Nick Goodall

Kia ora, and welcome to the New Zealand Property Market Podcast, brought to you by Cotality for the 13th of April, 2026.

I'm Head of Research, Nick Goodall, and today I'm joined, as per usual, by Chief Economist, Kelvin Davidson.

Kelvin, I think we'll briefly revisit the monetary policy review later on, now that we've had a few more days to digest it and track the market reaction to that decision to hold the cash rate at 2.25%.

But first, we did release the triple CI for Q1 last week.

Do you want to go through what it told us, and maybe we can move that into a broader discussion about kind of that construction and development industry?

Yeah, I think that covers off pretty much all of that.

I just wanted to touch on a few things.

I think when you had that chat with Gerard as well, that, you know, PVC piping, which I hadn't realised prior, was a by-product of the petrol process as well.

So that's likely to go up.

I talked to a plumber last week of the Urban Development Institute,

presentation and he talked about yeah once he sort of saw what was happening they went in you know stockpiled essentially all the PVC piping they could get so that they could continue to keep up with their jobs so there's going to be that disruption there's going to be some change to the cost of those items as well even though that was one that went down in Q1 I wouldn't be surprised to see that spike back up in Q2 if there's some sort of supply issue there as well so yeah there's going to be some change I think that's the key here right is that yeah this this is for Q1

Yep, the Iran conflict started at what, the last day of Feb or early March.

So, you know, partway through the quarter, unlikely to have seen any change or major impact from the conflict itself and these numbers, but it certainly will come through in Q2.

Yeah, while it is a bit of a, you know, we might now have seen sort of, you know, two quarters in a row of, you know, 3.9% and 1% growth each quarter, but of a turning of this, you know, slowdown that we saw in cost growth and that turnaround's come now and maybe it's really only set to get even worse off the back of the disruption caused by what's happening over there.

Yeah, I don't think there's too much else.

I'm just going to look through my notes and see if there's anything else we sort of hadn't touched on.

Probably not.

I think, yeah, just to reiterate probably your point around consents increasing again, that feel of positivity in the industry, as I said, presenting on Thursday to the Urban Development Institute, you know, people there certainly feeling that positivity, even in Wellington here.

So it does feel like there's some positivity coming through from that perspective.

We've talked about it as well, the fact that first-time buyers can and certainly do take advantage of the exemptions from loan-to-value ratio rules to get into new houses.