People are often quick to climb in with criticism when things go wrong in the economy - but not till after the event. Hindsight is very comforting that way.
And yet, things seldom go wrong without at least some signs ahead – and usually it is very clear signs – that something is going wrong.
New Zealand governments - and this criticism is by no means confined to the current administration - have shown a consistent pattern over the years of ignoring developing problems until these are of a magnitude that engulf us.
There needs to be a change of attitude.
I was prompted to write this by the results of the latest ANZ Business Outlook Survey. Away from the 'headline' news in the survey of overall business confidence etc, was the specific findings of, in the words of ANZ chief economist Sharon Zollner, a "truly spectacular crash" in sentiment in the residential construction sector.
People, a downturn is coming. Have no doubt.
Now, clearly, if we talk about residential construction, it has been very hot. Statistics New Zealand figures show that we have been consenting new dwelling builds at a rate of over 50,000 per year.
However, there are clear signs that the unbelievably negative sentiment unfolding in the ANZ survey is starting to translate into the figures.
According to the Stats NZ figures, June was the third consecutive month in which the number of consents fell, on a seasonally-adjusted basis.
The number of consents in June was, on a seasonally-adjusted basis (IE taking out natural variations according to the time of year and state of the weather), over 11.5% lower than the number in March. Yes, over 11.5% lower.
Looking back through the (seasonally adjusted) figures, we actually have to go back to the period between November 2016 and January 2017 for the last time building consent numbers fell for three months in a row.
That's a long time.
And if we want to beat the three month sequence, the last time we had FOUR months in a row of consent number falls it was the period from May 2008 to August 2008.
Yep, that's right. 2008. Does the year ring a bell?
The Global Financial Crisis was the last time we had four consecutive months of consent number falls. And I'm betting now that July 2022 will see us match that 'record'.
People may accuse me of being alarmist by identifying a drop in numbers from historic peaks. And the industry view is that we are currently trying to build too many houses. The cost pressures in the industry certainly signal that.
Executives at construction giant Fletcher Building recently suggested a sustainable number of new builds for the NZ construction industry was about 35,000 a year.
So, okay. Accepted. But do we think that the numbers will slide down to a nice 35,000 and stay there?
Well, they might. History would suggest they will not though.
I think you could easily see the numbers of consents around halving (IE to about 25,000) within the next 12 to 18 months.
Remember also, that a consent is not a built dwelling. Chances are a fair number of the 50,000 dwellings consented in the year to June don't happen in the face of rampantly rising costs - and falling house prices.
The other point is, there's been a sharp rise in the number of multi-unit dwellings consented. And a commensurate fall in stand-alone houses.
If there's trouble ahead in the industry, what consents are most likely to be sacrificed, the ones for multi-unit developments, or the ones for single stand alone houses? I think we know the answer.
In fairness, it's hard to be sure whether a halving in consent numbers over the next year or so would be a problem or not. And we don't actually really know where we are with housing stock at the moment. Do we still have an undersupply? By how much?
What we don't want though is a repetition of the old boom to bust to boom and back again cycle.
The fact is it takes our building industry a long time to recover from the 'bust' period.
If we talk in June years (and all info here is sourced from Stats NZ), Auckland consented 21,609 new dwellings in the 12 months to June 2022. This contrasted with just 3223 in the 12 months to June 2009. It took many years to get from where we were to where we are now.
Likewise, with the nationwide picture, there were 50,736 new dwellings consented in the 12 months to June 2022. The low point of 13,539 was hit in 2011 (just to compare with the Auckland figures, for the June 2009 year, the national consents number was a little over 14,000).
That trough that Auckland and NZ hit was a heck of a trough. We can't just blame the GFC. Auckland's consent numbers nearly halved (from almost 13,000 to under 7000) in the period from 2004 to 2007. It may well have been interest rate rises that prompted that. But I don't remember any alarm being raised from the government.
So, New Zealand was significantly under-building houses, particularly in Auckland from about the mid-2000s onward. This situation pre-dated the Global Financial Crisis of 2008 but was then significantly worsened because of it.
For largely political purposes under the National government of 2008-17 there was large scale inbound migration. Labour, despite promises to the contrary, didn't stop the trend. This into a country not building enough houses. No foresight.
Look what happened.
Then, however, the closure of our borders in early 2020 gave use an excellent opportunity to properly get a handle on our population/migration issues.
