The median Auckland house price hit $675,000 in February - up $83,000, or 13 per cent, in a year.
House prices have galloped ahead of wages and it now takes much longer to save for a deposit.
According to the survey, 63 per cent of pre-1979 first-home buyers saved their deposit within two years. But since 2010 that figure has fallen to 34 per cent. Forty-seven per cent of today's buyers took three to five years, another 10 per cent took 6-10 years and a further 9 per cent took more than a decade.
For many, the financial strain has been aggravated by the Reserve Bank's loan-to-value restrictions, which cap the amount of lending available to borrowers with less than 20 per cent deposit.
The move was designed to cool house prices but the survey shows desperate first-time buyers are using their parents to dodge the restrictions, with nearly half receiving financial help from their family to get across the line.
Barfoot managing director Peter Thompson said young people were overcommitting themselves. He urged first-home buyers to borrow only what they could afford and be realistic about their options.
"If they moved out one or two suburbs ... they won't have to borrow as much finance and they'll be able to pay it off quicker, then eventually buy in another suburb and go through that same routine again."
He added that LVR restrictions were protecting first-home buyers from borrowing too much.
The survey also measured the level of sacrifice it took to get people into their first home and how hard it was staying on the ladder.
Nearly half (47 per cent) of the 1019 respondents said buying their first home put them under considerable financial pressure, while 53 per cent made "significant sacrifices to my lifestyle".
But unlike their predecessors, recent buyers continue to feel under financial pressure well beyond settlement day, citing mortgage payments (39 per cent) and maintaining the property (21 per cent) as their toughest challenges.
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• The downsized dreams of today's first-home buyers
Real Estate Institute chief executive Colleen Milne hoped changes to the KiwiSaver first-home-buyer grant, lifting the purchase price threshold to $550,000, would help more Aucklanders on to the property ladder, as affordable three-bedroom properties were available in the outer suburbs for around that figure.
Though work was under way to free up land and build more houses, this would take time, she said.
The Barfoot & Thompson First Home Survey, conducted by TRA, questioned more than 1000 Aucklanders about their first home purchase. The margin of error is 3.1 per cent.
An open letter from a first-home hunter ...
I am 24, hold a good degree and have a good white-collar job that pays above average. I am married and have a wife and a newborn baby girl. Between us, our salary would be around $90,000. Even so we can't make ends meet. Yes, I do have some luxuries such as iPhone and Macbook etc ... but the truth being that we are very money-wise.
We tried house-hunting last year and gave up, and we had a deposit sufficient for our age (around $60,000) which came from penny-pinching. Even then we failed to get a house, because the number of properties in our budget isn't there, and we are not going to buy in Northland, or anywhere else, as some media commentators have been preaching. We were looking for a family home where our daughter can grow, but we found out the hard way that the whole ladder was missing, not just the first step.
We have decided to leave New Zealand as it's not fair to us anymore. This country has failed our generation and the oldies aren't keen to solve the issue. We have a feeling of disenfranchisement and desperation that is hard to describe.
Visit tinyurl.com/downsizedreams to read the first part of this series.
