3 Comments
May 26Liked by John Butt

Hi John,

I was sad to read about your cancer, hopefully the chemo does the trick. I look forward to your next article for an update.

Regarding your other content, it was interesting to read the correlation with household income. It makes sense that they'd be related, because how could people buy houses at any other rate than one related to the cash they have? Well, i guess the other aspect would be how far that cash goes; more specifically, the affordability and availability of the cash. To that end, i think the OCR and economic outlook are equally important.

I'm undecided where I anticipate the economy going, but my feeling (as per my last post on inflation) is that we wont have OCR drops for a while. Not until at least the end of the year, but more likely next year. That said, I suspect that once the OCR drops (assuming its more than just 25 to 50bps), houses will likely take off.

Personally I'm not looking to jump into a property purchase in a hurry, though that might change as my situation changes over time.

Best of luck with your sales and I wish for your good health.

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May 26Liked by John Butt

I track my residential investments spread over Nelson / Tasman every two weeks using Homes.co. Despite what the media commentators say about no growth I have seen steady total portfolio gains over the last 6 months.

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Hi John. Best wishes with the treatment; we've always found Hutt Hospital staff a delight. So lucky to have the facility so close to hand. Thanks so much for your continued work - I am particularly interested in that affordability metric - and great to see the Hutt moving to within that 5:1 ratio. I use wage/salary household income before transfers for my rental market studies as I want to exclude the accommodation supplement from the calculations. Good luck with the investment property sales!

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