There was a chance to put make moves toward a population strategy (start by answering the simple question – how many people do we want in this country?) And there was a chance to back this up with a sensible, but structured, policy on immigration.
We have not done that. Chance gone. Lack of foresight.
And you just know that the political response following the border reopening will be the ramping up of inbound migration again.
Oh, but at least we are building a lot of houses now, right?
Well, let's see about that. I don't know how many houses is the right number for us to build. But it needs to be planned. And if governments need to step in to smooth the flow of houses then they should.
The reality is that this Government should not be congratulating itself for annual consent numbers of 50,000 - it should already be seeing the obvious signs of sharp decline and making plans to ensure this will not be the precipitous decline I think it will be.
To finish up with a more general view of this lack of foresight and anticipation, let's talk inflation.
As of March 2021 we had an annual rate of inflation of 1.5%. But the signs of inflation were there well before it officially exploded, with the annual figure to June 2021 rising to 3.3% from that 1.5% as of March 2021.
Go back to the ANZ Business Outlook Survey again and it was discerning cost and pricing pressures from October 2020, more seriously from December 2020 and pretty darn seriously on a month by month basis from February 2021.
The warnings were there. They were blissfully ignored.
So, that's just two examples, well, three really if you include the migration mishaps. Stretching my mind back further I can think of the finance company debacle of 2007-2010. That too was one that could be seen coming a mile back as the sector mushroomed. But again. No government action till disaster had struck.
What is required to make this a more forward looking country? For us to actually take on board the signs as they emerge of trouble?
I think government departments must at least get inklings of problems ahead, but is there a culture of don't cause problems? Don't raise your head above the parapets with 'negatives'?
Our politicians like to climb on to obvious bandwagons, but they seemingly don't want to cause waves ahead of times either.
I'm not sure what the answer is. The fact is though, that without people in important places seeing and assessing warning signs and being willing to get their hands dirty by finding solutions before problems become too big, we are going to keep repeating all the same mistakes.
And yes, that is going to include flooding the country with migrants again at a time when the building industry is withering on the vine.
Not for the first time I say with all sincerity, I hope I am wrong.
What do you think will happen?
65 Comments
Even though NZ and Aussie are both solid devotees to the bubble economics model, both countries didn't really experience a 'bust' during the GFC, partly because of the stimulus out of China. And yes, NZ and Aussie were both hot spots for immigration, bogus education exports, and money laundering. But I digress.
Anyway, if you need a pat on the back (like most Kiwis seem to want), things already look worse in the U.S. Median single-family home prices just experienced the largest two-month drop in recorded history at -11.9% (NAHB Housing Mkt Index), which is greater than the GFC.
The housing Ponzi is coming apart at the seams.
NZ had a really nasty bust in residential construction in 2007, before the GFC struck. It followed aggressive hiking of the OCR in 2005-2006 and the collapse of mezzanine finance.
My livelihood, and that of many people working in residential development (builders, tradies, architects, engineers etc), was severely affected.
So, been there - done that, and learnt a lot from it. And that's why, in early 2021, I started to mention repeatedly on this website that, despite the rosy consent numbers, things would turn to custard, especially from the second half of 2022.
David talks of lack of foresight, and that's certainly true of government. But it's true of this website too, which well in to this year was consistently reporting the strong building consents data without looking beyond the headline stats. So this lack of foresight is very widespread indeed. And when I raised this issue several times in 2021, hardly anyone in the comments section seemed interested. Didn't bother me, but I thought it odd, given the large significance to the economy of a residential construction sector slump.
So, I'm sorry to say again 'I told you so - a long time ago'.
House Mouse, your insights have been great, thank you so much. With construction activity now falling, what is your and other investors' prediction of the Auckland housing market?
I understand INZ has a new immigration scheme from 31 July. Do you know what this will do to immigration numbers?
What is your expectation about the house price level in Auckland?
The reason there is a construction boom and pending bust is due to government actions which:
- created a tax distortion for investment properties by removing interest deductibility for existing stock
- Reintroducing the temporary LVR restrictions which prevented owner-occupiers and investors from purchasing existing stock without 20% or 40% deposits - however they were able to buy new builds from 5% deposit
End result is enormous inflation and rising interest rates and next will come the horror stories where buyers lose their purchases along with the company collapses and bankruptcies from the construction industry
Yes, the biggest distortion has been allowing speculators to bludge tax-free while productive work pays most of the tax in NZ. Also why we have anemic business investment and an NZX starved for investors, to the point NZ companies list on the ASX.
