Cooking the Books podcast: Could building be the way for first-home buyers to get ahead?

Building creates the opportunity for something that fits your unique situation. Photo / Lewis Gardner.

Each week the NZ Herald and Newstalk ZB's Cooking the Books podcast tackles a different money problem. Today, it's why building could be what helps those with a small house-buying budget. Hosted by Frances Cook.

Houses are now so expensive, first-home buyers are considering anything and everything to tip the scales in their favour.

One of the options you can consider is building. There's a financial incentive, for starters.

The KiwiSaver HomeStart grant doubles if you're planning to build. It's $5000 for buying an existing home, and $10,000 if you're building a new one.

You can also have a bit more control over what type of house you buy. Maybe you can keep costs low by going for a smaller house on a smaller parcel of land, instead of the standard three-bedroom Kiwi home.

But the issue is that as a first-home buyer, by definition, you're new at this.

Building can be complicated, and there are more ways it can go wrong.

For the latest Cooking the Books podcast I talked to Kevin Atkinson, from Generation Homes.

We discussed what first-home buyers need to know before building, the trend for smaller homes, and the opposite strategy, of building bigger multi-generational homes.

For the episode watch the video podcast above, or listen to just the audio here.

If you have a question about this podcast, or question you'd like answered in the next one, come and talk to me about it. I'm on Facebook here, Instagram here and Twitter here.

You can subscribe to this podcast on iHeartRadio, Apple podcasts app, or Spotify, to make sure you never miss an episode.