Salient. Official Newspaper of the Victoria University Students' Association. Vol 44 No. 3. March 16 1981

A Worsening Shortage

A Worsening Shortage

Keith Bird, a letting agent, speaking for the Wellington branch of the Real Estate Institute of New Zealand, described the shortage as "very grim" and added that it "looks like getting worse." He identified several principal causes:

1.	Two flat properties are being converted back to houses.
2.	People are coming back into the central city to live, many of them young professional people able to pay good prices for houses, or top rents.
3.	Emigration has slowed down.
4.	Building stopped two years ago.

In Wellington, said Mr Bird, there are too few three- to four-bedroomed houses to let, the kind students prefer, at prices students can pay. And the reconversion of two-flat properties has withdrawn many one and two-bedroomed flats from the rental market.

"I'd prefer to put my money anywhere else than in rental property," he said. "There's no capital appreciation. Most of my landlords would sell tomorrow if they could."

He instanced a two-flat property bought three or four years ago for $30,000; an old place then, and getting older and less well maintained now because the owner cannot afford to put any more money in.

"The owner invested all his capital in the place, and looked forward to the gain he would make in three or four years to get the funds to renovate and upgrade the place. But there has been no capital gain, and so no money to put in."