An Auckland mortgage broker says lending restrictions are making it “impossible” to get bridging finance through banks, making it harder for people to move houses.
Bridging finance is typically used to fund a higher amount of debt for a short time when someone buys a house before selling their own home.
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John Bolton, chief executive of Squirrel Mortgages, says it is impossible to get bridging finance at the moment. Photo/Supplied
Wellington City Council will today become the first local authority to introduce a voluntary warrant of fitness for rental properties.
Mayor Justin Lester is set to announce the scheme this morning, in conjunction with the University of Otago, Wellington.
“We want to lift rental standards in our city and make better accommodation available for people. Every Wellingtonian deserves a warm, dry home,” Lester said.
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Wellington City Council is in the middle of a $400 million upgrade programme to bring all of its buildings up to modern standards.
A building housing a Wellington brothel owned by the Chow brothers is up for grabs in the city’s “traditional red light district”.
The two-storey property became New Zealand’s first purpose-built gentlemen’s club since the prostitution law came in to effect 14 years ago.
Michael and John Chow, whose assets include commercial property, hotels and strip clubs, built their $200 million portfolio from the ground up, starting with the adult entertainment industry.
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Michael Chow, left, and John Chow are selling a building which houses their Il-Bordello brothel.
Former Treaty of Waitangi claims negotiator Ngatata Love will be released on parole in October, having served less than half of his jail term for taking a secret payment of $1.5 million while chairman of the Wellington Tenths Trust.
Love was sentenced to two years and six months imprisonment last October for the fraud. The guilty verdict followed an investigation into a $1.5m payment from a land developer into a trust controlled by Love’s partner, Lorraine Skiffington, which was then used to repay a property loan on a Plimmerton house he and Skiffington co-owned.
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Ngatata Love Picture / NZPA
Bernard Hickey surveys the real estate and political landscape and finds Bill English just lit the fuse for another boom if the Government is re-elected in its current form and a rudderless Reserve Bank loses its nerve
It’s like déjà vu all over again for the Auckland housing market and the conditions are now in place for another post-election surge.
This election campaign carries many echoes of the 2014 campaign.
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Fireworks go off from Auckland’s Sky Tower at midnight on New Year’s Day of 2015. By then, a fresh boom was well underway after the 2014 election result. Photo: Getty Images.
Want to know the best suburb to spend your rental dollar without forking out more in travel and adding hours to your weekly commute? A new interactive app allows those hunting for a rental property to load income, workplace and living requirements then hover over different suburbs to find the perfect match.
Through the website affordability.org.nz creator Alex Raichev has used current rental data from MBIE, travel information from Google maps and costs from AA and Auckland Transport to create costings for each suburb in Auckland, Wellington and Canterbury.
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More than a decade after they were made, the lonely streets of Blue Bay at Mahia could at last have homes for company.
Real estate agent Bayleys is offering 35 sections across a 2.9ha area of the waterfront Blue Bay subdivision as part of a mortgagee sale, with instructions that the sections must be sold.
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The planned waterfront holiday home subdivision, on land previously operated as a classic Kiwi campground at Mahia Peninsula. Photo / Supplied
Prime Minister Bill English has ruled out allowing the Reserve Bank to introduce further curbs to home lending, and has signalled it should have a plan to remove a key lending restriction already in place.
The central bank has come under fire recently from real estate agents saying its loan to value ratio rules (LVRs) are squeezing buyers out of the housing market even as prices flatten and in some case fall.
The Real Estate Institute of New Zealand (REINZ) has called for a review of LVRs for first-home buyers, who must have a 20 per cent deposit.
Real Estate Institute chief executive Bindi Norwell has said tightening lending criteria from cautious banks and the LVR restrictions were impeding the market.
READ MORE:
* Reserve Bank property lending restrictions explained
* Mortgage rationing bites make it harder to get a loan
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Prime Minister Bill English has told the Reserve Bank it should plan for an end to mortgage lending restrictions.
House price inflation has vanished in Auckland and is slowing in other main centres as loan-to-value restrictions, tighter bank lending criteria and a pre-election slowdown deter buyers.
In its latest Economic Overview report, Westpac economists said prices had fallen 4 per cent since January in Auckland and more weakness was likely to come.
“Combined with last year’s tightening in lending restrictions and uncertainty ahead of September’s election, rising borrowing rates have seen annual house price inflation slow to just 1 per cent,” they said.
READ MORE: Rob Stock: The nightmare of negative equity
Investors might see less opportunity for capital gains over the next few years, Westpac economists said.
Economists at one of New Zealand’s largest mortgage lenders have predicted a flat to muted housing market for the next few years.
A new Westpac report out today has a gloomy national outlook for the housing sector.
The report, signed by the bank’s chief economist Dominick Stephens and others, said: “We expect that house prices will be flat over 2017 as a whole and that we’ll see only muted rises over the next few years.”
