housing affordability<\/a> is the headline\u201d for his region.<\/p>\n\u201cThe house price for earnings ratio is getting on for 17 \u2013 anything above three is deemed to be unaffordable,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have heard that the prices are driving our long-term locals away, and that is very, very confronting.\u201d<\/p>\n
He says the council needs to look at rating differentials for the region.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt may be that if people can afford [expensive homes], they can afford to pay a little bit more.\u201d<\/p>\n
Vanessa Williams, from RealEstate.co.nz says the Queenstown market is increasingly driven by high-income buyers, investors and people purchasing lifestyle or holiday properties.<\/p>\n
And over the past six years, the region has defied every housing trend and has rewritten the housing rulebook.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Central Otago Lakes District has been a really fascinating one, or more specifically Queenstown, and they have just bucked every trend over the last six years,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhile the rest of the economy was cooling, while we saw people struggle with the cost of living, it seems that not only did the average asking and house prices in the region continue to grow, but also so did the rents that followed.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s just been completely free of the economic shocks that the rest of the country has had and continued on a trajectory all of its own.\u201d<\/p>\n
A lot of the wealthy buyers are keeping the homes as \u201choliday cribs\u201d, using them for about a month every year. And for the other 11 months, they sit empty, fuelling frustrations in the region.<\/p>\n
Locals told Preston that it can be difficult watching darkened homes line parts of the district while workers scramble to find rentals, sleep in cars, or rely on emergency accommodation.<\/p>\n
\u201c[They say] even if you are living in Queenstown, it\u2019s actually not that nice to have an empty house next door to you,\u201d says Preston, who has just covered the situation for OneRoof.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou want to be in a community, but there are all these empty homes.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe latest Census information showed that almost 30% of the homes in the district were unoccupied.\u201d<\/p>\n
Glover says he doesn\u2019t want a town of \u201czombie houses, which sucks the life out of a neighbourhood\u201d; instead, he wants a sense of community for the tourist-heavy region.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou can\u2019t have tourists without the workforce that goes with that, and the workforce that goes with tourism, they have families, they have children, and the children need to go to school, and therefore we need teachers, so you have to take a holistic view of what are the things that we need in a community so as it grows and it develops and matures, we do that well together.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd that has to be a partnership with the government. They control many of the things needed to do this well.\u201d<\/p>\n
Glover also has concerns for developers, who are \u201ccoming in from a flat-lined Auckland housing market\u201d, hoping to strike property gold down south.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have seen a lot of developers come down to this district and pay a lot of money at very, very inflated prices for land, and that will either result in some very, very expensive properties or some quite significant risks in some of those developments.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo, that\u2019s a bit of a black cloud on the horizon \u2013 people paying more for the land than it is worth.\u201d<\/p>\n
The region now wants stronger intervention, including more affordable housing developments, potential restrictions on empty homes, and tighter rules around short-term rentals. Because for many locals who call Queenstown home, it is no longer just expensive; it\u2019s simply unattainable.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cI don\u2019t think you would find many other places in New Zealand, where you would find nurses, doctors,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":446546,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[10804,806,1647,28164,106602,111,43,139,69,1118,423,20930,32258,2951,79294],"class_list":["post-446545","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-zealand","tag-amanda","tag-as","tag-breaking","tag-fears","tag-gillies","tag-new-zealand","tag-news","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-of","tag-point","tag-queenstown","tag-reaches","tag-town","tag-zombie"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/446545","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=446545"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/446545\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/446546"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=446545"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=446545"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=446545"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}