Let’s make our housing better
For the past couple of weekends, my family has been exploring the property market in Auckland, with the idea of buying a house or apartment at some point in the not too distant future.
We wanted to see what sort of property was out there, check out different areas and find out if prices really were slowing.
It has been an interesting experience on all three fronts.
Firstly, the difference in property quality in a similar price range was really staggering. Houses built thirty or forty years ago in dank hollows, where even on a sunny day you could feel the wet pooling around the foundations, were up against shiny new builds which were very glamorously staged inside, but had some odd, potentially problem-causing features on the exterior, such as gutter pipes draining over roof lines and flat roofs.
With a few exceptions, all were asking more than a million dollars. No surprise there. Agents however admitted it was proving tougher to sell quickly and one revealed that generally, there was a trend now for sellers to accept less than they said they would. One or two properties had been reduced in price. There was a feeling that it was much more of a buyers’ market.
We were mostly shopping in an area where there is steady activity in house building, and the effects of that were very pronounced, with many older properties having defined price tags.
In the apartment sector, one agent openly plugged Kiwi-built apartments over those built by overseas companies, inferring they were better. Is that so? And if it is, what are we doing about it now? The cost of the much smaller apartments wasn’t that much different from houses three times the floor size.
As the population grows, NZ has a great opportunity to create housing which is innovative, environmentally-friendly and affordable, following Denmark for example. I hope we are not creating a new set of problems for the future in the rush to build.