There is a version of property investing that gets sold at the start. Buy well, add value, revalue, repeat. Nobody tells you about the other side of property: the one with the hot water cylinder, the fence the neighbour wants replaced, the roof that has one more winter in it, and the gutter that only leaks when you are out of the country. That is where most investors lose their enthusiasm, usually in small increments, one $1,800 invoice at a time, until owning the property starts to feel like a second job you never applied for.
At our Investor Fireside in March, Matthew Harris of Lighthouse Financial talked through a portfolio of more than 30 properties built over roughly a decade, alongside a career that started with nine years inside Inland Revenue. He has bought through mortgagee sales, the as-is-where-is market in post-quake Christchurch, and several rounds of policy and interest rate change. When the conversation turned to capital expenditure, his modelling advice was refreshingly unglamorous.
“I literally write down it’s going to be more than you think.”
The number he actually uses
His working rule of thumb for most properties is three to four thousand dollars a year for repairs and maintenance. That figure will make some owners flinch, particularly anyone still hoping the last two cheap years were the new normal. Treat it as a line item rather than a prediction of disaster.
The compounding effect is the part that catches people. One property at four thousand dollars a year is an annoyance. Eight properties at four thousand dollars a year is a part-time salary leaving your accounts every twelve months, and it arrives in lumps rather than in tidy monthly instalments.
Matthew’s discipline around that spend has two halves, and both matter: Only do what you need to do. Then actually do what you have to do.
He was honest about failing the first half himself. He described walking into a property to see a tenant, looking around, and deciding the place could do with new curtains. He likes new curtains. The existing curtains were completely fine. That instinct, multiplied across a portfolio, is how discretionary spending disguises itself as maintenance.
The second half carries the real risk. Deferred maintenance does not stay still. Skip the thing that has to be done and you generally end up paying for the original job plus everything that failed around it, often with a tenant relationship and a compliance obligation attached. He pointed out how visible this is across Auckland, where you can walk one street and see houses that have been looked after sitting beside houses that plainly have not.
Where new builds earn their place
For investors who are sensitive to repair costs, either because the portfolio’s cash flow is thin or because they simply do not want the risk sitting over their head, Matthew made a case that new builds are underrated as part of a mature portfolio.
His reasoning was practical rather than promotional. New builds are rarely the tool for creating wealth quickly, because what you pay usually matches what it values at, and every investor who has ordered a valuation on a new townhouse already knows how that conversation ends. What they do offer is strong rentability and close to no maintenance for around a decade. For an owner with twenty properties who has had enough of repairs and maintenance, adding one or two of those, ideally with a negotiated discount, can take real pressure off the rest of the portfolio.
That is the shift worth noticing. The purchase is there to buy relief rather than growth, and that is a legitimate reason to buy.
Cash flow is what breaks first in 2026
Asked to finish the sentence “the fastest way to blow up your first five properties in 2026 is”, Matthew’s answer was cash flow.
He was candid that his own portfolio reached a point in the last couple of years where it was not cash flowing well enough, and fixing it meant selling a few things, paying down debt, and working harder in the business to carry the rest. His summary of the market was that growth rates have slowed a long way from the years when property in New Zealand averaged around five and a half percent, yields have dropped, and the buy-and-hold-and-hope approach no longer functions as a plan on its own.
Which brings the maintenance question back around to something bigger. A four thousand dollar repair bill is a nuisance when the portfolio has cash flow. It is a crisis when it does not. The invoice is rarely the actual problem.
What to do this week
Three moves, none of which require a purchase:
- Put a real repairs and maintenance line in your model for every property, at three to four thousand dollars a year, and see what it does to your net position. Nobody enjoys this step. It takes twenty minutes.
- Separate your last twelve months of property spending into things you had to do and things you wanted to do. The ratio tells you whether you have a cost problem or a habit.
- Look at your least cash-flow-friendly property and ask what its job is in the portfolio. If you cannot answer that, that is the conversation to have next.
The part where it stops being miserable
Property gets described as passive income by people who have never held a set of keys. The honest version involves maintenance, compliance, tenants, lenders and a tax system that keeps changing shape. It is a grind. It is work.
The investors who make peace with that tend to have three things: an accurate picture of what the portfolio costs to run, a plan the portfolio is actually serving, and people around them who have solved the same problem before. Matthew put the last one plainly at the end of the evening. Your net worth is your network, and who you get around will largely dictate where you get to.
On Tuesday 11 August, Debbie Roberts and Eve Prouse are taking exactly this apart at APIA’s next event, Property Investing is Miserable (Until It Isn’t). Debbie will work through the pain points most investors run into and the mindset, systems and support that turn them into manageable problems. Eve will tell the on-the-ground version: what went wrong, what changed, and what made investing feel sustainable again. No hype, no venting, and a room full of people who have paid the same invoices you have. Members register free. Guest tickets are available on the event page.
APIA members and APIA TV subscribers can watch Matthew Harris’s full session, The 0-30 Playbook: Frameworks for safe and bold decisions in uncertain times, including the curtains story, the Avondale deal that made no sense on paper, and his three non-negotiables before any purchase.
Nothing in this article is personalised financial advice.
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