Speculator Entitlement Mentality has brought us to this economic precipice...now critical workers have been so exploited they're finding it makes no sense to stay and be exploited more.
‘For the good of the country’ is a fairly ominous turn of phrase, and one favoured by totalitarian governments throughout history.
Yes individuals are acting in their own interests, we do still live in a free society where people are free to choose how to live their own lives, rather than those choices being imposed on them by the state.
The sad thing is the politicians who are supposed to be acting in the interests of the country instead create these distortions and incoherency in the tax system which adds red tape and creates economic booms and busts because they think it’s in their own political interests.
They also need to include the house price index into the CPI. This alone would have prevented the bubble, by raising interest rates earlier.
Now, they need to stop raising the OCR. We have a serious deflation problem in the housing sector, and this could easily trigger a financial crisis worse than 2008.
I blame the polls , David ... or should I say , I blame the government's obsession with the polls ... they're freaking out , rabbits in the headlights , frozen by the reality that the love of the electorate is ebbing away from them .. Jacindamania is over , kaput ....
... they're left with spraying helicopter money around the planet to appease the poor huddled masses from Darfield to Denmark ... and with Shortland Street to highlight their healthcare recruitment policy ... Sigh !
While I agree Cindy's strategy is strongly anchored around populism (as they all are including with her sparring partners), the idea about maintaining house prices in the stratosphere while providing affordable affordable houses at the same time should have set off the alarm bells. The sheeple lapped it up.
You could say the inverse also. There's very few countries I've travelled to and lived in and been significantly impressed by the cheapness of housing relative to local incomes.
Maybe Japan? All we need is plumetting population levels, intensive housing and 20x more people to begin with.
Yes they are analogous on a state level. California, has land use policies very similar to many Commonwealth countries, ie restrictive land use policies, yet even so, NZ is the leader in housing un-affordability on the median income mutliple.
States that have less land use restrictions have more affordable housing, and those that don't have less affordable housing.
Is it causative though?
Areas with high levels of existing housing generally coincide with more restrictive land use policy. They're generally mature property markets that have a higher degree of demand.
Areas wanting housing growth have fewer barriers to new housing. But they're also often less desirable locations, and have all manner of other company and personal tax incentives to lure in punters.
Living near the beach in California is more expensive than building a house in the desert. NZs even worse because there's only a small handful of cities large enough to cater to a decent range of jobs, with all sorts of legacy infrastructure issues.
No it's not causative. Although there's some degree of truth to the argument, it's also hugely oversimplified by the likes of Hugh Pavletich.
For example, there's many reasons beyond more liberal land use regulation, that Houston has affordable housing. Those factors include:
- Huge economies of scale
- Large and low cost construction workforce
- Large areas of flat or flattish land = cheaper and easier to build
- Property taxation approach
This isn't to say that more liberal planning regulation wouldn't help in NZ. It almost certainly would (although could generate unintended consequences)
If you greatly removed regulation, I think you could get build costs in NZ down to $1000 a square.
As it is, you'd struggle building something pretty average for $2000. And that's why having any existing house, even if it's a rank old drafty damp dump doesn't depreciate down to zero like it should, because replacing it is too damn expensive. Renovating it's even worse.
There are elements of truth to most theories. No matter what you do, Auckland is likely always going to be less affordable than the likes of West Coast, but neither place will be as cheap to build on as a Greenfields development on some dry flat paddock.
Cost to build 195m2, 4 bed, 2 bath - no margin whatsoever - currently $1,670.00 inc gst. And that will rise sharply as new insulation to floor, wall, window & ceiling comes into effect - & a further rise for Ribraft foundations - about $15,000.00 or$76.92m2. Good luck with $1,000.00m2 !
So let's take your examples with Houston/Texas and compare to Los Angelos/California.
California because of its size has a larger economy of scale than Texas so should be cheaper. It's not.
It also has a large and low-cost construction workforce due to Manuel Labour, so should be just as cheap. It's not.
Both have large areas of flat land, and if flat land was a proxy for affordability then Australia would be giving it away. It's not the flatness of the land that is the difference.
And property is part of restrictive, or not, land use policies.
