Mike's Minute: Build what is wanted and housing can't fail

Bit of 'rubber hitting the road' research on unsold real estate for you. 

A real estate consultancy company looked at the amount of unsold stock when it came to apartments in Auckland. 

There are a record number. 541 to be precise, which is 20% of everything that has been built in the past three years. 

I love apartments, I live in one, I own them, I have owned them. 

They are not everyone's cup of tea, but what I have learned over the years, like most things in life, there is always nuance to the story. 

I bet you anything you want that the ones that aren't sold, aren't sold for very good reasons. They are crap. 

An apartment is no different to a house. A good one will always sell, in a good market or bad. A bad one won't. 

The trouble with research and stats is they deal with averages and they round things out. 

The apartment market, sadly, has been driven in some respects by ideology. 

The apartment would be part of the new, groovy Auckland where you stepped out of your trendy “town pad” onto your public transport, before taking your Lime scooter the final mile to the office. 

Now, that's apart from the fact there is no public transport in a way that any first-world city would expect, and because the cost of building went through the roof your apartment, which of course was supposed to be affordable, it now isn't. Well, unless you want to live in 80 square metres, which very few do. 

You will not have a car park, because cars are bad, except you like your car, but you've got nowhere to put it. 

And that’s before we get to the quality of the build. Unbelievably we are still dealing with leaky buildings, almost as though we are determined not to learn a lesson. 

Mix in the mad rush we saw for consents where you build a lot of stuff no one wants, and three years down the track all the good stock got snapped up and what's left is 541 boxes that might, if you're lucky, make a passable rental. 

The lesson is do things properly. Give people what they want, not what you want them to have. 

Location, size and quality. Get that right and it's hard to go wrong. 

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