PHOTO: SIMON MAUDE/STUFF The North Shore has proved a popular investment area for offshore buyers, many of whom prefer to leave their houses empty.
OPINION: Sixteen months ago I wrote a story about ghost houses in Auckland – those perfectly good houses that sit empty on so many of our streets because their absentee land-banking owners don’t want the hassle of being a landlord.
At that time, the only figure we had to go on in Auckland was 33,000, which came from the 2016 census. This week we learned that the number of empty houses has risen by a staggering 18 per cent in the past five years (2018 census), and the figure in Auckland is 39,393.
And it is no surprise to read that the North Shore is one of the two suburbs with the highest increase (along with South Auckland), because North Shore was where we saw a lot of the problem last year.
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