NEW YORK TIMES: New Zealand House Prices Have Crashed

According to the New York Times, New Zealand’s high interest rates have sent property prices sliding nearly 18 percent since November 2021.

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Welcome to New Zealand, one of the world’s most troubled housing markets. Over the last 18 months, homeowners and investors have lost billions of dollars in wealth after prices that spiked during the Covid pandemic started plunging as mortgage rates also soared.

“If we listed it, say, two months before we originally did, it would have literally sold the next day,” Mr. Wilson said. He and his wife, Jade, might finally have found a buyer for their three-bedroom house in Te Awamutu, a pretty North Island town of 13,000 people. But if they are lucky they will be paid about 15 percent less than they originally sought.

The pandemic’s disruptions to jobs, wages and living conditions caused a yo-yo effect in housing markets in many countries, including Sweden, Britain, Canada and Australia. Few places have experienced as wild a swing as New Zealand, which last week slipped into a recession.

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Property in New Zealand has traditionally been expensive and in short supply. Now a combination of even higher prices, poorly constructed housing and the biting effects of interest rate increases has pushed the housing crisis to the top of the agenda, ahead of national elections this year.

During the pandemic, as people took advantage of low mortgage rates and relaxed lending rules, house prices soared almost 50 percent. Since November 2021, after New Zealand’s hawkish central bank embarked on one of the most aggressive rate-tightening cycles in the world to tackle rising inflation, prices have plummeted 17.5 percent, eradicating more than $6 billion in household wealth, according to Statistics New Zealand estimates.