Pod Insights The Property Academy Podcast House Flipping in 2026: What Still Makes Money – and What Doesn’t⎟Ep. 2394 About this episode Want to know what actually works in house flipping in 2026 – from someone who’s been doing it since 1999? In this episode, Ed and Andrew sit down with Steve Goodey to break down the flipping strategies that still stack up, the mistakes that kill your margin, and why this is not a beginner strategy. You’ll learn:How to flip houses in 2026 The strategies that still work (and the ones that don’t) The one rule this investor lives by after 27 years of trading property. The big theme of this episode: protect your margin, stay disciplined, and don’t let lifestyle creep eat the wealth you worked so hard to create. Don't forget to create your free Opes+ account and Wealth Plan here. For more from Opes Partners:Sign up for the weekly Private Property newsletterInstagramTikTok
Transcript 0:08 Speaker 00 Hello and welcome along to the Property Academy podcast by Opes Partners. I'm your host, Sebbit Knight. I'm Andrew Nicoll. And this is a show that helps Kiwis go from zero to five investment property. So you could be financially free and stick around for the next 15 minutes because you're going to learn how to flip houses in 2026, the strategies that still work and the ones that don't. And the one rule that this investor lives by after 27 years of trading property. Now, I recently got a message from a listener on Spotify asking if we can get a property flipper on the show to talk about the strategies that do work in 2026, someone who's actually in the game right now. So to walk us through it, we've brought back Steve Goody, who's been a full time property investor since 1999. Steve, welcome back to the show.
0:53 Speaker 01 Thanks for having me again, guys. Appreciate it.
0:54 Speaker 00 So Steve, in 30 seconds or less, what is a flipping strategy? How does it work?
1:00 Speaker 01 A flipping strategy is when you purchase an undervalued asset, add some value to it and then exit the asset very quickly. So what we're talking here is buy, renovate, sell. It's very, very simple.
1:10 Speaker 00 Okay. And if we start with the big picture first, what kind of strategies, what kind of things still work in 2026?
1:19 Speaker 01 Well, this one's very, very different because a major thing happened in New Zealand property in the last 10 years, the Auckland Unitary Plan. And what it did is it made the land worth more than the house by quite some considerable amount. So we have a lot of developers now coming in and buying land at a per square metre rate, which means that older houses have become worth a little bit less and a little bit less highly regarded. But there is still a strategy there where you can buy something super dated, super scruffy, not try and rebuild it, just to add a paint carpet and give it a tart up, if you like, and make some money on that. But it's not a beginner strategy.
1:57 Speaker 00 And I always like to know examples of what deals people have done. So can you give me a real life example from last year? What did you buy? What did you spend on it? You sell it for, and then of course, all those other costs that people don't think about, like holding costs from real estate fees and all the rest of it. What actually dropped out of the bottom?
2:13 Speaker 01 Well, honestly, last year, I probably haven't done any myself because this is not a strategy at the bottom of a market. Nobody wants to catch any falling nines. But this year, in the last couple of months, we've got two or three new projects going that are exactly this buy renovate sell because it's starting to warm back up into that time in the market, time in the property cycle where this actually does start to work. So we've got one just down the road here. I'm currently in Wellington. We've purchased it for about $620,000. We've got an $80,000 renovation on this property and we believe, and the agents are telling us, we've got valuations to prove about an $850,000 on sale when we've finished the property. And that's going to take us about six to eight weeks to do.
2:57 Speaker 00 Okay, now, I always know that there's additional costs because often we hear those numbers and we think there's some great margin in that. But it's those other costs, like the holding costs and the agents fees, and maybe if someone's working with a mentor that's helping them through the first project or the second project, so they get a good feel for it, they get a good deal. What's a realistic margin for a flip right now?
3:20 Speaker 01 A realistic margin is between about $40,000 and $80,000 and those are the types of flips that I wouldn't do. I think that you really have to start with about an 80 to $120,000 margin because the margins very rarely get bigger. They always get a little smaller. They shrink in the dryer as you go through. Because you've got costs you don't think of. You need to supply all keys to the property. You might need to get a locksmith round. You need to house dress it. You need to paint it, put the carpet and do the holding costs. And then whatever profit you make at the other end, you're going to give the government about half of it. Because you get taxed about half. You're going to be on a high tax rate plus GST. This is why I'm saying it's not a beginner strategy. To see somebody do this for their first one or two properties.
