Many New Zealanders agree that Australian property investment remains the safest long term investment strategy available for wealth creation and retirement planning. It has worked extremely well for most Australian property investors for many decades. And with the recent recession more and more Kiwis are turning to Australian property investment as a means to diversify their portfolios and mitigate the risk of owning all their property within New Zealand alone.

With so many Kiwi property investors turning to Australian property investment I am seeing an increase in instances of people making all the classic mistakes that comes from not understanding the subtle differences between New Zealand and Australian property investment.

A recent independent report, written by Mark Uden, outlines the 7 biggest mistakes Kiwis make when buying Australian investment property. If you are considering purchasing property in Australia then you need to understand the pitfalls that you may come across. Ignoring these classic mistakes will most likely cause the Kiwi property investor to incur needless costs.

The first mistake Kiwis make when buying an investment property , and probably the most financially dire, is purchasing an apartment. There are many Australian marketing companies who travel to New Zealand to hold wealth creation seminars and sell Gold Coast apartments. However, the same principle applies to investors who purchase property in New Zealand too: ONLY BUY LAND!

Any seasoned property investor worth their salt would acknowledge that the inherent value in any property lies in the land underneath the building and not in the building itself. I can cite case after case of apartment investors who have purchased in Australia and New Zealand and actually LOST money after owning the property for as long as 5 years (sometimes longer). If you do not own the land, you really own nothing at all.