Narrow slices of awkward hillsides, bushy banks advertised as “blank canvases” and sections tilted at angles you could build a waterslide down - Wellingtonians will build houses just about anywhere.
Property listings in the capital are peppered with sections on sale for a reasonable price because they go down a bank or up a steep hill.
Buying a section of land that sits on a slope might seem like an affordable way to become a first-home buyer, but experts say the cost could be higher than expected.
Ash Stackhouse is a builder who managed to construct his new family home on a sloped section in Paremata and got great views in return.
He and his partner bought their section for $495,000 from another couple who only realised they couldn’t afford to build on it after they had bought it.
He said the previous owners calculated that the cost of developing the land and building their home on it would cost $400,000 more than the overall resale value of the property.
He estimated he spent around $1 million developing the site and building his home, on top of the cost of the land.
If he folded in the cost of his own labour, the cost would have shot up to $1.5 million.
The home he built is now valued at $1.9 million, he said.
Building on a slope can be costly because it involves doing excavation, earthworks and building retaining walls, which need waterproofing, drainage and additional engineering work, he said.
All that prep happens before the house itself can be built.
In Stackhouse’s case, he had an additional hurdle of trying to build around a large council sewer and stormwater drains he found on his site.
“If it was the same section without a view, I wouldn’t have been that interested in it, to be honest, because it would have been too much work.”
Stackhouse was able to heavily reduce his building costs by doing some of the labour himself, but acknowledged this wasn’t the reality for everyone.
Before buying a steep section of land, he recommended “being very cautious” and talking to as many experts as possible.
“A lot of people, including the people that we bought the section off, fall into that trap of buying a section because they think it’s their dream section and then discovering that they can’t actually afford to build it.”
Real estate agent Chris Robinson has been trying to sell a 294sqm section in Miramar which sits across a bushy bank on a main road.
He said the section was in a great location and the neighbouring houses showed what was possible to build in that area.
But the Wellington section market had been slow and there were a lot of unknowns with sloped pieces of land, Robinson said.
Those unknowns could include getting earthworks done, working around council restrictions and figuring out what the final cost per square metre of building would be.
Robinson said prospective buyers didn’t seem worried about slip risks when considering living on a slope.
“There is no cheap solution to sloping land,” geotechnical engineer Alan Wight said.
Geotechnical engineers are specialised civil engineers who help ensure construction projects built on slopes are safely and stable.
He said there were two ways you could build on a steep hill, but both were relatively expensive.
People could either level the land with a digger and build retaining walls or leave the terrain as is and fit the shape of a house on that angle.
The second option could involve getting cranes or cable cars to access parts of the site that were out of reach.
When it comes to cost versus payoff, Wight said he “would be suspicious of saving money in the end”.
Janhavi Gosavi is a Wellington-based journalist for the New Zealand Herald who covers news in the capital.