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I'm Chelsea Daniels and this is the Front Page, a daily podcast presented by the New Zealand Herald. If there's one topic kiwis never get tired of talking about its houses. It's the biggest purchase most people ever making their lives. So if you're looking to buy it pasted, do your research. Fortunately, One Roof has today released its official ranking of the
one hundred hottest suburbs across the nation. Alongside data partner Velocity, the experts have combed through every neighborhood in the country and rated them on factors like affordability, amenities and growth potential. Today on the Front Page, we're joined by One Roof editor Owen Vaughan to talk about their process and some of the surprising discoveries they made along the way. Oh and first off, what are our top suburbs this year?
Our top suburbs. There's a bit of a surprise there. I think most people, when you put to them, were New Zealand's one hundred best suburbs. There'll probably be lots of different answers, probably Ponson Bay, graylen Omaha, Oriental Bay, Bendleton. Sorry, none of those make the cup. What we wanted to find out was the suburbs that had the most potential
to grow. So we wanted to look at the next Graylands, the next ponds and bays, the next omahas, because look, everyone you talk to when you talk about real estate, they all go, Gosh, I wish I'd bought in grayle In in the nineteen nineties, or I wish I'd brought in Queenstown twenty years ago when no property was really cheap. And so we wanted to identify those areas, the areas that will be affordable for own buyers or people going
into their second home, which will grow in value. So the place is in thirty years time whether they'll be going, God, I wish I'd bought there. And so the number one suburb is East Hammocky, and I think most people will be going, what what East Hamacke. Isn't that an industrial estate? How many houses are there?
Look?
East Hamakae residential suburb is a small sliver on the side of a big industrial estate. It's also sandwich between lots of suburbs that are seen as higher value. So like your howex your Halfman Bay's, your Danni Mora's, these are Auckland suburbs that are out in the east and they're seen as desirable because they're zoned for good schools, they've got lots of manitaying, or they've probably got some stellar views as well. If you're on the coast east.
Haamackey is close to those suburbs. It's got a affordable housing, it's next to a huge employment center and it's just going to grow in value. Because of that. People will see it as a stepping suburb right now, but it will become the destination suburb in maybe five and ten years. So people who can get in now are going to be the people in thirty years time going I told you so.
So I'm looking in Ace, Tamakay where else should I be looking?
Where else should you be looking? Otahou, Otara, Mungery. Those are suburbs that don't usually make a list of the best suburbs in New Zealand probably kind of like make lots of other lists that probably are pretty detrimental to those suburbs. But I don't think that people should view those suburbs as being anything less than great places to live. And that's where we want to look at as well. It's not just is it decide a place where you can go to work. Is it going to grow in value?
Because they're houses are deep cheap. We wanted to look at places where there's great amenity, and that usually means kind of now good schools or great restaurants, cafes, and these communities. When we went down and we talked to the people who live there, we talk to the agents who sell there. These are humming, vibrant communities and I think people who don't have any knowledge of these communities should go check them out. They are kind of no
good places to live. You'll be able to get on the property ladder in Auckland at least in a very kind of like reasonable price. And so those are the surprises. Other places outside of Auckland, we've got lots of suburbs in Masterton, Fanganui, Gisburn, christ Church features prominently, Sydnym, the central city suburbs there. These are all great humming places that we've got developments that are happening around them. They're cheap.
It's different points in the cycle. People are very interested in that kind of migration. The big centers out into kind of provincial towns and cities. If you want to call it that, And certainly after COVID that I whole push to get more space, you know, get the lifestyle dream or whatever it was. And you look at the stets and it's definitely not clear cat. There's always people going both ways, regardless of the point in the cycle.
There's always people moving out to regions, there's always people moving back into the big cities.
