House prices drive Shaun and Annabelle from city

By John Cousins
Skilled working couple Shaun and Annabelle Ellis are leaving Tauranga because they can't afford a house here.
They would love to settle down and raise a family here but say the city's lifestyle-driven house prices have outstripped their pay packets.
Mr Ellis, a qualified fitter and welder earning $20 an hour, and Mrs Ellis, an environmental scientist earning $18 an hour, say they are being forced to seek higher-paid jobs in areas with a better parity between take-home pay and house prices. They intend heading to either Auckland or Australia.
"It is too expensive to live here - the wages are not even in the ballpark," Mr Ellis told the Bay of Plenty Times.
They say they have been caught between very modest pay increases and a property market where the median selling price in the past three years has surged by $90,000 (28 per cent) at the Mount and Papamoa, and $108,000 (46 per cent) across the rest of the city.
The couple say they could, at a pinch, afford to buy a home in a lower-priced suburb but it would leave them unable to enjoy the reason they chose Tauranga in the first place - the lifestyle.
They face a mortgage of $550 a week to buy a home in a suburb such as Brookfield - a figure that exceeded one of their take-home pays.
Mrs Ellis, 29, said a mortgage this size left them in a very vulnerable position once they started a family.
Friends in Brookfield on one income were really struggling to service a mortgage of $400 a week and raise two small children.
Mr Ellis, 38, said he needed a $4 to $5 an hour pay rise to stay in Tauranga but $20 an hour was pretty much the going rate for a fitter/welder at the Mount.
"The people I work with are great but at the end of the day we are going nowhere, we are going backward. What I earn on 40 hours a week does not cut it here - it is just a joke."
Mr Ellis said Tauranga wages were renowned for being substantially lower than other New Zealand centres and pathetic by overseas standards. He could earn another $5 an hour working in Hamilton, Taupo and Taranaki or could double his income in parts of Australia.
Tauranga's housing market was driven by property investors and wealthy people who came here to live, together with migrants who snapped up currency exchange rate bargains, he said.
Tauranga Mayor Stuart Crosby said the city's lifestyle attractions were a double-edged sword.
Lifestyle drove up property prices, while also luring skilled trades people to come and work for the going rate.
The law of supply and demand meant other less attractive areas of New Zealand were paying higher rates to attract skilled workers, he said.
Owning your own home in Tauranga meant a restricted lifestyle for ordinary working people. Financial stress destroyed relationships all over the place, Mr Crosby said.
Tauranga economic development agency Priority One chief executive Davie Marriott said house prices were driven by supply and demand and by what people were prepared to pay.
Tauranga's experience was a common trend throughout the world and was linked to globalisation, he said.
Industries paid the rates they could afford to meet the job market and the way people raised their incomes to reach the lifestyle they wanted was to upskill.
Businesses that paid higher wage rates were more innovative, stayed ahead of the game and produced higher-valued niche products. However many Tauranga businesses were lifestyle businesses that did not aggressively drive for maximum performance and paid average or below-average wages.
Mr Marriott said if Tauranga businesses found it hard to recruit skilled staff because they were being tight-fisted, then that was something they had to take on the chin. And while Priority One touted for skilled migrants to shift to Tauranga, he said the 130 migrants placed last year would not have done a lot to distort the city's property market.