"Property’s not looking so flash, so where should I put my cash?"
For decades many Kiwis have relied on term deposits and residential property for their investment portfolios. The share market has been comparatively ignored. Personal finance expert, Mary Holm, attributes this to the damage caused by the stock market crash of 1987. That crash was certainly brutal, and more so here than anywhere else in the world. The late Brian Gaynor provided an excellent summary of the excesses that led to this crash, in an article in 2017. While the world’s major stock markets fully recovered within twelve months, he states that the New Zealand’s market has never reached that height again. I would suggest that that is hard to conclude this with certainty as the calculation of the index has changed a few times since the crash. None the less it is unsurprising that this crash, coupled with the abject performance of the New Zealand market through the 1990s and 2000s, has made property investment much more attractive for the majority of Kiwis. In addition of c