Raised cap opens door wider for home-buyers
First-timers can add hundreds more properties to wish list thanks to Budget
This is good news for first-home buyers.
Jen Baird, Real Estate Institute
First-home buyers can now choose from nearly 1650 extra Auckland properties and still be eligible to receive a government cash contribution towards their deposit.
That’s according to property website OneRoof, which shows about
3070 Auckland properties on sale right now for less than $875,000.
These include a harbour-view apartment in the city’s tallest building, modern townhouses and even a five-bedroom beachfront home.
The Government raised Auckland’s First Home Buyer grant cap from $700,000 to $875,00 in its Budget on Thursday.
Eligible first-home buyers of Auckland houses worth $875,000 or less can now get a government contribution of up to $5000 towards their deposits if buying an existing home and up to $10,000 on new builds.
To qualify, the buyers need to earn $150,000 or less and have made regular contributions to their KiwiSaver.
Overall, OneRoof shows about
3070 Auckland homes are on sale for less than the new $875,000 grant cap, compared with 1417 on sale for less than the old $700,000 cap.
“This is good news for first-home buyers,” Real Estate Institute chief executive Jen Baird said about the higher cap.
“There has been sobering reading about their chances of getting into the market for the last few years so they’ll feel pleased.”
With home ownership rates falling in New Zealand, the grant was originally introduced to help first-home buyers save enough for a deposit.
However, in recent years house prices have skyrocketed while the grant’s cap has widely been viewed as not keeping up. As an example, Auckland first-home buyers typically paid $1.04 million for a property during the first quarter of this year, analysts CoreLogic said.
That is well above the new grant cap of $875,000 and even further above the previous $700,000 cap.
This mismatch has been blamed for fewer buyers accessing the payment in recent years. The Government said yesterday that it would now review the caps every six months in a bid to ensure they better matched market prices.
However, experts remain mixed about how much difference the new grant caps will make, given interest rates are rising and many buyers are finding it hard to secure home loans under tighter lending rules.
Despite that, for those buyers able to access the grant some of the properties they can potentially pick up include city apartments such as those in the new Seascape skyscraper. It’s being constructed near the waterfront on Customs St and will be Auckland’s tallest residential building once finished.
It has one-bed, studio apartments looking over the water on sale for $844,560. At just 46sq m of floor space, it will be a squeeze, but the apartments boast modern conveniences, a balcony and access to facilities such as a lap pool.
For those who’d rather have more room, a Halsey St apartment in The Viaduct looks out over marinadocked yachts and comes with an extra bedroom and nearly double the floor space at 85sq m.
There’s also another lap pool, while the asking price is $849,000.
OneRoof shows 196 new-build apartments and townhouses now on sale. They typically range from $500,000 up to the first-home buyer cap limit of $875,000 and can be found right across the city.
Few existing family homes are on sale in Auckland for less than the $875,000 cap and buyers wanting a better chance to snap up a traditional family home might need to consider going further out of the city.
Two Waiuku homes are each priced at $849,000, have three bedrooms and sit on large blocks of land.
Or there’s a Mt Roskill brick and tile home that appears to have been split, divided and extended over the years so that now just the secondstorey floor is being advertised for sale as a separate property.
A six-bedroom home in Whangapara¯oa, 36km north of the city, is beautiful inside and sits right by the water. But although it shows up on the OneRoof site when the homes are filtered for $850,000 or less, it is up for negotiation so could sell for more.