4:05 Speaker 01 I personally think you have to be in the market for a little while and know your market before you get into this strategy.
4:09 Speaker 00 So when you say it's not a deal that you'd do at that kind of typical margin. What's a sweet deal for Steve Goody to look at? Or what's the bare minimum margin that a Steve Goody is going to look at?
4:21 Speaker 01 Around eighty thousand dollars. I just think that a forty thousand dollar profit is a few beer vouchers too close to zero. And I hate the idea of I've just renovated this property and made it beautiful. And plan B is I now put some tenants in and they they destroy it. Well, not destroy it, but you know, we're in tear acts on the property. So I'd I'd much prefer to see a healthy profit so that you can learn as you go. You you we know what learning means. It means you lose money, right? So you learn as you go and you get good at it because making a fifty or sixty thousand dollar loss stops you from using that strategy ever again.
4:57 Speaker 00 Yeah.
4:58 Speaker 01 And the key thing to that is people in this country pay too much and we don't negotiate hard enough.
5:05 Speaker 00 And we were thinking about what you're doing to the property for that eighty K. Eighty K seems like maybe a bit more than just a a tart up, a bit more than just just painting the walls and the carpets. You know, back back a couple of years ago, a lot of people were talking about repurposing a dining room or some extra spaces, a bedroom or or doing the kitchens and bathrooms. Do those strategies still work? Is that what flippers are still doing now?
5:30 Speaker 01 Not that they don't work or they do work. What they're actually saying there is we're avoiding going to council. We're avoiding going outside the footprint. We we are trying not to do all of that. I particularly don't aim for properties where I change the footprint of the property because it's very, very expensive. I do aim for properties that are not wrecked. They're actually just cosmetically distressed. You know, Grandma's House, if you can modernize Grandma's House and make it look like, you know, a brand new property, some glass balustrades, some really good carpet, a couple of feature items, and just do all of the absolute basics. The absolute basics are two things. Let's be fair, carpet and paint. It touches every wall and every every surface of the property.
6:11 Speaker 01 And you make it smell and look and be better and then house dress it and prepare it for sale. You could get an eighty thousand dollar lift just out of that. The reason I don't go for two hundred and fifty thousand dollar lifts is because then you're, say, in Christchurch trying to sell a property for one point five million, or you're in Auckland at two point two million. A too higher price point for the middle of the market to absorb that property. And I, I want there to be lots of buyers for my product when I bring it to market.
6:38 Speaker 00 And like from a funding perspective, I know that if you buy an existing property, which you're gonna do if you're gonna do a flip, you need a higher deposit. So you need thirty percent deposit compared to for a new build, twenty percent deposit as your minimums. But you also need to factor in some of those other costs. So how does it typically work with people that you work with? How much money do they need upfront to kind of get started?
7:00 Speaker 01 Well, it depends what market they're in realistically. Um, I've bought a property in lower heart here with a five forty G V for two hundred and twenty thousand dollars this week. But the, when you buy it at half the G V, your, your renovation profit cost goes up a lot. That was, that house was trashed. And I'm just trying to find cosmetically distressed ones. I'm looking for low hanging fruit, stuff that's easy to do. So you do need a couple of hundred thousand dollars, but most people with two or three houses in their buy and hold portfolio have a redraw and offset facility that they can take advantage of to do that. Additionally, the other strategy here is buy, renovate, keep and not sell it. So you're buying a cosmetically distressed property in turn to get into a higher yielding asset
7:41 Speaker 01 rather than possibly buying a new build that might not yield quite as high initially.
7:46 Speaker 00 And then one of the things that I know with the people that buy, renovate and keep is they can sometimes get a bit emotionally invested in how that property looks when they're finished. So what I mean by that is they really bring it up to a lovely standard. They're very proud of themselves at looking at the fresh paint, fresh carpet, the new kitchen, then they rent it out and the tenants don't look after it quite the same way that they would if they were living in it, had they spent all that money. Have you had any experience of those kind of things where people just gets them in the head?
