Migrants saving up to $300K on Auckland housing at Hobsonville

Want to save up to $300,000 on a new Auckland property?

Recent migrants from China are looking to save themselves a fortune by picking up raw land at Hobsonville.

Those migrants have snapped up nearly 300 new land parcels since early last year and the agency selling all those sites says there's one extremely good reason why it's going on.

Money.

James Law, of James Law Realty, said his firm had sold the sections on the city's northwestern fringes mainly to people who had recently arrived here from China and the move was being driven by sheer economics.

"They're saving about $200,000 to $300,000," Law explained of each completed house-and-land package at Hobsonville, compared to new house stock elsewhere in Auckland.

Law said his agency had sold the sections since early last year. Sections sold for about $350,000 and about $650,000.

"It's cheaper for them to buy and then build rather than buy an existing house," Law said of the buyers, 97 per cent of whom are recent Chinese migrants.

The buyers migrated here usually in the last four to five years and all were either residents or citizens of New Zealand, Law emphasised.

"No sections have been sold to people who don't live in New Zealand. Every buyer, we ask them for their passport to check they are residents. A lot of them know each other," Law said.

His firm had used WeChat as its primary marketing tool and Law said this was a mechanism which was particularly popular with Chinese people who trusted it.

Last July, about 50 Chinese buyers snapped up 23 sections within minutes of a big release, following a post by the agency on the messaging application.

Law said some buyers were purchasing to develop houses and to sell the house and land package because they had networks in the building sector.

Others were buying to rent out their houses while others would live in the new houses, Law said.

Sections were sometimes only about 300sq m but houses of about 220sq m were built there, he explained.

The Chinese migrants were spending around $400,000 on the houses they built on the new sites, he said, and the whole package was costing them sometimes up to $1 million.

"We've also sold another about 100 sections around Kumeu and Massey," Law added.

The land is Clarke Rd and Scott Rd at Hobsonville in an area known as Scott Point, which is beside Hobsonville Point.

- An earlier version of this story referenced the land being purchased at Hobsonville Point.