FIRST HOME BUYER? TELL US YOUR STORY
The results - released exclusively to the Weekend Herald - suggest the long-sought-after Kiwi home-ownership dream is evolving as prices soar in the nation's biggest city on the back of immigration pressure and cut-throat competition amid a severe shortage of available homes.
The data also provides new insight into demographic shifts and economic changes that have occurred as a new generation of potential property owners seek to break into Auckland's overheated property market.
Barfoot managing director Peter Thompson said the research was a chance to better understand the experiences of today's first-home buyers - "the kids" who had purchased in the past five years - compared to the previous generation - parents who had bought prior to 1980.
"There is quite a lot of common ground, but there are also clear indications that today's first-time buyers are adapting to new challenges that their parents' generation simply didn't face to the same degree.
"Some aspects of the results are concerning, but the overall picture is a promising one where we see today's generation heading off the challenges and modifying the traditional approach in order to make that first step onto the property ladder."
The Weekend Herald has analysed the findings, which are broadly divided into three distinct areas: the buyer, the finances and the house.
In the first of a three-part series, we examine the demographic make-up of today's first-home buyers and how it has changed since the parents purchased their first slice of the much-vaunted "quarter-acre pavlova paradise" in the 1960s and 70s.
Pre-1979, more than three-quarters of Auckland's first-home buyers were younger than 30. But more than half of today's buyers are over the 30 mark, including 4 per cent who are 50-plus.
They are also less likely to have families (pre-1979, 41 per cent had children, compared to just 25 per cent today) and one in 10 of today's first-home buyers are investors who won't live in the property they own.
In other findings, today's buyers are less likely to purchase with a partner or spouse (63 per cent today, compared to 88 per cent pre-1979). And despite soaring housing costs, nearly one in four first-home buyers now purchase alone, compared to the previous generation's 11 per cent.
"Competition for housing stock" is cited as the biggest challenge by 14 per cent of recent buyers, behind "price" (27 per cent) and "finding the right type of property" (20 per cent).
Data released this week by interest.co.nz underlines the difficulty facing first-home buyers.
Auckland remains the country's most unaffordable region to buy an entry-level property, with mortgage repayments on the city's cheapest houses devouring nearly half of a couple's take-home pay.
Loan Market mortgage adviser Bruce Patten said first-home buyers were getting progressively older as they were forced to save bigger deposits.
"They're not buying first homes until their 30s, as opposed to their late 20s previously."
Meanwhile, family sizes were shrinking as parents returned to work earlier after struggling with the cost of children and mortgage repayments on a single income.
Real Estate Institute chief executive Colleen Milne said the findings were a "comment on the changing composition of our community".
The one in four buyers purchasing alone would include separated families going from one home to two, as well as young cashed-up professionals returning from overseas.
• The Barfoot & Thompson First Home Survey, conducted by TRA, questioned more than 1000 Aucklanders about their first home purchase. Respondents ranged from very recent purchasers to those who bought their first house before 1970. The margin of error on the sample of 1019 respondents is 3.1%.
Monday: Finding the money