8:18 Speaker 01 Yeah. And you know who the worst renovators are? Builders, because they, they mentally go, well, I can fix that. I can go down to placemakers and get some materials and I can make that perfect. And you're not looking for perfect, particularly with a flip. Because when you buy an asset and prove it and then sell it, the asset is gone. You don't own it anymore. The only thing you own is the profit that you've created on the way. So I'm not saying do shoddy work, I'm saying do equitable work.
8:44 Speaker 00 Yes.
8:45 Speaker 01 The way, the way that that works mostly is people price things from the top down. They price things from, oh, how much can I buy this for? How much is it gonna cost? How much can I sell it for? I'll make a profit at the bottom. And what they really need to do is they need to price it from the bottom up. They need to go, how much is this time and effort worth in my world to spend? Nine weeks and a couple hundred thousand dollars on this property, right? That's eighty thousand dollars, right? I'm gonna lock that up in stone and protect the heck out of that. How much is it gonna cost me to do the renovation, the holding costs, the tax, all the bits and pieces? Right, this is my grumpy price, this is my maximum buy price, I will not pass this price. I won't renegotiate with myself to go higher to get this for that price.
9:30 Speaker 01 And you've just got to be really grumpy about that and make it work that way.
9:33 Speaker 00 I'll give you another example and get your take on it. A, a listener of the show I know has been renovating a property and they looped in a family member in order to renovate this. And initially they're working with a, with a, a property coach and, and, and working on this renovation. And then they decided that rather than spending whatever it was gonna cost to paint the house, they really wanted to be eco and, and care about the planet, which is a wonderful thing to do. But I think it cost them an extra ten thousand dollars in order to paint the house in a way that, that satisfied their values. And a couple of other decisions later, they're now looking at their spreadsheet saying to their property coach, well, why is it that these numbers don't line up with the ones that you first gave us?
10:17 Speaker 00 And what they were saying back, the property coach was saying back is, because you made these decisions to spend more money to make it, I mean, I didn't even know there was like eco paint or plant-based paint, but to, to, to make these decisions and spend the extra money. What's your take on that?
10:30 Speaker 01 Oh, Ed, Ed, Ed, where do I start with this? You, you said two things right there, uh, spreadsheet, property coach. You know, you said a few things wrong there, eco, family members, overspending, I mean. It tells its own story. Don't do business with family members. You'll shorten the number of people at the Christmas table.
10:49 Speaker 00 Wonderful.
10:53 Speaker 01 You're being eco-friendly already. You don't need eco-paid. You're recycling a house. Nobody's putting that one in the bin. You're making it livable again for a new family. But you've got to make a profit to do that. You know, it's the same thing as every developer in the country. They need to make a profit each time to predicate the next purchase. And so do you. You're just doing that on a smaller scale. And you've got to protect that profit. Start with a plan, stick with the plan. My thing is, create a budget for absolutely everything. Have a line for every item. Have a 5% discrimination line. You know, have absolutely everything. Once you've stopped spending that money, sell the house in whatever condition it's in at that point. Be that strict on yourself. They've just spent all their profit on glory items. I'm sorry to say it.
11:34 Speaker 00 It's funny. I do think as well, if you're going to engage a professional to give you advice, listen to that professional's advice. Like, your family member, even if they're a builder, they might be an expert in their field. You didn't engage them for their expertise. You can't have two wives and listen to both of them. You're only going to end up in trouble doing that. Trust me. One more question if I can. When I hear people talk about flipping, often they're talking about flipping houses. In 2026, are there any people who are successfully flipping maybe apartments or older, like sausage flat units or, you know, townhouses that were built 20, 30, 40 years ago? Or is it always a house?
