Kāinga Ora homes empty on Hardinge Rd, on the Ahuriri seafront. The Government housing agency says they are being prepared for sale. Photo / Doug Laing.
Kāinga Ora homes empty on Hardinge Rd, on the Ahuriri seafront. The Government housing agency says they are being prepared for sale. Photo / Doug Laing.
Government housing agency has confirmed a small village of 10 homes on Napier’s Ahuriri beachfront is empty because they are being readied for sale.
The village fronts seafront Hardinge Rd with four homes at numbers 35 and 36, and has six more in two-storey accommodation at 88-92 Waghorne St, witha residents-only parking off Macaulay St.
Kāinga Ora central regions director Graeme Broderick, said that in recent months the agency has been supporting tenants moving into other Kāinga Ora homes.
“Now all the homes are empty, we are readying them for sale on the open market,” he said.
Proceeds from the sales will be used to provide new homes that are “warmer, drier, the right size and in the right locations for our tenants.”
Jim Brown, who lives elsewhere in Napier but visits the seafront several days a week, estimates he first noticed the front houses were unoccupied about six months ago.
He has a friend looking for a home and inquired of Kāinga Ora as to what was happening with the homes, and heard nothing other than “we’ll get back to you”.
“They’re a bit older than I would have thought, there’s a plaque saying they were built in 1985,” he said. “But it’s a nice little complex. Most people wouldn’t know they belonged to Kāinga Ora.”
The Waghorne St front of the 10-home village in Ahuriri where the empty Kāinga Ora homes are being prepared for sale. Photo / Doug Laing
In an area mixing cottages well over a century old with modern, two-story seafront homes, some property sales in recent years have been in the $1.5 million to $2 million range.
Meanwhile, numbers of applicants on the Ministry of Social Development’s housing register in need of a home in Napier increased in the quarter to the end of September, the first increase since December 2023. In Hastings, the numbers have decreased, for eight quarters in a row.
In Napier 279 were registered at the end of September, while in Hastings, they totalled 456.
They compared with the March 2022 highs of 801 in Napier and 804 in Hastings.
Nationwide, there were 19,431 registered, the third quarter in a row under 20,000, but having increased from 19,113 at the end of June.
The nationwide peak was 26,868 in March 2022.
Doug Laing is a Hawke’s Bay Today reporter based in Napier, with more than 50 years’ experience covering most aspects of news, including social, housing and community issues.
