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Mike Blackburn is watching a startling rise in section prices for new-builds in Christchurch and sees a complete disconnect between the current rate of land development and demand for new housing

Property / opinion
Mike Blackburn is watching a startling rise in section prices for new-builds in Christchurch and sees a complete disconnect between the current rate of land development and demand for new housing
Time waits for no one, sign

By Mike Blackburn*

18 months ago, you could buy a 600 m2 section in Christchurch, Selwyn or Waimakariri for under $200,000, today it will probably cost you more than $500,000.

In fact, $1,000 per square meter is becoming the new norm for greenfield subdivisions. If you want to buy a section for development in the inner suburbs of Christchurch it is more likely to cost you $2,000 to $3,000 per m2.

So why have section prices skyrocketed?

Simple ... lack of supply and increased demand.

Following the Canterbury earthquakes in 2010 and 2011 there was a steady flow of new residential land; Wigram, Prestons, Rolleston, Lincoln, Kaiapoi and Rangiora.

Pretty much all of these subdivisions are now sold out and the development of new land has simply not kept pace with the number of new houses being built. Yes, there are new subdivisions being developed in Halswell, Belfast, Rolleston and a few other places, but the number of sections is well short of the current level of demand for new housing.

On top of this, the sections that are coming to the market now will take two to three years before we see houses built on them and in the meantime, builders and developers are fighting over the handful of new sections which is seeing prices reach almost unheard of levels.

Building consents across the greater Christchurch area are up by 35% over the same period last year, that’s 1,200 more houses and this level of construction is showing no sign of slowing down.

I can think of one recent example where there were more than 500 offers made for a tender release of a dozen sections. Builders said to me that sections that they paid $260,000 for at the beginning of the year were now commanding prices of $450,000 plus.

There was an auction for sections in Woodend on Wednesday where prices reached $520,000…in Woodend, seriously?

I’m seeing house and land packages in Christchurch and Rolleston being advertised for $1.2 million.

It's like we are living in a parallel universe.

Can we do anything about it?

Yes…develop more land.

But of course, its not that simple. The process and up-front costs of developing land is prohibitive.

On top of this, the forward projections provided by the Greater Christchurch Partnership are still using baseline numbers from 2013…which are now more than 50% short of current construction levels.

I’m not directly blaming Councils here, as its land owners and developers who make the final decision as to whether or not they bring land to the market ... but make no mistake there is a complete disconnect between the current rate of land development and demand for new housing.

As long as this continues, the price of sections will continue to increase.


Mike Blackburn is the principal of Blackburn Management. You can contact him here.

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62 Comments

Pop!

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So why have section prices skyrocketed?

Simple ... lack of supply and increased demand.

What about unchecked collaterlised, leveraged bank lending?

Predominately Aussie owned NZ Banks have migrated away from lending to productive business enterprises because the capital risk weights can be as high as 150%. Thus around 61% of NZ bank lending is dedicated to residential property mortgages owed by one third of households because the RBNZ offers them a RWA capital reduction incentive, to do so.

Legislation must be enacted to put an end to bank liens on mortgaged residential property to encourage unsecured loans to GDP qualifying enterprises. Or:

I and others have urged a policy of land taxation in order to collect the land’s rising site value, so that it will not be pledged to banks for mortgage credit to further inflate china’s housing prices. - Link

Bank lending to housing rose from $50,788 million (48.36% of total lending) as of June 1998 to $317,021 million (61.31% of total lending) as of August 2021 - source.

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Lack of prime well located land always goes up because you cannot print more land, only print more money.

With some much freshly minted money and limited physical resources (e.g. land, building materials) and the COVID supply shock out from China, land values are going to go up and up. When the powers combine, Captain Planet appears.

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Yep. 

Watch the land values in central locations climb,  exacerbated by the new density rules. They don't create more land, but they create more development potential in that land.

I think there's a 'last burst' of property inflation coming in the next 6 months. The median to go another 5-10% higher. And then flatten / fall in winter, as unaffordability and increasing cost of borrowing start to bite.

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I'm glad to find such an enlightened comment on this thread so quickly. There is an utterly unsupportable assumption underlying the urban planning fad for "intensification as a substitute for greenfields sprawl" - which is that site prices are static and the price of them can be divided up between more units when more units are allowed to be developed. 

