New apartments smallest yet for city developer
Saturday, 9 September 2023
They’re almost tiny homes, but they’re not on wheels.
A drive to build cheaper homes in the face of high mortgage and construction costs has led a housing developer to build its smallest Christchurch homes yet.
With floors sizes starting at 34m² and without bedrooms or parking spaces, Williams Corporation’s new central city apartments are aimed strictly at the budget market.
Twenty of the 29 homes in the Wilmer St complex will be single-level studio apartments, each with a small balcony or garden space.
The studio units on the ground floor are 34 to 35m², while those upstairs are 41 to 42m².
They are priced at $365,000 to $390,000, and come with a bed that pulls down from the wall and fits over a couch.
The remaining nine homes in the development will have one bedroom each.
The project’s first stage has building consent from the Christchurch City Council and construction starts next week. The site is near the Durham St New World supermarket and South City mall.
Studio units are a feature of Auckland and Wellington’s central cities, but have not so far been common in Christchurch.
The average floor size of units consented in Christchurch last year was 77m².
Williams Corporation director Matthew Horncastle said it was “all about the price”.
“Obviously, if you make the house small, it makes it more affordable. They are also easier to build because the are only two storeys, and it’s timber construction.”
Horncastle said some of the furniture, including the pull-down beds, would come built in “because we are working with a small space, and it has to be done properly”.
He said they had pre-sold several of the homes, to a mix of first-home buyers and investors.
“They are selling really well.”
When asked whether many Kiwis were ready for a studio apartment, Horncastle said they built “lots of different options, and if people want a big house, they will buy a big house”.
Marketing material for the apartments promotes them as ideal for short-term visitor accommodation, such as Airbnb.
Horncastle said they would build more studio apartment complexes after Wilmer St was completed, although it would not become their key product.
Williams Corporation has also diversified into building free-standing houses to broaden its market after initially confining itself to townhouses. It cut staff numbers last year as sales of homes nationwide dropped.
Construction management consultant Mike Blackburn said the move to studio apartments was a sign of market demand.
“They wouldn’t build them if they didn’t think they could sell them.”
Blackburn said while the number of free-standing homes consented last year had dropped 15%, the drop-off in consents for units had only fallen 10%.
“Investors are still the largest individual group of purchasers for multi-unit homes.”
He said that about $10,000 a square metre, the Williams Corporation studio apartments “could not be called affordable”.
“But if you’re a first-home buyer and you’ve got less then $400,000, even if you’d rather have a stand-alone home, this will get you on the property ladder.
“Even if it’s like living in Singapore.”
He said very small homes were “not what people say they want”, but the high costs of house building in New Zealand meant buyers would compromise on space.
“The only way to build cheaper is to build smaller.”