PHOTO: PROPERAZZI
The past week, the news wires have been a buzz over the Bloomberg assessment that New Zealand was identified along with Canada as among “most vulnerable economies to a correction in house prices” based on measures of house prices to rents, income, real house prices and household debt. The unanimous view of the NZ journalists have been that this pronouncement is nothing new (we have heard it before) and it is not likely to happen.
Such articles always seem to pique my interest to wonder as to how unique our property market really is? and how much we are out of step with other countries. This thought was precipitated when I saw this chart on Twitter tracking London house prices.
It got me thinking how very different are the circumstances effecting the London property market as compared to the Auckland property market. For one thing the UK is seriously mired in the Brexit malaise, with all the uncertainty and economic dampening that has caused. Add to that London’s top end property market over the past decade has been fuelled by a significant number of overseas buyers squirrelling away millions if not tens of millions of pounds in properties that they then don’t live in; prompting calls for a vacant property tax.
How different then, the Auckland market where immigration has been the major driver as well as ever present investor activity added to which has been the continuing shortage of new properties under construction to support a city growing by around 120 new residents every day.
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