Residential consents reach 45 year high

New home consents reached their highest levels since the mid 1970s, with 37,882 granted in the year to February 2020, an 11 per cent gain over the previous year.

“The number of new homes consented in the February 2020 year is the highest in about 45 years,” Statistics New Zealand construction statistics manager Melissa McKenzie said.

Wellington saw the largest regional growth rate, at 21 per cent over the previous year, as did the South Island sans Canterbury, which saw 12 per cent growth. Waikato and Auckland saw 10 and 7.3 per cent growth respectively.

Given the country is now under lockdown to stop the spread of COVID-19, much of the consented building activity may be on hold, unless it’s deemed emergency work required for maintaining human health and safety.

“Building consent statistics may be affected in the coming months by the current lockdown because of COVID-19. However, any delay to or cancellation of already consented building plans would be seen in the quarterly value of building work put in place, not in monthly consent statistics," McKenzie said.

Consents for non-residential building work also grew over the year-long period, gaining 2.3 per cent to reach a value of $7.3 billion.

Offices, administration, and public transport buildings saw the greatest growth with an 8.4 per cent gain on the previous year.

At around $1 billion, the value of consents given for shops, restaurants and bars was still high by historical standards, even though they fell 12 per cent from the previous year.

"These figures articulate that once this lockdown period is over, there are record levels of both residential and non-residential projects in the pipeline, which provides certainty for our industry. In conjunction with these record consent levels, the government last week allocated $54 billion to infrastructure spend, with more expected to be announced shortly. Combined, this creates a positive outlook for the industry as a whole," ArchiPro founder Milot Zeqiri said.

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