Apartments and retirement villages keep Auckland building at 14-year high

Friday, 13 July 2018

Consents for new apartment complexes have pushed home approvals to a May record in Auckland.

Home building in Auckland is at record levels, with a second consecutive month of strong data being described as unexpected.

Auckland Council said 1530 residential building consents were approved in May, a record for that month and following a record-breaking April.

Three large apartment developments and one proposed retirement village fuelled the record May, making up 562 units in the total.

'After last month's [April] exceptional growth, it was quite possible we'd see a month of consolidation, so by any measure, this is an exceptional result,' said the council's chief economist David Norman.

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Auckland Council data shows a record number of dwelling consents issued in the month of May.

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Those consent figures are for dwellings that may or may not eventuate, but May data for homes completed was also at an annual high at 1364.

The monthly figures can be volatile due to the impact of a large number of dwellings being included in a single large apartment complex.

But Norman said the rolling 12-month total of consents issued had hit 12,274 which was the highest since the previous construction peak in 2004.

Levels of resource consents and home completions since have fallen short of the level needed to stop Auckland's housing shortage from worsening.

The city is estimated officially to be 45,000 homes short, and is forecast to need 14,000 homes built each year for the next two decades at least, to address that shortage and future population growth.

Population growth was underlined by figures showing international migration to the end of May added 33,695 people to Auckland.

The council figures show 46 per cent of consents issued were for standalone houses, 27 per cent for apartments, and the balance were attached townhouses, retirement village units and other types of dwellings.

Most of those consents, 84 per cent, were for dwellings inside Auckland's 2010 Metropolitan Urban Limit.

In the year to the end of June, 8434 new residential sections had been created in Auckland.

The Minister of Housing, Phil Twyford, on Friday visited the early stage of one major development, Housing New Zealand's overhaul of its Mangere portfolio, where 2700 existing state homes will be replaced by around 10,000 state and affordable market homes.