It would be an understatement to say that this has been a crazy year with so many unexpected things occurring.

In the property market we have gone from no activity during lockdown into one very hot market with house price inflation moving along at a rapid clip.

I’m not going to predict what the market will do from here. There are other people paid a lot more money than me to do that job.

But one thing which is clear at the moment is that property is a popular asset class for people. With low interest rates, cash and bonds are not producing any meaningful returns. The share market has been strong, but volatile.

It would seem with the current mix of economic factors that property is going to remain a sought-after investment for the foreseeable future.

But things have become hard for landlords, particularly with increasing compliance such as the Healthy Homes standards and changes to the Residential Tenancies Act

It has been a challenging year for us all at NZ Property Investor. Especially during the first lockdown when our printer was closed down. The April issue was nearly ready to leave the factory when this happened.

In the end it was trashed and we moved the magazine to a digital format. This created lots of problems, but the thing which shone through for us is that print is not dead.

Indeed the forced change reinforced how much readers enjoy reading the magazine in a printed format.

While some publishers have gone fully digital, it is not something we have any plans to pursue.

But we do have a digital property investor news service: www.landlords.co.nz. Recently we did a soft launch of our revamped site which focuses on the most popular areas of our unique content. Added to that it is cleaner and easier to use.

Please take a moment when you are online to have a look at the site.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank readers and subscribers for their support and feedback. Likewise we could not bring you the magazine without the contributions of advertisers. Please look at what they offer and support them.

Last but not least is a thanks to the team for their work in producing each issue. Our long-standing editor, Miriam Bell, moved on to a great role in the mainstream media and I wanted to single her out for thanks, too.

Enjoy your holidays and use this time to think about what you want to achieve as investors next year.