Media release
11 December 2014
Signs Christchurch market cooling
The Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment’s latest housing and construction report shows signs that the
Christchurch housing market may be slowing.
The Ministry today released the fifth edition of the New Zealand Housing and Construction Quarterly, which analyses key
housing market, construction and social housing data.
“This quarter we have seen signs that the growth of Christchurch house prices and rents may be slowing,” said Bryan
Field, MBIE’s Manager of Modelling and Sector Trends.
“Whether or not the Christchurch housing market is starting to return to a more normal state will remain to be seen. We
won’t know until house prices and rents start to dip,” he continued.
Also in this issue of the NZ Housing and Construction Quarterly:
• Residential building consent growth is starting to ease, while non-residential consents continue to increase and show
no signs of slowing down.
• We provide a brief comparison between MBIE’s rent data and the data presented by TradeMe, offering an explanation of
why these two sets of rental data can produce different figures.
The New Zealand Housing and Construction Quarterly publication can be downloaded from MBIE’s Building and Housing
information website at http://www.dbh.govt.nz/sector-information
Accompanying the release of the New Zealand Housing and Construction Quarterly are a new set of online rental data
tables. These can be downloaded at http://dbh.govt.nz/nz-housing-and-construction-quarterly-open-data.
The next edition of the New Zealand Housing and Construction Quarterly will be released in early March 2015.