Craig Cooper: Can my kids only achieve home ownership after their parents are gone?

Hawke's Bay's property market has ascended in the past four years. Photo / NZME

Will my children only own their own home, after inheriting it off their deceased parents?
It's a valid, albeit slightly morose, notion that many parents have pondered.

How will our kids own their own home in a rising housing market?

This week, we learned that 36 suburbs now have an average house price over $1 million.
A year ago there were just 13 suburbs in the $1m club.

Parental demise isn't the only option for first home owners, of course.
The Bank of Mum and Dad can help out.

In 1996, the BMD lent their daughter and myself most of the 10 per cent deposit for a first home that cost us $83,000.

My parents pitched in as well.

We bought the home privately, for $18,000 more than what the seller had paid for it, 13 months earlier.

We sold it nearly six years later for $106,500.
Either we paid too much, or the property market tanked. Probably a bit of both.

The author, pictured on the front step of his first home. No cats were harmed in the taking of this photo. Photo / Emily Hauraki-Cooper

The house had zero access from the road, no driveway, a single feijoa tree on the 865 sq m section and 75 per cent of it needed fencing.

It was an uninsulated 83 sqm railway cottage made of beautiful native rimu and mātai, with three small bedrooms and no shower.

It had no garage, mainly because you could not drive onto the section from the road.

The exterior badly needed painting and it rattled like a chest cold in winter.

We were convinced we had a "worst house in the best street" scenario.
Our "best street" had a friendly cannabis dealer a few houses away, with two pitbulls in the yard.

There was a nurse next door, a Black Power house over the road, and a man called Pete.

Pete made a lot of home brew, always wore sunglasses and a leather jacket, and had planted his entire back lawn in orange trees so he didn't have to mow it.

He didn't like the Government and got on well with the friendly drug dealer, whose customers occasionally knocked on our front door.

All the railway cottages looked the same. We were in a row of about 10.

And most of owned our homes.

My wife's father was a kind, generous soul happy to gift us most of the deposit.
My Dad thought buying the house was a mad idea.

Since we sold it in December 2001, it has remained in the same hands.

In 2021, you can buy it for $400,000 to $500,000. That's a conservative desk top estimate.

At 10 per cent, you'd need a $50,000 deposit to buy it. At 20 per cent, $100,000.

We'd probably have to sell the family home to gift the kids a 2021 deposit.
But there are other alternatives.

Multiple ownership - two couples buying a house together, or for less matrimonial risk, multiple friends buying into a property.

More homes need to built, and are likely to be more compact, on less land than what we've been used to.

There will be more multiple storey apartments. And relaxed regulations allowing increased subdivision.

And of course, moving in with the primary shareholders of the BMD is an option.

Although as a Dad, I think that's a mad idea.