Graeme Fowler

Graeme Fowler is one of New Zealand’s most prominent residential property investors, a best-selling author and the founder of the country’s largest online property investor community.

Fowler started his working life as an auto mechanic in Hastings, Hawke’s Bay, putting in 12-hour days and saving everything he could. He made his first million by the age of 36 through property investment alone and over his career has purchased more than 500 properties. He and his wife Katrina currently own around 80 residential and commercial properties.

Early in his investing journey, Fowler wrote himself a $20 million cheque, inspired by the story of Jim Carrey doing the same with a US$10 million cheque before he was famous. Fowler kept it on his wall, then in a drawer and eventually surpassed the figure. It is a detail that captures something about his approach: earnest, specific and unapologetically long-term.

Fowler has written two books on New Zealand property investment, New Zealand Real Estate Investors’ Secrets (which sold 10,000 copies across two printings) and 20 Rental Properties in One Year. In 2017, he and Katrina traded 24 properties in a single year, netting approximately $800,000 in profit.

In 2014, he founded the Property Investor Chat Group on Facebook, which grew to 73,000 members and became New Zealand’s largest property investor community on the platform, before being controversially removed by Meta’s automated moderation in late 2025, with no human review.

Fowler’s profile is noteworthy because he represents a different kind of New Zealand builder, one who created wealth and a national community not through technology or venture capital, but through patient, disciplined property investment and a willingness to share what he learned along the way.

Sources: Stuff · Stuff · RNZ