12:18 Speaker 01 Yeah, there is. I mean, the only reason that you would actually settle the property, go through that cost, do the renovation, spend eight, nine weeks on it, and then take a profit out the other side is if that profit was a larger profit than doing a contemporaneous settlement. And there's an awful lot of people around at the moment who are just out there as buyers advocates, finding 8 or 9% net returns and passing those on to other investors. Just as there's a lot of investors out there who earn really great money, don't want to go and hit trade me every morning for every invocargo property that pops up, but they want somebody else to find it for them. So this is what I mentioned earlier about there being a property cycle. At the moment, there's a lot of contemporaneous settlements going on.
12:58 Speaker 01 As it warms up and we get closer to rising values and equity starts being built into particular deals, people will buy them, renovate them, subdivide them, put a granny flat on the back, do the big job. At the moment, there's a lot of contemporaneous settlements, but trading is coming back and it will be back in full force in the next couple of years. Normally that starts in South Auckland, that's the barometer.
13:21 Speaker 00 And expect to see a whole lot more property coaches out there that have, uh, that maybe not done anything, but now they're going to give you some advice on how to do it yourself. Those who can do and those who can't teach, isn't that what they say?
13:33 Speaker 01 There's a, there's a property coach out there at the moment who came to one of my events.
13:38 Speaker 00 Oh, yeah.
13:38 Speaker 01 As a 12 year old with his dad, you know, and, and, and good on you. You've bought 20 or 30 houses, you've done great, but I don't know, you haven't seen a few cycles.
13:47 Speaker 00 And Steve, you keep talking about contemporaneous settlements. Now, a lot of new listeners won't know what that means. What do you mean by that?
13:54 Speaker 01 Well, I've done thousands of them, but I can't spell it. There's lots of vowels in the middle. But in it, in it, what it essentially means is you get a property under offer for a really good value. You show some value, you say what, this is what I would do with the property. And you pass that contract on to another investor to settle on the date that you were supposed to settle for a fee. The fee is usually one or two percent. You're basically acting as a real estate agent and you're bird dogging or finding good deals, passing them on to somebody else.
14:22 Speaker 00 So for example, I might go out there, spot a property and think, you know, I could buy it for 500 grand. If I spent 20 grand on it, I might be able to sell it for $600,000. There's some margin here, so I go and sign up for it. And then I go across to Ian and say, I can't really be bothered with this. I don't have enough cash to do the renovation at the moment. Would you like to take over this contract and you can buy it off me? Five hundred and twenty thousand dollars. And then on the day that I buy it, he buys it. And so I don't actually have to have any cash. I just sit in the middle of that transaction.
14:52 Speaker 01 Yeah, and you might make twenty or thirty thousand dollars. You might also supply a limb report, a healthy homes report and just make the transaction easy. And the best traders do this by fully disclosing it to all parties before and after. They're telling the person they're selling it to that they're making a small margin on it. If that's okay, because you're doing a lot of work. And they're telling the person they're buying it off, that they're not buying it themselves. They're passing it on to one of their investors or somebody in their database.
15:14 Speaker 00 Now, Steve, you're known as a negotiation specialist. Now, I know a lot of people will say, oh, you make your money when you buy the property, which is absolute nonsense if you're buying and holding for twenty years. Like, it doesn't really make any difference if you get twenty grand off, fifty grand off or nothing off. If you're holding for twenty years, it's irrelevant. But if you're doing a flip strategy, it really does count. So what is a technique that someone could use right now in this market to get a good deal?
15:42 Speaker 01 Stop hitting the watch list on Trade Me every day. The brand new fresh properties that come in, the one that was listed last night and you jump onto it straight away. They have a very, very high expectation and every other flipper trader is looking exactly the same properties. So take that Trade Me search and turn it around the other way. Look at the oldest listings first. That's one of my top tips. I love doing that because the real estate agent sipping on a listing that's been a hundred and eighty days, that's been seen by seven thousand people on Trade Me and that hasn't sold. That guy's had a couple of offers and the market's told him it's not worth what he thinks it's worth. He's become negotiable. That real estate agent probably made a cut lunch and took it to the office as well. They'd really like to have a sale and a commission come through right now. And so they're sitting there waiting by the phone.