All those things that NZ does NOT have as you say for affordable housing, we had even less of prior to early 1990, AND YET historically up until that time NZ had always been 3x median income multiple, the same as Texas was then, and is almost still now.
As mentioned previously, California has restrictions on a lot of its construction labour to be kosher. You can get a border jumper to build you a deck or repaint your house relatively cheaply, but a fully signed off house often only permits legal accredited workers.
So the labour cost of your position is heavily influenced on whether you want to overlook a labour force who aren't legal residents.
As for topography, while California is a large state, the areas where the action is deal with coastal and earthquake issues not applicable in most of Texas, their centres are effectively valleys so you're either hemmed in by mountains or have to build on elevated sites further adding to cost. Spreading out further has to contend with bridges/tunnels/more freeways.
Obviously if you remove regulations and oversight you make things cheaper, but all things being equal, California (at least the parts people want to occupy) is going to be more expensive to generate housing in than somewhere like Texas.
We'll find out in a few decades if Texas can do to housing the the US as a whole has done to healthcare, i.e. go for broke and if anyone stuffs up take them to court.
You're missing how land is valued in a market.
For example, two identical flat sections with two equal purchasers would be expected to sell for the same price. But if you alter the supply and demand on either side, then you would get a price difference.
Now make one of the sections with a slope. If the slope gives elevation and a view, then there would be a positive extra value over the flat section. But the slope will cause more excavation costs, so that is a negative value that has to be deduced. The net result would be expected to be higher than the flat section, but not always.
In any market, you do this, Texas or California, or NZ you will get this differential. However, the base price that they all start from is what it costs to buy the original raw land. In Texas, because of fewer restrictions, this is closer to its underlying rural land price (if its last use was rural) but in California and NZ because of zoning restrictions this rural land is monopoly gained up to 20x its rural land value, without any amenity value being added.
And the price of all land from the fringe to the city center is a multiple of what you can buy the fringe land for, ie the cheaper the fringe land, the relatively cheaper the CBD land will be compared to a city where the fringe price was dearer.
Further flat land does not automatically make it cheaper to build. What you need is good ground, and a lot of flat land is ex-swamp land which costs a lot to remediate. Christchurch is a good example of how expensive it can be to build on bad flat ground.
Your points of infrastructure costs, earthquake allowance etc. are correct. But that is a negative against the land, and in a free market, those extra costs would be deducted from the cost you pay for the raw land. Not added to in as it is under land with a monopoly advantage.
Hugh P was spot on.
It wasn't Hugh who said, 'If you get the land wrong, everything else is wrong,' but that is almost a universal law. And without being able to see that, you can never see how anything else works and reacts to that.
I have lived and developed in both Texas and NZ. Almost all of NZ's cost of housing issues can be pointed at restrictive land use policies.
And all he is saying has been acknowledged by all Govts. (and then ignored for ideology and votes), the Productivity Commission and the likes of Treasury economists.
And what do you think are the unintended consequences you think would happen if we had more liberal planning regulations like we used to?
So when you built in Texas, you did it somewhere coastal and elevated?
Interdesting.
I'd liken what you're talking about to the last 5 years or so in ChCh. That housing was cheap to do, partially because of deregulation, and partially because it was mainly flat greenfield land.
Texas has no real elevated coastal land, which can make it just as hard and dearer to build on with coastal sands, swamp land, exposure to the coast etc, than any land with slope.
It does have rolling hill Caliche clay lands around Austin, which is worse than building on NZ clay soils.
To build on much of Christchurch's flat land is very expensive because of the bad ground. That is why many people moved to Selwyn and parts of Waimak where the soils are better for build to begin with.
The worse the land is, the less you pay for it, or would do in a freer more deregulated market. And in a freer market, you don't have to pay that much more than its last economic value ie its rural value if it's greenfield.
41% prefer Ardern as Prime Minister compared to 22% for Luxon.
Jacinda Ardern's Labour government promise (and I believe want) a better and fairer country, but the implemented policies often have the opposite effect to that intended.
National under Luxon provide no vision of a better country, they just seek to restore the easy money for the rich, through cheap immigrant labour, loosening of environmental regulation and property speculation.
Unfortunately National will probably deliver on their promises.
I mean, where to start?
Zoning laws that reward development on city fringes in a country where there is little capability or desire to provide things like rapid transit to connect people to urban centres - other than motorways.
