Kristin Sutherland gave her maiden speech as APIA President to our members on 9th of February 2020. Below is an excerpt of her speech reformatted as an open letter to all members.

Dear members, 

I would like to introduce myself to those of you who don’t know me – I am Kristin Sutherland the newly elected President of APIA. I am thrilled to be able
to represent APIA and you, its members, for the next 2 years and look forward to meeting as many of you as possible during that time to hear your story
and investing journey.

I would like to share with you my goals for this role and APIA for the next 2 years. As President, with the help of the APIA board and yourselves, I would
like to help change the perceived image of property investors in NZ. I realised how bad it had got when an article in the Herald this month put us
in the same category as terrorists for tax treatment. I want to humanise us and tell a little bit of our story and why we are landlords, we certainly didn’t choose it because it was easy.
Members are telling us that they aren’t proud to say they are landlords, and there has been a lot of change that has made people nervous, and that
is understandable. But I want us to be proud of what we are doing. I know our members are doing this for the right reasons, otherwise, you wouldn’t
be here on a Tuesday night listening to me.

One thing that I learnt during 2020 was that being kind and compassionate prevails. If you think it a cliché or not our team of 5 million prevailed. NZ
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