Emile Donovan

for a lot of people around the country buying a house may have seemed like an ironclad investment but new data is showing that may not be the case anymore since the property market peaked in 2021 house prices across the country have generally been trending downwards leaving many homeowners in quite a tough position actually and now some new figures show nearly a fifth

of townhouses, nearly 20% are being sold for a lower price than what their owners paid for them, in some cases facing devastating losses in the six figures and above.

So how concerned should homeowners and especially townhouse owners be right now?

And is this an opportunity for buyers?

Well, finance journalist Frances Cook joins me now to break it all down in a bit of detail.

Lovely to have you back, Frances.

So, I mean, how bad is this from your point of view?

So is this a situation where we have this housing crisis?

I mean, in some people's minds, the housing crisis continues.

And so we built a whole lot of housing, a whole lot of housing in a relatively short period of time.

But it's turned out that the kind of housing that we built, no one really wants to buy or live in.

I mean, some of those outliers are pretty amazing though, aren't they?

There's one example in Rimuera, the person bought it four years ago and they've sold it.

They lost 800, they nearly lost a million dollars, 890,000 bucks.

Gee, that is just, that's an eye-opener, Frances.

Do you think, I mean, you mentioned earlier on that the kinds of houses that are losing value, as it were, or that are being sold for a loss tend to be in the sort of property speculator slash marginal buyer kind of demographic.

So do you think that the speculators who would have bought up townhouses looking to make a quick profit, you think that that's the demographic that would be most affected by this?

Do you think there's maybe an element, too, of New Zealanders having to get used to the idea that this is the type of house that many of us will be living in into the future?

And it's not a quarter acre block with a backyard and a white picket fence and a great big double garage.

It is a townhouse.