Vocal Voices

A part of what's kept me so busy this term is my Nana has decided to move to a retirement apartment. So I've been helping her clean up and out her house. It's a small 3 bedroom place, but she's very good at hoarding.

So after a couple of months work, it went on the market last Monday. She had 2 open homes on Saturday and Sunday. It was to go for auction in 4 weeks time.

Well the market in Auckland at the moment is horrendously nuts, overpriced, and insane begins to describe it.

The government puts a price on homes that our rates are then calculated from, hers was 570k ( which is based on the beginning of the property bubble, I think it should be 350-400k based on the rest of the country)

On Sunday, after being on the market for 7 days she was given a pre auction offer which she accepted. This meant the auction is then brought forward and held with 2 working days, so that was 4pm today. The real estate agent had to contact all "interested parties" (ie people who had come to see my Nanas house and said they liked it and wanted to take it further) to let them know the change in auction date. So that was 65 people he had to call Sunday night!!!

Today at the auction, there were 9 people bidding and it sold for 902k!!!

Its 6 hours later and I'm still in a state of shock!



I'm so grateful we found our home 3 years ago, based on that calculation ours would now be about 1.6m and we bought mid 800k
Sh!t@ a brick
There is no way we could afford this place now, and no way we could afford my nanas very small modest home!!!!

This market is totally out of control.

Blimey O'Reilly Weka, no wonder you're shocked!
I had no idea there was anything like that going on.

Are there just not enough homes? - It seems odd to have gone so mad when it's a small population.

Wow That sounds like how things were here at the height of the Celtic Tiger boom, houses going at ridiculous prices and the upshot is of course that very many people are now in serious negative equity. I hope the Auckland property market isn't heading the same way, Weka, but fantastic for your Nana that she got such a great price

Blimey, I agree with Osc, it's a bit worrying really If we'd held onto our house in Egham (the one we sold in 2009 to come to Gloucester) it would have gone up by about 100k by now, whereas the prices here in Glos have hardly moved Oh well, we'd never have got a house anywhere near as nice as this one over there, not for less than double the price. London prices, and I guess Auckland is also 'paying' the price for being desirable........

Nice for your Nana though, to have that tucked away for her retirement xxxx

There are a few factors causing the housing issues. Immigration, bad housing, economy, overseas investment, low interest rates and probably a few others.

More people are arriving than leaving, and kiwis are coming home and not as many leaving, then there is the internal migration within the country.

We have 15 years worth of bad "leaky" housing nobody wants buy, so that pushes up the cost of everything else.
Land is scarce as anything with land has had another house whacked on it (or developers pay extra for the property as they will then subdivide) and the city limits have not been opened up for ore housing. The council wants us to build up, ie apartment blocks, rather than out, but the general public all want a backyard and grass.

Our economy keeps getting described in the media as a "rockstar" economy, so people here are feeling pretty good in general, there are plenty of jobs, but they aren't paying very well. Average wage in NZ is 50k per annum.
Overseas investment commonly gets blamed, particularly the Chinese. They appear to be everywhere buying everything. But that is a common perception rather than a fact. Oddly one that the government doesn't want to disprove, I suspect because it's true and they have been chasing the Chinese dollar since they got into power.

Interest rates are fairly low at the moment (for NZ) the rest of the country has not got the same housing boom. They are about 6% more or less depending on fixed or floating.

It is a silly silly market, which has to crash. It's so far out of step with the rest of the country. And I think when the crash comes it will come hard. We are working hard on getting out mortgage down and paid off as fast as possible so we don't get caught out when it comes.
And I wonder if it's coming soon....
The Chinese economy is slowing.....,.,

And when it comes, there will be a lot of people with mortgages worth more than their homes


However it's fab for my nana. The place she's moving into to 400k. It's a retirement setup, so she only owns the right to occupy, not the bricks and mortar. But that's s thread for another day. So basically she's now exited the housing market.

That's 50k NZD? How many to the £?

I just googled, it's currently 0.43 NZD to the pound so the price of Nana's semi was high, but the fringes of London can be even higher. I think your average wage is around about the same as ours, currently around 25k, or maybe slightly lower xx

Yes I agree. The nuts part comes in when you consider it was on the market for 9 days, and there is no backing out. Once you bid at an auction you can not change your mind before you get the house keys. You win the auction the house is yours on exchange date (usually 6 weeks later). Nice and simple, but no time at all to do due diligence checks on the place, no building inspections, valuations, council locality searches to make sure the neighbours have put in building plans etc etc.

Compare to the rest of the country, average house price is 3-400k, with 1-200k in other areas.

Weka wrote:Compare to the rest of the country, average house price is 3-400k, with 1-200k in other areas.

Now those are a lot lower than ours!