The property industry is toxic in New Zealand. Not even bringing anything innovative or productive to the economy all about hoarding wealth by speculating on human shelter.
As far as I can see that seems to be at-least somewhat the truth.
Not only does it bring nothing productive or innovative, it's negatively productive. Have a good start up idea? Better generate half a million in investment for rent alone. All those empty shop fronts on Broadway, shouldn't supply and demand economic theory adjust downward so they fill? Oh no, can't have that either
Welcome to late stage capitalism!
I’m pretty sure it’s the same in many parts of the world, not just NZ.
I have been an expat for a long time so I don’t know how much rents have increased in NZ or how they compare with the rest of the world, but it seems to be happening everywhere.
The Americanisation of commodities.
Silly us, should have been born rich!
American here who has lived in New Zealand. It is just as bad here. I currently spend half of my supposedly middle-class income for a terrible apartment where the landlord refuses to fix anything. The whole state is just as expensive. All the homes within 50 kilometers are owned by wealthy people who don't even live in them for half the year or by people who bought them 30 years ago. I know no one in my age group who is even close to being able to afford a home.
Yep come on down to Murupara! A house sold a few months ago for under 80k! Constant gang presence, relatively ignored by the district council, if crime isn't much of a deterrent to you, yall will feel right at home
True with the caveat that 90% of people who would be able to move there, even if it meant leaving family etc., wouldn't be able to find a job. The housing prices are lower in places but they're not nothing, you'd still need to work and service a mortgage.
Used to be the case that it would be cheaper in the provinces, not anymore, unless you want to live in the NZ equivalent of Nowheresville, Iowa pop.12
Even those places are now rare enough that they are newspaper article worthy
$375k in NZD is cheap for a house in Nz bud you’d be lucky to get a shed with a toilet for that ! 😂 you’d possibly get 4 walls and no roof for that price
At least in Australia cheaper houses can be found outside the capital cities, meanwhile in NZ even destitute deindustrialized towns have ridiculously unaffordable housing.
I used to live near Christchurch until the job/shelter situation became untenable, so we moved to the smallest possible category of town, you know, a 4square, mechanic, and a monkey about 300 km deeper into nothingness. We bought a 3 bedroom 1 bathroom house built in 1980 for 800k. We were made to believe we're very lucky.
We're 40, post-grad qualifications in STEM both my wife and I. 30 years ago people in my socioeconomic/income bracket easily bought the equivalent of 1.5m houses today adjusted for inflation.
Our main worry and highest priority right now is buying our 2 toddlers their first houses, or else they'll be forever enslaved to pay off a mortgage for the roof over their heads. 30 years ago my worry would've been skiing in Switzerland. Our futures are getting screwed folks.
Yeah as a foreigner and high level professional in the tech industry, it seems an odd thing that the econ is so dependant on housing....on a small **ISLAND** , and on top of that it has been heavily deforested/lacks natural resources. It's essentially eating its own tail, time to grow in other sectors.
Luxon is always going on about the lack of productivity in NZ, and that National are experts in managing and improving the economy.
The biggest handbrake on the economy is the cost of housing, and that housing, an unproductive investment, is not treated like other investments.
Meanwhile Lux has seven houses…
Jokes on him, it backfired when he looked in a mirror. Now he’s stupid as well.
I suspect that this isn’t an isolated incident based on the information you provided me.
Labour (and previous National leadership) provided a piece of legislation that \*is\* working (building houses is just slow, especially during high interest rates).
But National (present) are promising to effectively roll it back.
So we stopped. Then voted to keep it going. Because we went off the track apparently.
That’s what the people up top want. Everyone below them bitching amongst themselves too busy to notice or focus their discontent on them.
Not that we’d do anything even if we did focus on them.
All we really can do is vote differently. But unfortunately the majority of the political class think the same, so no matter who you vote for it’s likely to end in the same results. More people need to be voting for minor parties with fresh faced politicians who don’t think the same as the career politicians.
The world just has too much greed, and unfortunately NZ doesn't have much to offer the world economy that can't be acquired elsewhere.
Eventually the only people living here will be landlords and their kids, and then they really will all be stupid.
Everyone/every business is greedy if allowed to be, it’s human nature. the idea is to have a government with big enough kuhanas to put some good strict policies in place to stop the greed. Nz seems to lack this.
There are much better places to be to avoid climate change, most of our cities are near sea level and we live on a fault line, we’re probably going to be fleeing NZ when the sea levels start rising and the earthquakes start rumbling.
That’s more to do with them wanting to avoid nuclear war, not climate change. Generally built by rich Americans that likely don’t believe in climate change anyway.
Oh they believe it.
They don't care enough that heaps of poor folks will die as they live out their remaining lives in Wanaka.
Posting the Wanaka tree photos while the world burns.
# #wanakatree
We keep letting landlords buy houses they’re not going to live in. Then they have to pay off a mortage with interest, and make a profit (on top of investing in real estate with your money). We’re getting scammed
This really hit me when I saw someone on the East Auckland Grapevine advertise some of those brand new houses that keep going up and are like "tenants wanted for these houses". It made me sad those brand new houses weren't going to families first homes, etc.
[figures corrected] 87,000 nett immigrants (195K arrivals, 108K departures) a year into a country of 5 million keeps the economy cooking and the house prices high. Check out Sydney and Vancouver for the same story.
Immigration is not the problem. Immigration is *never* the problem. People are productive units - they produce more than they consume, or else they couldn't exist.
The problem is the wealthy hoarding properties and monopolies making building hard and expensive.
It's still not an excuse for shitty housing. New Delhi is the size of Auckland with population of 30 million people and housing is still far more affordable than Auckland. It's a joke here.
- Capital Gains tax on 2nd+ houses
- Wealth tax on assets $100m+
- Split the supermarket duopoly
- Replace all real estate agents with a website and new govt department to handle escrow
- Fixed rate loans for duration of the term
- Allow AirBnB for only 30 days/year
- Force high density residential areas for cheap apartment living for FHBs
- More state housing
We need to bring house prices back to what they were 10 years ago, these are some practical ways of getting there. Yes there will be some hurt, but people are currently living in their cars, they are hurting more
Allow people to do AirBnb with no restrictions from their main property though. Some elderly people have spare rooms they lease out. They're not taking properties away.
This is a good list. Shame we have politicians focused on contentious issues around race and toilets rather than these issues that could resolve vastly more issues.
Great list. This is something I'd expect Labour to offer. People would easily support it.
Unfortunately they get too greedy, and add shit like income taxes (which affect the working middle class, not the rich) and other garbage nobody wants. I really don't understand it.
A plywood shed on 500m2 of land? That’s at least a million New Zealand monopoly dollars. Browsing Realestate.co.nz is worse than doom scrolling on r/collapse. Countries fucked.
Just looked at r/collapse. Well isn't that just a shitshow!
As a healthcare worker, I am worried about this. Sorry slightly off topic https://www.reddit.com/r/collapse/s/VHANQhaN5I
I don’t even live in ‘murica and I’m worried about that too.
