‘Wacky ideas’ won’t stop runaway house prices, but there’s one thing that will – Sir John Key

Building more houses and ramping up supply is needed to help fix New Zealand’s housing crisis, according to former Prime Minister Sir John Key.

Last week, Auckland’s median house price reached $1 million, and median prices across New Zealand have spiked by nearly 20 percent since the same time last year.

ANZ chairman Sir John, a former National Party Prime Minister who also presided over rapidly growing house prices and resisted calling Auckland’s housing situation a “crisis”, believes building more is the best way to solve the crisis.

“After the Christchurch earthquakes, we released the equivalent of, I think, about 20 years’ land supply – house prices didn’t move in Christchurch for a very long period of time – so you can come up with all sorts of crazy and wacky ideas but, in the end, houses don’t largely sit around dormant,” he told The AM Show. “If you build enough of them and you have a council that’ll approve that process – if you actually have builders out there building, eventually you fix the issue far more than anything else.”