Building consents up from New Year low

Building consents numbers are up for February, but remain historically low.

Building consent figures for February improved from January's deep hole, but remain low.

Last month 1059 dwellings were authorised, of which 193 were apartments, Statistics New Zealand (SNZ) said today. In February 2008, 1874 dwellings were authorised.

Seasonally adjusted, the total number of new dwellings was up 12 per cent in February after falling 13 per cent in January. When apartments are excluded the improvement in February was just 0.3 per cent.

January's total of 812 consents was the lowest monthly total since that series started in 1965.

The value of residential building consents in February was $358 million, down 42 per cent from February 2008, SNZ said.

Non-residential building consents were worth $382m for the month, up 5.8 per cent from a year earlier.

This morning's building consents come as the recession puts a halt to many construction plans around New Zealand, including Wellington.

Funding has been pulled on the luxury $200 million Watermark development in Wellington, and other apartment buildings around the city have also halted construction.

Dougal List from the planning department at the Wellington City Council said resource consents were down 10 to 15 per cent from the same time last year.

Applications for commercial buildings and renovations remained strong but the pace of activity was much slower than it was 12 months ago. He said many people are looking to get consents in place so they can develop once the market picks up in a year or two.

List said the main casualty in the market was multi-unit developments which has almost completely dropped off as developers struggle to get finance.

Statistics NZ said that as with the previous month, the value of consents for residential buildings in February was below the non-residential value. Before January the last time that happened was June 1998.

For all buildings, consents had a value of $740m last month, down 24 per cent from February 2008.

In the year to February, residential building consents were down 26 per cent from a year earlier to $5.77 billion, non-residential consents rose 5.5 per cent to $4.59b, and for all buildings the value was down 15 per cent to $10.36b.

- NZPA/NEWSTALK ZB