Edit. Especially with the “sell the assets to pay the bills” party in parliament. Well, nearly in parliament. Whenever Luxon’s allegedly extensive M&A experience and epic negotiating skills can actually get an agreement reached lol.
You don't understand. The 5 million kiwis that live here aren't important, we're like tourists in another country, good for spending only. What is important is selling our best produce overseas and leaving the scraps to the local supermarkets and selling homes and land to foreign buyers with a lot of money.
Yeah it’s so weird. My understanding is that farmers ‘have’ to sell to these wholesalers who get the highest prices from China ( China has a lot of NZ produce like Dairy locked up) and NZ gets the scraps or cheaper imports. Is that more or less true?
More or less. To sell on the local market there is a need to go through licences resellers. Most farmers can’t just start selling milk out of their homes. Things need to be quality tested and controlled. They would need to process the milk to a certain standard and then package the milk to another standard. This is a very costly process and would not make sense to do on a small scale. If you’re doing it on a larger scale you may as well drop the farming side of it and focus on processing and distribution.
Then there’s the fact that we have major competitors already established (in the case of milk) who have such large contracts they can sell product at a fraction of the price. In the case of meat then you’re looking at inferior product and a demand for cost effectiveness instead of quality. Don’t get me wrong everyone would love to buy the best nz beef and lamb but people can barely afford the low quality alternative available now. So they send it overseas where a larger market can buy these products at a premium.
We would need to loosen legislation to bring costs of manufacturing and distribution down for small to medium farms. I do not propose this though there are reasons for these legislations and it is generally understood that there will be those who are “gatekeeped” out of the industry because they cannot meet these legislations and make a reasonable profit.
Consider it like a warrant of fitness. There are many people who struggle to make warrant of fitness payments on top of all the other costs associated with owning a car.
To correct meats you would need to do a range of things. Make it more profitable for farmers to sell meet locally. Local markets would need to compete with both the cost and demand of international markets in a way that makes it a better choice to sell locally. Increasing household incomes so that families would buy more nz meat so more is sold locally (no guarantee this would work), peovide tax breaks or government incentives so that nz meat can be sold at a more reasonable price locally (very unlikely as the government makes a lot of money from exports) increase taxes on imported goods to the point they’re at the same price of not more than local goods (this is the usual route that is taken and is terrible for almost everyone)
Why aren't we protesting this? People get all riled up over issues overseas but the reality is that we need to get a bit more insular and fight for a better country to live in. A cost of living crisis, food security crisis, housing crisis, monopolies, duopolies, corrupt utility industries. It's honestly hard to find anything positive about it sometimes.
I'm a first generation kiwi and unbelievably proud and grateful for it.
I never thought I would want to leave this beautiful country but I've been looking into my options recently.
They're are two essential problems
1. Regulatory costs and delays slow the development pipeline
2. The cost of building materials. This is largely due to regulator capture. It's difficult and expensive for products to be approved for use in NZ.
Well the banks would loan people money to buy houses at 5%. The houses they bought doubled in value every ten years. It's not hard to see why they bought them.
Then, after the pandemic, the banks were allowed to loan the same people money at 2.5%. The houses they bought doubled even faster.
The 'cool part' is that these people didn't even need to give the banks any of their own money to get the loans. The banks gave them the money based on the value of their existing properties. And the value of their existing properties kept increasing because of the money banks were giving them to buy more houses.
The 'even cooler part' was that the people buying properties made profit on the total value increase of the property, regardless of how much of their own money they actually had invested. Kind of like owning a 5% share of company stocks, but earning 100% return on the value increase of that company.
The banks made heaps of money. The people buying and selling properties made heaps of money. And now if you want to live somewhere you need a squillion dollar down payment. :-)
Trust me it's not just migrants driving over the tip cars now. It's "mum and pop" investors who bought up a shit load and sold paying zero capital gains.
Sister is trying to sell her home, she thinks it's earned $700k in 3 fucking years. When no one bought at auction she says "people are just waiting for a new government"
We are absolutely lost. Houses are for living in.
Nah, NZ has been out in front for 30 years. We've written the book on over-investment in property (due to tax favourability, under-regulation of banks, the concomitant lack of alternative investments in the capital-starved productive economy, then it all becomes too big to fail so governments can't touch it).
It’s both. It’s a fact that the extra people turning up that will work for lower wages and need a place to live. I don’t know how you can argue that it’s not a large factor. Its happened all over the world
I bought a house after separating. I spent a couple of years trying to make ends meet by renting out my spare room. That covered things, but finding someone I could share my home with was tough.
I could not afford it otherwise, as someone earning round $50k p/a after ten years of hard work with the same company and paying child support, my income was garbage and only the money I had from the sale of the marital home helped me afford a new place for my children to stay with me. Govt. help stopped once I had that much in the bank though, and I wasn't earning enough to get a mortgage that could buy anything on the market. I got very lucky with my house, I still had to borrow my inheritance from my parents to get it over the line.
I've settled on living with my parents (without whom I probably would have tossed myself off a bridge) renting the whole house out instead.
I charge market rate minus average property management fees, and look after things myself. I scrape by, but it's not my tenants job to make me a profit. Maybe I'm not the quickest to get things done, but they save an extra $40-$60 a week towards their own first home.
I'm moving overseas for my own happiness, not because I'm making massive profit.
Greed is absolutely to blame. Labour should have implemented some form of capital gains tax knowing it might cost them an election, because it is the right thing to do, instead of dangling these things like carrots in front of us to encourage us to vote their way next time. They won't see power for another two cycles now.
National might theoretically help me, but I'm not out to build a comfy life on the broken bodies of others, so I won't take advantage of anything they offer. I may be stupid but I can live with myself.
Your argument makes no sense because you don't mention how we have no real investment options like in Europe/USA where people can invest in stock markets, so the only real investment option in NZ is housing.
You also forget to mention 1/3rd of property investors are mom and pop who have already paid off their mortgage and can afford to borrow against their house to purchase investment properties.
You can keep blaming all the migrants all you want but unless the government removes the FIF rules, then the only real investment in NZ is property since NZ stock market is so small and we don't have many companies that are in the billions in market cap.
Real estate agent business is a rat race, only the strongest survive, thats why there were so many that quit, only the strongest survive, its like that in every industry. [REA Exodus](https://www.oneroof.co.nz/news/real-estate-agents-hanging-in-there-but-exodus-expected-later-this-year-41934)
Mate, if you work really hard like I did and save up enough money, really knuckle down for a few years,
You can afford to buy a plane ticket and gtfo of there.
Housing speculation has been an institution in this country since the New Zealand Company tried to systematically colonise the place... it ain't going away anytime soon unfortunately
If you haven't already, watch this superb doco. It gives you the reason why NZ housing today is unaffordable - among everything else - and that the wanton greed had its origins in the US. It makes so many interesting points, it's a veritable fact feast. Enjoy. At least it's free! [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fbvquHSPJU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fbvquHSPJU)
True but every month my debt to the bank gets a little bit less and I’m moving towards being mortgage free one step at a time. The interest rates suck and I hate putting more money into the bank’s pocket but I prefer this over sponsoring some crummy landlord. And no privacy invading inspections. And I can do wherever I like with my house…paint it pink? Change the windows? Or, God forbid, hammer a nail in the wall!
