Catherine Harris.
When Marc Burborough moved from Auckland to Napier earlier this year, he was unknowingly joining a national trend.
The tide of people moving out of the cities is one factor in the increasing good health of provincial New Zealand.
But for Burborough, it was simply a chance to continue doing the job he enjoyed in a place with cheaper housing and a better worklife balance.
He is a payroll improvement specialist for Xero, which opened a regional office in Napier in February.
‘‘The opportunity to move out of Auckland was huge for us,’’ he said. ‘‘I recently just got married this year and my wife and I, we really wanted to get out of Auckland but the conversation kept coming back to my not wanting to leave Xero.’’
Life in Napier was agreeing with them.
‘‘No traffic, there’s no parking issues here ... Everything’s just five minutes away.’’
Infometrics senior economist Benje Patterson says the regions are enjoying a surprisingly broadbased recovery, aided by steady population growth and higher commodity prices, which in turn is creating more jobs.
It was a trend that had been most clearly seen in the upper North Island, with more people moving out to Northland, Hamilton and the Bay of Plenty for greater housing affordability.
But in fact, most parts of the country were looking stronger with the exception of the miningdependent West Coast, Patterson said.
Migrants were part of the growth, but ‘‘some of it is also driven by New Zealanders not leaving the provinces in the first place and people from overseas coming back home,’’ he said.
However, there was an element of good timing in smaller towns of the upper North Island, where dairying still had a big influence.
Patterson said ‘‘things would have been dire’’ had it not been for the Auckland housing crisis, and also better technology which had kicked off an army of remote workers.
‘‘Had you had this craziness in the housing market 10 or 20 years ago, when technology wasn’t as good, you wouldn’t have had so many people that could effectively move into the regions.’’
In Northland, Jim Fielden, a consultant with Classic Builders, is seeing the impact of population growth first hand.
Whangarei is enjoying a building frenzy which he puts down to a lot of local and Auckland retirees upgrading their houses, and a significant number of people returning home.
‘‘Absolutely, we’re experiencing the boom. Everybody is, it’s so hard to keep up with things at the moment. How long’s it going to last? It’s all crystal ball stuff, isn’t it?’’
Business is also booming in Hamilton, according to commercial real estate agent Mike Neale of NAI Harcourts.
He said the city had seen both a large number of families moving in and high interest from migrants keen to set up business and improve their immigration scores by setting up outside Auckland.
A number of quite large businesses were also either relocating to Hamilton or bumping up their existing operations – much of it ‘‘under the radar’’.
Aside from population, Patterson said the other reasons why some regions were doing well was the broadness of their economies.
‘‘Seafood returns have been very high, so have other pipfruits and stonefruits, sheep and beef have been pretty good, forestry prices have recovered, so provincial economies that have more strings to their bow have performed particularly well.’’
The Kaikoura earthquake, which had initially hurt business locally, was now creating a huge amount of stimulus, just as the Christchurch rebuild had.
And even without it, a flood of infrastructure work was under way.
Huge projects like the Waterview connection, improvements in Queenstown, and the Kapiti expressway and Transmission Gully in Wellington, were creating lots of jobs, and councils were busy with connector roads to these projects.
The only handbrake on regional growth at present seems to be a shortage of workers.
An ANZ quarterly survey of small businesses this week found a net 23 per cent reported a lack of skilled employees as their biggest problem.
Fielden said that for a time Whangarei had had a shortage of specialist construction workers, though the problem seemed to have resolved itself.
‘‘Eight or nine months ago, it was pretty stressful.’’
A further indication that provincial New Zealand is in good health is the confidence in the small business sector.
ANZ’s June quarterly business microscope survey showed that after a slow start to the year, businesses were more positive about their own short-term prospects than they had been for two years.
Further, a net 28 per cent expected greater profits in the next year, the highest in three years.
Antonia Watson, ANZ’s managing director of retail and business banking, said small businesses were increasingly upbeat about hiring, investment and profits. ‘‘They’re confident in the New Zealand business environment over the next 12 months, and their own growth prospects during that time.’’