Welcome to the new Vulgarians

Remember the good old days when you bought a house and what you paid for it was your own damn business? If you coveted your neighbour’s ass-ett and were determined to find out the price it took the trouble of a trip into town and a discreet property search of council records.

Now, even though a search is just a shot away on your phone, it’s commonplace for the slightest acquaintance to bail you up to ask how much you paid for your shack, before telling you to your face what its current market value is.

Welcome to the new Vulgarians, those who feel emboldened to ask personal real estate details of you on the premise that this the only game in town.

Do you own your own home? Whaaaat? Just the one? Surely you can do better than that? Don’t you go paying any heed to that Reserve Bank governor when he’s warning you not to get carried away at auction with inflated property prices. Come on punter, that property ladder’s being yanked up and you don’t want to feel the FOMO.

Hey, and who said dead tree publications were dying? As soon as a bundle of property magazines is delivered to a dairy or a cafe near you, the stack is fallen upon by packs of amateur property hounds and dragged away to lairs for deep devouring.

Back at base camp, 24/7 pow wows are held round neighbourhood coffee tables as legendary tall tales and true are told about some old dunger, a DIY doer-upper of the shabbiest sort, going on the market and overnight fetching millions. Imagine what you’d get for yours if …

No longer distracted by wintering over in another hemisphere, the chattering classes have busied themselves back at home buying up the country, purchasing multiple properties and taking full advantage of hiked-up rental prices.

Some don’t even have to rent out their new properties strung out across the land like their own private Best Western line, only to be used for occasional personal habitation.

While Mum and Dad (Reserve Bank Governor Adrian Orr and Minister of Finance Grant Robertson) fight about how much government housing policy should be taken into account, we kids have been left to run amok in the auction rooms as house prices have gone through the roofs.

Here in Hermit Kingdom where no-one gets in or out without the greatest of difficulty, real estate has become the new problem gambling. Extended families have become very Mafioso, helping each other out with extreme leveraging to buy more properties while skewing the supply lines and racking up the rents.

It’s the quick and the dead out there. One day you wake up in your dreamy suburb, only to find that the quarter-acre section next to, and opposite you, has 60 apartments on it built hard up against the road, and you’re left singing, Where have all the flowers gone?

You can’t stop progress. Those aren’t tiny houses you’re looking at, they’re tomorrow’s slum hovels where the new owners drown in mortgages, rates, insurances, and body corporate fees, till the hip replacement finds them too old to take the stairs and they have to sell up to afford cell space in the old folks’ home.

I blame Netflix and all that lockdown exposure to Mexican crime shows about cartels. It put ideas in people’s heads. When they were allowed out of their little boxes, they quickly went out and bought a whole lot more little boxes.

Just who’s controlling the little box racket now is anyone’s guess.