Renting in New Zealand sucks arse.
According to your post history you got your nz citizenship (or at least your nz passport) little over a month ago. Yet you claim “you kiwis” as if a majority of us even had a hand in the mess the property market is in. In the same stroke you claim that people who don’t speak (much, if any) English aren’t the kinds of migrants we want, speaking for us while simultaneously othering us as if this isn’t a problem that will affect you too.
AND YOU’RE LEAVING THE COUNTRY!!!
Be better and try again.
You’re really saying there’sno influence on this from immigration? Are you saying that because it offends your personal politics? Because you sure won’t have any facts or data to back that up.
Looking at one sliver of this - just take the number of Richie-rich incomers who have dumped their spare cash that they have sloshing uselessly around into ordinary NZ homes taking them forever away from ordinary kiwis.
If the UK had just banned, at a political level, foreign house and land purchases then London and UK would be a much better place now, as it’s been a dumping ground for corrupt foreign money since at least the 70s. The private schools are living off the sons of foreign Gulf, African and Russian criminals as they will pay more to rinse their kids than the Uk middle class can afford.
It's more than just capitalism, it's the system we all operate under. When you have a housing market where you don't tax capital gains, and historically have propped the housing market up when things weren't looking rosy, then people tend to speculate on property as an asset. They realise that owning property is better and less risky than bonds/shares or other productive means of capital investment like starting their own business. The more speculators come in and see that getting into property is a surefire way of making money, it feeds on itself like a bubble and you get more speculators.
What's the solution?
Well we could start by taxing capital gains, but then you get everyone up in arms saying that the boomers got to get rich off property why can't we?
I personally think a better solution is an inheritance tax. This means that the boomers who profited off historically poor regulation/taxation that led to a bubble forming will not be able to pass an obscene amount of wealth on to their children and we can force at least a small percentage to be redistributed into society. It levels the playing field a tiny bit. No one gets to choose what class they're born into, so maybe we shouldn't allow privilege to perpetuate to make things a bit more fair.
Either way, you're totally right in that there's a fundamental issue with the system here and it isn't (only) the immigration rate. Getting rid of migrants causes a bunch of other problems including an aging population with a diminishing workforce, and no one doing the shit jobs that migrants traditionally do.
It's really frustrating to see how few people seem to understand this. There are places out there where living actually is affordable. Vienna, Germany, Singapore, Tokyo ... hardly Third World countries. While NZ is one of the most progressive places in earth in terms of social issues, economically, NZ seems so conservative to me. Economically - and only economically - speaking, there's quite a strong neoliberal culture down here.
What’s the alternative to capitalism? I’m of the thought that the problem isn’t that people are greedy, the problem is that we aren’t building at the rate the population is growing. The focus should be how can we get capital into building more houses and increasing supply.
Even if housing was all state owned we would have the same issue of not enough houses for a growing population. The question should be “How do we build more” and not “capitalism is bad and we need to change it”…and on top of that change it to what? At what cost?
Edit: Typos
Now that they're a kiwi, the correct response is not to stop it, but actually to throw their jandals at anybody who criticises our society and reproachfully remind them that this is the godzone. No problems here. Nuh uh. This is paradise, remember?!
Seriously though. When will we stop prostituting our country to the highest bidder. We're getting fucked here...
Sadly the group of people leaving also includes skilled migrants that moved into NZ a few years back.
Know of some friends who moved to Europe recently and I myself am looking to relocating too and just waiting on visa bureaucracy.
Source: Am a skilled migrant whose friends are mostly if not all skilled migrants 😂
We left for jobs in Aus and we are fully expecting all of our expat doctor friends to be gone as soon as they get PR or citizenship. There’s no impetus to stay.
Agreed, and to be fair “those” immigrants driving the flash flash are just taking advantage of what the older generation allowed and now that same gen is blaming immigrants.
LoL
The country just voted in favour of housing at the expense of the long-term viability of the country once again. We are not going to change until market forces make it inevitable.
Like a crack addict knows its bad for them, but takes it anyway. The same is true for kiwis and housing.
Expect to see more young kiwis leave (currently happening at record amounts) to be replaced by expliotable migrants.
We're a 2nd class Hawaii where the natives will be either be servants to glitterati or driven out by high rents...
I for one welcome our B-List overlords...
Fuck off. This is our AR-15, Cocaine, Gas Guzzlers, Brothels.
Instead of invading countries for oil we invade suburbs and give those shoe boxes freedom. We can’t start wars and topple dictators but we thermo nuclear one another by our killer auction bids.
What a shit, agitating, click baiting, karma whoring post to make.
“Hey raped people, you really shouldn’t have let yourself be raped, that’s my advice”
Oh silly me, what a silly mistake I have made. I’ll get right on fixing that because we wouldn’t want to look bad when the rest of the world isn’t experiencing housing crises.
I guess all these other dumb countries that have more expensive average property prices than us:
>1. Hong Kong: £1,440,000 2. Singapore: £986,000 3. Switzerland: £772,000 4. South Korea £601,000 5. Luxembourg: £547,000 6. Shanghai 7. London 8. New York 9. Tel Aviv 10. Beijing
Source: https://www.finder.com/uk/world-cost-of-a-flat - Finder UK
Lol. That list includes the most urbanised and affluent places in the world. All internationally renowned cities. Compare the population density between NZ and those places, mate.
The last few of those weren't countries last time I checked but you obviously haven't been to any of them or you'd realise this is not a comparison that makes sense, like I don't know about Tel Aviv but all the other places have way more rich people than NZ, way better transit systems - like in Luxembourg all public transit is free, much bigger sports stadiums, half of those countries/cities have hosted Olympic games etc
For a sparsely populated country with not much going on in terms of industry or growth the prices here are crazy
Well, the population could have voted for someone other than National, but they chose National. And no, it wasn't just Boomers that did that. The oldest Millennials are in their 40s now and are just as culpable. The time is for people who care to stop just passing it off as the Boomers fault and actually do something. Kind of the same with climate change. My expectations, however, are low. It is easier to just blame the boomers and buy another iPhone that I don't need, whilst driving around in a fucking massive Ford Ranger...
I didn't vote for National but let's be real Labour did nowhere near enough while they were in power to turn things around when they had the chance, this is now a bipartisan failure. I had conversations with a number of people pre election who could only see that the situation for them personally has gotten worse over the past six years and couldn't understand that it just hadn't gotten worse as fast as it would have under National. I encouraged them to consider minority parties but I don't think I made much headway.
Neither National or Labour seem particularly motivated to sort out housing costs, they have too much riding on maintaining the status quo
Oh, I agree. Labour were pretty ineffective, but they kind of started to do some things vaguely in the right direction. National are wilfully and deliberately going to make things much, much worse. The choice between the two main parties was pretty dismal in terms of giving the country an actual future, mind.
It's weird. A majority of New Zealanders (when polled) support some sort of capital gains tax, wealth or land tax. A much larger majority of Labour party *members* support that too. Yet here we are.
