What I’ve learned from months of first home hunting – صحيفة الصوت

OPINION: At first sight, the little one-bedroom apartment in Wellington seemed perfect.

It had a wee balcony overlooking Cuba St, a decent-sized galley kitchen and a separate bedroom with a walk-in closet. The bathroom did look minuscule, but the price was great.

In fact … the price seemed too good to be true.

“That’s because it is too good to be true,” the agent told me when I gave him a call. This cute little apartment in the heart of town was a leasehold property, which meant you wouldn’t really own it as you would if it were freehold. Instead, you’d just lease it for the long term.

That was no good for a first time buyer. And no good for me. I’m not a first time buyer – I just write about them.

Once a week, I trawl the listings for a first-timer-friendly property. So many of the incredible properties we write about at Homed are inspirational but completely out of reach of first time buyers, and we wanted to change that.

READ MORE:
* Here’s what the gains on properties held for 40 years look like
* Credit crunch past its peak, but not over yet
* Construction costs rising at the fastest pace on record
* KiwiBuild will be more expensive, but housing experts say that’s actually good

From the get-go, our criteria for these properties were fairly simple: priced under the First Home Grant cap; pretty much ready to move into; ideally not going to an unpredictable auction; and with a little something extra, a bit of spirit or style, that sets it apart and makes it feel like a home.

Along the way, I added a few more to make the search easier. If there’s a body corporate, the fees should be under $3000 per year, and there should be no major works needed or planned. If it’s a unit title, it shouldn’t include anything too restrictive, such as an age limit, an interview requirement, “no visitors after 10” or “no pets”.

I also have some personal criteria.

I avoid homes that are clearly tenanted. You can usually tell, because the listing images have a lot of personal property in them. Sometimes a lower-cost home owned by the vendor will also have personal items in the listing images, but in my experience, kids’ toys and no obvious styling often suggests an investment property.

I choose not to feature homes where the sale might contribute to someone’s housing instability, because that’s the opposite of what we want to achieve with the feature.

I particularly wanted to feature the kinds of homes I often crush on: cute cottages, mid-century units, former state houses, baches.

At first, there were more homes that could work for first time buyers than I expected.

We’ve featured railway cottages, 1910 bungalows and 70s baches; units and flats; standalone and semi-detached. The homes have been vintage, new, and in-between – one of my faves was the little mid-century unit in Auckland with a zen garden in the middle of it.

I use several sites to search for homes. The four I mainly turn to are Neighbourly Property, Trade Me Property, Realestate.co.nz and Homes.co.nz.

On most of these sites you can set up regular searches, based on location, property type, price and configuration. Some will even ping you when homes come on the market that meet your criteria.

This is really handy – not just for buying, but for the crucial first step in house hunting: learning the market you’re hunting in and getting to know what properties sell for. But even with good tools in place, and the whole country to choose from, it has not always been easy to find places that fit the criteria.

In the past two or three months, it’s started to feel even harder. Despite reports of more homes for sale and a shift to a buyer’s market, it seemed to me as though the cute little gems – the interesting, unique spots I’d seen by the clutchful in summer – had dried up by the time winter set in.

This might be down to the time of year – folk tend to prefer to list and house hunt in summer. But I wondered if the shifting market meant would-be vendors in properties at the lower price points were deciding to stay put until they could get a better handle on what the market was doing.

“The first time buyer tends to be quite savvy these days,” says agent Ben Atwill of Ray White Real Estate. He knows the market well and spoke to us on the first season of First Rung, the podcast series we did especially for first time buyers.

First timers now have good support mechanisms around them, as well as resources such as settled.co.nz, Homes.co.nz, and Stuff Homed’s own First Time Buyers’ Club – a six-part guide to buying your first home, which we have just launched.

“There’s a lot of information that, going back 10 years ago just wasn’t as prominent,” Atwill adds.

Despite the challenge of rising interest rates, he says the first time buyers he sees are “cashed up” after two years of not being able to afford a property.

Their deposits have grown, and as prices dip, they’re often looking beyond the $500,000 range – maybe even over a million dollars in cities like Wellington. There’s still plenty of activity in that price bracket, he says.

One Onehunga agent I spoke to said they’d only had seven one-bedroom or two-bedroom properties come on the market in the past 12 months. But an Upper Hutt agent told me there were “50” two-bedroom units on the market at one point, yet he struggled to get first time buyers interested in seeing them as a stepping stone to the home they really wanted.

Like with that one-bedroom apartment on Cuba St, when it comes to the Kiwi first home market, it pays to keep an open mind. The gems are still out there, but when a market is as rocky and diverse as Aotearoa New Zealand’s is, you might have to dig for them a little deeper.