Couple say they lost home built for disabled daughter to property investor
Sunday, 23 March 2025
Facing financial insolvency, an elderly couple and their disabled daughter put their trust in a wealthy “knight in shining armour”, but became embroiled in a dispute between two titan investors involving a “stolen” Ferrari and alleged aliases. Jonathan Killick investigates.
An Auckland couple say they have been left feeling foolish after a property investor who befriended them ended up buying their house and evicting them.
Rick and Sally Kerse, aged 77 and 67, thought they were securing their daughter’s future when they built a house and five Airbnb “sheds” in Matakana Village.
Tough financial headwinds subsequently saw them having to seek refuge in the arms of an investor - but instead of investing in them, they claim he separately negotiated with their mortgagor to buy their house.
The investor, Laurence Pope, resolutely denies he wronged the Kerses: “Nobody disputes that this is a fricken awful situation for them. I totally get it … [But] there’s two sides to every story, and this is a shit story that I wish I’d had no part of.”
The couple appear to have been caught in the crossfire of a multi-million-dollar stoush between Pope and property mogul Matt Ryan, with both men courting the Kerses for their land.
The pair have multiple ongoing disputes which have already seen Ryan arrested over an allegedly “stolen” Ferrari, and Pope revealed as having a second identity used to purchase a fleet of luxury cars and operate personal finance companies.
Say the Kerses: “We’re shell-shocked. We’re asking ‘is this for real?’”
They’ve had to pack their lives into a car and drive to Wellington, where they are now staying while they figure out how to pick up the pieces and where it all went wrong.
A livelihood ‘shattered’
Rick Kerse says getting a mortgage at his age proved difficult.That’s why he and Sally initially went to a “second-tier lender” to make their vision come to life.
At the back of the Matakana property, they constructed a purpose-built house for their daughter Hannah, who has cerebral palsy and uses a wheelchair.
Five sheds at the front to be rented out on Airbnb would provide an income, topping up their pension.
“The intention was have something for retirement, and something for Hannah, so her future is taken care of,” says Rick Kerse.
But when Covid-19 lockdowns and the subsequent materials shortage delayed the build, they found themselves with a $4.14 million loan and interest penalties of $87,350 a month.
“We were absolutely shattered at this point because our retirement dream had been crushed, and Sally was just about having a nervous breakdown.”
It became clear they would have to sell or refinance. That’s when they were introduced to Laurence Pope and Matthew Ryan, who at that time were great mates.
The Kerses say they had initially sought out help from Ryan, but Pope befriended them, and he was promising the world.
“He’d say we’re going to be the best partners, it will be so much fun and we’re going to make a fortune, and it’ll be hard work at first, but I’m going to shout you a trip to Fiji,” says Sally Kerse.
Pope assumed the role of their “advisor”, the Kerses say, and took over dealing with real estate agents ostensibly to get them a better deal.
The Kerses showed the Sunday Star-Times a sales and purchase agreement for $4.1m - nearly enough to settle their core debts - but say Pope told them to turn it down.
In screenshots of emails provided by the Kerses, Pope appears to insist that the property is worth $5.2m and nothing less than an offer of $4.395 would suffice.
That made it all the more surprising when Pope later came to them saying he had separately negotiated with their mortgagor Gubb and Hardy to buy the property himself for $3.6m, they say.
In an email, Pope appears to have had a change of mind, saying “the numbers don’t work”.
Pope tells the Star-Times: “The only reason I got involved was I thought it could help them out and maybe I could make a dollar in it along the way.
“I thought that maybe this could be a win-win situation and I gave them a hand and took them on as tenants, and it’s just bit me firmly in the arse.
“I’ve learned a very valuable lesson here - worry about yourself before you worry about other people.”
After the sale, the Kerses came to an agreement with Pope to rent their two-bedroom house for a thousand dollars a week, which they came to view as oppressively expensive. They also ran the Airbnb sheds while Pope took the lion’s share of the profit.
“We worked our bloody backsides off for $50 a clean,” says Sally Kerse.
An already deteriorating relationship really soured during this period, and six months in they were served with a 90-day eviction notice, on the basis that Pope intended to sell the property.
“I just couldn’t be around it any more, so it had to come to an end,” says Pope.
“[And] the whole thing has since been litigated to buggery.”
