Readers will by now be well acquainted with the minimum standards under the Healthy Homes Regulations. Rather than discuss what landlords need to do to adhere to these standards, in this blog I want to address the debate as to the tax treatment of costs incurred in doing so.  In recent weeks the IRD have issued a draft statement ... More 

We were recently involved with assisting a new client to resolve a dispute between shareholders. This was a prime example of a business succession planning scenario going wrong.  On the face of it, the client had everything you should have, such as a constitution and a shareholders’ agreement, but the relationship got such that it was completely dysfunctional and ... More 

2008 was a year all of us would like to forget.  It was the year when the global economic crisis hit and many individuals, businesses and countries went bankrupt, redundancies happened in their droves, unemployment went up and government cutbacks were the norm.   Those of you who have been through other recessions will attest that this was definitely ... More 

In April 2016 the Government announced a new SME-friendly tax package, which will make paying tax easier and more certain, reduce the burden of interest and penalties, and help smaller businesses tailor payments to their own circumstances. PROVISIONAL TAX To give you some background, provisional tax is a tax that businesses and the self-employed must pay in instalments on ... More 

As you may be aware, there is a new law that requires all tenanted homes to be insulated by 1 July 2019. Anyone who owns rental property must ensure their properties are insulated to the required standard by this date. At GRA we’ve been getting a lot of questions about whether the cost of insulating a rental property is ... More 

It is a requirement in New Zealand for parties to provide their IRD numbers when buying or selling real estate (whether as an individual or through another entity such as a company or trust). Normally this does not pose any sort of problem. However, there will be significant issues if you are selling a property that has been generating ... More 

Recently I've seen several interesting client problems which would undoubtedly have resulted in lots of money being lost and lots of legal fees being incurred if these clients hadn't had GRA's Professional Trustee on board.  Having now experienced three property cycles in my adult lifetime, I know these sorts of issues (and others) commonly arise when an economy and ... More 

It’s been an interesting start to 2017 with a much tighter credit market than what we have seen for most of the last decade. While the majority of the media have been concentrating on the fact that the market seems to have slowed since the 40% deposit rule introduction, I put more down to banks themselves pulling back in ... More 

At Property Ventures we are increasing our focus on new builds as investments because we see tremendous advantages from a financing perspective. Not only do investors get pristine new and low maintenance properties in better areas, they get the benefit of 80% LVRs and tax advantages from higher chattel depreciation.   These smart tax and finance benefits make investing ... More