Politicians, the Reserve Bank and every man and his dog apparently believe that the current rising house prices are a bad thing - just don't try to tell the New Zealand public that.
According to the BNZ's latest confidence survey, rapidly growing numbers of people reckon that the current hot house market is a pretty darn good thing.
The survey, which, by the way, showed confidence at an all time high (the survey was conducted before Fonterra's weekend bomb hit), has recently been seeking views of respondents on whether rising house prices are a good thing or not.
In the latest (July 29) survey, which attracted a high number of 763 respondents, some 42% of those respondents were happy about the rising house prices, up from 36% in June and just 29% in May.
Correspondingly, the number unhappy about the rising market has dropped to 24% in the latest survey from 29% in each of the last two surveys. The number of people indifferent is 34%, down from 35% in June and 42% in May.
Therefore a net 17% are happy about the rising prices in the latest survey up from 7% in June and 0% in May. More to the point some 76% of respondents to the latest survey are either happy about the rising prices or indifferent.
"While policy-makers and buyers fret about house prices rising the bulk of people on average appear increasingly happy with the situation," BNZ chief economist Tony Alexander said.
"The [survey] results suggest that electoral support for radical policies aimed at curbing house price rises could be minimal," he said.
The Labour Party announced a little over a week ago that it would ban overseas investors from buying New Zealand houses.
The latest ONE News Colmar Brunton poll over the weekend showed, however, that Labour (on 33%) had not gained any support after releasing the policy, though the Green Party, which has had such a policy for a while, did jump from 9% to 14% and the ruling National Party fell to 46% from 49% support.
The BNZ's main result in its latest confidence survey shows that a net 59% of respondents expect that the economy will be in better shape in a year's time than it is now. (Though it should be noted again that this was conducted before the Fonterra announcement over the weekend.)
"This result is consistent with other less up to date measures showing very positive business sentiment," Alexander said.
"Some of those other surveys also show high levels of business investment and employment intentions.
"Our survey does not directly gather such information but instead we give respondees the opportunity to tell us how things are in their particular sector. In that regard the comments have been over-whelmingly positive this month with some key themes being worsening shortages of labour and a still deepening shortage of residential real estate listings."
Alexander said that while growth in the economy appears to be picking up and the Reserve Bank is laying the groundwork for a tightening of monetary policy, our survey shows that credit demand as such is not shooting upward.
"The gross proportion of our 763 respondents who say that they are thinking about borrowing more money for their business in the next three months has fallen to 21% from 27% in June and 28% in May."
For three surveys in a row now the net percent of people feeling relaxed about our growing economic relationship with China has sat at 44%.
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