After failing to overturn the eviction notice in the Tenancy Tribunal and district court, the Kerses resigned themselves to leaving, but not before stripping the house bare.
When Rick Kerse awoke to the fact that the property transfer had been registered as a mortgagee sale, he realised that by definition it hadn’t included chattels.
“So I went around and took the doors off, removed the stove, the pool pump and cut the pipes off,” he says.
Pope took to social media, posting pictures on a Matakana community page, writing “this is the harsh reality of having bad tenants. Landlords beware.”
“They took the clothesline and even sprayed all the plants in the garden with round up!,” he wrote.
It backfired when locals instantly recognised the Kerses’ home and rallied to their defence. Sally Kerse responded with her own post, detailing their story.
Pope tells the Star-Times he only made the posts because he was looking for tradespeople.
“The [Kerses] outed themselves and it blew up,” he says.
A ‘tangled web’
The circumstances of the sale are murky. The Kerses claim they were left confused when Pope presented them with his own offer of $3.6m, with the understanding he was borrowing the funds from their lender, Gubb and Hardy.
Rick Kerse says he was reluctant to sign, but felt pressured to do so.
He supplied the Star-Times with screenshots from Gubb and Hardy director Desleigh Jameson chiding him for not taking up the offer.
“It is unfortunate you are not accepting the offer from Laurence Pope as it leaves us no option but to move immediately to a mortgagee sale,” it reads.
“Regardless of whether you take [Pope’s] proposal, or we go to mortgagee auction, the outcome will be the same.”
Kerse regretted signing the agreement, but it was too late. Gubb and Hardy were able to invoke powers under the Property Law Act to see the sale complete.
Records registered with LINZ show the transfer described as a 'mortgagee sale'.
'Importantly, Matakana Sheds Ltd still owe us and our investors a substantial amount of money that to date remains unrecovered,' Gubb and Hardy say in a statement to the Star-Times.
In the statement, Jameson also says she was not aware that Pope was advising the couple, or of any other higher offer.
Speaking candidly on the phone, she adds: “It’s a tangled web and there’s all sorts of emotions going each way … And, it gets wilder, that’s the crazy part.”
She is not wrong about that.
Rick Kerse began to do his research into Pope and was astonished to find that he also went by the name of Max Bailey. He was even able to track down photographs of two separate driver licences under both names.
Laurence Pope, who is also a pilot, famously nearly sent his parents broke after he scooped up eight properties on a single street in Paeroa, promising to clean up a “ghetto”. When he reportedly defaulted after not being able to find tenants, he blamed the locals, calling them “scum”.
Meanwhile, Max Bailey has made his money as director of personal finance company The Lending Room, and Kiwi Own - a “mobile trader truck shop” that previously had to refund $110,000 in credit and default fees after being investigated by the Commerce Commission.
“I changed my name a number of years ago for personal reasons,” Pope tells the Star-Times. “There’s nothing untoward about that.”
It’s understood the name is an amalgamation of Max Verstappen, a formula one driver, and Pope’s childhood cat, Bailey.
PPSR records show that Bailey (the man not the cat) owns 15 luxury vehicles, including three Ferraris, two Dodge Challengers, two Teslas, and a Lamborghini Gallardo.
One of the Ferraris, with the licence plate “TOS5ER”, was often seen around Matakana at the Kerses.
Pope tells the Star-Times he registered the plate because people already looked at him like he was “a w…er”.
“But, then they see the plate, they have a chuckle and say ‘he’s OK, he’s taking the piss out of himself’.”
When Matt Ryan found out what had happened between Pope and the Kerses, he set about possessing Pope’s Ferrari, which he claims had been offered as collateral against loans - a dispute that saw Ryan subsequently arrested outside Masu restaurant at Auckland's SkyCity, with Pope having reported the vehicle as stolen.
Says Pope: “It’s fair to say that there’s a significant number of disputes between the two of us.”
The Kerses say the whole episode has been surreal and ultimately all they really want is somewhere to live with their daughter.
“It’s been traumatic, but we’re all still here together, Sally, Hannah and I,” says Rick Kerse. That itself is a “miracle”, given their daughter’s health problems, he says.
Pope, meanwhile, says he’s now looking to get out of Matakana calling it “a horrid experience”.
“Believe it or not, I’m trying to find the simple life now, and I don’t want any of this drama.”
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