Opinion: House price increases changing home ownership

In the last year, the average price of a Tauranga home has gone from $599,915 to $687,364.

Good news was announced in Saturday's Bay of Plenty Times Weekend for anyone who currently owns a home in Tauriko, Mount Maunganui, Matua, Bethlehem or Otumoetai.

These five suburbs are picked to become Tauranga's suburbs with average house prices over $1 million within four years, according to Homes.co.nz.

People that have worked hard all their lives to buy a home in one of these suburbs will have been excited to hear the news, deservedly.

But the news isn't greeted with happiness by everyone.

For people of my generation, sometimes known as Generation Rent, more often as millennials, this is just another story telling us the goalposts for home ownership have moved yet again.

In the last year, the average price of a Tauranga home has gone from $599,915 to $687,364. That's an increase of $87,449 in one year, or another $17,000-odd dollars added to a deposit.

Cheap houses are out there, but they're few and far between. The cheapest I could find yesterday was a one-bedroom attached home for $309,000, for which a mortgage would cost about $800 a fortnight.

Renting is far cheaper - you can get a decent two-bedroom rental for that price and don't have to worry about paying rates or maintenance costs, plus you can have a flatmate to help split costs.

My generation is waiting until later in life to start a family, so there's less pressure to buy a house, and we're also more mobile - jobs are less secure than a few decades ago and we're aware our jobs might not exist in five or 10 years, so it's better to have fewer ties.

Because of these and other reasons, in the not-so-distant future, I think more Kiwis are going to choose renting over buying.

It will be interesting to see how this changes the housing market.