From Auckland’s transportblog, by John Polkinghome:
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Are vacant homes adding to Auckland’s housing shortage?
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As Auckland housing hysteria gets more, well, hysterical, there seem to be a few people worried that investors are leaving homes vacant rather than bothering to rent them out – preferring to rely on capital gains as a source of income instead. …
The most easily accessible source of data on vacant homes comes from the census. The 2013 census shows that, on census night, there were 33,360 unoccupied homes across Auckland. That sounds like a lot. Out of the 500,000-odd homes in Auckland, it’s 6.6%, which might still sound like a lot.
However, it’s almost unchanged from 2006, when there were 33,330 unoccupied homes, 7.0% of the total. And not much up from the 29,586 recorded in 2001, also 7.0% of the total. When I first saw these stats, I thought of them more as something indicating the current shortage of homes – i.e. housing is tighter, so more homes are being occupied. ….
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I think it’s a myth that there are large numbers of people leaving homes vacant for speculative reasons, and I think the data in this post goes a long way to busting it. I also don’t see support for my original hypothesis that low vacancies in Auckland suggest a housing shortage. That doesn’t mean we don’t have a shortage, but the vacancy data doesn’t really tell us. Of course, since the census we’ve had two years of strong population growth and not built enough homes for all the new Aucklanders.
