Real Estate Investor Magazine South Africa October 2015 | Page 13

D

olf first began investing as an undergraduate while
studying for a PH.D in electrical and electronic
engineering at the University of Canterbury in New
Zealand. He noticed that engineers were not uniformly wealthy,
and started to study the rich to find out what they had in
common, finding that it wasn’t age, gender or religious. Rather,
they were all people of high integrity, and they all either made
their money, or held their wealth, in real estate. “I knew then that
I should invest in real estate,” says Dolf.
His book Real Estate Riches was a New York Times and
Wall Street Journal bestseller. He regularly conducts seminars,
investment tours and education events throughout the world,
including the US, Australia, New Zealand, Europe and South
Africa.
The current state of the Real Estate Market
As of today, the world economies are in turmoil, exemplified by
Greece’s financial collapse shortly after the implosion of Wall
Street in 2008 and growth in China, the second biggest economy
in the world, falling to its lowest level since 2009. Rather than
watch the news and panic, Dolf advises us to rather stand back
and look out for the developing long-term trends, as Real Estate
itself is often a long-term proposition. As such, if you purchased
property just before the crash throughout 2008 and 2009, then
three years later you would have found yourself down on your
investment. However, if you go back and look through recorded
history, generally at the end of any ten-year period you find prices
higher than what they were. This is true for real estate across
the board, the only exception being ݡ