PHOTO: Buying a house is increasingly out of reach for New Zealanders. Photo/Getty
House prices are on the move again. Upwards, of course.
The Real Estate Institute of New Zealand had to dip back into its bag of superlatives for its December report on the residential market: “Wellington was a standout region… Southland, Manawatū/Whanganui and Gisborne again saw really strong uplifts in price…”
To cap these tidings of comfort and joy, a bunch of people on the North Shore became millionaires, again, when a 7.1% annual uplift saw the median house price hit $1,050,000.
Barely had the REINZ put away the party hats when Demographia released its 2020 international housing affordability survey. The US-based urban consultancy takes a much dimmer view of housing statistics. Based on its house price-to-income ratio data, each of New Zealand’s eight surveyed local areas is now classified as “severely unaffordable”. “Severely” kicks in when a median household needs more than five times its annual income to buy a median house. Tauranga’s giddy ratio of 9.3 makes it the fifth most expensive of the 305 housing markets in Demographia’s global survey. Even London (8.2), San Francisco (8.4) and Los Angeles (9.0) are more affordable. Hamilton – the Tron, for goodness sake – is less affordable than Las Vegas.
Tauranga, with its high sunshine hours, lovely beaches, economic growth ticking along – what’s not to like? But the fact that a very small city in a very small country at the bottom of the Pacific is more expensive for its house-hunting residents than London or San Francisco should be a national shame.
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