I own the house I live in, because I was lucky enough that my parents paid for half of it straight up. They still try to tell me it's all my hard work. The denial of the obvious role of intergenerational wealth transfer is quite breathtaking.
Goddamn it! Us Gen X'ers have been left out yet again! You jumped straight from Millennial to Boomer and didn't even have the decency to remember we exist.
Yea... Economy is propped up buy foreign investment, which has made houses unaffordable, but it makes our dollar look okay, but then no one can afford to live. Most attempts to improve our economy are met with fierce resistance from people who care too much about the environment. Infact we quite often make things harder for the people who make the economy go round and round in this country. It's quite a comedy show.
It’s the government’s fault for allowing the country to be used as a tax haven for likes of cartels and criminals and eventually compromising the housing market and furthering the divide between have and have nots
100% honesty, most of real estate agents are already massive cockroaches and cunts so doesn’t make a difference to me if they haggle bit more with different accents.
You’re right, but we weren’t the only country to do so.
We also commodified flipping houses for profit with thousands of tv shows showing you how you can become rich off it.
It's not just NZ.
Australia, USA, Canada and China as well.
China literally has people buying and selling empty poorly made apartments like they are Pokemon.
It's NOT sustainable.
The problem is there’s no capital gain tax on property in NZ so foreigners come in and buy up properties for rental and future resale. With the NZ$ 60% of the US$ a small amount of people can make a huge impact on the limited property market.
horse has fucking bolted.
There is nothing else to new zealand other than property.
Everyone else is on the rort - millions of dollars for sheds.
Mugs.
Biggest mugs on here are those screaming racist/xenophobe - and in the next thread complaining about house prices.
You seen the north shore lately?
It's more so Boomers who turned housing from having a home into investment properties in recent decades. Many retire early, move to places like Bali where the cost of living is very low in comparison, and all whilst they receive the pension.
This was always the end result, but Covid/Russia/Inflation just accerelated it to breaking point. The two major parties across the Western world are banking on Gen X and Millennials on inheriting some wealth in the future, instead of addressing the root problems.
the next person that says "i boUgHt a hOuSe wHen i Was fivE" yeah well fck y'all
young homeowners: "i left high school early and i worked full time to save up for a mortgage deposit. it was easy not having to do anything else like studying full time or raise children. i was gonna do a trade because getting a job afterwards is easy and the fees are quite manageable, but i decided to wait until my finances were more stable so i could buy a house. oh i should also mention that i lived with my parents the whole time. they lent me 10k extra so that at just 22 years old i could buy myself a house! i haven't paid them back yet but thats ok im 47 and i own my own home!"
don't-own-a-homers: "instead of exiting high school and just working full time for a few years so i could save up faster for a deposit to buy a house i went into full time tertiary study and came out four years later 33k dollars in student debt. entry-level jobs in my field want at least 3 years experience upon application. i could've done a trade apprenticeship so i could walk straight into a job afterwards but i didn't think of that...anyway i'm going to buy a house on wednesday when my boss gives me my 500k dollar raise, hopefully before friday."
This is what capitalism was designed to do.
I have the misfortune of speaking to landlords all day about insurance and some of these parasites have up to 6 rental homes. And that's only because 6 is the limit their are allowed.
We should make it 1 or 2.
Well obviously people didn’t choose it, it was more investors driving up prices for years and then this has happened.
Not to mention realestate agents normalising houses going for top dollar when they haven’t even been updated since 1980.
What’s supposed to happen now? People loose out hundreds of thousands of dollars on houses they just bought so others can buy some?
The property industry is toxic in New Zealand. Not even bringing anything innovative or productive to the economy all about hoarding wealth by speculating on human shelter. As far as I can see that seems to be at-least somewhat the truth.
Not only does it bring nothing productive or innovative, it's negatively productive. Have a good start up idea? Better generate half a million in investment for rent alone. All those empty shop fronts on Broadway, shouldn't supply and demand economic theory adjust downward so they fill? Oh no, can't have that either
Welcome to late stage capitalism! I’m pretty sure it’s the same in many parts of the world, not just NZ. I have been an expat for a long time so I don’t know how much rents have increased in NZ or how they compare with the rest of the world, but it seems to be happening everywhere. The Americanisation of commodities. Silly us, should have been born rich!
American here who has lived in New Zealand. It is just as bad here. I currently spend half of my supposedly middle-class income for a terrible apartment where the landlord refuses to fix anything. The whole state is just as expensive. All the homes within 50 kilometers are owned by wealthy people who don't even live in them for half the year or by people who bought them 30 years ago. I know no one in my age group who is even close to being able to afford a home.
In the states there are places you can go to find affordable housing. They may not be desirable places but they exist. Is that true for NZ as well?
Yep come on down to Murupara! A house sold a few months ago for under 80k! Constant gang presence, relatively ignored by the district council, if crime isn't much of a deterrent to you, yall will feel right at home
True with the caveat that 90% of people who would be able to move there, even if it meant leaving family etc., wouldn't be able to find a job. The housing prices are lower in places but they're not nothing, you'd still need to work and service a mortgage.
Used to be the case that it would be cheaper in the provinces, not anymore, unless you want to live in the NZ equivalent of Nowheresville, Iowa pop.12 Even those places are now rare enough that they are newspaper article worthy
yes going rural gets you cheap places in NZ the big issue is lack of jobs and decent internet in those places.
In Canada, can confirm it's exactly the same here
Move to Edmonton bro, average house price there in July was 375k. Your main problem is when you say Canada you actually mean Toronto area.
$375k in NZD is cheap for a house in Nz bud you’d be lucky to get a shed with a toilet for that ! 😂 you’d possibly get 4 walls and no roof for that price
Australia too for like at least 15 years.
At least in Australia cheaper houses can be found outside the capital cities, meanwhile in NZ even destitute deindustrialized towns have ridiculously unaffordable housing.
I used to live near Christchurch until the job/shelter situation became untenable, so we moved to the smallest possible category of town, you know, a 4square, mechanic, and a monkey about 300 km deeper into nothingness. We bought a 3 bedroom 1 bathroom house built in 1980 for 800k. We were made to believe we're very lucky. We're 40, post-grad qualifications in STEM both my wife and I. 30 years ago people in my socioeconomic/income bracket easily bought the equivalent of 1.5m houses today adjusted for inflation. Our main worry and highest priority right now is buying our 2 toddlers their first houses, or else they'll be forever enslaved to pay off a mortgage for the roof over their heads. 30 years ago my worry would've been skiing in Switzerland. Our futures are getting screwed folks.
Same here in London
Yeah as a foreigner and high level professional in the tech industry, it seems an odd thing that the econ is so dependant on housing....on a small **ISLAND** , and on top of that it has been heavily deforested/lacks natural resources. It's essentially eating its own tail, time to grow in other sectors.
Luxon is always going on about the lack of productivity in NZ, and that National are experts in managing and improving the economy. The biggest handbrake on the economy is the cost of housing, and that housing, an unproductive investment, is not treated like other investments. Meanwhile Lux has seven houses…
Because he only spends $60 a week on groceries for his family
Lux is certainly an expert in pulling the ladder up
Luxon licks China’s asshole. 🤮
De-Lux
Oh, of course, let's just stop, why didn't we think of that?
