MYTH BUSTED?
It’s an old wives’ tale that has persisted for, well, decades – but is there any truth in the popular opinion that property prices double every 10 years in New Zealand?
It’s long been held up as a reason to invest in property, rather than in another asset class, but is the evidence only anecdotal?
To find out how much weight to give the popular myth, we took a look at the CoreLogic value growth data over the past 30 years (that’s as far as the data goes back) and spoke to investors who’ve invested in residential property through multiple property cycles across New Zealand.
The data and opinions were mixed, and that’s because there are, naturally, very diverse economic drivers for growth in different parts of the country, and at different times over the past 30 years.
However, the national average increase shows that the data doesn’t exactly reflect the myth: from March 1990 to 2000 the average increase was only 51%, while in the following two decades the value increases started to roughly double: at 115% from March 2000 to