As such, we have no knowledge of building affordable density, a three bedroom apartment costs millions of dollars and we lose billions of dollars to congestion that people literally have no choice but to endure - and in the process - cause.
So instead of a steady pipeline of central intensification, we have a building industry that seems to want to knock out single-level dwellings, but with so much variation that we can't even get scale on those either.
None of these problems can be solved by importing more people, or suppressing wages, or deferring rapid transit projects or blowing them out of proportion, but I'm betting that's what we'll do.
And a council that don’t want to increase density in the central isthmus because they don’t know exactly where the stations will be (hint: somewhere near Sandringham or Dominion roads) or if National will cancel it (hint: National will still do something even if rapid bus). There is always a good reason to not allow density where it is obviously needed.
New country suburbia as experienced in places like NZ, Australia and the US is really not a sustainable model. The compounding problem being it's now part of the culture, the answer lies in intensification as you say, but opposed by both existing owners wanting to preserve their neighbourhood, and prospective buyers expecting the same space and lifestyle their parents generation enjoyed.
I see townhouses and apartments in Ponsonby and Grey Lynn, and they're not empty. Plenty of willing buyers if the council simply liberalises land use rather than pandering to NIMBYs' sense of entitlement to erode freehold property rights and enforce their own desires over others' land.
You could start by reading Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, anything by Alan Evans, and Alain Bertaud, or the NZ Productivity Commission's report on Housing.
There is nothing more factual incorrect than the reasons you have given about why housing is unaffordable.
Jurisdictions that have fewer land use restrictions, both up and out, have more affordable housing.
It's the very issue of forced compact city thinking that is causing our housing unaffordability.
If I have misread that, apologies.
Yes, if we want more affordable and better quality housing, we need to have fewer restrictions both up and out, including fewer restrictions on monopoly suppliers of materials and those that provide consenting and infrastructure services like council etc.
Note that this does not mean it is carte blanche and there is no need to protect environmental lands, elite soils, and heritage areas etc.
I read an interesting link from PDK a while back. It was talking about climate change and global energy needs in the future, though the same principle applies here.
Essentially as a species we are driven by two drivers that contribute to the boom bust/over-consumption cycles.
Firstly, from an individual driver perspective, we naturally crave more than those before us. More wealth, tech, space, property. We are hard wired from birth to consume and demand more.
Secondly, from a social perspective, no single movement, government or person is really in charge. The authors likened humanity to a hive mind, a single beast driven by the needs of increasing possession and consumption.
We act every day in small steps that are hurting the environment, causing social imbalances etc. We know what we are doing (well many of us take time to think) though no one person can really step off the bus and make any real difference. You just get left behind.
My personal conclusion is that the worst case scenarios of climate change & consumption are almost inevitable. Humans will not radically re-think the consumption/capital model until we are forced to. And I mean forced too like collapse of the bronze age, or western Roman empire etc. Possibly even a genuine mass extinction event (noting that current extinction rates are already 1000's times higher than geological averages).
So. To take a completely selfish I need more than my parents approach (knowingly doing so). All you need to do from an investment perspective is understand that these cycles of boom/bust are guaranteed, and make sure that you are in a position to take advantage of (or weather the storm) when the inevitable arrives.
It is very simple why we always have booms and busts in housing.
The primary reason is that just about every market related to housing is rigged to be non competitive.
- Land supply (corrupt councils)
- Building material suppliers
- Non tarriff barriers to building material suppliers
- Regulatory capture by the building supply industry and trades
- Artificial demand through out of control immigration.
Governments perceive that ever increasing house prices is good for public confidence and their electoral chances. It also suits a few of very powerful vested interests with whom they have a very unhealthy and corrupt symbiotic relationship.
- The building material supply industry
- Property investors
- Land bankers
- Property developers
For a market to be stable, strong and healthy competition is required. If their is under supply the small price rise signals are sufficient to stimulate an increase in supply and stimulate competition for the increased profit. Accordingly supply increases to meet demand and equilibrium is preserved. And vice versa. Basic ECC 101.
If a system is not held in equilibrium, then the risk is that it will move where what stabilizing mechanisms that exist or should exist no longer are capable of functioning and catestrophic events occur. Ie a crash or boom.
What turns a normal economic cycle into a boom /bust , is the amount of credit creation that happens.