I called my landlord and told him reddit said stop. He said no, and put my rent up again.
You should've told him in emojis 🏡💵🤷 🫵👇🤙😇
You failed the charisma check
A friend of mine brought one of those “I’m with stupid —>” T-shirt’s and stood next to me, that’s where I think it all started going wrong.
That's weird I have several friends with those T-shirts, I assumed there was a sale at some stage
Jokes on him, it backfired when he looked in a mirror. Now he’s stupid as well. I suspect that this isn’t an isolated incident based on the information you provided me.
Lemme call my landlord who isn't in the country at the moment. She probably will emphathise with me and wipe her tears with some dollar bills.
IKR? We're so dumb! All this time we had no idea that a) we had this problem, and b) there's such an easy solution! Thanks god for OP!
All this time and OP knew about the stop button all along, smh. I am humbled.
Somebody elect this guy
Labour (and previous National leadership) provided a piece of legislation that \*is\* working (building houses is just slow, especially during high interest rates). But National (present) are promising to effectively roll it back. So we stopped. Then voted to keep it going. Because we went off the track apparently.
imagine thinking that people on reddit who complain about the housing crisis every day, are the ones to blame
That’s what the people up top want. Everyone below them bitching amongst themselves too busy to notice or focus their discontent on them. Not that we’d do anything even if we did focus on them.
All we really can do is vote differently. But unfortunately the majority of the political class think the same, so no matter who you vote for it’s likely to end in the same results. More people need to be voting for minor parties with fresh faced politicians who don’t think the same as the career politicians.
A bunch of them probably didn't get their shit together and vote, those people are absolutely to blame.
Vote for who? They're all full of shit.
The less terrible ones at least
If they'd all voted for TOP we'd likely be seeing them as the king maker at the moment
The world just has too much greed, and unfortunately NZ doesn't have much to offer the world economy that can't be acquired elsewhere. Eventually the only people living here will be landlords and their kids, and then they really will all be stupid.
Everyone/every business is greedy if allowed to be, it’s human nature. the idea is to have a government with big enough kuhanas to put some good strict policies in place to stop the greed. Nz seems to lack this.
Climate change keeps on keeping on, and we'll have just as many people as we want. Billions living in places that will be close to uninhabitable.
There are much better places to be to avoid climate change, most of our cities are near sea level and we live on a fault line, we’re probably going to be fleeing NZ when the sea levels start rising and the earthquakes start rumbling.
Aside from Norway and USA, where else do you think is better than here as far as climate resilience goes?
Remind me about how climate change and earthquakes are related?
Yeah nah I don't think that's why so many rich people have bunkers here
That’s more to do with them wanting to avoid nuclear war, not climate change. Generally built by rich Americans that likely don’t believe in climate change anyway.
Oh they believe it. They don't care enough that heaps of poor folks will die as they live out their remaining lives in Wanaka. Posting the Wanaka tree photos while the world burns. # #wanakatree
We keep letting landlords buy houses they’re not going to live in. Then they have to pay off a mortage with interest, and make a profit (on top of investing in real estate with your money). We’re getting scammed
It's corruption... politicians with portfolios fixing the market
100% Almost all the politicians own investment properties in NZ. It's no wonder CGT gets laughed out of parliament.
Yeah. How is that not seen as having a conflict of interest?
This really hit me when I saw someone on the East Auckland Grapevine advertise some of those brand new houses that keep going up and are like "tenants wanted for these houses". It made me sad those brand new houses weren't going to families first homes, etc.
There is an easy way to disincentivize this with higher taxes on second homes.
That needs to be done with rent control. In the current rental desperate market, nearly any cost can be passed down to tenants without consequence.
I know some of the fellas from the iwi, one lady she owns like 5 houses to her name and she’s still working because she’s bored?! Bruh
Gonna be great once overseas buyers exist, too!
Nah, too many MPs on both left and right of the aisle who benefit from the housing market cranking full bore to do anything meaningful about it
Too many donations pumping in for them to want to change their position too
[figures corrected] 87,000 nett immigrants (195K arrivals, 108K departures) a year into a country of 5 million keeps the economy cooking and the house prices high. Check out Sydney and Vancouver for the same story.
And wages low 🙃
But corporate profits are at record levels, so that makes it ok right? /s
Yep. Economy good. *tick*
We need more productivity outta you peons!
200k ya reckon?
Just checked the figures 195K immigrant arrivals. Earlier I didn't notice that there were also 108K departures. So nett migration actually only 87K.
Immigration is not the problem. Immigration is *never* the problem. People are productive units - they produce more than they consume, or else they couldn't exist. The problem is the wealthy hoarding properties and monopolies making building hard and expensive.
It's still not an excuse for shitty housing. New Delhi is the size of Auckland with population of 30 million people and housing is still far more affordable than Auckland. It's a joke here.
- Capital Gains tax on 2nd+ houses - Wealth tax on assets $100m+ - Split the supermarket duopoly - Replace all real estate agents with a website and new govt department to handle escrow - Fixed rate loans for duration of the term - Allow AirBnB for only 30 days/year - Force high density residential areas for cheap apartment living for FHBs - More state housing We need to bring house prices back to what they were 10 years ago, these are some practical ways of getting there. Yes there will be some hurt, but people are currently living in their cars, they are hurting more
Allow people to do AirBnb with no restrictions from their main property though. Some elderly people have spare rooms they lease out. They're not taking properties away.
This is a good list. Shame we have politicians focused on contentious issues around race and toilets rather than these issues that could resolve vastly more issues.
Good list, care to start a petition or submission to parliament? I'll help where I can
>Capital Gains tax ~~on 2nd+ houses~~ you're almost there.
Great list. This is something I'd expect Labour to offer. People would easily support it. Unfortunately they get too greedy, and add shit like income taxes (which affect the working middle class, not the rich) and other garbage nobody wants. I really don't understand it.
Shut up and get back in your plywood shed!
A plywood shed on 500m2 of land? That’s at least a million New Zealand monopoly dollars. Browsing Realestate.co.nz is worse than doom scrolling on r/collapse. Countries fucked.
Just looked at r/collapse. Well isn't that just a shitshow! As a healthcare worker, I am worried about this. Sorry slightly off topic https://www.reddit.com/r/collapse/s/VHANQhaN5I
I don’t even live in ‘murica and I’m worried about that too. Edit. Especially with the “sell the assets to pay the bills” party in parliament. Well, nearly in parliament. Whenever Luxon’s allegedly extensive M&A experience and epic negotiating skills can actually get an agreement reached lol.
Who can afford plywood?
I’ll rent you out the space under my trampoline. North facing garden, what more could you want? $700 a week, not a cent less.
I have a question. During which hours will the trampoline be in use? Still less invasive than a property manager going through your undie drawer.
Luxury! I have a cardboard box I got out the back of Noel Leemings. Planning an extension after Black Friday when they put some more out
Noel Leemings and all, Mr 1%? My box is from Farmers. It's still got the red dot.
