In episode 70 of Leaders Getting Coffee our guest is Alex Martelli, a young innovator who is changing the way people buy real estate.

She’s a born and bred Aucklander who spent her entire schooling and university years in the city. But somewhere in there a desire for travel was instilled, and she spent 11 years traveling the world and working with some of the biggest real estate brands.

She admits that her first break was a result of being in the right place at the right time. But she’s a hard worker and that first opportunity led to an international real estate career that many would crave. Her experiences in Sydney, London and Hong Kong formed a desire to innovate and bring her learnings back to the residential property market in New Zealand.

Once back, she founded Martelli Buyers Agents, an agency directly focussed on working exclusively with the buyers of residential real estate.

She’s now three years in and her business is growing faster than the market.

Early on, she was told that her ideas would never work in New Zealand, and so, along the way she’s had to educate the market about the role of the buyer’s agent, a concept new to New Zealand, but well understood, and in some cases compulsory, in other parts of the world. Those early non-believers have since been turned around and she now enjoys the support of the wider industry that she’s a part of.

On the Leaders Getting Coffee podcast, Alex speaks with Bruce Cotterill about the role of a buyer’s agent in the real estate transaction, the broad spectrum of people using the service and the benefits to buyers. She also discusses how her team works alongside traditional real estate agents to ensure the best outcome all round.

And there’s even room for a robust discussion about the state of the current real estate markets around the world, and the ongoing challenges for New Zealand property, a market that still hasn’t recovered to the heights achieved in 2021.

Above all, this is an enjoyable discussion with a young leader who is putting the skills she developed overseas to the test in New Zealand’s highly competitive real estate industry, all while introducing a new service that many people will find highly valuable.

Leaders Getting Coffee – Episode 70 with Bruce Cotterill and Alex Martelli, Founder and CEO of Martelli Buyers Agents

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Australasian venture-capital heavyweight Blackbird has closed a record $1.25 billion sixth fund – and its New Zealand general partner Phoebe Harrop Meadows says Kiwi companies are central to its investment strategy.

The fund, described by Blackbird as the largest venture-capital raise in ANZ history, underscores the firm’s rise from a small Australian startup investor into one of the region’s most consequential backers of technology companies.

Having backed the likes of Canva, Halter, Marloo, and Partly, Blackbird has structured the new fund into two roughly equal pools: about $600 million for investments from pre-seed to Series A, and a similar amount to support companies later in their growth.

That allows it to write the first cheque when a company is little more than a proposition, then retain firepower to keep investing as the business scales.

The Goldilocks fund

In the latest episode of The Business of Tech, Harrop Meadows explains why the unusually large fund is not simply a bigger pile of money chasing startups.

“It’s a sort of Goldilocks size,” she says, large enough to invest across a company’s life, but still built around identifying exceptional founders at the very beginning.

That is a marked contrast with the conventional division between early-stage venture funds and later-stage growth investors. The model is finding fertile ground in New Zealand. More than half of Blackbird’s new early-stage investments over the past year have been in Kiwi-founded companies, although Harrop Meadows stresses that measure is by number of companies rather than dollars invested.

Harrop Meadows, who grew up in New Plymouth, studied law at the University of Otago, before heading to London to work at Bain & Company, then in growth-equity investing ahead of joining Blackbird in 2021, says New Zealand is like a “Galápagos island of ideas”, where founders often start companies not because startup status is fashionable, but because they have encountered a problem they feel compelled to solve.

Listen to the full conversation with Phoebe Harrop Meadows on The Business of Tech, available on iHeartRadio, Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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Opposition Leader Chris Hipkins is waiting for the Government to release its pre-election fiscal update before explaining how Labour would fund a freeze to fuel taxes over the next three years.

Speaking to Canterbury Mornings, Hipkins said Labour would need to wait until the government's books were opened to determine how it would fund the election promise, but he backed the party's plan to ease petrol costs for Kiwis.

"What I'm being really clear about is that we're not going to ask New Zealanders in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis to pay another 25 cents a litre every time they fill up the car."

Hipkins also discussed Labour's policy to guarantee jobs for all graduate nurses, the latest Roy Morgan poll numbers, and the Paris Agreement, which currently divides the coalition government.

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The Reserve Bank Governor's defending the latest hike to the Official Cash Rate.

The central bank's raised the cash rate another 25-basis-points to 2.75%.

Anna Breman says they'll need to assess the impact of the past two OCR hikes before deciding whether to hike again.

But she told Mike Hosking yesterday's hike was needed to rein in high inflation.

She says if the OCR had been left unchanged yesterday, the Reserve Bank may have had to act much more aggressively later.

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The Reserve Bank has raised the Official Cash Rate 25 basis points, from 2.5 percent to 2.75.

The Monetary Policy Committee agreed unanimously to the rise, broadly expected by economists and the market.

Newstalk ZB senior political correspondent Barry Soper says this could have an immediate impact on retailers, as people will now have less money to spend in stores.

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The Finance Minister says major gas user Methanex shutting up shop doesn't change the Government's argument for a Liquified Natural Gas terminal.

The methanol producer is closing its Taranaki plant after more than 30 years.

It cites the continued decline in domestic natural gas and no clear pathway to meaningful new supply.

Nicola Willis told Mike Hosking they'd already predicted Methanex would close and had factored this into their LNG plans.

She says they decided the gas Methanex uses being released back into the market wouldn't be enough to solve our problems, believing another option is still needed.

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An industry group for chartered accountants is putting a novel idea on the table to lower the cost of New Zealand Superannuation to the Crown, while keeping it universal.

Chartered Accountants Australia New Zealand is advocating for the next Government to allow people to delay the age at which they start receiving Super.

According to NZIER modelling, this approach could reduce the annual cost of Super to the Crown by billions of dollars every year, depending on how the system was designed.

NZ Herald Wellington business editor Jenee Tibshraeny explained further.

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More Official Cash Rate hikes are possible, but far from guaranteed.

The Reserve Bank has raised the cash rate 25-basis-points this afternoon to 2.75 percent.

Governor Anna Breman says they are moving it towards a neutral level, to around 3 percent.

But she says nothing is set in stone.

"Today's decision will allow us to assess the impact of these two OCR increases - and then we will see whether we need to do further increases."

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