John Key famously said that he didn’t want Kiwis to become tenants in their own country. He then went on to merrily allow the sell-off of vast amounts of land and an unknown number of houses to overseas buyers.
But being tenants in our own country is starting to look like the good old days. Who can afford the rent? The latest figures are startling:
Queenstown rents up 26.7% compared to a year ago with increases in parts of Wellington also in double digits, Auckland not far behind, Christchurch rents declining
With a title that long you know it has to be the good people at interest.co.nz.
… Interest.co.nz has begun collating the median rents in 19 major urban areas throughout the country, based on bonds received each month by the Tenancy Services division of the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment.
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Nationally, the median rent from bonds received in January this year was $390 a week, up $20 (5.4%) compared to January last year.In Auckland Central, which includes all of the suburbs within the old boundaries of the former Auckland City Council, the median rent was also up by $20 a week over the same period, rising from $475 a week in January last year to $495 a week in January this year, (+4.2%).
But in the rest of the Auckland region the median rents in January were up by between $30 and $50 a week compared to a year earlier giving increases that ranged from from 6.7% in Manukau to 11.1% in Rodney.
Those are significant amounts of money to come out of household budgets each week, particularly for those people on lower incomes and the increases are at a level where they are likely to be be putting some families under financial stress.
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However it’s not just Aucklanders that are paying more to rent a home, the table shows that rents are also up substantially in most other parts of the country.In Whakatane the median rent in January was up $40 a week (14.3%) compared to a year earlier. In Porirua and Upper Hutt it was up $45 a week, (12.9% and 15.3% respectively) compared to a year earlier.
The most expensive rental area monitored by interest.co.nz is the Queenstown-Lakes District, where the median rent in January was $570 a week, up a whopping $120 (26.7%) compared to January last year.
The only area that recorded a decline was Christchurch, where the January median has fallen for two years in a row, from $405 a week in January 2015, to $390 in January 2016 and $370 in January this year.
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According to the 2013 census, 512,000 households were renting and interest.co.nz estimates that number is likely to have increased to around 550,000 now.That means that every $20 increase in average rent sucks up an extra $11 million a week, or $572 million a year that is not being spent in other parts of the economy. …
Great work – well worth reading the full piece.
What happens to cities when ordinary people cannot afford to live in them any more?
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