In real life, which the urban planning fad remains impervious to, site values are elastic to allowed density, and the elasticity is exponential and in the wrong direction. It is obvious from a cursory look at the evidence, that systemic housing affordability as defined by median multiples around 3, certainly not much over 4, are all to be found where greenfields expansion is allowed to whatever extent the market determines to be necessary. This always results in an urban area remaining no more than medium density, because the intensification that occurs anyway driven by market demand and the evolution of central parts of the urban economy, is matched by continued lower density development beyond the fringes. 

However, in ANY urban area where there are restrictions based on the assumption that intensification is to substitute for greenfields expansion, the median multiple is NEVER below six, and is frequently 10 and higher - and cyclical volatility is greater (however the bottom of the crash never gets anywhere near a median multiple of 4). And it seems the greater the "allowing" of density of development, the HIGHER the price of new units coming to market is, NOT the "lower". 

In the typical median multiple 3 urban area, the average new-supply home "unit" is a large McMansion with multiple bedrooms, a backyard and carparking (mostly a garage rather than a pad). And the price of these is around the market median; i.e. three to four times median household income. However, in markets where the average or median new housing unit is something much smaller and more tightly constrained, and possibly even "stacked" on top of other units, the price of this unit is seldom less than the market median: ie six or more times household income.

The difference is to be found entirely in the cost of sites. The cost per square foot of the site rises exponentially as more density is allowed, so that the resulting housing units supplied to market are always more expensive rather than less. I do not believe there has ever been a "sufficiently aggressive" upzoning to demonstrate that upzoning and intensification can indeed provide systemically affordable new housing - every time the upzoning fails to achieve this (Britain has been trying this for decades and failing) the conceited planning classes conclude that "we must try more aggressive upzoning next time". 

The current open-slather 3 stories liberalization will be an interesting experiment: I predict that it will cause another explosion in site prices (I have been correctly predicting inflation every time a Council enacts a round of upzoning, for years now). The problem being that "site prices" are also "house prices", and house prices are set by expectations based on "the highest recent sale". So if developers are bidding more than ever for a "house" on a section with "redevelopment potential", the successful bid then becomes "the expected house price" for that area. And the resulting "supply of new houses" never swamps the "site price inflation" effect. "House prices" go UP because of upzoning, not down. In fact Grimes and Aitken (2010) "Housing Supply, Land Costs and Price Adjustment" had the apropos phrase in the conclusion: "all the profit potential from redevelopment is impounded in rising site prices".

Developing and building becomes a higher-cost, higher-risk game, with the profits earned on honestly building structures being swamped by the "fixed costs" of site acquisition and holding. In Britain, the trend has been decades of building-sector attrition and monopolization by large players, even as a housing shortage worsens and prices climb, because the people reaping the profits from the market distortion are those gouging fixed, non-value-added costs out of the builders, who are trapped in a gladiatorial bidding war against each other, between site vendors with a form of monopoly price gouging power, and the capacity of end consumers of housing to be gouged the absolute maximum they can afford for the necessity of housing. 

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Totally true. Look at what happened in Auckland. Crappy houses in Manurewa worth maybe $375k 3 or so years ago now worth $1.3m because they can subdivide and put 4 or 5 town houses on. The price still works for the developers so away we go. Every older house value is now set by development potential

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There is, though, a demonstrable "substitution" effect when the market is allowed to convert the superabundant land in low value "other" (ie rural) uses, to housing. The price of well located land then is "differential" to that cheapest option. That is the only reason there has ever been, and still is, median-multiple-3 housing markets. Demographia has been right all along. 

When you remove the potential superabundant cheap supply of "all land in all uses" from urban use by regulatory restrictions, housing and land prices become derived by a completely different process, one well recognized by economists prior to 1900 - "monopoly economic rent". It forces people to pay the maximum they can stand for a necessity, in this case, housing. It is possible to restrict the supply of resources for other essentials too, to enable this kind of price gouging, but we have learned not to stand for it in food and clothing. 