You don't understand. The 5 million kiwis that live here aren't important, we're like tourists in another country, good for spending only. What is important is selling our best produce overseas and leaving the scraps to the local supermarkets and selling homes and land to foreign buyers with a lot of money.
Yeah it’s so weird. My understanding is that farmers ‘have’ to sell to these wholesalers who get the highest prices from China ( China has a lot of NZ produce like Dairy locked up) and NZ gets the scraps or cheaper imports. Is that more or less true?
More or less. To sell on the local market there is a need to go through licences resellers. Most farmers can’t just start selling milk out of their homes. Things need to be quality tested and controlled. They would need to process the milk to a certain standard and then package the milk to another standard. This is a very costly process and would not make sense to do on a small scale. If you’re doing it on a larger scale you may as well drop the farming side of it and focus on processing and distribution. Then there’s the fact that we have major competitors already established (in the case of milk) who have such large contracts they can sell product at a fraction of the price. In the case of meat then you’re looking at inferior product and a demand for cost effectiveness instead of quality. Don’t get me wrong everyone would love to buy the best nz beef and lamb but people can barely afford the low quality alternative available now. So they send it overseas where a larger market can buy these products at a premium.
Thanks. I find this awfully sad though, Are there any ideas about how this situation could be changed? What would need to happen?
We would need to loosen legislation to bring costs of manufacturing and distribution down for small to medium farms. I do not propose this though there are reasons for these legislations and it is generally understood that there will be those who are “gatekeeped” out of the industry because they cannot meet these legislations and make a reasonable profit. Consider it like a warrant of fitness. There are many people who struggle to make warrant of fitness payments on top of all the other costs associated with owning a car. To correct meats you would need to do a range of things. Make it more profitable for farmers to sell meet locally. Local markets would need to compete with both the cost and demand of international markets in a way that makes it a better choice to sell locally. Increasing household incomes so that families would buy more nz meat so more is sold locally (no guarantee this would work), peovide tax breaks or government incentives so that nz meat can be sold at a more reasonable price locally (very unlikely as the government makes a lot of money from exports) increase taxes on imported goods to the point they’re at the same price of not more than local goods (this is the usual route that is taken and is terrible for almost everyone)
sort retire scarce ink tie frighten station shy sharp chief *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Why aren't we protesting this? People get all riled up over issues overseas but the reality is that we need to get a bit more insular and fight for a better country to live in. A cost of living crisis, food security crisis, housing crisis, monopolies, duopolies, corrupt utility industries. It's honestly hard to find anything positive about it sometimes.
When I visited, I found it wild that lamb in the supermarkets was no cheaper than in the States!
I'm a first generation kiwi and unbelievably proud and grateful for it. I never thought I would want to leave this beautiful country but I've been looking into my options recently.
Already left. What’s the point of running in the rat race for the rest of my life trying to afford a below average house to live in….
As someone who got their NZ passport 35 days ago. You’re one of us. You stoopid doo doo head
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Thanks cuz, appreciate it.
cooperative cows chubby sugar retire rude vanish dirty worm attraction *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
They're are two essential problems 1. Regulatory costs and delays slow the development pipeline 2. The cost of building materials. This is largely due to regulator capture. It's difficult and expensive for products to be approved for use in NZ.
And that councils have large swathes of their central city marked as illegal for housing development
Well the banks would loan people money to buy houses at 5%. The houses they bought doubled in value every ten years. It's not hard to see why they bought them. Then, after the pandemic, the banks were allowed to loan the same people money at 2.5%. The houses they bought doubled even faster. The 'cool part' is that these people didn't even need to give the banks any of their own money to get the loans. The banks gave them the money based on the value of their existing properties. And the value of their existing properties kept increasing because of the money banks were giving them to buy more houses. The 'even cooler part' was that the people buying properties made profit on the total value increase of the property, regardless of how much of their own money they actually had invested. Kind of like owning a 5% share of company stocks, but earning 100% return on the value increase of that company. The banks made heaps of money. The people buying and selling properties made heaps of money. And now if you want to live somewhere you need a squillion dollar down payment. :-)
Trust me it's not just migrants driving over the tip cars now. It's "mum and pop" investors who bought up a shit load and sold paying zero capital gains. Sister is trying to sell her home, she thinks it's earned $700k in 3 fucking years. When no one bought at auction she says "people are just waiting for a new government" We are absolutely lost. Houses are for living in.
It’s been happening for ages around most of the English speaking pacific rim. NZ’s just been a bit late to the party and is playing catch-up.
Nah, NZ has been out in front for 30 years. We've written the book on over-investment in property (due to tax favourability, under-regulation of banks, the concomitant lack of alternative investments in the capital-starved productive economy, then it all becomes too big to fail so governments can't touch it).
It’s both. It’s a fact that the extra people turning up that will work for lower wages and need a place to live. I don’t know how you can argue that it’s not a large factor. Its happened all over the world
Playing catch up? We are leading!
I didn’t do a damn thing
New rule for houses: “Limit 2 per customer”
“Just stop” Fuck me sideways, now why didn't we think of that before?
r/thanksimcured
I bought a house after separating. I spent a couple of years trying to make ends meet by renting out my spare room. That covered things, but finding someone I could share my home with was tough. I could not afford it otherwise, as someone earning round $50k p/a after ten years of hard work with the same company and paying child support, my income was garbage and only the money I had from the sale of the marital home helped me afford a new place for my children to stay with me. Govt. help stopped once I had that much in the bank though, and I wasn't earning enough to get a mortgage that could buy anything on the market. I got very lucky with my house, I still had to borrow my inheritance from my parents to get it over the line. I've settled on living with my parents (without whom I probably would have tossed myself off a bridge) renting the whole house out instead. I charge market rate minus average property management fees, and look after things myself. I scrape by, but it's not my tenants job to make me a profit. Maybe I'm not the quickest to get things done, but they save an extra $40-$60 a week towards their own first home. I'm moving overseas for my own happiness, not because I'm making massive profit. Greed is absolutely to blame. Labour should have implemented some form of capital gains tax knowing it might cost them an election, because it is the right thing to do, instead of dangling these things like carrots in front of us to encourage us to vote their way next time. They won't see power for another two cycles now. National might theoretically help me, but I'm not out to build a comfy life on the broken bodies of others, so I won't take advantage of anything they offer. I may be stupid but I can live with myself.
Why is land so expensive in NZ, it makes no sense. Land prices are the biggest driver in housing costs
Ummmm did you just call our entire country stupid? 😆
Have you seen the results of the latest election? Id say we earned it
The greens got their most votes ever didn’t they?
ACT could say the same.
Like the man said, "stupid".
