21 August 20

At Whites IFM we have often cautioned about the use of property as an investment asset for retirement, especailly in SMSFs. There are many issues here including the lumpiness of the investment, the lack of liquidity, the fact that most investors already have significant exposure to property, the low yields associated with residential property and so on.

To add to these concerns, it appears there are now many so-called property experts deliberately targetting SMSFs as a market ripe for the picking. The concerns here are, firstly, anyone can call themsleves a property “expert” (there are no qualifiactions), there are a whole range of conflicts of interest which don’t have to be disclosed and, of most concern, the entire area of property investing is outside ASIC’s domain. Amazingly the corporate regulator does not consider property as a “financial product” and therefore it falls outside ASIC’s jurisdiction – a point surely not lost on those less scupulous operators that blight the investment landscape.

Two articles worth reading for any would-be property investors are found in today’s Australian – “High price for free advice” and “Property the new gravy train in ban on commissions for financial advice“.