The global supply chains, free trade and superabundant resources that make food and clothing such fantastic value for money compared to what our Victorian ancestors got for their money, had its counterpart in superabundant rural land being allowed, for decades, to be developed for housing use just to whatever extent the market demanded. Prior to the automobile, sheer lack of mobility enabled an economic-rent-extractive norm in "housing", which is why everyone paid 50% of their income for the rent of a tiny tenement. During the decades when automobile based suburban development was occurring, the real price of land underneath housing fell by some 95%. It could do so again if regulations were removed, that since a couple of decades ago threw the trend that had enabled systemic affordability, into reverse back towards the Victorian conditions. 

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165000 new residents?

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All this talk about lack of supply, but no talk about reducing demand...

Concern about increasing emissions, but again no talk about reducing the (imported) source of increasing emissions...

Concerns about infrastructure and healthcare, but no talk about reducing demand...

Total hipocrisy by the politicians, because it's all about "growth" and increasing GDP, tax take, etc

 

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Subdivisible land has become an increasingly sought-after asset throughout much of NZ - not just in Wellington, Auckland and Christchurch.

Phenomenal prices are being paid for well-located sections in cities like Palmerston North. Developers and people wanting to build new homes are struggling to find good building sections because the best land is often owned by long-term land-bankers.

TTP

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Enabled by local governments "Plans" which signal to land owners that they now have holdout powers. Portland enacted a famous growth boundary in the 1970's with "20 years supply of land" inside it. Land prices started to inflate 3 years later. Lesson upon lesson upon lesson since then, all over the world, has been stubbornly refused by the prescriptive, conceited, closed-minded central planning lovers and their useful idiot allies in professions that should know better, such as economics. 

As Alan W. Evans described decades ago, analyzing the Portland example, the facts in real life are not rocket science. The "supply of land" in a given geographic unit cannot be predicted by planners because it is dependent on "land owners deciding to sell". What if no-one inside the "20 year growth boundary" has decided to quit farming? Furthermore, developments take years, and developers wish to secure their "next site" while they are still working on their current one - therefore, there will always be a point at which the "supply of houses" has required around 5 years holdings of the land on which they are being built, and the developer has already bought their next site. Even with a "20 year growth boundary" there is a massive mismatch inevitable between what developers absolutely need to stay in business, and "willing vendors of farmland". The process becomes one of developers knocking on doors and pleading with land owners to sell, and of course the assumption of quasi monopoly price-gouging powers becomes a norm quite rapidly from that point. 

"Splatter" expansion of existing urban areas has to be accepted as the norm that it was for decades for this simple reason if systemic housing affordability is to be restored. Splatter exurban development is not inherently inefficient, rather the reverse is true because of the way the use of the bare land remaining in the gaps can be intelligently decided once the market has provided some early indications. Insistence on incremental expansion guided by a boundary on planners maps, is riddled with losses of efficiency because of "make-do" location decisions and high land costs. Economic agglomeration clusters do evolve where there is "spare land" to a much greater extent that when there is no spare land and potential new participants in them have nowhere to go or are unable to afford to buy in to the location. Silicon Valley is the cluster that surely comes to everyone's mind as a prime example - and this started to evolve on low cost greenfields land miles from the existing urban fringe, in the 1970's. There has never been anything like it evolve in an existing built city with high land costs and structures all already in use. 

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Well, as the great Sir Fredrick Dagg once said,  "you can only fit so many sheep into one paddock"

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Investors desperate to rinse tax.

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Yes Probably some Zoning impacts, but most certainly Credit Availability and interest rates.  $1.2M for a house and land in Rolleston.  Again the unintended or intended consequences of the favourable FHB and Investor lending/tax benefits.

See this from over the ditch.  Same Sh*t different toilet.

https://theconversation.com/when-houses-earn-more-than-jobs-how-we-lost…

 

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  • Median weekly household incomes from wages and salaries in the Canterbury region were slightly below the national median in June 2018, at $1,280 compared with $1,304.

https://greaterchristchurch.org.nz/our-work/indicators/economic/income/

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Agree, almost certainly more about cheap and free flowing credit than zoning.

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This is exactly what I would expect to happen with last weeks zoning change - 50% of footprint, 3 stories and 3 titles as worst case development scenario means land close to the CH/AK/WN CBD will shoot up in value. Seems pretty obvious.

