There is no housing problem!

Written By: - Date published: 10:25 am, May 11th, 2017 - 19 comments
Categories: housing, national, spin, useless, you couldn't make this shit up - Tags: , , , , , ,

Unbelievable:

Better for first-home buyers now – Government

Nick Smith says figures for first home buyers nationally show housing is more affordable than when National became government.

Nick Smith has lost the plot (along with the portfolio).

The Government says first homes are more affordable, despite a new measure showing houses are out of reach for the majority of first-time buyers.

Four-fifths of potential first home buyers could not comfortably afford a house in New Zealand, according to an MBIE report.

The long-delayed housing Housing Affordability Measure (HAM) was finally released on Wednesday after almost two years of delay.

The new Housing Affordability Measure (HAM) is described here (Henry Cooke on Stuff):

New HAM measure is powerful but won’t stop the spin

Throughout the entire housing crisis, while median prices in Auckland have close to doubled in the last seven years, the Government has lacked an actual measure on what they consider “unaffordable”. This situation let John Key point to a grab bag of Trade Me listings when it was politically useful, and hamstrung journalists and others looking to get a rigorous picture of the problem.

Today that changed – kind of. The Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment (MBIE) have finally released the Housing Affordability Measure (HAM), which Cabinet commissioned way back in 2012. It has a funny name and is very complicated but it does do one very important thing: it puts a specific number on unaffordability.

If you’re a single renter who has less than $690 of pre-tax income left each week after paying rent or a hypothetical mortgage payment in your area, you’re below the threshold, and your housing options are unaffordable.

The story that number tells is a bit more complicated than “everything’s screwed” but isn’t that far off. With that number in mind, as of mid-2015, four fifths of renters could not afford to buy even a cheap house near where they currently lived, and close to two thirds couldn’t comfortably afford to continue to rent. (MBIE estimates those renters make up about a third of the country.) As ever, things are the worst in Auckland, where 95 per cent of the renters in Manakau could not comfortably afford mortgage payments on a starter home in their area.

MBIE got this number by taking a look at the exact median amount left over for the entire country in mid-2013, and then adjusting for inflation and for household size.

So no, the picture is likely not quite as bleak as “four fifths of Kiwi renters will never be able to afford a home,” but it does show that there is a definitely a serious problem, and in Auckland that problem is getting even worse. …

Read the full piece for plenty more and pretty graphs.

In other news (Liam Dann in The Herald):

Young house hunters should just give up

Last week’s property statistics were horrible for anyone hoping to get on the property ladder in Auckland.
…
If you convert that 12.3 per cent rise into dollars (which, unfortunately, is what we have to pay for things with) the average value of a house in the Auckland region rose by $114,000 in the past 12 months.

I’m not sure how many flat whites that is, but if I was young and contemplating the Auckland housing market I’d waste my money on something a bit stronger.

Normal people should probably just give up. If you are on any kind of regular wage then scrimping and saving to buy a house is futile.
…
Based on the case studies we’ve seen in the media in the past few weeks some young people are so desperate to own a home they are gearing every aspect of their life towards it. They are effectively learning to become property investors in order to get into the market. This is a terrible way to resolve the housing crisis. The last thing New Zealand needs is more property investors.

To quote Dr Oliver Hartwich from economic think tank The New Zealand Initiative: “Booming property markets create a mirage of wealth, not wealth itself.” That’s not a lefty liberal, millennial view. That’s the view of most economic and financial market experts in this country.
…
The next Government, regardless of which party forms it, needs to confront housing inequality. Otherwise New Zealand will eventually have its own Brexit or Donald Trump-style backlash. …

Housing affordability plummets across New Zealand
Auckland housing affordability tumbles
Housing affordability ‘crisis point’
Auckland houses ‘severely unaffordable’
‘I see no way of ever being able to own my own home’
Loans for first homes jump 43% in 2 years
NZ ‘half a million houses’ short
Auckland needs to double number of new homes – data

And so on…

19 comments on “There is no housing problem! ”

  • Comments are now closed

  1. Rosemary McDonald 1
    11 May 2017 at 11:09 am

    No housing?

    No problem.

    Sorted.

  2. Keith 2
    11 May 2017 at 11:11 am

    Failing all else on housing, the National Party are now solely reliant upon lies. Nothing new there but they getting far more blatant stupid lies at that.

    Yes Nick, 10+ times the average wage to buy a home, the vast vast majority of first home buyers are now excluded from the market and the best this idiot and his lying party can come up with is ” housing is more affordable than when National became government”. How embarrassing and how fucking insulting is that!

    They are out of ideas, they know the housing bubble is propping up the economy and they want to cling to power any way they can.

    Time for a new government who, a, gives a shit and b, has a genuine plan to sort this mess out!