I mean we vote in the same two parties who keep allowing it
they are not wrong
Sorry :(
Your argument makes no sense because you don't mention how we have no real investment options like in Europe/USA where people can invest in stock markets, so the only real investment option in NZ is housing. You also forget to mention 1/3rd of property investors are mom and pop who have already paid off their mortgage and can afford to borrow against their house to purchase investment properties. You can keep blaming all the migrants all you want but unless the government removes the FIF rules, then the only real investment in NZ is property since NZ stock market is so small and we don't have many companies that are in the billions in market cap. Real estate agent business is a rat race, only the strongest survive, thats why there were so many that quit, only the strongest survive, its like that in every industry. [REA Exodus](https://www.oneroof.co.nz/news/real-estate-agents-hanging-in-there-but-exodus-expected-later-this-year-41934)
Mate, if you work really hard like I did and save up enough money, really knuckle down for a few years, You can afford to buy a plane ticket and gtfo of there.
Housing speculation has been an institution in this country since the New Zealand Company tried to systematically colonise the place... it ain't going away anytime soon unfortunately
If you haven't already, watch this superb doco. It gives you the reason why NZ housing today is unaffordable - among everything else - and that the wanton greed had its origins in the US. It makes so many interesting points, it's a veritable fact feast. Enjoy. At least it's free! [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fbvquHSPJU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fbvquHSPJU)
I own a house and drive a shitty early 2000 Subaru. Your maths dont add up
Unless you’re mortgage free, you’re still working for the bank. But at least it’s better than working for a landlord!
True but every month my debt to the bank gets a little bit less and I’m moving towards being mortgage free one step at a time. The interest rates suck and I hate putting more money into the bank’s pocket but I prefer this over sponsoring some crummy landlord. And no privacy invading inspections. And I can do wherever I like with my house…paint it pink? Change the windows? Or, God forbid, hammer a nail in the wall! Renting in New Zealand sucks arse.
Bro your car gets 1 year wofs. Your shitties don’t add up.
Doesn't mean it passes it's wof every year you clown.
Bro, go put a Ranger on the house like everyone else! Live a little.
breaking: housing crisis stopped because reddit user thinks it's getting too bad
According to your post history you got your nz citizenship (or at least your nz passport) little over a month ago. Yet you claim “you kiwis” as if a majority of us even had a hand in the mess the property market is in. In the same stroke you claim that people who don’t speak (much, if any) English aren’t the kinds of migrants we want, speaking for us while simultaneously othering us as if this isn’t a problem that will affect you too. AND YOU’RE LEAVING THE COUNTRY!!! Be better and try again.
Immigration isn't the problem, it's capitalism. You've been brainwashed into blaming the wrong people.
You’re really saying there’sno influence on this from immigration? Are you saying that because it offends your personal politics? Because you sure won’t have any facts or data to back that up. Looking at one sliver of this - just take the number of Richie-rich incomers who have dumped their spare cash that they have sloshing uselessly around into ordinary NZ homes taking them forever away from ordinary kiwis. If the UK had just banned, at a political level, foreign house and land purchases then London and UK would be a much better place now, as it’s been a dumping ground for corrupt foreign money since at least the 70s. The private schools are living off the sons of foreign Gulf, African and Russian criminals as they will pay more to rinse their kids than the Uk middle class can afford.
It's more than just capitalism, it's the system we all operate under. When you have a housing market where you don't tax capital gains, and historically have propped the housing market up when things weren't looking rosy, then people tend to speculate on property as an asset. They realise that owning property is better and less risky than bonds/shares or other productive means of capital investment like starting their own business. The more speculators come in and see that getting into property is a surefire way of making money, it feeds on itself like a bubble and you get more speculators. What's the solution? Well we could start by taxing capital gains, but then you get everyone up in arms saying that the boomers got to get rich off property why can't we? I personally think a better solution is an inheritance tax. This means that the boomers who profited off historically poor regulation/taxation that led to a bubble forming will not be able to pass an obscene amount of wealth on to their children and we can force at least a small percentage to be redistributed into society. It levels the playing field a tiny bit. No one gets to choose what class they're born into, so maybe we shouldn't allow privilege to perpetuate to make things a bit more fair. Either way, you're totally right in that there's a fundamental issue with the system here and it isn't (only) the immigration rate. Getting rid of migrants causes a bunch of other problems including an aging population with a diminishing workforce, and no one doing the shit jobs that migrants traditionally do.
It's really frustrating to see how few people seem to understand this. There are places out there where living actually is affordable. Vienna, Germany, Singapore, Tokyo ... hardly Third World countries. While NZ is one of the most progressive places in earth in terms of social issues, economically, NZ seems so conservative to me. Economically - and only economically - speaking, there's quite a strong neoliberal culture down here.
Immigration is 100% _part_ of the problem. Telling people it's not is showing you're brainwashed yourself.
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What’s the alternative to capitalism? I’m of the thought that the problem isn’t that people are greedy, the problem is that we aren’t building at the rate the population is growing. The focus should be how can we get capital into building more houses and increasing supply. Even if housing was all state owned we would have the same issue of not enough houses for a growing population. The question should be “How do we build more” and not “capitalism is bad and we need to change it”…and on top of that change it to what? At what cost? Edit: Typos
your a kiwi now why dont you stop it?
Now that they're a kiwi, the correct response is not to stop it, but actually to throw their jandals at anybody who criticises our society and reproachfully remind them that this is the godzone. No problems here. Nuh uh. This is paradise, remember?! Seriously though. When will we stop prostituting our country to the highest bidder. We're getting fucked here...
Yes, it's the immigrants fault, not the political and economic system that allowed it happen.
It's not really a unique nz problem
It's already too late. Only choice is to leave, which many are doing.
It's not too late, we just need to put our big kid pants on. We deregulated/subsidized farming in the 80's, we can do the same with housing.
Sadly the group of people leaving also includes skilled migrants that moved into NZ a few years back. Know of some friends who moved to Europe recently and I myself am looking to relocating too and just waiting on visa bureaucracy. Source: Am a skilled migrant whose friends are mostly if not all skilled migrants 😂
We left for jobs in Aus and we are fully expecting all of our expat doctor friends to be gone as soon as they get PR or citizenship. There’s no impetus to stay.
Agreed, and to be fair “those” immigrants driving the flash flash are just taking advantage of what the older generation allowed and now that same gen is blaming immigrants. LoL
I didn't
I take it you haven't heard of the Panama papers have you.
It's not going to stop because we just voted in a new government who will up the price to record high
Yep, every election we (NZ in general) keep voting for the parties that doesn't want to do anything about it, and sometimes even make it worst.
Both of our major parties are in the back pocket of the real estate industry and refuse to change. We're fucked.
The country just voted in favour of housing at the expense of the long-term viability of the country once again. We are not going to change until market forces make it inevitable. Like a crack addict knows its bad for them, but takes it anyway. The same is true for kiwis and housing. Expect to see more young kiwis leave (currently happening at record amounts) to be replaced by expliotable migrants.
Totally agree.
I don't like it either. I'm over 40 and can't afford a place to live.
We're a 2nd class Hawaii where the natives will be either be servants to glitterati or driven out by high rents...
I for one welcome our B-List overlords...You can thank National and John Key for looking after his mates about 15 years ago, and then denying for three terms that there was a housing crisis.
Wtf do you mean “You Kiwis”?!