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What else is going to happen when you have a kleptocratic central bank that has lost all credibility for protecting the value of the currency.

People are simply dumping their kiwi dollar shitcoins for anything less worthless.  Much more convienient to buy crypto or stocks than property though.

Christchurch was supposed to the poster child for supply of land in New Zealand.  It's a shame our politicians aren't paying attention, because they might notice that supply makes very little difference when a speculative credit bubble is in play.

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Actually, Brock, given the Covid crisis the NZ monetary system is proving well-managed and safe/stable.

That, of course, does not mean that the prices within particular asset classes (such as housing/property) won't fluctuate.

TTP

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Actually Tim,

The highly doctored CPI inflation index is currently running at 250% of the policy target and still increasing, rapidly.  The RBNZ is the thief in your pocket.

Monetary policy is still being held at "emergency lows".  The price of assets aren't "fluctuating", they have been pushed beyond the point of no return.  Their only strategy to escape the predicatble mess they have made is to dilute the purchasing power of the kiwi dollar to oblivion.

Only a blithering clown would call their management of the monetary system "well managed" and "safe and stable".

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I know you have a downer on NZ BL, but every central bank is in the same position. There are houses being flipped in Sydney for 100% gain on sales just 2 years ago, this one sold for $6m 2 years ago just sold for $12.2m and it's a knockdown tbh. https://www.realestate.com.au/sold/property-house-nsw-bellevue+hill-137…

 

 

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Most central banks in the anglosphere read from the same script and they are all rapidly losing credibility.

Nobody wants their worthless tokens.  People are desperate to put their wealth anywhere these crooks can't water it down.

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You are entitled to your opinion about the RBNZ, but you cannot accuse them of being less competent than the Fed/BOE/RBA etc. From what I hear about Sydney property prices, anyone leaving NZ for there will be in for a rude awakening.

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I moved to Sydney 10 years ago and while house prices and rents were higher I was able to easily save a whole lot more in the same job - and that's what mattered.

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10 years ago

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Bingo.  Never fear though the LNP are going to give only $180k and above earners a nice tax break to come out of the education, health and infrastructure budgets shortly, so inflation? pfft all's looking good for the comfortably wealthy in Oz.

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Crypto

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Yep, all the central banks are on the same merry bandwagon, in one final final piss up before the bandwagon crashes.

Some, like Bascand, are jumping off before it crashes. But his role in this debacle won't be forgotten, he can be sure of that.

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You are right mate, had to check it myself. They have capital gains tax, stamp duty and land tax but still nothing stopping property market. I suppose it's all desirable cities in the world address experiencing it and will keep going that way. I do feel sorry for the people left behind and future of the young people. Syndey is so much more expensive than Auckland.

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Upvote for "kiwi dollar shitcoins" haha! All my kiwi dollar shitcoins are going into crypto, as you say, and have been for the last few years in anticipation for this cycle climax. Put crypto straight on the crypto credit card to spend if required, don't even need a bank card anymore.. it is truly amazing.

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Please can you let me know which card you are using. Very interested in this. 

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There's one managed in Singapore dollars, I think it's Singapore Bank do crypto cards. 

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This is good news for house prices.

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Government promoted by its policy of exempting speculators from tax change.

 

Also :

 https://i.stuff.co.nz/life-style/homed/housing-affordability/300435614/…

Reason approach CA for loopholes. Example if you have two house, first sell the house that one lives in to avoid BLT and move into other house, which again can sell the second house after a year and avoid BLT.

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The BLT has a 'change of use' rule for this exact situation, so no, that doesn't work. Don't let that stop you though.

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Some very ill informed views have been made on this website by one or two people about the likely effect of the government's new density rules on property values. 

There's a growing body of academic literature that shows zoning for more density usually increases property values significantly. 

There is a good paper from 2021 on this, looking at Brisbane, titled 'We Zoned for Density and got higher house prices', by Mark Limb et al.

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Brilliant book (below link) from Patrick Condon in Canada. One of his key conclusions (page 99) is this:

 1. Sometimes we choose to limit new urban construction. When we do that we freeze available supply and boost land prices, and stimulate speculation.

