Wellington rents flat, Chch slides
New employment site ‘Tinder for hospitality jobs’
THE cost of renting in Wellington has risen just $5 in the last year, and Christchurch rents have gone substantially backwards, Trade Me says.
Wellington median rents in September were $380 a week, up just 1.3 per cent on a year ago, based on the website’s monthly index of advertised rents.
Trade Me’s head of property Nigel Jeffries said the Wellington market had a distinctive pattern, spiking at the beginning of the year when university started and then tailing off.
The Wellington and Auckland markets were ‘‘chalk and cheese’’, with rents in the capital inching up just $10 in the last five years.
Nationally the rental market was also fairly stable at $420 a week, up 5 per cent in the last year or an extra $20.
The housing market had stayed firmly in favour of renters, Jeffries said, even in Auckland where rents had climbed 8.5 per cent to $499 a week.
While that had added more than $2000 to an Aucklander’s rent bill, the expected selling price of an Auckland property had risen $128,000 over the same period.
In Christcurch, another strong SAVANNAH from Wellington is a student, with a ‘‘great sense of humour’’.
The 20-year-old is also ‘‘quite flexible’’ – with her work hours that is – and one of hundreds signed up on a job-seeking website created by a Wellingtonian for hospitality workers and employers.
The creator of Helping Hands – with its star rating system and prominent profile photos – is comparing it to dating app Tinder.
Former Southern Cross bar staffer Dave McGregor launched Helping Hands in Auckland in January and expanded into Queenstown in May.
He has now brought
the housing market, rents had fallen 6.5 per cent to $430 a week as new housing eased its earthquakedriven shortage in accommodation.
Renters there were saving $1560 a year, Jeffries said.
‘‘Over the past five years, rents in the garden city have risen by almost 39 per cent with the largest component of that occurring between 2011 and 2014 during the rebuild,’’ Jeffries said.
‘‘That growth topped out in March this year at $495 a week, but has cooled down a lot over the past six months.’’
The biggest spike in rents was not in Auckland or Christchurch, however, but in the Bay of Plenty, where weekly rents have risen 13.3 per cent to $363.
Jeffries put this down to the ‘‘Auckland effect’’, with Aucklanders looking to other regions to escape the tougher market.
The same appeared to be happening in the Waikato, where median rents were up 8.5 per cent to $350.
Gisborne had the biggest fall in rents, down 17.6 per cent to $280 a week.
That was a fall of $60, but Jeffries said the number of rental properties advertised on Trade Me in Gisborne was relatively small. hospitality-focused website, which matches employers with job seekers’ profiles, ‘‘home’’ to Wellington.
‘‘It takes the traditional way of recruiting and flips it on its head . . . Think Tinder but for jobs,’’ he said.
Job seekers such as Savannah Davenport upload a free profile with their picture and experience, and then sit back and wait for employers to head-hunt them for available positions.
Employers pay a monthly subscription of $89 to use the site.
Davenport, who now works fulltime at The Bresolin, used the website to secure extra hours elsewhere while she was working part-time at the restaurant.
‘‘It’s so easy to use and I had numerous calls from employers,’’ she said.
Each week she got emails from the website checking to see if she was still actively seeking work, keeping her profile up-to-date.
McGregor came up with the idea for the website about seven years ago when he helped to manage Southern Cross with his wife Liv.
Working in the hospitality business got frustrating for the pair when they attempted to find staff on traditional job sites and got spammed by multiple nonhospitality related resumes, he said.
‘‘This year I had a chat to the wife and decided to take a risk to start the website.’’ Apart from seed investment from a private
prospective funder, McGregor had supported the venture with his own money.
More than 1000 job seekers and hundreds of employers were using the website, which he plans to expand into Christchurch and other parts of the country next year.
The feedback from Wellington users had been good, he said.
Although Auckland was still the biggest market for the website, it was growing fast in Wellington.
Many well-known hospitality businesses in the capital were using the website, he said.
Some of these included businesses owned by the Bresolin brothers, Nick Mills who owns Public and Julie Clark from Floriditas. John Lawrence, owner of the Boulcott Street Bistro, said the website was ‘‘a fantastic tool that saves time and energy when looking for staff’’.
Monsoon Poon owner and Restaurant Association president Mike Egan found the website useful for his Auckland restaurant and said he would use it for his Wellington business.
‘‘It’s an interesting business model that has reversed the traditional recruitment process.’’
Hospitality New Zealand Wellington regional manager Dylan Firth said it was a ‘‘cool little product’’. He estimated there could be 900 hospitality businesses that employ between six and 40 people in Wellington.
The organisation had launched its recruitment Hosps Recruit, tailored for businesses. also site, hospitality
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