So if I was a first home buyer right now, these were to be the places that I would look happily. Not my own suburb features in the list. I did n't enjoy the figures. It got there on its own merits. Just let me tell you a better story about myself. I came to New Zealand. You could probably guess I'm not from New Zealand. Know what kind of accent is that. I'm from Scotland. And I rocked up in New Zealand just over ten years ago with my Kiwi wife, and
we're looking for somewhere to live, somewhere to buy. And I think for most people, when you turn up to a new location, it can all seem a lot, it can seem very overwhelming, it's daunting. We all wish we could have Kirsty and Phil or the new Location Location Location, New Zealand hosts are becking call to go off and find us a house a great price, but we don't. We have to search and it can be time consuming
and it could be really daunting. So we found ourselves looking at first in places like Saint John's in Auckland and that's a fairly nice suburb, but very expensive. We looked at Stonefields again, really nice suburb, really expensive, and we just didn't have that money to pay for a house like that. Even back in twenty fourteen, part of me wishes you should have just gone to the bank and got every money that you could have got and just got in a queen'stown. But we didn't make that
decision where we ended up only hung Out. We started looking at suburbs that were on rail lines. I used to live in London and that was the key thing if you were looking to buy a house, buy a house next to a tube station, because you needed to be connected to get to work. And that's where we started looking. And we found only Hunga and that's where
we bought and we love it there. It's a great humunity, but at the time it was really affordable, and we just see it growing in value, not from monetary point of view, but we can see the development that's going on down there. There's lots of new apartment blocks, lots of new cafes coming in the dressmark. That's a big feature of only Hunger that's getting redeveloped. So these kind of things make a suburb seem all the more impressive
and all the more attractive to buyers. And so that's my little own personal story of I know what suburbs should be be going to. What are the factors that are the reasons you should go to a suburb?
In terms of creating this list, so you mentioned that you spoke to local real estate agents and what kind of work went into finding and really digging in compressing this list and naming the one hundred best suburbs.
So what we did was we wanted to create an index. We just didn't want to create out put a hole of the suburbs in a hat and go here's one, or we choose our favorite suburbs because it's all subjective when you do it that way, and everyone's got a personal connection to a certain suburb and thinks that that's
a suburb that should go off. We looked at round about ten to twelve factors and created an index around that, and we measured the suburbs on those factors, so employment, resistance to price scrops, price growth, population growth, the turnover of a suburb, the amnity that's around there, of schooling. We definitely did do it in a methodical manner because really anecdotal evidence can kind of point you down some blind alleys, and this we felt was going to be
the best case. But what we ended up doing was when we had that list, we went out to agents, We went to the people who sell there and kind of no buy there, and we wanted to get there kind of from a perspective on these suburbs. And by and large, what we found with our index was being reflected in the suburbs themselves.
Were you surprised with the top five or ten?
Yeah, I was surprised that my own suburb didn't make number one, even though I'd paid a lot of people to do that. No, I was surprised by maybe some of the suburbs that were in there, maybe not the type of suburbs they were, maybe the names of the suburbs. I wouldn't have picked East Hamaka mainly because I've never gotten to these tamiki before. I've only recently been there, and we wanted to get a sense of what's it
actually like. And it's great. I love being there. It was kind of an eye opener whenever you got a new place and you can see, all right, I can see why people would want to live here, I can see why people have bought here. Some of those kind of results were surprising, and I've found out about lots of different places in New Zealand that previously I'd have
no knowledge of, and that's always kind of fun. And hopefully that's what that list does, that people can see it, browse through it and say, all right, I never thought that, you know, buying and fung anui could be so great and it's going to go up in value at least kind of now, that's what the forecast say. So I
think that's the joy of those kind of lists. There's always a kind of like a surprise entry in there, lots of prise entries, and I think it's going to be a good talker for people just going I didn't think wastamiki should and hopefully the residency East Tammochy will be going well, I told you so. I bought here for a reason.
In terms of this being a resource for first home buyers, it's also a resource for those on their second and third as well.
Hey yeah, look, there's certain suburbs in this list that wouldn't be considered first home buyer suburbs. I'd say Mount Eden would be one. You've got to be earning a lot of money to be a first home buyer in Mount Eden. But we didn't just go, well, what's the cheapest suburbs and then go for that. Mount Eden's got a lot of opportunity in scope to grow in value, so people who are buying now in that suburb, and for people who don't know what Mount Eden is, it's
a inner city suburb in Auckland. It's got lots of villas. It's seen as kind of, you know, one of the top suburbs to buy in Auckland, largely because of the schooling that's on offer there. It's in a zone called double Grammar Zone and that's seen as pretty much an extra million dollars because you're in a zone for some of the best schools in the country. So that's been
Auckland Grammar for boys and Epsong girls grammar. But also there's lots of private schools that are around there that lots of families who buy in these areas want to go to. We thought that because Mount Eden was close to aid in Terrace, close to where the new CRL line is coming in, it hadn't seen the crazy prices that now we had seen in remu Era, which is another double grammar zone suburb and gets all sorts of
attention for ten million twenty million dollar house sales. Mount Eden is not in that league, but it's seen as a fairly prestigious and expensive suburb. But for people who can afford it and can get in, that's a suburb that's just going to grow in value.
