Screwing more out of Auckland renters

Written By: - Date published: 10:21 am, January 10th, 2017 - 12 comments
Categories: class war, housing, useless - Tags: , , , ,

2014 – Housing taking more of incomes

2014 – Rise in housing costs outpaces income

2015 – Auckland rents keep soaring, others slip

2016 – Rising Auckland rental prices causing financial stress

2016 – The surging cost of renting an Auckland house, in one terrifying animation

2016 – Recruiting Auckland teachers ‘a nightmare’ due to housing costs

2017 – Brace yourself: Auckland rents are rising

Auckland rents are set to increase this month with landlords blaming housing shortages and an unprecedented interest in their properties.

The Auckland Property Investors Association warns that rent hikes could be more dramatic than in previous years as landlords look to pass on the cost of rising interest rates to their tenants.

Hey Aucklanders – loving this brighter future?

12 comments on “Screwing more out of Auckland renters ”

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  1. adam 1
    10 January 2017 at 12:11 pm

    Greed, the thing with it, those in it’s clutch are never satisfied.

    They like to blame everything else but their own greed as well, what a funny age we live in.

  2. Treetop 2
    10 January 2017 at 12:36 pm

    More over crowding, less food in the house, less electricity during the winter. This is the hard reality for those who rent in Auckland. The lower an income the worse the situation is.

    Rent and bond to tenant a place is out of reach for many.

    Shame on the government.

  3. Sabine 3
    10 January 2017 at 1:04 pm

    oh but see it’s all good, cause if they can’t afford the rent they can apply for a Accommodation Supplement.
    I mean whats not to like about the Tax payer funding the rents for working people? No matter how much the rents go up, the Taxpayer will fund it. Woot Woot.

    But hey, they can all just move out of Auckland to somewhere else, right?

    • Rae 3.1
      13 January 2017 at 6:48 pm

      I wonder how all this would look if it were the landlord having to go cap in hand to MSD or whatever their current incarnation might be.

  4. RichardP 4
    10 January 2017 at 2:14 pm

    I imagine a day when the lattes will cease to flow and the schools will all have to be private due to the inability of staff not earning 6 figures to actually rent in Auckland. And yet there are more expensive cities in the world and all the services that require low to middle income earning staff are there – how do they manage it?

    • Sabine 4.1
      10 January 2017 at 4:10 pm

      rent control.
      tenancy protection
      and the simple understanding that a good city is home to all income groups and not just absentee landlords and property speculators .

  5. DH 5
    10 January 2017 at 3:46 pm

    IMO it’s a good illustration of the ratchet effect and shows why housing ‘bubbles’ deflate by themselves without a crash in the market.

    One of my wishes I posted here some time back was for property investors to be hit with a CGT whenever they increased their rents. This is why.

  6. Andrea 6
    10 January 2017 at 7:48 pm

    It sounds like blackmail: ‘interest rates are going up so somebody, not the ‘investor’ is going to have to pay’. The poor suckers renting, and the rest of NZ via taxes, and those fools called ‘savers’ who are bumping along the bottom for income.

    If that’s ‘investing’ – it sounds like a vicious game indeed. Heads I win: tails you lose.

    Is there any way that the rentier sector can be required to have only a long-term, fixed rate mortgage, and NOT dump their business risks onto people who cannot finagle their pay as easily as the rentiers can?

    • Colonial Viper 6.1
      10 January 2017 at 7:55 pm

      The reason the system is called “capitalism” is because the “capitalists” run the board.

      Some political party could propose rent controls but AFAIK most MPs in Parliament are landlords with rental properties.

  7. Stephen 7
    11 January 2017 at 8:25 am

    I am now 67 years’ old. I grew up in a rent-controlled state house, for which I am enormously grateful. I got a free education, and free health care – again, I am grateful. I owe this country. So as the population bubble of the post-war years approached retirement age I was determined to find a way of supporting myself without having recourse to a pension that would have to be paid by the younger generation. he only way I could do that was to keep working – which I am doing, although I get flak for locking up a job a young person could do – and to buy a couple of flats to rent out, which I have done. I charge less than “the market”, I have never put a tenant out, I have never increased rent whilst a tenant has lived there, and mostly people I rent to live in their home for years. I am friends with the people who live in the flats. I have no debt to deduct against income, I haven’t sold the flats so I haven’t made this vast profit I am accused of making on price rises, and I pay tax on the rental income.
    Now I get criticised for ripping the young off for being a landlord. How to avoid bludging off the young through the pension then? Invest in New Zealand businesses run by the corrupt capitalists?
    Why don’t we address the true issue of the housing shortage? First, build more State Houses – which means tax increases for all of us. Second, have proper tenancy protection laws assuring people of a peaceful home to live in in a good state of repair. Third, control rents, and (again) increase taxes so that we can ensure that if rents are above 20% of a family income the state will pick up the difference – which will reinforce to governments the advantage of having an adequate stock of its own state houses. Taxing capitalists never has resulted in changing a capitalist maket

    • Wensleydale 7.1
      11 January 2017 at 10:19 am

      You sound like a decent bloke, Stephen, and a thoroughly reasonable landlord. I don’t think anyone’s saying all landlords are rapacious brigands determined to squeeze the last drop of blood from tenants already at breaking point, but there are some absolute villains out there who don’t display your level of restraint. And they seem more than happy to increase rents, despite their tenants current financial circumstances and obvious difficulty in meeting that expense. Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.

  8. Peter 8
    13 January 2017 at 7:12 pm

    Control Council rates on housing (up 45% in five years)

    Control insurance premiums on housing (up 50% in five years)

    Control charge-out rates for plumbers, electricians and builders ( up ?% in five years).

    Then you might get stable rental prices.

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