    • Draco T Bastard 2.1
      11 May 2017 at 1:00 pm

      They are out of ideas

      They have ideas but their ideas always make things worse for the nation in general although it will make a few rich people richer.

      That’s now becoming excruciatingly obvious now and so they’re having to lie even more than usual.

      • michelle 2.1.1
        11 May 2017 at 1:39 pm

        Even worse than our government lying more is they have the police lying for them so its like a disease its spreading

    • NZJester 2.2
      11 May 2017 at 2:22 pm

      Technically he is not lying as for Wealthy foreigners as well as well healed National party supporters who have received large tax breaks, had the tax burden moved off them to the less well off, got bargain basement shares in SOEs returning nice dividends and lots of new ways to funnel their money through tax havens it has become more affordable for them to afford a house in New Zealand than when National first came to power.
      All those middle-class idiots who voted for National and those of us who would never vote for National are the only ones finding it impossible to buy a house.

    • Liberal Realist 2.3
      11 May 2017 at 7:40 pm

      Failing all else on housing, the National Party are now solely reliant upon lies. Nothing new there but they getting far more blatant stupid lies at that.

      Yes Nick, 10+ times the average wage to buy a home, the vast vast majority of first home buyers are now excluded from the market and the best this idiot and his lying party can come up with is ” housing is more affordable than when National became government”. How embarrassing and how fucking insulting is that!

      Clearly Nick and his Nasty Party colleagues don’t give a fuck! It doesn’t matter how embarrassing the lie is. Insulting the ‘plebs’ is part of the Nasty Party DNA, they just can’t help themselves.

      Nick must believe his own bullshit! How does the quote go? “How can you tell when a politician is lying? His lips are moving!”

      A creative solution to lying politicians could be a requirement for them to be hooked up to a polygraph as a prerequisite to media interviews and public speeches. Not a bad test either! How difficult is it for a Nasty Party politician to tell the truth? Is it even possible?

      I’d be interested to know if any of Nick’s trusts hold interests in residential property?

      https://www.parliament.nz/media/3926/2017-summary-report-final.pdf

  3. saveNZ 3
    11 May 2017 at 11:26 am

    Just do what Bill does and gamble $293m at Sky City! No questions asked! Or asked but after private negotiations, 4 months community service. And lets face it, nobody would have cared if he had not got involved with Mega and FBI vendetta and just stuck with property and gambling and whatever else one does to be able to gamble $293 million at Sky City.

    http://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/news/article.cfm?c_id=3&objectid=11835412

    So the Paua poacher gets 4 years prison.
    A WINZ women who ‘had a relationship with another WINZ person’ gets 1 year of prison for fraud and her kids put into CYFS.
    8.5 years jail for businessman who wrote letters to Fonterra pretending he was going to put 1080 in milk powder.

    Gosh, no wonder we have so many new resident and non resident property investers these days! Crime does pay if you are rich enough!

  4. Ad 4
    11 May 2017 at 11:39 am

    They’ve just GOT to keep Smith on.

  5. Draco T Bastard 5
    11 May 2017 at 12:52 pm

    The next Government, regardless of which party forms it, needs to confront housing inequality.

    Yes they do but is even Labour or the Green willing to build enough state houses fast enough to ensure everyone is housed with a lifetime lease for the house that they’re in?

    • tc 5.1
      11 May 2017 at 2:16 pm

      Rhetorical question draco. Both those parties are way too middle of the road for that.

  6. Cinny 6
    11 May 2017 at 1:42 pm

    Far out Nickoff, looking forward to our next encounter, you are a National Disgrace.

    I would really like to know how many Tory voters actually support him and his ideas, that don’t live in Smiths electorate excluding English, Brownlee and co.

  7. Richard@Downsouth 7
    11 May 2017 at 9:38 pm

    I see to recall when 1st home buyers could afford a house, and could slowly afford the 5% deposit…

  8. Tanz 8
    12 May 2017 at 12:25 am

    Labour opened up the door though to overseas investors with the Free Trade Agreement. House prices were reasonable before then, when Kiwis sold mostly to Kiwis, homes to live in, not to make whopping fortunes out of, whilst locking out all new generations to come. Thanks Labour. National are no better, they blame the council for poor planning, rather than themselves, for doing nothing. A whole generation betrayed, locked out, not given the chance and right of owning a home, one of the best and most satisfying life achievements. Tragic really.

  9. simonm 9
    12 May 2017 at 2:33 pm

    After all that dreadful publicity, Nick Smith is sure to be cheered by this bit of good news. Some buyers are finding it easier than ever before to purchase a home in New Zealand apparently…

    http://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/news/article.cfm?c_id=3&objectid=11853725