of Neurofit, a Christchurch based neuroscience coach who works with elite athletes and business owners, and who keynotes day two of the PMC.
Rico came to this work the hard way. He and his wife went through serious mental health struggles about eleven years ago, and after nothing else worked he went looking for answers in cognitive neuroscience himself. What he found changed both their lives, and it became the basis of the rewire process he now runs with clients.
His core argument will challenge how most of us think about burnout. The answer is not to remove pressure. Pressure is the hand squeezing the toothpaste tube, and what comes out of you under pressure was already inside you. What determines whether someone lasts forty years or five is not the performance itself but where their head is three days afterwards.
For property managers caught between landlords and tenants, and for the managers leading them, there is plenty here that lands straight away. Why your hard conversation should never be your first conversation, and what relational equity means in practice. The trust box and the performance box, and what happens when a leader lives in only one of them. Why scrolling and outsourcing your thinking to AI is quietly making you less resilient. And a story about imposter syndrome that turned into the most important yes of Rico's career.

David Faulkner is joined by Sarina Gibbon of Tenancy Advisory, alongside Samantha Arnold and Property Brokers' Sarah Green, to flag a case the whole industry needs to watch.
Earlier this month the High Court gave a tenant leave to take a question of law to the Court of Appeal: just how far does a Section 78A rent refund for unlawful premises actually go? Sarina walks through how we got here, from the 2013 Anderson decision that pushed unlawful premises outside the RTA, to prohibited transactions under Section 137, to Winton v Pabu and the "footling breach" line, and why the binding authority everyone has relied on since 2018 may not apply to Section 78A at all. In this case the tenant is seeking $113,000.
The heart of it: if the Court of Appeal decides the benefit of accommodation is no longer a good enough reason to discount a refund, tenants will start ringing councils to check consents, and plenty of agencies will not know what is sitting on their rent roll. Sarina's argument is that this is an opportunity rather than a threat, and she gives three moves to make this week.
Also: where liability actually lands between the agency and the owner, whether your indemnity clause would hold up, what happens to fees already collected, the granny flat rules and why consent free does not mean compliant, and the question of why the only intervener in this case is a tenant advocacy group.
Sarina and Sarah are speaking back to back at the PMC on 29 and 30 October, with the Renti soiree the night before.

David Faulkner and Harrison Vaughan are joined from Singapore by Matt Ball of the New Zealand Property Investors Federation for an election special, recorded ahead of the 7 November vote and the PMC at the Pullman on 29 and 30 October.

Matt has stood for both the Greens and ACT, worked in Parliament and spent three decades around politics, so he takes the panel through what each party is actually proposing and what it would do to rental property.
The Opportunity Party's land tax at 1.75 percent, why it hits your whole land value rather than your equity, and the universal basic income that comes with it. Labour's 28 percent capital gains tax from July 2027, and the missing piece that makes it worse than Australia's: no indexing for inflation. Why Matt thinks interest denial is the real danger, what a 50 percent version does to your weekly numbers, and the grandfathering and portfolio size options that could soften it. Plus the death spiral that leads from bad tax policy to rent controls, National's 5 percent deposit scheme with its new $300,000 income threshold, and a prediction on who forms the next government.

Also: the NZPIF conference in Tauranga, with a political panel moderated by Heather du Plessis Allen and a workshop featuring Tenancy Tribunal principal adjudicator Brett Carter.

David Faulkner is joined by Sasha Lockley of Money Sweet Spot, a former KPMG forensic accountant who now runs a lender built to get people out of debt rather than keep them in it. She's speaking at the PMC in October.

Sasha explains the moment on the Harbour Bridge that changed her career, and the principle behind everything she's built since: people are good and bad things happen. The finance system, she argues, is designed as though life is predictable, then punishes people with fees and default interest when it isn't.

The conversation gets practical for property managers. Why a text and a 14 day notice tells you nothing about the why. What empathy mapping actually is, and how listening properly makes tenants call you before they miss the rent, not after. How to spot who is spinning you a line sooner. Finding the halfway house between a tenant who needs six weeks and a landlord who says they've got none. And Sasha's challenge to anyone proud of low arrears: at what cost to the human?