 2. Sometimes we choose to boost new housing construction. When we do that we signal investment opportunity. And again we boost land prices and stimulate speculation.

So, both restrictive and liberal planning regimes hurt housing affordability, but for different reasons. The solutions like elsewhere...

https://uploads-ssl.webflow.com/5efd1c1c4e2740c1bb1bfb69/60001a4f82797d…

 

 

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And an interview with him at link below. Hopefully one or two of you might learn something :)

https://www.planningreport.com/2021/02/18/patrick-condon-density-afford…

 

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There's a growing body of academic literature that shows zoning for more density usually increases property values significantly. 

Sure there is. But your example of Brissie coincides with the biggest open bar in monetary history. And incomes are going nowhere. And haven't been for years. Don't get too drunk on the neverending property bubble story. They do have limits. That's just not obvious to you yet. They're not obvious to me either. 

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HouseMouse; have you read the three comments I have placed on this thread? There are basic "real life" reasons that upzoning makes housing more expensive, not less. 

The only way we ever got systemically affordable housing markets was by making sure "the market" could allocate land between uses - which meant that the price of land at the margin for housing, was set by the next highest bid. Someone, somewhere, could simply outbid a rural land bidder and proceed to build houses on land that cost around rural price. 

The evidence is undeniable and people denying it obviously have some vested interest in never allowing this old time-tested approach to be re-adopted. There is absolutely no valid reason for "prohibiting sprawl" or splatter development per se; every single complaint against these things can be addressed by means other than blunt-instrument prohibitions. The underlying pretexts concern things like resource consumption; if we simply applied the right "pricing" or fiscal incentives, some of the multitudes of ways in which free people and entrepreneurs would respond, might well involve exurban land use - off-grid sustainable technology and that kind of thing. A crude "one size fits all, we know what is good for you" approach is the stuff of long-since proven failures of central planning, fatal conceits and unintended consequences. 

By the way, that is an interesting study from Brisbane, but knowing the co-author Cameron Murray, it is a certainty that his "solutions" will be something like "trying Communism properly this time", anything but "allowing sprawl" and allowing actual markets to allocate land use. 

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Seems like there are two ways to reduce the land price cost curve, either i) reduce restrictions at the rural end and hope everything else adjusts downwards to reflect the relative difference with rural prices or ii) push prices down at the center by e.g. taxes, compulsory acquisition, not-for-profit development, and hope this forces down the cost curve further out. I'm unclear why i should be better or worse than ii, why not a combination of both?

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The latter suggestion is what we are trying now, and prices are going up.

And all the land economic theory and practice historically shows it's the fringe that sets the price. 

There is no mystery as to what works, both in theory and what you can see happening with your own eyes.

But to paraphrase Phil re vested interests, 'it can be hard for someone to understand something when their income is dependent on them not understanding.'

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Calaverite - I would agree very much with "a combination of both" or indeed every trick in the book. The critical insight is that combinations of "everything but liberalizing the use of exurban land" has already been tried and failed. I do like discussing the example of Germany, which is often raised as a good one. The problem is that advocates cherry-pick what they like and omit what they don't like, or have missed. 

The first thing to note is that Germany has not relentlessly curtailed exurban growth and insisted on intensification "instead". One of the reasons that "old world" cities are so dense is that they started from an extremely dense point around 1900, and even having spread out and become less dense over time since then, they remain more dense than new world cities. It is instructive to compare Britain and Germany; Britain has relentlessly curtailed its sprawl and has successfully held urban densities up to a level around double that of Germany. In practice, what has happened in Germany is that they had suburban sprawl of a very similar magnitude to countries like NZ, Australia and Canada (and so did much of Europe), and this resulted in densities somewhere between NZ and Britain. However, with NZ's relentless intensification focus for the last 20 years, Auckland's density is now comparable to the least dense German urban areas of comparable populations. Our anti-sprawl fanatics will never admit this. 

Germany's amount of sprawl was obviously helpful in averting the kind of housing crisis that Britain suffers from, and that we now do. It was also very well-planned sprawl. But there are several other important contributing factors. 