16:27 Speaker 01 In my twenty something years of coaching, I've found the hardest part of a client's life is picking up a phone and ringing somebody. We all want to text through a message. We want to know the information without having to have the interaction. Force yourself to have the interaction. Ring up agents, ask them about their listings, ask them what they've got that's been slow to move. Who needs an offer? Who really needs to get out of their property? There's something like fifty six thousand properties. On the market at the moment in New Zealand, huge numbers at the moment. There's gotta be a thousand of them that are desperate for any offer today.
16:59 Speaker 00 Now, what about regions? Which regions are worthwhile for flipping in right now? You mentioned before Invercargill, because Invercargill's cheap and property prices are going up at the moment down there. But is that the region that people should go for or are there already too many investors in there?
17:16 Speaker 01 A quick and dirty rundown of the country. Auckland, great, yee-haw, love it. Patchy market at the moment and it's all about development land value and putting higher density on things, hard work. Taurong are just about a possible, super tight market. Hamilton, heaps of space, some good trades, some interesting houses. You come down the country and there's actually some action in Hawa, Wanganui, Harmistah North at the moment. Really good low values, good yields. I know you guys have a lot of opinions on on different places and this is just, this is me and a couple of hundred clients looking at lots of different stuff. Wellington, I'd love to love Wellington more. I've lived there 50 years. Wellington's shit to the bed. Wellington's gone down 25%, so yields have gone up really high. We're still at really high incomes here though. So there's actually some good returns to be had here, but I don't think it's going to recover incredibly quickly.
18:00 Speaker 01 Nelson's a retirement village. There's nothing really between Nelson and Christchurch. I've just disillusioned half the database. Christchurch is on a fonteira cash boom at the moment. They're booming really hard. But but Christchurch's also a brand new city and you can buy something at a reasonable price in the four avenues and be really, really close to town. Trading and flipping is like further out of Christchurch than that though. You know, Ashburton, Amaru, brilliant. Queenstown, Monaka, just leave it alone. Too much money down there. It's hard to flip, in my opinion.
18:25 Speaker 00 It's interesting because a lot of the places that you look at as a flipper might be completely different places to where you'd look at a buy and hold strategy. So it's just about knowing what it is you're trying to achieve. And you can never take a one size fits all approach to any kind of investing.
18:42 Speaker 01 Yep. I mean, Invercargill, for instance, there's actually quite a lot of people living there. There's a lot of houses there. A lot of them are dated. I don't particularly want to live there or anything. Great place to visit, oysters, you know, good fun, but. I don't want to have a portfolio full of properties there, but I can't afford a portfolio full of Auckland properties either. So you take what you can get. Mm hmm. And how much work? Let's say you're doing a flip that's not in Wellington, because you said you don't want to catch that falling knife. So instead you do it in in Hamilton where there's a bit of space. How much work or what's involved with managing that renovation from Wellington when you're flipping that property? An eight hour drive away. Oh, yeah. Steve Roper, Hamilton Renovate, Auckland Mark Trafford. He's got a renovation company.
19:25 Speaker 01 I I got people all around the country and you can get them to do a fixed price quote for you. It'll be a two pager. It'll tell you exactly what they're going to do and how much it's going to cost you. There might be a third down up front and then a third and then a third when they're finished. You get progress reports, you get videos and photos. It's not as hard as it looks. You know, fixed price contract is exactly what it says. It's a fixed price. We will do everything carpet it, put the curtains up. It's ready for the house dressing when you're done. It's just about the quality of people you work with, really. And are you having to pick the colour of the carpet and and which tacks are being used? Like, how much are you telling Mark Trafford in Auckland what to do? Not very much because I like and trust Mark and he's done lots of renos for me. My reno guy in Wellington here, Aaron, has done 200 plus renovations for me in the last 10 years
20:10 Speaker 01 and and another couple of hundred for my clients. And I don't tell him anything. I say, what does it need? Because I actually trust his opinion now. You might be a bit more details oriented in your first few before, until you get sort of comfortable with it. But really it comes down to the budget as well. I mean, sometimes in a particular renovation, you can't afford to do everything. So you have to make some choices. And Steve, obviously with a flip strategy, you've really got to think more about who your end buyer is going to be. So who is buying a flip? You know, if you were to pigeonhole people, is it the first time buyers, is it other investors, is it downsizers? Predominantly it's first, second, third time home buyers. So your perfect customer is mum, dad, kid or dog. You know, they're emotionally invested. They've both got two jobs.
