When you take into account all those fun extras like maintenance and insurance on top of the mortgage, a typical first home buying household is around NZ$57 a week better off renting than buying.

While this is a bummer, consider this: one year ago the difference was a whopping NZ$150. I don’t need to tell you this is because interest rates and house prices were much higher a year ago, obviously.

And check this out: when house hunters went crazy in November 2007 increasing the demand for houses, the market followed suit and went a little bit crazy too. At that time, a household would have been NZ$187 a week better off renting.

Speakers such as Murray Smith, Head of Property at the New Zealand Superannuation Fund will look at 2010 and what it holds, real-estate wise.

They’ll also address key issues facing the industry including what the macroeconomic environment may have in store and the outlook for property markets.

(FYI: Macroeconomic relates to the entire economy, including the growth rate, money and credit, exchange rates, the total amount of goods and services produced, total income earned, the level of employment of productive resources, and the general behavior of prices.)

The 16th annual conference is hosted by Massey University at the InterContinental Hotel from 24 to 27 January.

Click here to check out the details.

Massey University professor Bob Hargreaves said it would get harder to buy a house over the next five years, with house prices more likely to rise than drop, interest rates only able to go up and wages remaining static. “Plus the fact that most of the people operating in the housing market are not first-home buyers, they are existing investors. The house prices will go up.”

Hargreaves said the recent home loan affordability jump in November was a short burst in an otherwise pretty crappy long-term picture for aspiring home owners.

Talk of property taxes and such is something that could change the market, but Hargreaves points out it would take a brave politician to make such a move.

Sales in December last year averaged $552,933 which is the highest in two years, managing director Professor Peter Thompson said.

He said the amount of sales has decreased markedly, but this is for no other reason than sellers not willing to settle for less than they think their property is worth.

He said property ownership has been falling for some time now, but remains high in the older demographic. “If people want to get a house, they will get there, it just takes longer. Whereas people were buying them in their 20s when I was younger, it is now more like your late 30s or 40s.”

Click here to read the rest of this Dominion Post article.

The report calculated it now takes 61.8 percent of the average income (of one person) to pay an averaged sized mortgage on an average house.

And in case you were willing to settle for a doer-upper in the no-so-central part of town, those houses which are considered to be in the lower price range also increased in price just enough to make them pretty unaffordable to the average Joanne Bloggs. Excellent.

In saying that, this time one year ago it would have cost 64.4 percent of the average persons income to service an average mortgage so I suppose we can’t complain about that.

Click here to see the rest of the report.

The BNZ Home Loan Affordability report shows the amount of an average income needed to service an 80% mortgage on a median house rose by 3.2 percentage point to 61.9% this month.

That’s a pretty big deal. That’s a bigger jump in home loan affordability in one month since March 2007, which was at the height of the boom that doubled house prices between 2002 and 2007.
Read the rest of the report here.

And the market shows no signs of stopping with banks quietly moving to raise their short-term fixed mortgage rates.

Latest figures show 343 mortgagee sales were recorded in September 2009.

Overall this doesn’t seem like an unusually high figure. That’s 102 more than the previous month.

But its when you consider the numbers for the sime time 2 years ago it gets really scary..

In September 2007 when the property boom was peaking, there were only 16 mortgagee sales for the whole of NZ.

What happened!?

Click here to read the Sunday Star Times article.

There have been signs of banks easing their lending standards in recent months, with some offering home loans at relatively high loan-to-value ratios.

Read this landlord.co.nz article here.

The fake-start recovery in the housing market and high long term interest rates are not helping the current situation, which is already dire due to virtually no income growth and rising unemployment.

The report shows the amount of income needed to service an 80% mortgage on a median house rose by 2.5 percentage points to 58.7% – its highest level in 2009.

Click here to read the BNZ Home Loan Affordability Report.

But is this the beginning of a recovery for the property market? Or is it one of many ”fake starts” we might experience before the market heals again?

Read the article by Tghe New Zealand Hearld here.

The companies were fined thousands of dollars after admitting to charges relating to the Fair Trading Act.

Read the article here.