Been looking at housing in Wellington past couple of months. All but one of the houses we looked at were very old, never insulated, often pretty terrible places with few updates over their life. They were all 1.3-1.5m NZD for approximately 120-160 sqm. So think something like ~1m USD for ~1400sqft that then needs 200k USD to bring it up to US standards for insulation, to make it healthy and ensure your kids don’t get asthma, etc. I really can’t express the kind of miserable shape most of these houses were in. In the US many would be just sold as tear downs and replaced with something new.

The market here would in all normal respects be a bubble with average house prices now over 12x the average wage. The most unaffordable in the OECD I think. But the problem is the only thing NZers put their money into is housing. It’s treated as an investment where the goal is to build equity then use that to get the next house etc. This has been supported with very very low tax rates on property and no CGT on sales. (You pay a pathetic 0.25% tax on your property in Auckland.) On top of this poor policies have lead to not building enough housing for the growing population. So it’s unclear how it will resolve but it’s adding a lot of stress to the society, as half the population face a bleak future of housing insecurity and handing over most of their wages to live in bad conditions.