Germany, as with most of Europe, has much smaller rural land ownership parcels. It is Britain and the Anglosphere that are marked by massive farms as a norm; small farms are a norm in much of the rest of the world. This means that a prescriptive Plan for urban expansion does not deliver monopoly powers to the owners of a few large parcels of land; there are many owners of many small parcels of land; and the Plans in Germany always made it very easy for the owners of these small sites to "develop" by right. The planners also have compulsory acquisition powers that are not controversial like they are in the Anglo world, and exercise them occasionally. The fact that they exist means that the owners of land earmarked for urban growth are reluctant to "hold out" in case they attract the attention of the officials who will wield the compulsory acquisition powers if they need to so as to make the Plan work.

A further factor is that many rural towns are not obstructive of development, and the ability to drive at 200 km/h on autobahns makes far more rural towns a de facto housing-supply option compared to nations and regions with low speed limits and a high tolerance for congestion related to inadequate highway capacity. 

The factor that many advocates like to focus on, is Germany's significant amount of rent-controlled housing. Rent-controlled housing is a disaster in some parts of the world because supply is disincentivized - but in Germany, investment institutions are encouraged to get involved in supply of rent-controlled housing by generous tax incentives. So the factor suppressing the market could be said to be more "subsidy" than "control". Now subsidies in a distorted urban property market like what we have, would just feed straight into higher prices for developable sites - Germany's overall package "worked" for decades because of the overall mix of policies. However, their affordability was never close to as good as the USA's median-multiple-3 cities, or ours from the 1950's to the late 1990's. 

And now, the game is completely over in Germany as their policy mix for systemic affordability has completely collapsed before the onslaught of funny money from central bankers. The only urban areas anywhere in the world that still have median multiples somewhere around 4 or lower, are the ones that Demographia always identified, and this is because the allowance of sprawl exists in those places. It is obvious that only the liberal policy settings around land use are the decider for stablizing urban land prices. 

The last new point I want to emphasize is that the economist Issi Romem studied the rate at which US urban areas were intensifying, and he found that those like Portland that deliberately Plan with the intention that intensification is the main means of new housing supply, in fact were dismal failures in "housing supply", period, and the systemically affordable cities with rapid growth achieved a mix of around 70% new housing by sprawl and 30% new housing by intensification - and that 30% was more in terms of real housing supply, than is achieved by the "intensification focused" cities. Planners hell-bent on saving the planet from urban sprawl will throw up their hands in horror at the idea that "revealed preferences" under a relatively free market, will produce a 70% split for sprawl and only 30% for intensification - but the outcomes are superior on so many levels, that it is criminal not to allow it. For example, the intensification that does occur, driven by evolutionary market forces, clearly increases agglomeration economies. Because the whole price curve is flattened, this intensified housing is ridiculously affordable - far more affordable compared to Auckland near-CBD intense housing than McMansion sprawl is more affordable compared to Auckland - and people are priced "in" not "out". In contrast, the cities that focus on intensification end up "pricing out" potential agglomeration participants. 

The amount of "real income" - derived from "production" - that is not swallowed up in economic rents related to land, becomes a virtuous "flow of money" booster in the local economies with systemically affordable housing, far superior to artificial "stimulus" so beloved of politicians and central bankers. All this "stimulus" in local economies with distorted land markets, just feeds into the land-rent black hole. The recipients of the stimulus become just the "middleman" as rents and house prices rise again in response to the added liquidity. All this would be clear at a glance to any economist from circa 1900 who somehow time-travelled into our day. 

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Yes and 2+2 still equals 4. It's not that hard to understand unless your income is dependent on not understanding.

There is a fine line between willful ignorance and plain ignorant.

And we are seeing the same ideological thinking playing out with our response, or lack of, to Covid.

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So Christchurch has caught up to the rest of NZ.  
500-600k for sections.  1.2 million for a standard 4 bed new build.  
That’s  across all regional cities as well.  

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You make it sound like a good thing, when in fact it is NOT!

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With next to no net migration I’d wager section demand is currently a mix of pure speculation and low teaser interest rates for construction loans.. the trouble with stagging sections is that everyone wants to cash out at the same time - not everyone wants to settle and build - and a great many won’t like the real interest rate once the teaser rate evaporates.  In Mangawhai Heads, Northland, sections jumped from 60k to 200k in 2004-2007 pre GFC and then crashed to half that in 2009. 

