First up, consents have remained surprisingly high despite economic concerns around inflation and news of house prices starting to drop – though they are still way too high. Those high consent numbers mean we’re still seeing new records set for the total number of consents with 21,743 issued over the 12 months to the end of July. You can see in the graph above, but more clearly if we unstack it, that the big driver of consents continues to be ‘multi-unit homes’ like townhouses, the volume of which continue to soar. One thing that we can see is that the increase of ‘multi-unit homes’ both in Auckland and elsewhere is having an impact on the average size of homes we’re building. However, around 82% of all consents are within the old 2010 Metropolitan Urban Limit – that has been superseded by the much larger Rural Urban Boundary.

Source: New Zealand Herald September 05, 2022 01:36 UTC