Are women better at property investing?

When it comes to property investing, the question is who actually makes for the better property investor? Is it the men or is it the women? Now, I’m probably not the most balanced person to answer that question because clearly I have an agenda out of that but I was recently chatting with Veronica Morgan who is my co-host on Location Location Location Australia on Foxtel Lifestyle Channel and she has a very strong argument that women actually makes a better investment decision than men and she wrote an article on her own blog that I spoke to her about. She has got four very distinct reasons on why so I thought we would chat about this today and leave it to the viewers to work out whether or not they agree that women make for better property investors.

The first one is that women don’t get the ego gets in the way and therefore are more likely to do some homework And I have to say, that’s probably a pretty valid point because us fellas think that we know everything and we don’t think that what we don’t know is worth knowing but females are definitely keen to research and to ask people and to talk about different ideas so that they can make a better decision when it comes to investing in property. I have to say that in the battle, she’s probably quite right on that one.

The second point she points out is that women are more likely to ask for help. In my experience, the most successful property investors don’t treat it as a solo sport, they actually have multiple advisors, they are prepared to ask many people to gather enough information and knowledge and turn it into wisdom so that they can make a really good decision when it comes to property investing. So I don’t know where she gets that idea because surely blokes always ask for help when they need directions right? Well, maybe she got another good point then. Women are more likely to ask for help so she’s got two for two but let’s not get carried away.

Her third answer or her third reason why women make for a better property investor is because she thinks that women are not scared of long term commitment. Fair enough, I would probably say she raised a very valid point. Short term with property investing is considered 10 years, medium term is 10 – 25 years and long term is 25+ years so if they are prepared to make a long-term commitment, they are more like to actually get a better result when it comes to property investing because if you are trading in and out, I’ve seen it way too many times that people just don’t make money. So high cost to get in then there is cost to get out and when you buy another one, it’s high cost to get in and out again but if you stay the long path and you play the long game, in my experience over 18+ years where I’ve seen hundreds and hundreds of property investors, the ones who do play the long game actually gets a really good result. So it’s not looking good at the moment. She’s got three for three there.

The fact that they do their homework, they are prepared to ask for property investment advice and they are not scared of long term commitment are very valid reasons why women make for better property investors but the last one is around emotion. When it comes to property investing, her argument is that emotion is not a dirty word.

We’ve probably preached on many occasion that you should not buy with emotions when it comes to property investing, you should buy with your calculator and that’s actually very true because you should fall in love with the deal not the property.

But her point is really valid again because when you are walking through a property there should be an element of emotion that you use to determine whether it is a good property or not because 70% of the market is actually owner occupiers and 30% of the market is actually investors. So you are going to be appealing to a much broader group of people if you have that owner occupier appeal and we know that those owner occupiers are buying with emotions so it’s a bit of a myth that you should have zero emotions in an investment decision. But the point is, you should not fall in love with the property, you should fall in love with the deal and if the deal actually makes sense, then you can throw a little bit of emotion into the decision around the actual property to give you a chance of appeal to the most amount of people which will give the chance to the best outcome and ultimately, the best result for your property portfolio.

So I’m not sure if that’s conclusive that women are actually better property investors than us blokes but I can certainly say that she makes a very strong case that those four reasons are some of the strengths that women have and therefore, probably a very valid point that women actually do make really great property investors.