Lifestyle Market Update
In this sector market update, we focus on the lifestyle sector with insight on market conditions from Bayleys Auckland General Manager Lifestyle, Raymond Mountfort.
The popularity of the lifestyle property sector has remained over the last 12 months as people continue to explore options living away from the cities and towns with increasing acceptance and flexibility from businesses to allow people to work from home.
Lockdown restrictions have had a huge impact on the way New Zealanders now want to live, with pandemic-related assessments of their homes and lifestyles encouraging more Kiwis to look for something outside the traditional urban home.
Alongside healthy commodity prices, demand for New Zealand’s exports and greater global investment into climate change, more Kiwis are also looking at the lifestyle benefits of living in rural areas. Kiwis too, are interested in using their homes as hobby farms, with the rising costs of goods and services a motivating factor to squeeze more out of every dollar.
For the 12 months to 30 September 2021, there were 9,464 lifestyle properties sold, up 23.5 percent on the same period last year. The total value of lifestyle properties sold was $10.26 billion for the year to September 2021, up a massive 52 percent on the same period last year. For the quarter ending 30 September the national median for a lifestyle block was $950,000, up $195,000 (or +25.8 percent) for the same period last year.
Despite the high-profile difficulties facing expatriate Kiwis wanting to get back across the border, enquiry from overseas-based residents looking to return home continues with consistency. New Zealand’s stable political climate and ‘safe haven’ status, alongside our initial pandemic response, has made a lasting impression for buyers based offshore, especially those seeking the land and lifestyle they can’t get in more built-up areas like London and Singapore.
It’s an exciting time for the lifestyle sales market with heightened interest across the board from fast-moving one hectare-plus lifestyle properties adjacent to urban boundaries offering people a reprieve from the rat race to larger land sites open to a multitude of uses across the country. With life under a traffic light system now apparent, the flexibility, access to space and clean air offered by lifestyle properties are likely to continue to be appealing factors for homeowners.
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