20:54 Speaker 01 They can't spend nine weeks with an empty house that they're renovating because they can't afford to do the renovation. If if you've got a house that's nearly unlivable, the bank's going to look at that and go, we're going to lend you 70%, but we're not going to lend you the GST or we're not going to lend you the renovation capital. You need to have that in cash and you might not. Once I've renovated it, put it back on the market for a hundred thousand dollars more, that couple can borrow a full 70% of that entire purchase price, possibly 80%. So we're. Tandering to that exact market and we want to make sure that market's fat. Which is why I don't normally do trades in towns of less than sort of fifteen thousand people. And what about some of the horror stories? Cause I mean, it all sounds good. You think, great, I'm in and out nine weeks.
21:35 Speaker 01 I've got my eighty grand margin. I'm gonna, gonna take away the things Steve said and I'll parrot those back to the real estate agent. But it doesn't always go smoothly. So what can go wrong and what are those horror stories? Well, the main one is it just doesn't sell or it just doesn't sell for a profitable level. Now, normally that means you've had a few problems along the way. You've overspent or you've just misappropriated your marketplace. You know, if you don't have enough buyers for the product or if you put too much of your own flavour and colour scheme into the property. I know a famous all black and his wife who did massive renovations and there was leopard skin wallpaper. And people just hated it and people would paint over their shit and start again. You just can't do that. You've got to go bland, dress it up with house dressing and furniture and towels and colour from that perspective.
22:20 Speaker 01 But make something that's sellable and then have a strong plan B. Plan B is I gotta rent it out. So, you know, face the fact that that could possibly happen if you can't make the profit that you want to. And I saw that you said something interesting around where we're at in the property clock. And the opportunity about buying off the plans. What was that about? As I mentioned recently, I did write a book and I designed a property clock. But instead of using the traditional boom bust property clock, I put strategies into the clock. Where I feel that the strategies are best used. So for instance, with a contemporary settlement where you're not loading up a mortgage, you can do that anytime on the property clock. I, I just think that there's probably thirteen main strategies in real estate in New Zealand.
23:02 Speaker 01 And five or six of them work at any one time when we're on the, at a different time in the clock. So being wise to that can be very, very important. So you don't go bust. Okay. And after twenty seven years, what's the one rule that you?
23:16 Speaker 00 Going to live by. What's the non-negotiable?
23:19 Speaker 01 Oh, geez, cutting it down to one. Um, just have some discipline. If you're taking an $800,000 mortgage and the bank gives you $8,000 cash back, pay it off principal, don't spend it. Create cash flow and knock that off principal for the long term. Don't spend it. Have that discipline. You see so many people that start making money in property. So the little, the secondhand Porsche turns up and then the bigger house and the batch of the boat. Just don't have that lifestyle creep. Have that little bit of discipline. Pays massive dividends at the other end.
23:52 Speaker 00 And look, if you want to learn more about Steve, he is obviously a property coach. You can Google Steve Goody. It's got an E in it. That's why I say Google it. Rather go to stevigody.com because there's an E before the Y. So if you want to get more into flipping and learn about some of these active strategies, type Steve's name in. What's that about your book? I want to go find out about that as well.
24:12 Speaker 01 Right back to property success. Took me a couple of years to write it. It's been a labour of love. It's been out for about a month. We've got some good sales going on. People love it. So yeah, it's in all good bookstores.
24:20 Speaker 00 Fantastic. And over the last 25 minutes, you've learned how to flip houses in 2026. The strategies that still work are the ones that don't. And the one rule that Steve lives by after 27 years trading properties. Right, let's wrap it up there, but please don't forget to rate, review and subscribe to the podcast. Really does help us get the message out to more people.
24:43 Speaker 00 Thanks for listening to the Property Academy Podcast. I'm your host, Tepit Knight. And I'm Andrew Nocco. We're going to be back here tomorrow with even more daily strategies, tactics and insights to help you get the most out of the estate and property market. Until next time.
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