Location! Location! Location!
23 March 2003

My daughter Corrie, at the age of fourteen, has developed all those finely-tuned behaviours for relieving a parent of money that are a natural by-product of adolescence. I swear she can smell or hear a wallet being opened from 50 metres. Usually I duck her impulses or suddenly urgent needs (“Dad, I really NEED those new shoes to go with the jeans I bought last time you opened your wallet”).

Right now, however, she’s got me over a barrel, and she knows it. Her gaze is unflinching, her eyes brimful with dollar signs, her hand as steady as the taxman’s. I owe her $750.00. To my greater discomfort, I know this debt could have been avoided. You see, it’s a gambling debt. I rolled the dice and lost.

I count my cash - $147.00. It’s no use going to the bank for a loan, my credit rating is zip. The only thing I can do is mortgage some property. What will it be? Vine Street? Piccadilly? The Waterworks?

I’ve always been terrible at Monopoly. In fact, I believe I’m on a thirty year losing streak, which doesn’t look like breaking in this game. My siblings still remind me what an atrocious loser I was at Corrie’s age (I owned the Monopoly set and used to regularly up-end the board and walk off with it). My downfall has been an abiding ignorance of the old real estate mantra: location, location, location.

Take tonight’s game, for example. I couldn’t resist buying Pentonville Road and The Angel, Islington. I even bought ridiculous Whitechapel – rent $4.00. I always fall for them because they’re cheap to buy and cheap to build on. I seem unable to learn that they earn pitiful rents and have no capital gain. Corrie, a natural entrepreneur, went for the top end of the market. Right now, my pale yellow counter sits on Regent-Street-with-three-houses. $750.00 please.

What’s really dispiriting is that this defect of character spreads into my life. I’m appallingly bad at buying houses. The first house Sylvia and I bought was wrong in about every possible way, except one – we adored it. It was a gorgeous wooden cottage with exposed beams and leadlight windows, lots of kauri and a mezzanine floor with sleeping platform. It was like a housetruck that had subsided gracefully onto a New Brighton sand dune. It was funky.

Only gradually did reality dawn: the sagging foundations, the non-existent drains, the rock-fiend neighbour who played Jimmy Hendrix VERY LOUDLY at all hours (he played rather well, but there’s only so much Hendrix anybody can take). It was in the wrong suburb. It was on the wrong street. It was on the wrong part of the wrong street. We had this family joke that I was the only person in the neighbourhood who got out of bed to go to work in the mornings. It was true.

Mind you, I’m convinced that luck plays a big part in successful property management. Take this game of Monopoly. I haven’t collected $200.00 for passing GO for the last eight rounds. Each time I pass GO I either land on Income Tax (“$200.00 please”, says the bank) or on King’s Cross Station, which is $200.00 rent to Corrie, who owns all the stations. In the last round I thought I’d cleared the hurdles. I landed on Chance, picked up a card that made me go back three spaces, right back to Income tax. It’s wrong, I agree, to expect handouts in life. But surely Monopoly could be a little kinder?

Our second house came much closer to being perfect. You know how real estate agents encourage you to buy the worst house on the best street? Well, we nearly pulled it off, only we bought the best house on the worst street. It was a lovely family home, with a large ragged section that we developed into a stunning garden, all-aluminium joinery, and an enormous in-ground swimming pool. We were very happy there, until we realized that Corrie and Marjan, at the ages of five and three, had memorized all the words of all the drinking songs sung by our hoonish neighbours. We decided to move to Mid-Canterbury.

Our mistake was that we didn’t sell our lovely family home – we rented it. Do not ever rent your family home. You will watch the beautiful garden revert to a tangled wilderness, the swimming pool become a slime-filled mire. The all-aluminium joinery will corrode and leak, that special shrub your godmother gave you before she died will be poisoned by an over-zealous cocker spaniel. The property market will sag. The retaining wall will crack. The hot water cylinder will explode.

You could end up, as I am now, selling off your houses at a fraction of their real value, to pay your Monopoly debt to your fourteen year old daughter. It seems such a fine, and random, line between success and failure. A few minutes ago I had a hotel on Bow Street, plenty of money and a Get Out Of Jail Free card. Now, my portfolio is a shattered wreck, cast upon a reef of mortgages. I count out the last of the $750.00 and prepare to roll the dice.

After six years in Mid-Canterbury - carefree years of renting – we are once more looking for a house to buy. This time I’m sure we’ll get it right: a good house, in a good part of town, with great neighbours and excellent prospects.

I roll the dice. A two and a one. I move my counter. One. Oxford Street. Two. Community Chest. Three. Bond Street. Corrie is merciless.
“Uh huh! Bond-Street-with-three-houses. That will be $900.00 thanks.”

Then again, perhaps my life is doomed to mirror my fortunes in Monopoly. So, if you have a crummy, over-priced, run-down old dump of a house in the wrong part of town, give me a call. I’ll be the sucker who answers the phone.