New homes make up much of the housing market in Selwyn, Canterbury, but agents have told OneRoof that buyer appetite for house and land packages has waned on the back of supply chain delays and price increases in the construction industry.
Harcourts Rolleston agent Caine Hopcroft said that finance was another issue impacting the market. “I’m coming across clients who have said that their pre-approvals are restricted to two to three months and of course the build takes longer than that. Most of my clients that are buying [new] are snapping them up closer to when the Gib starts going on or the painting starts.”
For those who can conjure up finance from the bank for a house and land package, the cheapest developments are mostly in Darfield, which start in the $500,000s.
Both Rolleston and Lincoln each have around 1500 sections that are due to come on stream in the next 12-18 months. And in Prebbleton, developers are looking to develop 527 new sections, pushing the boundaries out across rural land.
Start your property search
However, whether there is a future for the thousands of sections in the pipeline is up for debate, with new developments in the district set to compete with sections that are set to come to market in Halswell and Wigram on the edges of Christchurch.
CoreLogic chief economist Kelvin Davidson said that the slowdown in population growth raised the question of where all the people for the thousands of new homes in the district were going to come from.
Davidson, who lives in Lincoln, said: “Drive around Selwyn and you'll see a lot of construction activity, in Rolleston, Prebbleton, in Garfield and Lincoln. But where’s the demand coming from? I mean, doubling the size of Lincoln, doubling the size of Prebbleton and keeping Rolleston growing. There are a lot of houses and we’ve got negative net migration now.
"The developers are confident and I'm sure they’ve done their sums, so it must be coming from somewhere. There is internal migration and people are moving to Canterbury for affordability reasons."
He said the new builds would appeal to local buyers who are looking to move up the property ladder. “People might have bought their first house in Christchurch City and are now thinking, ‘I need my second house now and Rolleston looks pretty appealing with a new build’."
The recent sale of this six-bedroom home on Mclaughlins Road, in Darfield, delivered its owner a healthy profit. Photo / Supplied
A lifestyle property on Heaton Drive, in Tai Tapu, recently sold for $2.95m. Photo / Supplied
House prices in Selwyn are already under pressure. While the district’s average property value is up 12.1% year on year, in the last three months it has slid 3.7% ($38,000) to $988,000.
Some properties have bucked the downwards trend. Property Brokers agents Angela Hunt and Chris Moore recently sold a six-bedroom home on a 1.3ha lifestyle section on Mclaughlins Road, in Darfield, for more than $1.2 million – more than $200,000 what the vendor paid for it in June 2021.
Bayleys agents Urszula Bedggood and Tim Dyer sold another six-bedroom lifestyle property, on Heaton Drive, in the semi-gated Otahuna Estates, in Tai Tapu, for $2.95m – $230,000 above its RV and $405,000 more than what it last sold for in October 2020.
Moore said the Selwyn housing market had returned to normal after the frenzy of last year, when prices were “unbelievable” and unsustainable.
“We’ve got lots of new listings coming to the market. And in most cases, we're able to achieve results for people with a four to six week window, which is how it’s always been really. The properties that are selling are generally the ones where we’ve got vendors who are prepared to meet the market.”
First-home buyers were still managing to get a foot on the property ladder in Selwyn, at price points of between $750,000 and $900,000, but Moore said it was hard to compete with the cheaper townhouses on offer in Christchurch.
That said, Rolleston was becoming increasingly popular. The motorway connection with Christchurch had made commuting easier, and infrastructure development in the town had provided new employment opportunities. A mall and a Pak’n’Save supermarket are on the drawing board and agents report rumours that Costco is looking at opening a store in the town.