 

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My only comment is to recommend reading all of Phil Haywards comments above! 

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Good reading and enlightening. But we're in a totally different world now. 

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What Phil is describing are immutable cause and effects laws of the land economics universe.

NZ Govts. have been in their own little bubble world for a while now. They think that in NZ, land economics gravity operates differently than in other places of the world. Not only are they out of this world, but are out of their minds.

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If you own a house in NZ. Enjoy and be happy. If you do not own a house in NZ, just move to another country. This country is not for you to buy the house right now due to stupid prices, you will spend a life time paying it off and probably eating only potatoes every night. 

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There's nothing wrong with potatoes. They're a good, nutritious food - mashed, baked or fried - albeit a little high in carbohydrates.

TTP

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In stable markets, the supply line lies almost on top of the demand line. And in stable truly free markets, because demand is cyclic, so ideally is the supply. but still lies almost on top of the demand line.

In unstable markets which we have, the supply cannot react fast enough to demand so the lines move further apart to the point they become counter cyclic.

This is where I think we are today. Very little is physically available for the demand, which amplifies the difference in supply and price due to FOMO and speculative behavior.

Thus the few sections that are available are selling for prices that do not make any financial sense and this is further driving tulip bulb behaviour. To accommodate for this demand for phantom sections, we sell 'Avatar' sections in the form of selling off the plan, but a nice brochure. People are literally buying things that don't exist, ie a promise. We are effectively pulling future supply into the present and selling it now.

This can be extremely problematic for anyone buying off the plan that is hoping to use borrowed funds to settle as most financial institutions will not confirm funding until 3 months from the settlement, yet these properties are being bought off the plan up to 18 months prior.

Many things can happen between signing an unconditional contract and confirming funding, like for example interest rate rises (never), and could now automatically make you ineligible to qualify for funding (at that future date) that the very same bank said you qualified for when you originally purchased. 

I've seen this type of behaviour in the past before, and the outcome wasn't pretty.

 

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These are like mini grey swans that when aggregated can produce a black swan event. 

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'Domino effect,' 'death by a thousand cuts' etc.  All self-fulfilling prophecies. 

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I live on one of these new subdivisions, perhaps 100 houses, most built around 5 years ago. However there are about 10 empty sections with no signs of any construction. Utilities are all there, cables sticking out of the ground for their power connections.

It's all too common, neighbouring subdivisions have the same problem. We need a way to force these land bankers to develop or sell to someone else who will.

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If said sections have all utilities available - cables sticking outta the ground - then there's no 'development' needed whatsoever.  Just a sale.  And if the TLA rated on land value, there would be an economic incentive to close that deal ...because there would be no penalty rates-wise for plonking a House on top 

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Rates are based on the total value, land + improvements. For most of the houses in the area the rated land value is around 250k, and improvements of around 450k. This will change when new assessments come out I'm sure.

Looking one of the address up, they pay less than 40% of the rates I do. An incentive, yes, but clearly not a big enough one.

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The surge on new builds came because of the new government rules targeting investors and now demand is fueling demand. 

Stay well clear. 

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Thing about land prices is that they reflect adjacent (and if not enough adjacent, then further afield) prices, and those prices need have little to no connection to cost of either acquisition or development. 

Plus, to chuck petrol on the fire, Gubmints are rather prone to one-size-fits-all actions which send a Universal Pricing Signal to them as what set the aforesaid prices. 

Raise Welcome Home loan criteria?  Whack the increment onto the price and capture it.

Allow densification by central fiat? Each house plot thus magicked into existence sells for the same or above (Amenity!) an equivalent in suburbia.  Bank the proceeds.

Squeeze loan rates to the zero bound? Watch with open mouth and palpitations as the loans are used to pump and dump hard assets.  Like - er - shelter....

A local example: Ocean Ridge subdivision just south of Kaikoura, early this year, had a sign - sections from $225,000.  Two months later, the sign pasters were covering it up with one that read - sections from $275,000.  Nothing else had changed.  Except they Could.

Sigh....

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It costs a lot to get the signwriter to change the sign, that is why the price would have increased that much :-)

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I have said a number of times on this site - the people making the money are the developers, not the builders. And the developers are really creaming it!

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