When house prices are rocketing, build your home on Mars
It will be cheaper to build on Mars than buy in New Zealand by 2040 if recent house price increases continue, according to a piece of tongue-in-cheek research conducted by a data consultancy owned by Stats NZ.
Data Ventures executive director Drew Broadly said the team conducted the analysis, in part, to stop arguments in the office between home-owners and renters.
The research was part of a monthly training exercise in outof-the-box thinking to address complex problems.
‘‘It’s becoming so bad, moving to Mars should be something you should seriously consider,’’ Broadly said.
Comparing the house-price trajectory to the predicted cost of building on Mars also allowed a ‘‘light-hearted approach’’ to analysing the market, rather than the ‘‘deeper, more anger-type
arguments’’ that could spring up.
‘‘Kind of our underlying joke is that’s how bad we think it is, that rather than saying renters vs. homeowners, let’s take it to a whole different argument that doesn’t bring that political lens to it.’’
Data Ventures are a whollyowned subsidiary of Stats NZ, and act as an independent consultancy to draw on expertise and data from within the government organisation for paying clients.
The idea for this research came from Elon Musk’s recent announcement that he wants a city of 1 million people on Mars by 2050.
Broadly said using Musk’s predictions of costs had the advantage that anyone with complaints about the analysis could take them directly to the billionaire.
In the past, Data Ventures has worked with Tourism NZ and the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment to increase understanding of the domestic tourism market using anonymised telecom data.
The trajectory of New Zealand’s housing market was based on a QV index that showed prices increased by 18.2 per cent in the year ending March 2021.
Data Ventures’ predictions were based on this increase continuing year-on-year.
The cost of buying an acre of Mars was taken from BuyMars. com, which Broadly concedes might not constitute a legally binding right to occupy.
According to Auckland Council, a residential-sized section in Auckland with no infrastructure or amenities would cost $132,665 – over 3000 times the cost of Martian real estate.
The big cost on the Mars-side of the ledger is transport.
While no one enjoys sitting on the Southern Motorway at 5pm, a one-way trip to Mars is predicted to reduce in cost from roughly $14 billion to around $300,000 in future.
A family’s trip to the Red Planet would cost around $810,000, and building an earthbag-style dome home would cost $35,520 in materials and $53,480 in labour.
Crunching the numbers, Data Ventures found it became cheaper to build on Mars in 2040.
A blog post by Date Ventures noted Musk might not be a reliable source for true costings of Mars travel, buying land there might be illegal, Martian homes would be unfurnished and there was a high risk of death involved in the move.