Lifestyle, lower costs attract new residents
‘‘I'm completely happy now. We want to be part of the community.’’ Karen Randall
You’re moving where? Are you nuts? Shift to Taihape - or even just think aloud about it - and that’s likely what they’ll say.
Lance Collier hasn’t made the move yet but he’s going to as retirement looms.
He’s itching to get out of Paraparaumu and quit the Kapiti Coast for the rolling hills and peace and quiet of Taihape in a year or two’s time.
Karen Randall also talks about getting older, cashing up and having little or no mortgage at the end of the process.
She’s gone from Auckland to Matamata and soon, Taihape.
You can smell the money the closer you drive to Matamata, but Randall says she’s after the lifestyle changes money can’t buy.
‘‘Everyone I spoke to said don’t buy in Taihape, you’ll do your money. I went into panic mode.’’
But then she talked to others who had made the move.
‘‘I’m completely happy now. We want to be part of the community. I don’t like cities. For us, a house is a home. We’re excited about it.’’
Randall spoke of the community and the environment as values that mattered to her.
Deborah Moon also spoke of the lifestyle, the price of houses and the lack of traffic congestion as big influences in the decision to swap suburban Mt Roskill, Auckland, for a place to call home just outside Taihape.
‘‘It’s vastly different, a huge change, but we were fed up with Auckland.’’
The pressure is off now and there is all that new territory to explore.
All three spoke too of Taihape’s centrality - a couple of hours or so at most from Wellington in the south, Hawke’s Bay to the east, New Plymouth to the west, and the snow and mountains of the central plateau to the north.
There was now the time and space to live their lives, they said, rather than scrabble around in the metropolitan rat race.
Official population figures don’t show a people boom in the area yet. It falls between 1996-2013 to a low of 1580 in Taihape, but picks up from then. So perhaps the Auckland ripple has lately become a new factor, as astronomical house prices persuade some people to seek fresh fields where a cleaner, greener lifestyle coincides with monetary sense.