Thursday news in brief

Life is busy and it’s easy to miss some of the stories that hit the news. So here’s a brief rundown of some of the stories that might have slipped by you this week…

Thursday, April 27th 2017, 12:00AM

by The Landlord

Demand weakened

After a surge in housing market activity earlier in the year, demand has significantly weakened in recent weeks, according to CoreLogic’s Property Market Update for April-May.

Core Logic head of research Jonno Ingerson said their expectation remains that the latest lending restrictions will slow values for a few months before things pick up again, probably after September’s election.

“While recently Wellington had bucked the trend of the other main centres, this month we’ve seen the same drop in buyer demand as Auckland, Hamilton and Tauranga.

“Investor activity in Dunedin has remained as low as anything we have seen over the past 10 years in a sign that lending limits to investors have put at least some off.”

Labour’s negative gearing plans

Negative gearing is firmly on the Labour Party’s agenda – with the Party’s housing spokesperson, Phil Twyford, telling media they will be releasing a policy tackling negative gearing in the next couple of months.

Twyford said that rich property speculators are getting even richer as a result of the current tax system. “And in the process, these tax breaks are turbo-charging a speculative real estate market that is driving house prices beyond the reach of most people.”

Allowing negative gearing provides a major incentive for people to invest in residential property, he said.

But Revenue Minister Judith Collins said the negative gearing rules for properties were in line with those for other forms of investment, allowing taxpayers to offset any loss against other income, and were not a tax break.

Read more:

Negative gearing to go under Labour

Regional meth lab trends revealed

Worried about the possibility of meth contamination in a rental property? It might pay to check out the first geographic study of meth lab distribution to uncover regional trends.

By mapping the location suburbs of laboratory seizures and performing cluster analyses of NZ Police data between 2004 and 2009, University of Auckland researchers have identified five hot spots of meth lab activity.

Researcher Daniel Exeter said there were more meth labs than expected in the north of the North Island, with clusters located in central Auckland, west Auckland, Hamilton, and the Far North – and Helensville and Hamilton emerging as particular hot spots.

While four socioeconomic characteristics (younger median age, lower median income, higher levels of socioeconomic deprivation and rural land use type) were found have a mild effect on the presence of meth labs in hot spots areas, the researchers said there were also other unknown factors at work.

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