I believe most folk are worried, and the media has been referring to it as a "housing crisis". Notably the price increase has been limited to Auckland though (and Queenstown, but Queenstown is the NZ equivalent of Aspen, Colorado; which is to say it's a bit of a millionaire's club).

Unfortunately the currently in power government has done a lot to court this outcome, and so has mostly been avoiding doing anything about it. I think they did recently step in to make it harder for Chinese investors to purchase property in NZ though.

Average house prices in Christchurch just hit half a million, so it's not limited to Auckland and Q'Town, it's just that they were already crazy markets in the first place.

LVR restrictions were upped in October to 40% meaning you now need as an investor 40% deposit for a mortgage in Auckland from the NZ banks (previously was upped to 30%). Things might be slowing down - open homes in my area seem to have less traffic on weekends ....

Yes. Fact of life. More or less every day or so there's an article on the house prices. Lots of parts to the problem - trust me we worry. Not dissimilar to Vancouver or Sydney ...

I spend almost 40% of my post-tax pay on rent each week in Auckland. It's mad.

"Twice the size of England, but with less than a tenth of its people" means that beyond the very short term issues, the housing shortage is easily solvable with ample construction. If you can sell a newly built house for 500-700k USD; then they will magically sprout like mushrooms unless you explicitly forbid it (e.g. as in the California housing problems).

New Zealand has the same issue that Canada does, which is that there are too many incentives for buying housing as an investment. The end result is that housing prices have been spiking upward.

This is due to not only global wealth, but also locals that have been trained to believe that housing is the only good retirement investment.

Canada has finally taken some measures to reign this in, with the 15% foreign investor tax in BC and tougher mortgage rules, but a lot more needs to be done. NZ has finally started adding more regulation around housing investment as well, but I feel like they're still far behind where Canada is at.

Are these for listing price or sales price? Average sales price is always quite bit lower than listing price.

By US state, Hawaii's average sales price is $740k (listing = $980k). DC's average listing price is $703k (sales = $538k).[0] If sales price, Auckland seems to be about $100k USD over Santa Cruz County, CA.

[0] https://www.trulia.com/home_prices/

quite the reverse actually. most houses in akl sell by auction and not a quoted price (gotta let the market decide). the numbers you see referenced are almost certainly the average of actual selling prices.

We are very bloody worried, rest assured.

That's why I'm moving back to my rural home town. The lifestyle is better, too.