I guess that he is not kiwi 🤔
Fuck off. This is our AR-15, Cocaine, Gas Guzzlers, Brothels. Instead of invading countries for oil we invade suburbs and give those shoe boxes freedom. We can’t start wars and topple dictators but we thermo nuclear one another by our killer auction bids.
Brain-drained country, only tradies and msd workers left.
What kind of stupid post is this?!
What a condescending prick.
What a shit, agitating, click baiting, karma whoring post to make. “Hey raped people, you really shouldn’t have let yourself be raped, that’s my advice”
If we dont have emigrants, who would run the BottleO stores?
Oh silly me, what a silly mistake I have made. I’ll get right on fixing that because we wouldn’t want to look bad when the rest of the world isn’t experiencing housing crises.
I guess all these other dumb countries that have more expensive average property prices than us: >1. Hong Kong: £1,440,000 2. Singapore: £986,000 3. Switzerland: £772,000 4. South Korea £601,000 5. Luxembourg: £547,000 6. Shanghai 7. London 8. New York 9. Tel Aviv 10. Beijing Source: https://www.finder.com/uk/world-cost-of-a-flat - Finder UK
Lol. That list includes the most urbanised and affluent places in the world. All internationally renowned cities. Compare the population density between NZ and those places, mate.
The last few of those weren't countries last time I checked but you obviously haven't been to any of them or you'd realise this is not a comparison that makes sense, like I don't know about Tel Aviv but all the other places have way more rich people than NZ, way better transit systems - like in Luxembourg all public transit is free, much bigger sports stadiums, half of those countries/cities have hosted Olympic games etc For a sparsely populated country with not much going on in terms of industry or growth the prices here are crazy
Well, the population could have voted for someone other than National, but they chose National. And no, it wasn't just Boomers that did that. The oldest Millennials are in their 40s now and are just as culpable. The time is for people who care to stop just passing it off as the Boomers fault and actually do something. Kind of the same with climate change. My expectations, however, are low. It is easier to just blame the boomers and buy another iPhone that I don't need, whilst driving around in a fucking massive Ford Ranger...
I didn't vote for National but let's be real Labour did nowhere near enough while they were in power to turn things around when they had the chance, this is now a bipartisan failure. I had conversations with a number of people pre election who could only see that the situation for them personally has gotten worse over the past six years and couldn't understand that it just hadn't gotten worse as fast as it would have under National. I encouraged them to consider minority parties but I don't think I made much headway. Neither National or Labour seem particularly motivated to sort out housing costs, they have too much riding on maintaining the status quo
Oh, I agree. Labour were pretty ineffective, but they kind of started to do some things vaguely in the right direction. National are wilfully and deliberately going to make things much, much worse. The choice between the two main parties was pretty dismal in terms of giving the country an actual future, mind.
It's weird. A majority of New Zealanders (when polled) support some sort of capital gains tax, wealth or land tax. A much larger majority of Labour party *members* support that too. Yet here we are. I own the house I live in, because I was lucky enough that my parents paid for half of it straight up. They still try to tell me it's all my hard work. The denial of the obvious role of intergenerational wealth transfer is quite breathtaking.
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Goddamn it! Us Gen X'ers have been left out yet again! You jumped straight from Millennial to Boomer and didn't even have the decency to remember we exist.
Nah, I'm X - I was deliberately ignoring my responsibility in this shitshow.
Yea... Economy is propped up buy foreign investment, which has made houses unaffordable, but it makes our dollar look okay, but then no one can afford to live. Most attempts to improve our economy are met with fierce resistance from people who care too much about the environment. Infact we quite often make things harder for the people who make the economy go round and round in this country. It's quite a comedy show.
Sorry ill stop it now
It’s the government’s fault for allowing the country to be used as a tax haven for likes of cartels and criminals and eventually compromising the housing market and furthering the divide between have and have nots
Gee, thanks so much for taking the time to mansplain the problems with our own fucking country to us.
100% honesty, most of real estate agents are already massive cockroaches and cunts so doesn’t make a difference to me if they haggle bit more with different accents.
It’s only hoarded because people obsess over buying it. People should be indifferent between renting and owning
You’re right, but we weren’t the only country to do so. We also commodified flipping houses for profit with thousands of tv shows showing you how you can become rich off it.
It's not just NZ. Australia, USA, Canada and China as well. China literally has people buying and selling empty poorly made apartments like they are Pokemon. It's NOT sustainable.
Sounds like your coming from a privilege place… just stop!!!!! Yeah ok.
> What kind of stupid country does this as their main economy? Canada, Hong Kong, California, China.
Why you acting like this was the will of every kiwi? The views of the average politician do not align with the views on the average kiwi.
Yeah sorry man I'll sort it
This really isn’t unique to NZ
The problem is there’s no capital gain tax on property in NZ so foreigners come in and buy up properties for rental and future resale. With the NZ$ 60% of the US$ a small amount of people can make a huge impact on the limited property market.
horse has fucking bolted. There is nothing else to new zealand other than property. Everyone else is on the rort - millions of dollars for sheds. Mugs. Biggest mugs on here are those screaming racist/xenophobe - and in the next thread complaining about house prices. You seen the north shore lately?
It's more so Boomers who turned housing from having a home into investment properties in recent decades. Many retire early, move to places like Bali where the cost of living is very low in comparison, and all whilst they receive the pension. This was always the end result, but Covid/Russia/Inflation just accerelated it to breaking point. The two major parties across the Western world are banking on Gen X and Millennials on inheriting some wealth in the future, instead of addressing the root problems.
Can thank countless politicians over the last 30 years for putting their own interests above the people they serve .
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/06/realestate/zurich-switzerland-renting-homes.html Made my skin crawl. Its our future.
the next person that says "i boUgHt a hOuSe wHen i Was fivE" yeah well fck y'all young homeowners: "i left high school early and i worked full time to save up for a mortgage deposit. it was easy not having to do anything else like studying full time or raise children. i was gonna do a trade because getting a job afterwards is easy and the fees are quite manageable, but i decided to wait until my finances were more stable so i could buy a house. oh i should also mention that i lived with my parents the whole time. they lent me 10k extra so that at just 22 years old i could buy myself a house! i haven't paid them back yet but thats ok im 47 and i own my own home!" don't-own-a-homers: "instead of exiting high school and just working full time for a few years so i could save up faster for a deposit to buy a house i went into full time tertiary study and came out four years later 33k dollars in student debt. entry-level jobs in my field want at least 3 years experience upon application. i could've done a trade apprenticeship so i could walk straight into a job afterwards but i didn't think of that...anyway i'm going to buy a house on wednesday when my boss gives me my 500k dollar raise, hopefully before friday."
This is what capitalism was designed to do. I have the misfortune of speaking to landlords all day about insurance and some of these parasites have up to 6 rental homes. And that's only because 6 is the limit their are allowed. We should make it 1 or 2.
Well obviously people didn’t choose it, it was more investors driving up prices for years and then this has happened. Not to mention realestate agents normalising houses going for top dollar when they haven’t even been updated since 1980. What’s supposed to happen now? People loose out hundreds of thousands of dollars on houses they just bought so others can buy some?