New home building consents down in Southland and Invercargill

Friday, 24 November 2023

The Southland District and Invercargill have been on the receiving end of economic and election uncertainty as data shows new home building consents in the south have fallen for the year.

Data from the Southland District and Invercargill City councils shows that new home building activity has fallen sharply during the calendar year.

The Southland District Council’s building solutions manager, Julie Conradi, said that from January 1 to November 20 this year, new home consents stood at 202.

This was down on 291 for the same period last year, out of a total of 315 for the 2022 calendar year.

The change was a 30.6%​ year-on-year decline, which she said could be attributable to several factors.

These included “the economy, that it is an election year, and there are insufficient resources across all aspects of the construction industry”, Conradi said.

“This means the council is seeing owners focus more on renovations for existing dwellings and building sleepouts under the schedule 1 exemption.”

At a meeting earlier this year, Conradi said Southland builders were under pressure, which was lowering the quality of their building consent applications.

In Invercargill, new home building consents had fallen from 193last year to 120 this year during the same January 1 to November 20 period, a decrease of 37.8%​.

In the 2022 calendar year, the Invercargill council issued a total of 239 new home consents.

The council’s planning and building services manager, Anne Duncan, also pointed to several explanations.

“These include product shortage, availability of builders, and waiting for the outcome of the recent general election.”

She said the decrease could also be because of legislative changes that came into effect on May 1 this year and increased the requirements for roof, window, wall and underfloor insulation.

The changes were “aimed at reducing the amount of energy needed for heating residential homes by approximately 40%, increasing a home’s warmth”, she said, but also had the effect of “making building more expensive”.

Duncan said the Invercargill council had issued 47 Land Information Memorandum (LIM) reports in the two-week period from November 3 to 17, compared with 46 for the month of October, “which may speak to things beginning to turn around”.

A property’s LIM report is a summary of the current information held by the council’s different departments on issues such as sewage drains, heritage protection, and zoning, among other things.

Consents for new homes throughout New Zealand also fell, dropping 21 percent in the year ending October, to 39,900, according to data from Stats NZ.

*This story has been updated from an earlier version that referred to 2022 Stats NZ data. Amended: 10.36am, December 1.