Posts by Matthew Poole
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Hard News: Behind those Herald…, in reply to Mikaere Curtis,
Change our immigration policy settings to massively reduce the number of people moving to Auckland.
How, exactly, would you do that? Incentives to live in the regions, which will then suffer the same kinds of infrastructure and housing-price stress as Auckland but with a far lower starting point in terms of capability to cope?
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Hard News: Behind those Herald…, in reply to BenWilson,
Not surprising when it’s almost all of our capital.
You ain't kidding. Nearly 77% of the national wealth is tied up in residential property (scroll down for the pretty horizontal bar graph titled "New Zealand Asset Classes").
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Hard News: Behind those Herald…, in reply to RaggedJoe,
We have been trying to guide our daughter into a first home in Auckland, she has $30k saved
$30k doesn't get you overly far against a deposit requirement of, at pretty much barest minimum, 10%. The only places for $300k tend to be apartments, and the banks are much more hesitant to lend on those for a large number of reasons.
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Hard News: Behind those Herald…, in reply to Moz,
The advantage of Sydney is that there are jobs right out, so you can reasonably find decent paid work even west of the geographic centre (the CBD is close to the eastern edge of the city).
Yeah, Auckland's highly-paid jobs are largely concentrated in the CBD, which accounts for, from memory, 22% of the region's employment if you count all the jobs within the motorway collar up to Newton Rd/Khyber Pass. There's a fair chunk of decent-paying work in the Albany IT cluster and the manufacturing around Highbrook/East Tamaki, but those areas are all public transport ghettos, made worse in Albany's case by the proliferation of huge loop roads that make bus services a nightmare and pedestrian thoroughfare utterly miserable. There's really the industrial corridor through East Tamaki/Highbrook/Otahuhu/Penrose/Onehunga, the logistics stuff around the airport, the CBD, and Albany, with an attempt at a secondary office location at Takapuna/Smales That's a fair dispersal, but if you work in particular sectors there's very little geographic diversity: in IT it's the CBD or Albany; in top-tier accounting and consulting it's the CBD; in heavy manufacturing it's that corridor but predominately East Tamaki/Highbrook and Penrose; in logistics it's the airport, or a little bit near the port.
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Hard News: Behind those Herald…, in reply to Glen Koorey,
I'm also quite intrigued about the apparent blanket snobbery of entire suburbs that seems to condemn them to not even worth looking at on the basis of a few bad streets or sensationalist stories in the media...
There are three - count them, three - suburbs in Auckland with a median house price low enough to qualify for the various forms of government assistance. That's out of well over 100. People want access to transport options, and they want decent schools (that's decent ERO reports, not high decile rankings), and they don't want raging parties at all hours of the day and night. The suburbs that fare really poorly do not, largely, score well by those metrics, but even those three still have houses that, at the cheapest, will go for $300k+. The $100-250k range is, as I said, all single-bedroom apartments and/or townhouses on leasehold land with ground rents that will run the cost of the property up by five or six times if you hold it for a decade.
Those three suburbs are not on the railway lines, they're not close to the motorway, and that means that a commute to the CBD, or even to Penrose, will take well over an hour every day of the week. Is it actually so unreasonable to not want to spend hours of your life in a car every week? Really?
Toss in the rampant gang activity, which is not at all sensationalised by the media based on what I've seen and heard from people who live in gang areas, and they're not conducive to wanting to raise a family. If the only thing they've got going for them is a cheap house, miles away from where the new buyer currently lives, why would you? -
Hard News: Behind those Herald…, in reply to Russell Brown,
But let’s not be demonising South Auckland.
Oh, I'm not intending to, that just happened to be an easy example of a battered house that's got a price expectation of $silly (as opposed to $ludicrous or $ROFLMFAO), to demonstrate to Glen just what something around the bottom quartile of Auckland's housing market actually looks like. It just so happens, too, that most of the houses that are in the contiguous urban area and priced <$600k are in South Auckland, which is consistent with the only three suburbs with a <$600k median price being in the old Manukau City area.
The problem with telling people with city jobs to buy in the far south is that that it locks out people who want to buy homes in their own neighbourhoods.
Like my wife and I, who would really rather like to buy in Ellerslie, where we live and where we have social connections as well as transport options and community amenity, but yeah, well, we don't have $squillions in parental largesse available to assist us on our way.
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Hard News: Behind those Herald…, in reply to Glen Koorey,
I’m pretty sure that most first home buyers will be aiming closer to the lower quartile (or even lower 10%)
As an example, Glen, this fine specimen filters out of TradeMe's results when the maximum price is the extravagant sum of $500k. That won't even be the bottom 10%, which will be occupied by single-bedroom apartments and leasehold townhouses, and the house is in an area that is serviced poorly by public transport as well as being about a 45-minute commute to the CBD in the peak shoulders.
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Hard News: Behind those Herald…, in reply to Moz,
I suspect that Glen, being from Christchurch, has no idea what the bottom quartile of Auckland's housing actually looks like. Zero non-private-car transport options, and deciding whether you prefer blue or red when you pick the gang affiliation of your neighbours.
Anyone able to translate the worst parts of Otara and Mangere into Christchurch?
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Hard News: Behind those Herald…, in reply to Glen Koorey,
I'm pretty sure that most first home buyers will be aiming closer to the lower quartile
Bottom quartile in Auckland is, last I saw, in the vicinity of $600k, meaning a 20% deposit of around $120k, and competing with speculators who are eyeing up the gentrification-induced capital gains that come with such cheap housing.
The reality is, in Auckland, you are facing upwards of $600k or a commute of well over an hour on a good day. That's the binary option unless you're OK with a one-bedroom apartment. My wife and I could afford a house, if we were prepared to live halfway to Hamilton (literally) and commute to the jobs we both very much enjoy that are located in the Auckland CBD. It would, of course, come with a standard commute of about 90 minutes each way, stretching out to well over two hours at least once a month. A daily commute that we are not willing to inflict on our two pre-school children, and, honestly, we should not have to be forced to make that choice in order to buy a house on an eighth-decile household income!
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Hard News: Behind those Herald…, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
The secret is drainlaying…
…and being in Palmerston North!Don't forget "He lived at home, paying $50 in board a week".
There's a very consistent theme of parental largesse that runs through most of these stories, be it wedding gifts, equity gifts, or room and board at below-market rates (frequently $0).