Through the roof
For years, land-price inflation has received most of the blame for making shelter – the second in the hierarchy of needs – eye-wateringly expensive.
But the cost of building on that land has conspired to push the national median house price to new heights of exorbitance: in a range from $795,000 to $980,000, depending on who you listen to. In Auckland, it’s $1.15 million.
That’s a lot of money for households whose average gross family income pre-Covid was just over $107,000, and it’s even more of a problem for people who don’t live in a convenient family arrangement.
“Fifteen years ago, we had a quote for $90,000. It ended up being $800,000 or a bit more.”
It means for many young people, home ownership resembles an unscalable cliff. But older people with families can face a similar scenario, and Nick Griffiths is one of them.
Griffiths is a former soft ware developer who wanted to enlarge his home in Devonport for his partner and three children and saw the cost of the work rise nearly ninefold in a decade and a half.
“Fifteen years ago, we had a quote for $90,000. The next time we looked at it, it was $300,000 and then $500,000,” he says. “It ended up being $800,000 or a bit more.”
This was the price of turning a 120sq m three-bedroom 1920s house into a four-bedroom place of