One of the big flaws of Central Bank policy, in my view, has been the fixation on inflation/interest rates.
Probably just as important as inflation .... is the levels of credit growth that happens.. which is what Central Banks have ignored/ been blind to.
Central Banks focusing on credit growth ( debt) relative to incomes is just as important as focusing on inflation .....AND as we have seen, the forces of inflation can ,kinda, "hide in the dark " .... waiting for a supply shock "light to come on "....
Central banks never saw this inflation coming... whereas debt burdens and credit binges can be seen as they happen.
just my view...
Agree - a construction downturn would provide an opportunity for the government to step in to moderate the boom-bust construction cycle and alleviate housing shortages by increasing the number of Kiwibuilds and also increasing the number of social houses built. Lack of affordable and healthy housing is at the crux of many of our entrenched social problems imo.
I don’t understand your point.
Kiwibuild was/is delivered by developers - government merely underwrite it.
12 months away? More like 6, for many.
If they weren’t so ideological, the government could buy out a whole lot of developments and use them for social housing. But…. Kainga Ora has design criteria that far exceed what you will see in more than 95% of developments.
A pragmatic government might waive those design requirements to support the sector and get much needed housing completed and repurposed for social housing. It would be a win on multiple fronts.
Will the government get off its high horse and be that pragmatic? I doubt it, but you never know.
The government has increased its spend on housing by $2bill in the last 2 years, up to $4.4bill in the latest budget. .
https://www.interest.co.nz/public-policy/115868/budget-202223-summary-a…
Kainga ora's policies have added to the cost of housing.
https://businessdesk.co.nz/article/public-sector-project/kainga-ora-fac….
https://en.ant777.club/affordable-housing-agency-kainga-ora-raises-fern…
Pays over valuation of $70.4 million for raw land to build 1,000 medium density houses, ie $70,000 raw land cost.
Boom and bust is built in with our colonial past and single tier system of government, so just shake your head sadly and carry on.
Our role as the back door to Australia will perpetuate labour shortages but importing skills with promises of residency will ensure we are as multicultural as the Tower of Babel, and that is a positive.
Cycles are inherent in any system, but the frequency and amplitude in an economic cycle can be controlled to some extent.
In supply and demand cycles, if the cycles are in sync and can lie on top of each other, ie if supply can meet demand in real-time by increasing or being retracted to equal the demand at any point of the demand cycle, then it will be stable. IE no boom or bust.
This can only happen if restrictions within the system are removed to prevent this from happening. This means the right type of Govt. regulation to create more of a free, less restricted market.
We have huge supply restrictions within the system at the moment, the majority of them due to Govt. Policies.
Thus while the cycles are still there, they have become countercyclical to each other, ie are out of sync.
So we have large numbers of housing still being consented to while at the same time demand has fallen. At the time that developers started the design to the consent process, would have been based on a proven demand for those consents. But as restrictive systems slow down the consenting process so much, that by the time they are consented, the demand has changed.
Restrictions allow supper profits to be made due to the monopoly advantage they can give the holder of the monopoly, but also super negative debt for those end developers that have bought the monopoly priced land and then get caught out of sync with the market and go broke. This increases the risk profile and thus the super profits are needed to offset any super loss. This high amplitude profit/loss is also a cycle due to the policies that cause these countercyclical demand and supply cycles.
In jurisdictions with fewer restrictions the cycles have a lower top and bottom, ie are more stable and house prices are way more affordable because of that.
If you don't Boom to begin with, then there is nothing to go Bust. Stability/Equilibrium should be the name of the game.
Hard not to go a day in lil ole NZ without RE featuring ...lol , Lets face it too many Kiwi's are fixated on it...If the Richmaster's had their way we would all be trading our way to 10 Million dollar fortunes...Sadly minimum wages would have to lift and a tin of beans would probably cost 50 bucks...lol Boom and bust ,Bull and Bear, inevitably required to drag some of us back down to planet earth... Smart folk know when to jump in and bail out... Didn't Frank Sinatra write a song .... "Thats' Life" .... 'riding high in April , shot down in May'...One thing that caught my eye was the increase in missed loan repayments up 5% on last year (400,000 folk at least 1 payment behind) if stuffinz and centricks have it correct . Could this indicate that the credit gatekeepers might have been a tad creative with their calculators...lol... Hope not....
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