There are a lot of suburbs, and you've mentioned this with certain stakes mis around them and due to things like high number of reported crimes for example, how much does this affect a suburbs writing? Do you think is it a possible for an area to truly shake a stigma like that?
Look, it's one of those things when people are buying its front of mind, you can't help but go, oh, I read that you know such and such kind of no bad crime happened on that kind of no street that's around a corner, or isn't that the place that somebody got salted, stabbed or whatever? Those are real issues for kind of no buyers. It may not be the number one issue for buyers. Prices usually that. But you
want to feel safe in your community. You want to feel like you can walk outside and you know you're going to be in good company. But most suburbs in New Zealand have a certain element of crime that goes on. I mean Pons being a very desirable suburb, but we saw kind of arendous shooting earlier that happened and that does make people go eh, But does that stigmatize a suburb. I think you have certain suburbs in South Auckland, and
certain suburbs are around the regions. There will be certain types of people that would have a dim view of them. And maybe that's been formed over years of a certain amount of negative headlines, a certain amount of poor employment, come of no prospects. But cities change, They're changing all
the time. I grew up in a town called Dundee in Scotland, and where I grew up, I grew up in a council estate and the house that I've come from grew up and is still there, but the houses around it have kind of grown up over the last kind of ten fifteen years, and it's now coming from the suburbs which I grew up in. It's now saying it's very desirable. It's got lots of big house sales that I would never have thought possible. And I think
that's the same for Auckland. I mean, just during the post COVID housing market boom, we were seeing people pay more than a million dollars for a house in Otara. Now, that used to be the joke, the Atara Millionaires Club with kind of You, that song which I can't remember now. I'm not from New Zealand, so if you asked me about the Proclaimers, no problem.
He's known as OMC tang in cheek now meaning Atara Millionaires Club. I mean, I mean I say that, I mean it's it's really had to be in a point where she's surrounded by some really famous people and you don't know what to say, You're awkward, and you know, you knock out the glass of wine and stuff and people don't understand it.
But Atara getting a million dollars. I was like, that's but that happened. People wanted to spend money in a house in Atara and they wanted to pay no seven figures for it. Now you're seeing a lot of new developments are happening in these South Aakland suburbs. The idea of slums of the past are quickly being forgotten. There's
a lot of modern new housing there. I think most Aucklanders of a certain age would remember that Ponson Bay and gray Linn we're seeing as no go areas like don't want to go in pons and Me and graylan At that you will get mugged, you will get stabbed. It's a horrible area. And that was a little bit of classism, fear of different cultures, whatever. But these suburbs are no longer seen as that. They're seen as, oh, if I've got a lot of money, out buy a
house in pons and Bay kind of suburbs. And that's what's going to happen with places like Atara Otahoo and I think most people who go there now we'll see kind of now the warmth of the communities, that there are communities where people want to have a great family lifestyle, and I don't think people should be put off by headlines because if that were the case, we should be staying away from pons and Bay's, We should be staying away from remnu errors, we should be staying away from No.
Iraqis where one of the courtes we got from one of the real estate agents. Yes, there was a p lub in a much in Iraqi, and we've seen kind of like lots of bad headlines are owned lots of suburbs, cities change, and majority people who live in these suburbs are nice folk just want to go on with their lives, and I don't think we should tar them with some of the negative headlines that come out.
Thanks for joining us on That's it for this episode of The Front Page. You can read more about today's stories and extensive news coverage at enziherld dot co dot nz. The Front Page is produced by Ethan Seals. Patty Fox and Richard Martin are the sound engineers. I'm Chelsea Daniels. Subscribe to the Front Page on iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts, and tune in tomorrow for another look behind the headlines.