ANZ Property Focus

ANZ Property Focus assesses the state of the property market in New Zealand, providing investors and prospective homeowners with an independent appraisal of recent developments.

2024 editions

September 2024

This month we look at housing market developments across 14 key regions. Now that interest rates are normalising after the post-COVID rollercoaster, regional over- or under-performance is worth investigating. We evaluate regional house prices, indicators of housing market tightness, key regional economic indicators, and regional measures of housing affordability. Most regional housing markets are currently on a loosening trajectory, though house price cycles have been far more pronounced in some regions than others. The West Coast takes the prize for the strongest performance, with house prices up around 65% from December 2019, while Auckland has seen the weakest growth, with prices up only around 10% over the same period. How does your region stack up? See this month’s Feature Article.


August 2024

The housing market continued to weaken in July, with the REINZ House Price Index falling 0.6% m/m. Subdued sales over recent months and rising listings on the market suggest weakness is likely to persist in the near term, with prices likely to correct further to clear the backlog of supply. But a lot has happened in the past month that makes the July market snapshot feel like ancient history. With the RBNZ kickstarting its easing cycle this month, and mortgage rates having already responded, we expect dynamics in the market to shift later this year, with a recovery in house prices over 2025. Our updated projections show mortgage rates falling to around the level that prevailed in the middle of last decade. Mortgage rates are an important driver of the housing market, but they aren’t the only driver. There’s still plenty of strong headwinds facing the market. We compare the current landscape to the conditions that prevailed back in 2015, highlighting that risks to the housing market certainly aren’t one-sided.


July 2024

New Zealand citizen departures to Australia are picking up sharply as the local economy underperforms. With so many Kiwis jumping the ditch, it’s worth asking what kind of housing market they might be jumping into. This month we open that can of worms to investigate that very question. While we don’t get all the way to the bottom of the can (this is a feature article, not a book), we discover a few interesting differences. And in terms of the relative housing outlooks, it appears that Australian house price inflation is set to outpace that in New Zealand for a little while yet. 


June 2024

Following May’s weaker-than-expected REINZ data and taking signal from the forward indicators, we’ve downgraded our house price forecast slightly. We now expect house prices to rise just 1% this year vs 3% previously. It's worth noting that while a downgrade from 3% y/y to 1% y/y could give the impression that we’re able to forecast the housing market with a high degree of precision, we can’t, and nor can anyone else. But we’ve crossed a threshold warranting a forecast update, and the upside and downside risks feel more balanced around a 1% y/y rise this year than a 3% lift. In the big picture, this is only a tweak to our forecast, and it is probably best thought of as a slight delay to what we were previously expecting: modest growth, with gradually falling mortgage rates offset by softening household income prospects (including job security fears) as the labour market cools. But as always, there’s a lot more to the housing outlook than that!


May 2024

Housing affordability deteriorated significantly following the pandemic, with house prices relative to incomes touching highs never seen before. It’s been a particularly bumpy ride for new entrants, who have not only had to save a larger proportion of their income to come up with a deposit (and/or wait longer), but who now face a much higher debt-servicing cost as a share of income compared to the decade preceding the pandemic. The good news is that the worst is hopefully behind us. But international comparisons show that some economies may have it even worse, implying that the recent peaks in unaffordability seen in NZ may still be shy of any “natural limit”. We present a range of affordability indicators as well as a weighted affordability index based on some of these measures. Plugging in our forecasts show that the only major relief on the affordability front over the next few years is expected to come via the debt-servicing channel as mortgage rates decline. But overall, our outlook implies housing will remain less affordable over the next few years than it was prior to the pandemic.


April 2024

House prices came in a little softer than we anticipated in the first quarter of the year, and forward indicators suggest the second and third quarters could be just as soft. Auckland often leads nationwide housing outcomes, so this month we take a closer look into what some of the Auckland indicators are saying about what might lie ahead for the country as a whole. Given Auckland tends to get the lion’s share of net migrants, this regional lens on the housing market is particularly important in the context of current surging net migration. However, we find little evidence in rental yields to suggest migration is about to drive a surge in investor demand for houses. In fact, rental yields in Auckland have been somewhat muted in recent months compared to the national average. All in all, indicators of market tightness in Auckland, and the rest of New Zealand for that matter, are running on the colder side of tepid, and that points to some downside risk around our house price forecast for a modest 3% rise in prices over 2024.


March 2024

Is it better to buy a house, or rent it? It’s a question a lot of people grapple with. As always, the ultimate answer is “it depends!” but in this article, we shed some light on the question by taking a long-term perspective. In what follows, we take data from 1999 to 2023, make a bunch of assumptions about the outlook, and compare cash flows of someone who buys a house versus someone who rents. The upshot? When borrowing at a high LVR (we assume 80%), servicing a mortgage and paying other ownership costs will generally be more expensive than renting in the first years of ownership. But eventually, homeownership costs will typically be lower than renting. Therefore, to the would-be borrower-buyer, what’s best does depend to some degree on how long you are willing to wait to break even. But as we show, the amount of time that takes depends on a bunch of variables and assumptions, and how you frame what ‘breaking even’ actually means. Do you care about annual cash flows, cumulative cash flows, or discounted cash flows? And what about capital gains and opportunity costs? We discuss the lot. But it’s important to note that the mythical “median person” in our analysis is likely to differ greatly from personal experiences. And as with most choices in life, whether big financial decisions work out well will inevitably partly depend on luck.


February 2024

The housing market looks stagnant. While January house prices were stronger than we expected, sales were abnormally soft, listings continue to rise and days to sell are back near their 2022 peaks, especially in Auckland. We are expecting the Reserve Bank of New Zealand (RBNZ) to lift the Official Cash Rate (OCR) two more times to combat increasingly stubborn domestic inflation. Homeowners should be conscious that mortgage rate cuts in the near future are not a sure-fire bet, as the RBNZ will be unwilling to provide mortgage rate relief until they’re confident that inflation will stay in their 1-3% band. Our expectations for further lifts in the OCR put the risk of further house price falls back on the table. At this stage, it’s a risk only, because the HPI remains robust in the face of a deteriorating outlook. We still expect house prices to go broadly sideways over the first half of this year, but the picture is looking a lot less certain than it was at the end of last year.


January 2024

Construction may be about to bottom out. Fair to say, the housing market rebound has been underwhelming since it found a floor earlier than anticipated in April. However, the outlook for construction is nonetheless intriguing, as population growth and still-high interest rates square off. While consents are yet to find a floor, builders in the ANZ Business Outlook survey became much more optimistic some months ago, and their colleagues in the NZIER QSBO now concur. That suggests that consents and construction activity could soon base. The RBNZ is relying on a prolonged slowdown in residential construction as part of their plan to bring down domestic inflation, and the risk is that the slowdown will be sharper but not as prolonged as the RBNZ expects. The implications for the inflation outlook are unclear.