A big motivator for first home buyers in the Hamilton and wider Waikato region is being close to family, says Mark Keesom, principal for Ray White Hamilton City. “Outside of that, it just comes down to their budgets.”
He says the current crop of first home buyers is more educated than their counterparts 10 years ago. But while buyers know what they want, getting finance approved is still the hard part.
“That's just the big hurdle at the moment. People want to buy houses, they want to go and do things but the banks - it's a big wall to climb at the moment for them.”
That’s a shame because “one hundred per cent” it’s the best time for a first home buyer to be looking, Keesom says.
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“In the last five years I don't think there would be a better time for purchasers to be getting out there and buying a property.”
They shouldn’t muck around because the tide is already turning, he thinks.
“Our enquiry has just gone through the roof. People coming through the houses is starting to lift quite quickly now and we're actually starting to get Auckland investors looking at it.
“This happened four years ago just as the first home buyers started to go ‘maybe we should start buying’ and then the investors start to come in and start to pick the good properties off and then they start to miss out.”
Keesom says first home buyers would be the largest pool of buyers and they fall in a varied price range, from $500,000 homes to $900,000.
Not all are youngsters with Keesom sometimes seeing people in their 40s trying to get in the market for the first time and looking at $900,000 properties.
“Whether or not they've come back from overseas I'm not too sure but certainly mid-20s into about the 30s is probably the vast majority of them.”
Glenview, Melville and Dinsdale probably offer the best bang for buck for first home buyers, he thinks.
These suburbs are near the hospital and the majority are freehold properties.
The south side of Hamilton is “about to explode” with all the new subdivisions opening up, he says.
“Glenview is the traditional suburb and those other suburbs are starting to grow quite rapidly around it. All the roading has been done through Hamilton and they're going over to the South side of Hamilton now, so the north has done all its growth and everyone is going South.”
The South side is also cheaper – a first home buyer could pick up a 1970s three-bedroom house on a full site for between $650,000 and $700,000, he says.