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Dominick Stephens – Chief Economist
At 17 Ben Booth worried about how he would fund his retirement. At 24 he had just $1 left in his bank account and a house he could call his own.
Not many teenagers have a clear idea about where they want to be in five years time, let alone 30, but Cantabrian Booth was the exception to the rule.
As he stared down his final years of high school, Booth decided his time would be better served by getting a job and preparing for the future, rather than graduating high school.
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“I have no qualifications, I have never worked a high paying job and I currently earn $38,000 a year,” yet seven years of hard work and perseverance resulted in him purchasing his first home.
The new property speculators’ tax, lending restrictions and the general election are all hitting the Auckland house sales market hard, according to the boss of the country’s largest real estate chains.
Chris Kennedy, chief executive of Harcourts, has cited these factors as reasons for a 43.5 per cent annual increase in the volume of unsold Auckland properties listed with his business.
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There’s been a 43.5 per cent increase in the volume of unsold Auckland properties. Photo / Doug Sherring
Real estate agents are wasting their breath calling for a removal of Loan to Value Ratio restrictions. There is no chance they will be removed prior to the election, nor should they be.
Though the housing market has cooled there is a risk that it will bounce back post-election as spring takes hold. That would be a disaster for first home buyers.
We know that population pressure is still far stronger than the rate on new building.
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Demands are growing for first-home buyer house lending restrictions to be relaxed. Photo / Michael Craig
Demands are growing for first-home buyer house lending restrictions to be relaxed, with one real estate agency boss saying Aucklanders now needed an average $200,000-plus deposit to buy their first home.
Barfoot & Thompson’s Peter Thompson, the Real Estate Institute and Century 21 national manager Geoff Barnett want Reserve Bank lending limits scrapped for newbie buyers and TailRisk Economics principal Ian Harrison has released a new report on proposed debt to income limits.
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One in three people strongly believe they deserve to have money to spend because they work hard, yet many are worried about their debt.
The Commission for Financial Capability has surveyed more than 1000 people about their attitudes towards debt for Money Week which starts today.
New Zealanders collectively had $237.79 billion in housing debt and $15.39 billion in personal consumer debt as of June – a record level.
But it appears many are worried about it with half of the people surveyed disagreeing with the statement “I have debt but I don’t really think about it that much.”
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Retirement Commissioner Diane Maxwell is worried about how easy it is for people to get into debt. Photo/Supplied
Beauty vlogger Annalee Muggeridge lives in a “fresh, contemporary and chic” home in New Plymouth, Taranaki with her fiance, Trent, a flatmate and her beloved dog, Peters.
The Taranaki-based makeup artist, who started her career by accident, rose to fame by posting makeup tutorials online and has now amassed a following of over 112,000 subscribers on YouTube and more than 35,000 followers on Facebook and Instagram.
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Hope you guys enjoyed the tour through our home.
Some of you may have noticed I only took you through 3/4 bedrooms, out of respect for our flatmate I didn’t take you through his room.
Filed under Celebrity, Homes & Property New Zealand, Uncategorized
The median house price in Palmerston North has increased only a flicker in the last month, but competition for houses remains intense, with most selling well above the asking price.
Real Estate Institute of New Zealand figures show prices stalled at $360,000…
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Houses are selling for well above their asking price in Palmerston North.
The Real Estate Institute is calling for a review of loan-to-value restrictions as property market turnover drops to its lowest non-Christmas level since 2014.
The number of properties sold across New Zealand in July fell by a quarter when compared to the same time last year, and the number of properties sold in Auckland fell by 30.6 per cent, the institute’s latest data shows.
That is the lowest level of sales, apart from Christmas periods, since August 2014.
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Real Estate Institute chief executive Bindi Norwell says LVR rules are stopping young people buying houses.
Modular homes are on the rise as homeowners priced out of the market see it as a cheaper and more adaptable new build.
Thanks to the growing popularity of modular building, a factory in Upper Hutt is churning them out at near capacity.
Matrix Homes is working on 22 homes for a residential “village” in the Wellington suburb of Tawa that will go up in late September. The company ships homes all over New Zealand on the back of a truck for homeowners looking for a quick and easy way to build.
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Construction manager Scott Jones oversees the build of six homes a month at the Tretham factory.
A Wellington office tower, headquarters of one of New Zealand’s largest family-owned companies, is up for sale.
The Todd Building on the corner of Customhouse Quay and Hunter St has been put on the market by 678 Trustee, a company owned by Wellington property developer Ian Cassels.
The 16-storey property was built in 1988, and is leased to several well-known corporations including Todd Energy, Oracle and Kiwibank.
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Ian Cassels’ company owns the building, which sits on land owned by the Wellington City Council.
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