iscover 
This is awkward. I am not here to talk about struggling renters or “avocado toast” eating Gen Z. I am here to talk about the “avocado-caviar toast” eaters: a cohort likely sitting in your book right now. Invisible.
2026 is likely to be 2025 thinking run through a 1996 map. The gap between those two realities hides clean revenue.
Customers are already behaving one way – your systems insist they are something else. That gap is where mispriced risk and unclaimed margin quietly accumulate. The delta is what this piece is about.
Categories as fossils
Borrowers typically fall into three big buckets: owner-occupier, first home buyer, and investor made perfect sense in the 1990s. They’re starting to hide more than they reveal.
High‑income renters (roughly three times the share they held in the mid‑1990s) now account for about 25 per cent of private renter households. More than half of first home buyers now say they would consider rentvesting.
But if your dashboards still treat “renter” as “cannot buy” and “investor” as “mum and dad + one extra property”, the significant behaviours underneath have moved on without you.
2 rental markets, 1 label
The barbell: Low-income households in housing stress (paying more than 30 per cent of their income on rent).
A quarter of private renters are high-income earners, up from one in 12 in the late 1990s. A meaningful slice of “renters” aren’t locked out of ownership – they choose to rent in one place, while deploying capital elsewhere.
Broker reports contain this pattern, but the categories don’t surface it.
The policy debate focuses on the first group. The commercial opportunity sits with the second. Your labels make no distinction, so it remains invisible revenue leakage.
The invisible revenue
Renters who are already investors live where they want, own somewhere else, and treat property as an income engine or arbitrage play.
Even if only a single-digit percentage of your book, that cohort is large enough to matter. Mislabelling them as generic “renters” or “mum‑and‑dad investors” is a structural blind spot to seeing risk, opportunity, and future revenue.
The non‑linear lens is simple: hold two truths at once: “renter” as tenure and “asset-holder” as balance sheet. Notice the commercial behaviour in the overlap that your map doesn’t name.
On your screens, they flatten into “renter,” “investor”, or “FHB”. In reality, they have different risk profiles, portfolio appetites, and structuring requirements.
That is revenue you are underserving, mispricing, or losing to someone who spotted them first.
What gets missed
Consider the strategic rentvestor: a first‑timer buys an investment property, while continuing to rent. First Home Owner Grants and stamp duty concessions only apply if the property is a principal place of residence.
A rentvestor who uses that first purchase purely as an investment cannot access those incentives, quietly trading away tens of thousands in government support for timing, yield, and lifestyle.
If your system calls them “investor” or “FHB” and nothing more, that trade‑off is easy to miss. The impact shows up in their future borrowing capacity, resilience, and loyalty years later, long after the file is closed.
Linear thinking – A non‑linear market
Rich‑renter data, rentvesting intent, and grant rules sit in plain sight. The issue is not information access. When your senior people brief in owner‑occupier/FHB/investor language, the categories become the constraint.
For 30 years, we’ve built mortgage strategy like rigid concrete walls – straight lines, fixed categories, no movement. Today’s market behaves more like an Inca wall in an earthquake: designed to shift, flex, and absorb shocks instead of crack.
The result: you keep hiring talented people to execute against an outdated map, and you keep missing structural revenue pockets your labels don’t let you see.
The lens problem
If your first instinct is to brief your product team to build an “Elite Rentvestor” product, that’s a linear lens.
The avocado‑caviar cohort is a segmentation problem, which doesn’t fix itself with new products. It compounds quietly until someone else redraws the map and walks away with your unidentified revenue.
The traditional lens is that everyone with a lease is a “renter”, and everyone with an investment loan is an “investor”. But if you cross “renter versus owner‑occupier” with “owns other property versus does not”, a new cohort appears: households who rent their home, but hold property elsewhere. No system changes – only the lens. Suddenly, a clean, commercially interesting group has a name and shape.
The three‑bucket framework is not wrong, just too linear for a market where behaviours inside those buckets have quietly split.
The real shift isn’t another product or dashboard, it’s key people looking at the same book through a non‑linear lens (or hiring those who do), so that more than one truth about a customer can sit in view at once. That way, unseen value stops walking out the door, but dashboards still look tidy.
Michelle Joseph is an executive search and leadership adviser to financial services firms, specialising in outlier leaders who spot value where standard dashboards do not. Drawing on two decades in mortgage and wealth businesses, she also runs workshops that train brokers, distribution heads, and executives to think non‑linearly about their own books, so they can surface hidden cohorts and revenue opportunities.