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Cutting out 50 per cent of your potential client pool may not sound like a recipe for success, but one buyer’s agent believes she has found a niche in the market.
Karen Lacheta-Pell is a Gold Coast-based buyer’s agent with an unconventional business strategy: her property investment company, InvestHer, exclusively works with female clients.
“Women still have to overcome more hurdles than men to become property investors,” Lacheta-Pell said.
“There are also still far more many individual male property investors than female in this country, and my aim is to try and remedy that imbalance to improve the financial positions of women.”
Originally from a sales and marketing background, Lacheta-Pell’s journey into the world of south-east Queensland property kicked off in 2022, and she quickly became aware of a dearth of information for female investors’ specific needs.
“Wherever you look, there is a financial guru of some kind on social media, but that doesn’t mean they actually know what they are talking about,” Lacheta-Pell said.
She noted, however, that this proliferation of unregulated and largely unscholarly information has “piqued the interest of younger generations” and created an appetite for property investment education.
When it comes to women hoping to invest in property, Lacheta-Pell stated there are unique hurdles that can get in the way of this goal.
As CoreLogic’s Women and Property 2024 report revealed, only 12.5 per cent of women own at least one residential property, compared to 14.1 per cent of men.
Findings from a September 2023 Property Investment Professionals of Australia (PIPA) report were even starker, with only one in four investors surveyed identifying as female.
“Lower average earnings make it more difficult for some women to save a deposit for their own home, which can be used as a stepping stone to property investment,” Lacheta-Pell said.
“Saving additional funds for stamp duty is also made more challenging for women given they generally earn less than men,” she said.
As the recent Workplace Gender Equality Agency (WGEA) data revealed, Australian women earn 21.7 per cent less than men.
In some Australian companies, the gap is as large as 73 per cent.
Lacheta-Pell also noted that divorced women and women who take time off work to raise children struggle significantly more than men with home ownership and mortgage servicing.
Research presented at a 2023 Victorian parliamentary inquiry found that “only 34 per cent of women who separated managed to own a home within five years and only 44 per cent within 10 years”, stated Lacheta-Pell.
“Divorced women were also three times more likely to rent at age 65 than married women, according to the inquiry,” she said.
The specific financial struggles women face suggest that female property investors could benefit from a bespoke approach.
“My goal is to help as many women as possible to become property investors either individually, or by taking the lead with their risk-averse partners,” said Lacheta-Pell.
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