Samantha Motion: Kiwisaver First Home Grant price caps must rise

First-home buyers using the grant may wind up with homes in need of major renovations. Photo / Getty Images

OPINION
When KiwiSaver was created in 2007, most of the rhetoric centred on helping New Zealanders save for retirement.

That's still a far-off prospect for many people in my Millenial generation and even more so for the Generation Z cohort following in our footsteps.

For these generations, the more immediate reason to join KiwiSaver is to get help towards taking a first step on to the property ladder.

Once you have a few years of participation in the scheme under your belt, you can withdraw some savings to put towards buying a first home.

You also get access to the First Home Grant, which offers $10,000 towards an existing property and $20,000 towards a new one, if you meet certain eligibility criteria. These include staying under an asset cap on the price of the property.

In Tauranga, the cap is $500,000 for an existing property and $550,000 for a new build.

In the rest of the Bay of Plenty, including Rotorua and Whakatāne, it's $400,000 for an existing property and $550,000 for a new build.

The caps were raised to the present level in 2016 when the grant was known as HomeStart - a scheme introduced in 2015.

According to the announcement from then-Minister of building and housing Nick Smith the change reflected "the $50,000 increase in the national median house price since the scheme began.

"We are deliberately increasing the cap for new homes by an additional $50,000 to help drive growth in new residential construction."

According to the Real Estate Institute of New Zealand, the median national house price rose $121,000 in the year to December, hitting a new record of $749,000.

In that period, Tauranga was up $112,000 for a new median of $825,000; the Western Bay was up $142,000 to a median of $734,000, and the Rotorua median hit $541,000 on the back of an $83,500 increase.

Those increases followed steadier rises. In the past five years, Tauranga's median has risen $305,000 and Rotorua's $291,000 - several times over the rise that prompted the last cap lift.

While not impossible, it's pretty hard to find anything to buy under the price cap today - including new builds.

Buyers committed to using the grant will likely wind up with a less desirable property - smaller, in a worse area, in need of more repairs and renovations - than was available under the threshold back when some people (myself included) got to take advantage of it.

That can be a tough compromise to swallow when you're talking about most people's first major investment, and one they must live in at that.

It's time to update the First Home Grant house price caps.

They need to be lifted to a range where they can actually be useful for a generation watching first-home affordability slip further and further out of reach.