Planners considering new avenues for advice

Interest from financial planners in residential property advice for their clients is surging, according to the chief investment officer and director of Ironstone Group, Jason Isherwood.

Ironstone, which runs a residential property advice and research firm, Capital 360, was seeing surging interest from planners to provide residential property advice to their clients as their revenue from other sources was shrinking, Isherwood said.

“[Financial planners] have found their revenue world shrinking. The absolute value of [their client’s] portfolios has now atrophied, money [is] flowing into self managed super funds where they’re no longer advising, [and] clients [are] shifting money out of cash into direct residential assets, and again [planners] are not participating in that,” he said.

Residential property makes up a significant portion of client’s assets, and they were fundamentally unadvised around the investment decisions and how they go about the process of acquiring an investment property, Isherwood said.

“The private banks and the higher net worth dealer groups are actually using us in particular because they have a number of clients who are very property centric, and they find that they can’t really have a discussion with the clients, and it also provides them with additional income streams,” Isherwood said.

It also centralises and provides a single point of accountability, rather than the client liaising with different parties to buy and renovate and manage the property, Isherwood said.