For most homeowners, their house and land are easily their biggest assets.
Mortgages loom large. Wealth, or the feeling of it, rises and falls with the market. Some even argue, with more than a letterbox of truth, that the New Zealand economy is built on housing, with a few extras bolted on.
Civis, curmudgeonly as ever, finds them frustrating.
First up: the word "average". As any budding statistician knows, there are at least two kinds — mean and median — and they can differ significantly.
Monday’s ODT front-page report, "Average Central house price hits $1.6 million", didn’t say which kind. Civis assumes it’s the more common "mean": total asking prices divided by the number of properties.
It’s much like a cricket batting average: total runs divided by dismissals.
The source, a media release from realestate.co.nz, offered no clarification, simply referring to "averages".
Civis reckons the "median", the midpoint in the range, is often more useful.
The two "averages" are often close, but a flurry of high-end Queenstown Lakes listings can skew the mean above the median. Conversely, a run of cheaper homes can drag it down.
There’s also the mode, the most frequent value, plus other more technical averages.
Second on Civis’ list: the failure to account for inflation.
The realestate.co.nz release noted a marginal 1.1% rise in the national average asking price to $862,563 in October 2025, noting the "stability". In real terms, though, prices fell because inflation was running about 3%.
This week, Civis noted a three-month uptick in the OneRoof-Valocity Home Value Index. A graph showed the national average (presumably the "mean") down 12.6% from its February 2022 peak, to $958,430 — a notable drop, though hardly a plunge.
Factor in CPI inflation of about 17% over that time, and the picture shifts. Building-cost inflation has been steeper still.
Civis crunched the numbers from early 2018 to now: home values are up about 40%, while cumulative CPI inflation sits around 30%.
Meanwhile, as reported on Wednesday in the ODT, Dunedin’s rateable value was stable over the past three years. With inflation around 12.5% over that time, house values effectively fell, though not as much as in many centres.
A third irritation: reports of old properties in Queenstown and Wānaka fetching eye-watering sums. The key, of course, isn’t the house — it’s the land.
Take a recent Bremner Bay, Wānaka example: the property had a rateable value near $7 million. The article, while sensibly rich in family history and interest, took several paragraphs to reveal the crucial detail — the size of the land.
In this case: 2814sq m, nearly seven-tenths of an acre in old money. No wonder the "crib" commands a whopping price. To be fair, the article did quote the agent, who noted the house sat on premium land and was ripe for development.
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Civis welcomes the slide in house prices since the peak.
They needed to fall substantially, and they have, once you factor in inflation. Were the economy not so desperate for confidence, a further drop would help make homes less unaffordable for first-home buyers.
Reasonably priced homes and manageable rents are vital foundations for a healthy society where everyone has a stake.
Building costs also need taming. A few recent measures taken together may help modestly: exempting small buildings from the national levy, allowing more overseas products, streamlining consents, and exempting some small builds from consent altogether.
Civis remains wary of proposals to allow tradespeople to self-certify their work. Still, none of this will make much of a dent in Queenstown Lakes’ mountainous prices.
Sadly, many workers remain priced out of the district.
